“Yes?”
“So I asked myself, what can I do to pass the time and keep from killing the musicians?”
There was another splash in the pond, and she stopped to listen. He half saw, half sensed her smile. Madeleine was fond of frogs.
“And?”
“And I thought to myself I could start figuring out my Christmas card list-it’s practically November-so I took out my pen and on the back of my program, at the top of the page, I wrote ‘Xmas Cards’-not the whole word Christmas but the abbreviation, X-M-A-S,” she said, spelling it out.
In the darkness he could feel more than see her inquiring look, as if she were asking whether he was getting the point.
“Go on,” he said.
“Every time I see that abbreviation, it reminds me of little Tommy Milakos.”
“Who?”
“Tommy had a crush on me in the ninth grade at Our Lady of Chastity.”
“I thought it was Our Lady of Sorrows,” said Gurney with a twinge of irritation.
She paused a beat to let her little joke register, then went on. “Anyway, one day Sister Immaculata, a very large woman, started screaming at me because I’d abbreviated Christmas as Xmas in a little quiz about Catholic holy days. She said anyone who wrote it that way was purposely ‘X-ing Christ out of Christmas.’ She was furious. I thought she was going to hit me. But right then Tommy-sweet little brown-eyed Tommy-jumped up out of his seat and shouted, ‘It’s not an X.’
“Sister Immaculata was shocked. It was the first time anyone had ever dared to interrupt her. She just stared at him, but he stared right back, my little champion. ‘It’s not an English letter,’ he said. ‘It’s a Greek letter. It’s the same as an English ch. It’s the first letter of Christ in Greek.’ And, of course, Tommy Milakos was Greek, so everybody knew he must be right.”
Dark as it was, he thought he could see her smiling softly at the recollection, even suspected he heard a little sigh. Maybe he was wrong about the sigh-he hoped so. And another distraction-had she betrayed a preference for brown eyes over blue? Get ahold of yourself, Gurney, she’s talking about the ninth grade.
She went on, “So maybe ‘X. Arybdis’ is really ‘Ch. Arybdis’? Or maybe ‘Charybdis’? Isn’t that something in Greek mythology?”
“Yes, it is,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “Between Scylla and Charybdis…”
“Like ‘between a rock and a hard place’?”
He nodded. “Something like that.”
“Which is which?”
He seemed not to hear the question, his mind racing now through the Charybdis implications, juggling the possibilities.
“Hmm?” He realized she’d asked him something.
“Scylla and Charybdis,” she said. “The rock and the hard place. Which is which?”
“It’s not a direct translation, just an approximation of the meaning. Scylla and Charybdis were actual navigational perils in the Strait of Messina. Ships had to navigate between them and tended to be destroyed in the process. In mythology, they were personalized into demons of destruction.”
“When you say navigational perils… like what?”
“Scylla was the name for a jagged outcropping of rocks that ships were battered against until they sank.”
When he didn’t immediately continue, she persisted, “And Charybdis?”
He cleared his throat. Something about the idea of Charybdis seemed especially disturbing. “Charybdis was a whirlpool. A very powerful whirlpool. Once a man was caught in it, he could never get out. It sucked him down and tore him to pieces.” He recalled with unsettling clarity an illustration he’d seen ages ago in an edition of the Odyssey, showing a sailor trapped in the violent eddy, his face contorted in horror.
Again came the screech from the woods.
“Come on,” said Madeleine. “Let’s get up to the house. It’s going to rain any minute.”
He stood still, lost in his racing thoughts.
“Come on,” she urged. “Before we get soaked.”
He followed her to her car, and they drove up slowly through the pasture to the house.
Before they got out, he turned to her and asked, “You don’t think of every x you see as a possible ch, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why…?”
“Because ‘Arybdis’ sounded Greek.”
“Right. Of course.”
She looked across the front seat at him, her expression, abetted by the clouded night, unreadable.
After a while she said, with a small smile in her voice, “You never stop thinking, do you?”
Then, as she had promised, the rain began.
Chapter 9
After being stalled for several hours at the periphery of the mountains, a steep cold front swept through the area, bringing lashings of wind and rain. In the morning the ground was covered with leaves and the air was charged with the intense smells of autumn. Water droplets on the pasture grass fractured the sun into crimson sparks.
As Gurney walked to his car, the assault on his senses awakened something from his childhood, when the sweet smell of grass was the smell of peace and security. Then it was gone-erased by his plans for the day.
He was heading for the Institute for Spiritual Renewal. If Mark Mellery was going to resist getting the police involved, Gurney wanted to argue that decision with him face-to-face. It wasn’t that he intended to wash his own hands of the matter. In fact, the more he pondered it, the more curious he was about his old classmate’s prominent place in the world and how it might relate to who and what were now threatening him. As long as he was careful about boundaries, Gurney imagined there would be room in the investigation for both himself and the local police.
He’d called Mellery to let him know he was coming. It was a perfect morning for a drive through the mountains. The route to Peony took him first through Walnut Crossing, which, like many Catskill villages, had grown up in the nineteenth century around an intersection of locally important roads. The intersection, with diminished importance, remained. The eponymous nut tree, along with the region’s prosperity, was long gone. But the depressed economy, serious as it was, had a picturesque appearance-weathered barns and silos, rusted plows and hay wagons, abandoned hill pastures overgrown with fading goldenrod. The road from Walnut Crossing that led eventually to Peony wound its way through a postcard river valley where a handful of old farms were searching for innovative ways to survive. Abelard’s was one of these. Squeezed between the village of Dillweed and the nearby river, it was devoted to the organic cultivation of “Pesticide-Free Veggies,” which were then sold at Abelard’s General Store, along with fresh breads, Catskill cheeses, and very good coffee-coffee that Gurney felt an urgent need for as he pulled in to one of the little dirt parking spaces in front of the store’s sagging front porch.
Inside the door of the high-ceilinged space, against the right wall, stood a steaming array of coffeepots, which Gurney headed for. He filled a sixteen-ounce container, smiling at the rich aroma-better than Starbucks at half the price.
Unfortunately, the thought of Starbucks brought with it the image of a certain kind of young, successful Starbucks customer, and that immediately brought Kyle to mind, along with a little mental wince. It was his standard reaction. He suspected that it arose from a frustrated desire for a son who thought a smart cop was worth looking up to, a son more interested in seeking his guidance than Kyle was. Kyle-unteachable and untouchable in that absurdly expensive Porsche that his absurdly high Wall Street income had paid for at the absurdly young age of twenty-four. Still, he did owe the young man a return phone call, even if all the kid wanted to talk about was his latest Rolex or Aspen ski trip.