Mellery’s lecture topic of two minds at war inside one body interested Gurney for other reasons. It resonated with his own perception over the years, reinforced now by his Mug Shot Art efforts, that divisions of the soul are often evident in the face, and most evident in the eyes. Time and again he had seen faces that were really two faces. The phenomenon was easiest to observe in a photograph. All you had to do was alternately cover each half of the face with a sheet of paper-along the center of the nose, so only one eye was visible each time. Then jot down a character description of the person you see on the left and another of the person you see on the right. It was amazing how different those descriptions could be. A man might appear peaceful, tolerant, wise on one side-and resentful, cold, manipulative on the other. In those faces whose blankness was pierced by a glint of the malice that led to murder, the glint often was present in one eye and absent from the other. Perhaps in real-life encounters our brains were wired to combine and average the disparate characteristics of two eyes, making the differences between them hard to see, but in photographs they were hard to miss.
Gurney remembered the photo of Mellery on the cover of his book. He made a mental note to take a closer look at the eyes when he arrived home. He also remembered that he needed to return the call from Sonya Reynolds-the one Madeleine had mentioned with a touch of ice. A few miles outside Peony, he pulled off onto a patch of weedy gravel separating the road from the Esopus Creek, took out his cell phone, and entered the number for Sonya’s gallery. After four rings her smooth voice invited him to leave as long a message as he wished.
“Sonya, it’s Dave Gurney. I know I promised you a portrait this week, and I hope to bring it to you Saturday, or at least e-mail you a graphics file you can print a sample from. It’s almost finished, but I’m not satisfied yet.” He paused, aware of the fact that his voice had dropped into that softer register triggered by attractive women-a habit Madeleine had once brought to his attention. He cleared his throat and continued, “The essence of this art is character. The face should be consistent with murder, especially the eyes. That’s what I’m working on. That’s what’s taking time.”
There was a click on the line, and Sonya’s voice broke in, breathlessly.
“David, I’m here. I couldn’t make it to the phone, but I heard what you said. And I understand perfectly your need to get it just right. But it would be really great if you could deliver it Saturday. There’s a festival Sunday, lots of gallery traffic.”
“I’ll try. It might be late in the day.”
“Perfect! I’ll be closing at six, but I’ll be here working for another hour. Come then. We’ll have time to talk.”
It struck him that Sonya’s voice could make anything sound like a sexual overture. Of course, he knew he was bringing too damn much receptivity and imagination to the situation. He also knew he was being pretty damn silly.
“Six o’clock sounds good,” he heard himself say-even as he remembered that Sonya’s office, with its large couches and plush rugs, was furnished more like an intimate den than a place of business.
He dropped the phone back into the glove box and sat gazing up the grassy valley. As usual, Sonya’s voice had disrupted his rational thoughts, and his mind was pinballing from object to object: Sonya’s too-cozy office, Madeleine’s uneasiness, the impossibility of anyone knowing in advance the number another person would think of, blood as red as a painted rose, you and I have a date Mr. 658, Charybdis, the wrong post-office box, Mellery’s fear of the police, Peter Piggert the mass-murdering motherfucker, the charming young Justin, the rich aging Caddy, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and so on, without rhyme or reason, around and around. He lowered the window on the passenger side of the car by the creek, leaned back, closed his eyes, and tried to focus on the sound of the water tumbling over the rocky streambed.
A knock at the closed window by his ear roused him. He glanced up at an expressionless rectangular face, eyes concealed behind mirrored sunglasses, shaded by the rigid circular brim of a trooper’s gray hat. He lowered the window.
“Everything all right, sir?” The question sounded more threatening than solicitous, the sir more perfunctory than polite.
“Yes, thank you, I just needed to close my eyes for a moment.” He glanced at the dashboard clock. The moment, he saw, had lasted fifteen minutes.
“Where are you heading, sir?”
“Walnut Crossing.”
“I see. Have you had anything to drink today, sir?”
“No, Officer, I haven’t.”
The man nodded and stepped back, looking over the car. His mouth, the only visible feature that might betray his attitude, was contemptuous-as though he considered Gurney’s drink denial a transparent lie and would soon find evidence to that effect. He walked with exaggerated deliberation around to the rear of the car, then up along the passenger side, around the front, and finally back to Gurney’s window. After a long, evaluative silence, he spoke with a contained menace more appropriate to a Harold Pinter play than a routine vehicle check.
“Were you aware that this is not a legal parking area?”
“I didn’t realize that,” said Gurney evenly. “I only intended to stop for a minute or two.”
“May I see your license and registration, please?”
Gurney produced them from his wallet and handed them out the window. It was not his habit in such situations to present evidence of his status as a retired NYPD detective first grade, with the connections that might imply, but he sensed, as the trooper turned to walk back to his patrol car, an arrogance that was off the scale and a hostility that would be expressed in an unjustifiable delay, at the very least. He reluctantly withdrew another card from his wallet.
“Just a moment, Officer, this might be helpful as well.”
The trooper took the card cautiously. Then Gurney saw the flicker of a change at the corners of his mouth, not in the direction of friendliness. It looked like a combination of disappointment and anger. Dismissively, he handed the card, license, and registration back through the window.
“Have a nice day, sir,” he said in a tone that conveyed the opposite sentiment, returned to his vehicle, made a rapid U-turn, and drove off in the direction he’d come from.
No matter how sophisticated the psychological testing had become, thought Gurney, no matter how high the educational requirements, no matter how rigorous the academy training, there would always be cops who shouldn’t be cops. In this case the trooper had committed no specific violation, but there was something hard and hateful in him-Gurney could feel it, see it in the lines in his face-and it was only a matter of time before it collided with its mirror image. Then something terrible would happen. In the meantime a lot of people would be delayed and intimidated to no good end. He was one of those cops who made people dislike cops.
Maybe Mellery had a point.
During the next seven days, winter came to the northern Catskills. Gurney spent most of his time in the den, alternating between the mug-shot project and a painstaking reexamination of the Charybdis communications-stepping deftly back and forth between those two worlds and repeatedly veering away from thoughts of Danny’s drawings and the inner chaos that came with them. The obvious thing would be to talk to Madeleine about it, find out why she’d decided to raise the issue now-literally to bring it up from the basement-and why she was waiting with such peculiar patience for him to say something. But he couldn’t seem to summon the necessary willingness. So he would push it out of his mind and return to the Charybdis matter. At least he could think about that without feeling lost, without his heart racing.