“Come to the door and you’ll hear him.”
He almost replied that he had no interest in hearing him but realized that would be a poor way to start the day. He pushed himself up from the chair and went to the door.
“There,” said Madeleine. “You heard him that time, right?”
“I think so.”
“He’ll be a lot easier to hear,” Madeleine said brightly, pointing to the expanse of grass between the asparagus patch and the big apple tree, “as soon as we build the coop over there.”
“No doubt.”
“They do it to announce their territory.”
“Hmm.”
“To ward off other roosters, let them know, ‘This is my yard, I was here first.’ I love it, don’t you?”
“Love what?”
“The sound of it, the crow.”
“Oh. Yes. Very … rural.”
“I’m not sure I’d want a lot of roosters. But one is really nice.”
“Right.”
“Horace. At first I wasn’t sure, but now it seems the perfect name for him, doesn’t it?”
“I guess.” The truth was that the name Horace, for no reason that made sense, reminded him of the name Carl. And the name Carl, the instant it came to mind, came complete with the stricken eyes in the photograph, eyes that appeared to be staring at a demon.
“What about the other three? Huffy, Puffy, and Fluffy—do you think those names are too silly?”
It took Gurney a few seconds to refocus his attention. “Too silly for chickens?”
She laughed and shrugged. “As soon as we build their little house, with a nice open-air pen at one end, they can all move up from the stuffy barn.”
“Right.” His lack of enthusiasm was palpable.
“And you’ll make the pen predator-proof?”
“Yes.”
“The director of the clinic lost one of his Rhode Island reds last week. The little thing was there one minute, gone the next.”
“That’s the risk of letting them out.”
“Not if we build the right kind of pen. Then they can be out, running around, pecking in the grass, which they love, and still be safe. And it’ll be fun watching them—right over there.” She pointed again with an emphatic little jab of her forefinger at the area she’d chosen.
“So what does he think happened to his missing chicken?”
“Something grabbed it and carried it off. Most likely a coyote or an eagle. He’s pretty sure an eagle, because when we have the kind of drought we’ve had this summer they start looking for things other than fish.”
“Hmm.”
“He said if we’re going to build a pen we should be sure the wire mesh goes over the top and down at least six inches into the ground. Otherwise things can burrow underneath it.”
“Things?”
“He mentioned weasels. Apparently they’re really awful.”
“Awful?”
Madeleine made a face. “He said if a weasel gets in with the chickens, he’ll … bite their heads off—all of them.”
“Not eat them? Just kill them?”
She nodded, her lips pressed tightly together. More than a wince, it was an expression of empathic misery. “He explained that some kind of frenzy comes over a weasel … once he tastes blood. Once he does, he won’t stop biting until all the chickens are dead.”
Chapter 6. Ants
A little after sunrise, feeling that he’d made a sufficient gesture in the direction of solving the chicken problem—by drawing a construction diagram for a coop and fenced run—Gurney put away his pad and settled down at the breakfast table with a second cup of coffee.
When Madeleine joined him, he decided to show her the photograph of Carl Spalter.
From her triage and counseling work at the local mental health crisis center, she was accustomed to being in the presence of the extremes of negative feelings—panic, rage, anguish, despair. Even so, her eyes widened at the vividness of Spalter’s expression.
She laid the photo on the table, then pushed it a few inches farther away.
“He knows something,” she said. “Something he didn’t know before his wife shot him.”
“Maybe she didn’t. According to Hardwick, the case against her was fabricated.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know.”
“So maybe she did it, and maybe she didn’t. But Hardwick doesn’t really care which, does he?”
Gurney was tempted to argue the point, because he didn’t like the position it put him in. Instead, he just shrugged. “What he cares about is getting her conviction thrown out.”
“What he really cares about is getting even—and watching his former employers twist in the wind.”
“I know.”
She cocked her head and stared at him as if to ask why he’d let himself be drawn into such a fraught and nasty undertaking.
“I haven’t promised anything. But I have to admit,” he said, pointing to the photograph on the table, “I am curious about that.”
She pursed her lips, turned to the open door, and gazed out at the thin, scattered fog illuminated by the sideways rays of the early sun. Then something caught her attention at the edge of the stone patio just beyond the doorsill.
“They’re back,” she said.
“Who? What?”
“The carpenter ants.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
“Everywhere?”
She answered in a tone as mild as his was impatient. “Out there. In here. On the windowsills. By the cupboards. Around the sink.”
“Why the hell didn’t you mention it?”
“I just did.”
He was about to ride the argument over a self-righteous cliff, but sanity prevailed and all he said was “I hate those damn things.” And hate them he did. Carpenter ants were the termites of the Catskills and other cold places—gnawing away the inner fiber of beams and joists, in silence and darkness converting the support structures of solid homes to sawdust. An exterminating service sprayed the outside of the foundation every other month, and sometimes they seemed to be winning the battle. But then the scout ants would return, and then … battalions.
For a moment he forgot what he and Madeleine had been talking about before the ant tangent. When he remembered, it was with the sinking feeling that he’d been straining to justify a questionable decision.
He decided to try for as much openness as he could. “Look, I understand the danger, the less-than-virtuous motive driving this thing. But I believe I owe Jack something. Maybe not a lot, but certainly something. And an innocent woman may have been convicted on evidence manufactured by a dirty cop. I don’t like dirty cops.”
Madeleine broke in. “Hardwick doesn’t care whether she’s innocent. To him, that’s irrelevant.”
“I know. But I’m not Hardwick.”
Chapter 7. Mick the Dick
“So everyone thought he tripped, until they found a bullet in his brain?” asked Gurney.
He was sitting in the passenger seat of Hardwick’s roaring GTO—not a traveling option he’d normally choose, but the trip from Walnut Crossing to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility would take close to three hours, according to Google, and it seemed a good opportunity to ask questions.
“The little round entry wound was kind of a hint,” said Hardwick. “But the CAT scan left no doubt. Eventually a surgeon retrieved most of the bullet fragments.”
“It was a .220 Swift?” Gurney had managed to review half the trial transcript and a third of the BCI case file before Hardwick arrived to pick him up, and he wanted to be sure of his facts.