Gurney looked up again at the hawk, gliding with elegant ease above the ridge. Then he went into the house, expecting to see Madeleine or to hear the sound of cello practice upstairs. He called her name. The interior of the house, however, communicated only that odd sense of emptiness it always seemed to have when she was out.
He thought about what day of the week it was—whether it was one of the three days she worked at the mental health clinic, but it wasn’t. He searched his memory for any trace of her mentioning one of her local board meetings, or yoga classes, or volunteer weeding sessions at the community garden, or shopping trips to Oneonta. But nothing came to mind.
He went back outside, looked up and down the gently sloping terrain on both sides of the house. Three deer stood watching him from the top of the high pasture. The hawk was still gliding, now in a wide circle, making only small adjustments in the angle of its outstretched wings.
He called out Madeleine’s name, this time loudly, and cupped his ears for a reply. There was none. But as he was listening, something caught his eye—below the low pasture, through the trees, a glimpse of fuchsia by the back corner of the little barn.
There were only two fuchsia objects he could think of that belonged in their secluded end-of-the-road world: Madeleine’s nylon jacket and the seat of the new bicycle he’d bought her for her birthday —to replace the one lost in the fire that had destroyed their original barn.
As he strode down, ever more curious, through the pasture, he called her name once more—sure now that what he was looking at was in fact her jacket. But again there was no reply. He passed through the informal row of saplings that bordered the pasture, and as he entered the open mowed area surrounding the barn, he saw Madeleine sitting on the grass at the far corner of the building. She appeared to be intent on something just out of his line of sight.
“Madeleine, why didn’t you—” he began, his annoyance at her lack of response coming through clearly in his voice. Without looking at him, she raised one of her hands toward him in a gesture that meant he should either stop approaching or stop speaking.
When he stopped both, she motioned him forward. He came up behind her and peered around the corner of the barn. And there he saw them—the four chickens, sitting placidly in the grass, their heads lowered, their feet tucked under their breasts. The rooster sat on one side of Madeleine’s outstretched legs, and the three hens sat on the other side. As Gurney stared down at this odd tableau, he could hear the chickens making the same low, peaceful cooing sounds they made on their roost when they were ready for sleep.
Madeleine looked up at Gurney. “They need a little house and a safe fenced yard to run around in. So they can be out as much as they want in the air and be happy and safe. That’s all they want. So we have to do that for them.”
“Right.” The reminder of the construction project ahead irritated him. He looked down at the chickens on the grass. “How are you going to get them back in the barn?”
“It’s not a problem.” She smiled, more at the chickens than at him. “It’s not a problem,” she repeated in a whisper. “We’ll go into the barn soon. We just want to sit in the grass for a few more minutes.”
Half an hour later, Gurney was sitting in front of his computer in the den, making his way through the website of the Cyberspace Cathedral, “Your Portal to a Joyful Life.” Predictably perhaps, given the name of the organization, he could find no physical address, no picture of any brick-and-mortar headquarters.
The only option offered on the Contact page was email. When Gurney clicked on it, the actual email form that popped up was addressed to Jonah himself.
Gurney thought about that for a while—the disarming, almost intimate suggestion that one’s comment, inquiry, or plea for help would go directly to the founder. That in turn made him wonder what sort of comments, inquiries, or pleas for help the website might be generating; looking for the answer kept him scrolling through the site for another twenty minutes.
The eventual impression he got was that the promised joyful life was a vaguely New Age state of mind, full of soft-focus philosophy, pastel graphics, and sunny weather. The whole enterprise seemed to be proffering the sweetness and protection of baby powder. It was as if Hallmark had decided to start a religion.
The object that held Gurney’s attention longest was a photograph of Jonah Spalter on the Welcome page. High-resolution and seemingly unretouched, it had a kind of directness that contrasted sharply with the surrounding fluff.
There was something of Carl in the shape of Jonah’s face, the full dark hair with a slight wave, the straight nose, the strong jaw. But there all resemblance ended. While Carl’s eyes at the end were full of the most extreme despair, Jonah’s seemed to be fixed on a future of endless success. Like the classic masks of tragedy and comedy, their faces were remarkably similar and totally opposite. If these brothers had been locked in the kind of personal battle that Kay had indicated, and if Jonah’s photograph truly represented his current appearance, there was no doubt which brother had emerged victorious.
In addition to Jonah’s picture, the Welcome page included a long clickable menu of topics. Gurney chose the one at the top of the list: “Only Human.” As a page with a border of entwined daisies came up on the screen, he heard Madeleine’s voice calling to him from the other room.
“Dinner’s on the table.”
She was already seated at the small round table in the nook by the French doors—the one at which they ate all their meals, except when they had guests and used the long Shaker table instead. He sat across from her. On each of their plates were generous portions of sautéed haddock, carrots, and broccoli. He poked at a slice of carrot, speared it with his fork, began chewing it. He discovered he wasn’t very hungry. He continued eating anyway. He didn’t care much for the haddock. It reminded of the tasteless fish his mother used to serve.
“Did you get them back in the barn?” he asked with more irritation than interest.
“Of course.”
He realized he’d lost track of the hour and glanced over at the clock on the far wall. It was six-thirty. He turned his head to look out the glass door and saw the sun glaring back at him from just above the western ridge. Far from any romantic notions of a pastoral sunset, it reminded him of a movie-cliché interrogation lamp.
That association carried him back to the questions he’d posed at Bedford Hills just a few hours earlier, and to those uncannily steady green eyes that seemed more suited to a cat in a painting than a woman in prison.
“You want to tell me about it?” Madeleine was watching him with that knowing look that sometimes made him wonder if he’d been unconsciously whispering his thoughts.
“About …?”
“Your day. The woman you went to see. What Jack wants. Your plan. Whether you believe she’s innocent.”
It hadn’t occurred to him that he wanted to talk about that. But perhaps he did. He laid his fork down. “Bottom line, I don’t know what I believe. If she’s a liar, she’s a good one. Maybe the best I’ve ever seen.”
“But you don’t think she’s a liar?”
“I’m not sure. She seems to want me to believe she’s innocent, but she’s not going out of her way to persuade me. It’s as though she wants to make it difficult.”
“Clever.”
“Clever or … honest.”
“Maybe both.”
“Right.”
“What else?”
“What do you mean?”
“What else did you see in her?”
He thought for a moment. “Pride. Strength. Willfulness.”