“Were you expecting him?” asked Madeleine.
Gurney glanced down the slope. The GTO came to a stop by his own dusty Outback in the little makeshift parking area by the side of the house. The big Pontiac engine roared louder for a couple of seconds as it was revved prior to being shut down.
“I was expecting him in a general way,” said Gurney, “not necessarily today.”
“Do you want to see him?”
“I’d say he wants to see me, and I’d like to get it over with.”
Madeleine nodded and stood up, pushing her short brown hair back from her forehead.
As they turned to start down the trail, the mirror surface of the quarry pool shivered under a sudden breeze, dissolving the inverted image of the willows and the sky into thousands of unrecognizable splinters of green and gray.
If Gurney were the kind of man who believed in omens, he might have seen the shattered image as a sign of the destruction to come.
Chapter 2. The Scum of the Earth
When he was halfway down Barrow Hill, deeper in the woods, out of sight of the house now, Gurney’s phone rang. He recognized Hardwick’s number.
“Hello, Jack.”
“Both your cars are here, but no one’s coming to the door. You hiding in the basement?”
“I’m very well, thanks. And how are you?”
“Where the hell are you?”
“Coming down through the cherry copse, quarter mile to your west.”
“Hillside with all the yellow leaf blight?”
Hardwick had a way of getting under Gurney’s skin. It wasn’t just the little jabs themselves, or the pleasure the man seemed to take in delivering them; it was the uncanny echo of a voice from Gurney’s childhood—the relentlessly sardonic voice of his father.
“Right, the one with the blight. What can I do for you, Jack?”
Hardwick cleared his throat with disgusting enthusiasm. “Question is, what can we do for each other? Tit for tat, tat for tit. By the way, I noticed your door is unlocked. Mind if I wait for you in the house? Too many fucking flies out here.”
Hardwick, a solidly built man with a ruddy complexion, a prematurely gray crew cut, and the disconcertingly blue eyes of an Alaskan sled dog, was standing in the center of the big open room that composed half of the lower floor. At one end was a country kitchen. A round pine breakfast table was tucked in a nook next to a pair of French doors. At the far end was a sitting area, arranged around a massive fieldstone fireplace and a separate woodstove. In the middle was a plain Shaker-style dining table and half a dozen ladder-back chairs.
The first thing that struck Gurney as he entered the room was that something in Hardwick’s expression was slightly off.
Even the leer in his opening question—“And where might the delectable Madeleine be?”—seemed oddly forced.
“I’m right here,” she said, coming in from the mudroom and heading for the sink island with a half-welcoming, half-anxious smile. She was carrying a handful of asterlike wildflowers she’d picked on their way down from Barrow Hill. She laid them by the dish drainer and looked at Gurney. “I’m leaving these here. I’ll find a vase for them later. I need to go upstairs and practice for a while.”
As her footsteps receded to the upper floor, Hardwick grinned and whispered, “Practice makes perfect. So what’s she practicing?”
“Cello.”
“Ah. Of course. You know why people love the cello so much?”
“Because it has a nice sound?”
“Ah, Davey boy, now there’s the kind of direct no-nonsense insight you’re famous for.” Hardwick licked his lips. “But do you know what it is exactly that makes that particular sound sound nice?”
“Why don’t you just tell me, Jack?”
“And deprive you of a fascinating little puzzle to solve?” He shook his head with theatrical resoluteness. “Wouldn’t dream of it. A genius like you needs challenges. Otherwise he goes to pot.”
As Gurney stared at Hardwick, it dawned on him what was wrong, what was off. Underneath the prickly banter, which was the man’s customary approach to the world, there seemed to be a not-so-customary tension. Edginess was part of Hardwick’s personality, but what Gurney detected in his expression now was more nervousness than edginess. It made him wonder what was coming. The man’s unsettledness was contagious.
It didn’t help that Madeleine had chosen a rather jittery piece for her cello practice.
Hardwick began walking around the long room, touching the backs of chairs, corners of tables, potted plants, decorative bowls and bottles and candlesticks that Madeleine had picked up in the area’s inexpensive antique shops. “Love this place! Just love it! It’s so fucking authentic!” He stopped and ran his hands back through his bristly crew cut. “You know what I mean?”
“That it’s fucking authentic?”
“The whole deal here—it’s pure country. Look at that cast-iron woodstove, made in America, as American as fucking pancakes. Look at you—lean, all-American, Robert Redford kind of guy. Look at them wide floorboards, straight and honest as the trees they came from.”
“Those.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Those wide floorboards. Not them wide floorboards.”
Hardwick stopped pacing. “The fuck are you talking about?”
“Is there a point to this visit?”
Hardwick grimaced. “Ah, Davey, Davey—all business, as usual. You dismiss my attempt at a few pleasantries, my efforts at social lubrication, a few friendly compliments on the puritan simplicity of your home decor—”
“Jack …”
“Right. Fuck the pleasantries. Where do we sit?”
Gurney motioned to the small round table by the French doors.
When they were seated across from each other, Gurney leaned back and waited.
Hardwick closed his eyes, massaging his face roughly with his hands as though trying to eradicate some deep itching under the skin. Then he folded his hands on the table and began speaking. “You ask if there’s a point to my visit. Yes, there is. An opportunity. You know that thing from Julius Caesar about a tide in the affairs of men?”
“What about it?”
Hardwick leaned forward, as though the words contained life’s ultimate secret. The chronic mockery had disappeared from his voice. “There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune. / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / is bound in shallows and in miseries.”
“You memorized that just for me?”
“Learned it in school. Always stayed with me.”
“Never heard you mention it before.”
“The right situation never came up before.”
“But now …?”
A tic yanked at the corner of Hardwick’s mouth. “Now the right moment has arrived.”
“A tide in your affairs—?”
“In our affairs.”
“Yours and mine?”
“Exactly.”
Gurney said nothing for a while, just gazed at the excited, anxious face across from him. He found himself far more uncomfortable with this suddenly raw and earnest version of Jack Hardwick than he’d ever been with the perennial cynic.
For a few moments the only sound in the house was the sharp-edged melody of an early-twentieth-century cello piece that Madeleine had been struggling with for the past week.
Almost imperceptibly, Hardwick’s mouth twitched again.
Seeing this a second time, and waiting for it to happen a third time, was getting to Gurney. Because, to him, it suggested that the payment about to be demanded for the debt incurred months earlier was going to be substantial.