“I’ll be leaving the clinic in a few minutes. Gerry Mirkle is going to drop me off at the Winklers’. They have a pair of alpacas that have just been weaned. They’re six months old—the perfect age for us to adopt them. Of course, I won’t do anything until we talk about it, but it sounds perfect, doesn’t it? We just need to put a door on the shed and install some fencing. Dennis Winkler said we only need to enclose half an acre, maybe an acre at the most if we wanted to get a couple more after the first two. The low pasture would be perfect. There are some fence posts in the barn from when we were planning to put in a big vegetable garden. You could check and see how many we have. If you get home before I do—Deirdre Winkler said she’d drive me—take the scallops out of the freezer and get the rice cooker going. See you later.”
Early in his law-enforcement career he’d become familiar with the gap between his work life and home life. Now, with the Lerman murders on one side and Madeleine’s pastoral plans on the other, the gap seemed more like a canyon.
IT WAS NEARLY six when he reached the point where the town road ended and their property began. The dim light of the November dusk had faded into darkness. He parked beside the black mass of the barn, got out, and switched on his phone’s flashlight app.
A spare key to the barn door was located under one of the flat rocks placed there to keep the weeds down. Inside, he was greeted by the familiar barn smell—a combination of sawn wood and faint remnants of the gasoline he had spilled the previous week, getting the snowblower ready for winter.
As he turned his phone light toward the stack of lumber where he dimly recalled storing the fence posts, another light caught his eye—a thin line of it at the base of the closed door to his tool room—the same room where a few days earlier he had found the light on and one of the windows ajar. He remembered turning the light off the last time he was in there. There was no reason for Madeleine to have been in there since, and even if she had been, she was religious about turning off lights.
He opened the door and took a good look around the room. Seeing nothing unusual or out of place, he switched off the light, locked up the barn, and returned to the car. Instead of driving immediately up to the house, he sat there for a while, pondering the peculiarity of the light. Three possible explanations occurred to him. The first was a loose wire in the fixture or in the switch. He made a mental note to check that out. The second was someone getting in through one of the barn windows, not all of which were lockable, and turning on the light as part of a nasty game aimed at disconcerting him. The third, equally troubling, was that his memory of having turned the light off the last time he was in the barn was a false memory.
He could learn to live with certain physical limitations, even episodes of pain, but mental limitations were a different matter. If he couldn’t trust his perceptions and recollections . . . the very thought of that sent a shiver through him.
AFTER PUTTING THE RICE ON AND TAKING THE SCALLOPS out of the freezer, Gurney was at his laptop in the den. He heard the side door out by the mudroom opening and shutting.
A minute later, Madeleine came into the den, smiling.
“Thanks for getting the rice going. I’ll run some water over the scallops to hurry the defrosting along. But first, I have to tell you about the alpacas. Actually, when they’re young, they’re called crias. They’re amazing. You should see their—” She stopped, noting the expression on his face. “What’s wrong?”
“Have you been in the barn recently?”
“No. Why?”
“The light in the back room was on again.”
“Again?”
“A few days ago, I noticed it was on. I went in and turned it off. Then, this evening when I got home, it was on again.”
“Are you saying that someone is sneaking into our barn and using the back room for something?”
“Or just turning the light on and leaving it that way.”
“What on earth for?”
“Maybe to create exactly this sort of confusion.”
“What sort of lunatic . . . ?” Her voice trailed off, her eyes registering the possibilities. “You think it’s connected to your investigation?”
“It’s possible.”
She took a slow breath, her lips tightening. “I want a gun.”
“There’s a shotgun in the upstairs hall closet.”
“I’d like to have another one for downstairs.”
“I thought you hated guns.”
“Not as much as I hate feeling threatened. I’ve had to move out of this house before, for fear of some homicidal madman you were playing cat-and-mouse with, but I’m not being driven out again. You understand?”
DINNER WAS A silent affair. Long after Madeleine cleared the dishes, Gurney remained at the table, trying to decide how to tell Cam Stryker what he’d learned from Nora Rumsten and Tess Larson without revealing the extent to which he had ignored her warning to stay away from the case.
His thoughts were interrupted by a call from Hardwick.
“Hello, Jack. You have news for me?”
