“Did you get lost out there?” asked Gurney.
“No. I was just looking around.”
“In the dark?”
“Looking to see if I could see any stars. Breathing the country air.” She sounded uneasy.
“Not a good night for stars.”
“No, not very good. Actually, it was kind of spooky out there.” She hesitated. “Look … I want to apologize for the way I spoke to you before.”
“No need. In fact, I want to apologize for upsetting you. I understand how important this thing is to you.”
“Still, I shouldn’t have said what I said the way I said it.” She gave her head an embarrassed little shake. “My timing is really lousy.”
He didn’t understand what the “timing” reference meant, but he didn’t question it, lest it prolong the exchange of apologies, which he found awkward. “I’m going to have some coffee. How about you?”
“Sure.” She seemed relieved. “Good idea.”
“Why don’t you both have a seat at the table,” said Madeleine firmly. “I’ll put on enough for all of us.”
They took their seats. Madeleine plugged in the coffeemaker. Two seconds later the kitchen lights went out.
“The hell happened?” said Gurney.
Neither Madeleine nor Kim answered.
“Maybe that thing tripped a circuit breaker?” he suggested.
He started to get up, but Madeleine stopped him. “The circuit breaker’s fine.”
“Then what could …?” A low, flickering light came from the hall that led to the stairway.
The flickering light grew stronger. Then he heard Kyle’s voice, singing, and a moment later the young man came in through the arched doorway, carrying a cake covered with lit candles, his voice growing louder with each word.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Daa-aad, happy birthday to you.”
“My God …” muttered Gurney, blinking. “Is today … really …?”
“Happy birthday,” said Madeleine softly.
“Happy birthday!” cried Kim with nervous enthusiasm, adding, “Now you know why I feel like such a total idiot for behaving the way I did, tonight of all nights.”
“Jesus,” said Gurney, shaking his head. “Bit of a surprise.”
With a broad grin, Kyle laid the blazing cake gingerly in the middle of the table. “I used to get pissed when he’d forget my birthday. But then I realized he couldn’t even remember his own, so it wasn’t so bad.”
Kim laughed.
“Make a wish and blow them out,” said Kyle.
“Okay,” said Gurney. Then, silently, he made his wish: God help me say the right thing. He paused, took the deepest breath he could, and blew out about two-thirds of the candles. He took a second breath and finished the job.
“You did it!” said Kyle. He went out to the hall, to the main switch for the kitchen lights, and flipped it back on.
“I thought I was supposed to get them all with one blow,” said Gurney.
“Not when there are that many. Nobody could blow out forty-nine candles with one breath. The rule says you get a second try for any number over twenty-five.”
Gurney looked at Kyle and at the smoldering candles with bewilderment and, once again, felt the threat of an oncoming tear. “Thank you.”
The coffee machine began making sputtering sounds. Madeleine went over to tend to it.
“You know,” said Kim, “you don’t look anywhere near forty-nine. If I had to guess, I would have said thirty-nine.”
“That would make me thirteen when Kyle was born,” said Gurney, “and eleven when I married his mother.”
“Hey, I almost forgot,” said Kyle abruptly. He reached down under his chair and brought up a gift box of the size that might contain a shirt or a scarf. It was wrapped in shiny blue paper with a white ribbon. Stuck under the ribbon was a birthday-card-size envelope. He handed it across the table.
“Jesus,” said Gurney, accepting it awkwardly. He and Kyle hadn’t exchanged birthday gifts for … how many years?
Kyle looked anxiously excited. “Just something I came upon that I thought you should have.”
Gurney undid the ribbon.
“Check out the card first,” said Kyle.
Gurney opened the envelope and began to withdraw the card.
On the front in a happily cursive script, it said, “A Birthday Melody Just for You.”
He could feel a hard lump in the center—no doubt one of those little scratchy singing things. He assumed that when he opened the card, he would be treated to another rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.”
But he didn’t have a chance to find out.
Kim, whose attention had evidently been drawn to something outside the house, stood up so suddenly from the table that her chair toppled over backward. Ignoring the crash, she rushed to the French doors.
“What’s that?” she cried in a rising panic, staring wide-eyed down the pasture slope, her hands coming up to her face. “God, oh, my God, what is that?”
Chapter 22
The Morning After
It had rained intermittently from midnight till dawn. Now a thin fog hung in the midmorning air.
“Are you planning to go out that way?” asked Madeleine with a sharp glance at Gurney. She looked chilled, sitting at the breakfast table with a light sweater over her nightgown and her hands wrapped around her coffee mug.
“No. Just looking.”
“Every time you stand there, the smell of smoke comes in.”
Gurney shut the French doors, which he had opened a minute earlier—for the dozenth time that morning—for a clearer view of the barn, or what was left of the barn.
Most of the wood siding and all of the roof sheathing had been lost in the terrific blaze the night before. A skeletal structure of posts and rafters remained standing, but in too weakened a condition to be of any future use. Everything still erect would have to be torn down.
The wispy, slowly drifting fog gave the scene a disorienting weirdness. Or maybe, thought Gurney, the disorientation was in himself—the natural effect of not having slept. The dead-fish personality of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation arson specialist wasn’t helping either. The man had arrived at 8:00 A.M. to take over from the local fire department and the uniformed troopers. He’d been poking through the ashes and debris for nearly two hours now.
“Is that guy still down there?” asked Kyle. He was sitting at the far end of the room in one of the armchairs by the fireplace. Kim was sitting in the other one.
“He’s taking his time,” said Gurney.
“Think he’ll discover anything useful?”
“Depends on how good he is and how careless the arsonist was.”
In the gray haze, the BCI investigator was walking once again with painstaking slowness around the perimeter of the ruined structure. He was accompanied by a large dog on a long lead. It looked like it might be either a black or a brown Lab—no doubt as thoroughly trained in accelerant detection as its master was in evidence collection.
“I still smell smoke,” said Madeleine. “It’s probably on your clothes. Maybe you should take a shower.”
“In a while,” said Gurney. “Too much to think about at the moment.”
“At least you could change your shirt.”
“I will. Just not this second, okay?”
“So,” said Kyle after an awkward silence, “do you have any suspicions about who might have done it?”
“I have suspicions, like I have suspicions about all kinds of things. But that’s a hell of a lot different from accusing anyone.”
Kyle shifted forward to the edge of his chair. “I was thinking about it most of the night. Even after the fire trucks left, I couldn’t sleep.”
“I don’t think any of us slept. I know I didn’t.”
“He’ll probably give himself away.”
Gurney looked from the door toward Kyle. “The arsonist? Why do you think so?”
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“Don’t these idiots always end up bragging to someone in a bar?”
“Sometimes.”
“You don’t think this one will?”
“Depends on why he started the fire to begin with.”
Kyle appeared surprised by his father’s response. “How about because he’s a drunken lunatic hunter and was pissed off at your No Hunting signs?”
“I guess that’s a possibility.”
Madeleine frowned into her coffee mug. “Considering that he ripped down half a dozen of our signs and set fire to them in front of our barn door—wouldn’t that make it more than ‘a possibility’?”
Gurney glanced back down the hill. “Let’s wait and see what the man with the dog has to say.”
Kyle looked intrigued. “When he ripped down the signs to burn them, he probably left footprints in the dirt, maybe even fingerprints on the fence posts. Maybe he dropped something. Should we mention that to the arson guy?”
Gurney smiled. “If he knows his job, we don’t need to tell him. And if he doesn’t, telling him won’t help.”
Kim made an odd little shivering sound and sank farther down into her armchair. “It gives me the chills—knowing he was out there the same time I was, creeping around in the dark like that.”
“The same time you were all out there,” said Madeleine.
“That’s right,” said Kyle. “Down on the bench. Jeez. He could have been within a few yards of us. Damn!”
Or within a few feet, thought Gurney. Or even inches, recalling with an unpleasant twinge his blind circumnavigation of the barn.
“Something just occurred to me,” said Kyle. “In the couple of years you’ve been here, have any guys approached you, wanting to hunt on your property?”
“Quite a few, when we first moved here,” Madeleine answered. “We always said no.”
“Well, maybe this guy is one of the ones who got refused. Did any of them seem particularly pissed off? Or claim that he had a right to hunt here?”
“Some were friendlier than others. I don’t recall anyone claiming special rights.”
“Any threats?” asked Kyle.
“No.”
“Or vandalism?”
“No.” She watched as Gurney’s eyes went to the red-feathered arrow on the sideboard. “I think your father is trying to decide whether that counts as vandalism.”
“Whether what counts?” asked Kyle, his eyes widening.
Madeleine just kept watching Gurney.
“A razor-tipped arrow,” said Gurney, pointing at it. “Found it sticking in one of the garden beds the other day.”
Kyle went over and picked it up, frowning. “That’s weird. Any other weird shit been happening?”
Gurney shrugged. “Not unless you count an oddly jammed tractor brake that wasn’t jammed the last time I used it, or a porcupine in the garage …”
“Or a dead raccoon in the chimney, or a snake in the mailbox,” added Madeleine.
“A snake? In your mailbox?” Kim looked horrified.
“A tiny one, over a year ago,” said Gurney.
“It scared me to death,” said Madeleine.
Kyle looked back and forth between them. “If all that happened after you put up your No Hunting signs, doesn’t that start to tell you something?”
“As I’m sure they point out in your law classes,” said Gurney, more stiffly than he intended, “sequence doesn’t prove causality.”
“But if he tore down your No Hunting signs … I mean … If the arsonist wasn’t some batshit hunter who thought you were taking away his God-given right to blow holes in deer, then who was it? Who else would do such a thing?”
While they were standing and talking by the French doors, Kim had quietly come over from the fireplace and joined them. She spoke in a small, uncertain voice. “Do you think it could have been the same person who sawed through the step in my basement?”
Gurney and his son both seemed about to respond to this when a metallic clang from somewhere outside the house diverted everyone’s attention.
Gurney looked through the glass door down toward the remains of the barn. There was another clang. He could just make out the kneeling form of the investigator, wielding what appeared to be a small sledgehammer against the barn’s concrete floor.
Kyle came over to his father’s side. “The hell is he doing?”
“Probably widening a crack in the floor with a hammer and chisel to get a sample of the earth underneath it.”
“What for?”
“When a liquid accelerant gets on the floor, it tends to seep into any available cracks, then down into the soil. If you can get an unburned sample, it makes precise identification easier.”
Madeleine’s eyes grew angry at this new aspect of the violation. “Our barn was doused with gasoline before it was set on fire?”
“Gasoline or something similar.”
“How do you know that?” asked Kim.
When Gurney didn’t answer immediately, Kyle explained, “Because of how fast it went up. A normal fire couldn’t spread through a building that quickly.” He glanced at his father. “Right?”
“Right,” muttered Gurney vaguely. His attention had moved back to Kim’s suggestion that the staircase saboteur and the barn burner might be the same individual. He turned to her. “Why did you say that?”
“Say what?”
“That it might be the same intruder—here and in your basement.”
“It just popped into my head.”
He thought about it. It brought to mind a question he hadn’t wanted to ask her the night before. “Tell me something,” he said softly. “Does the phrase ‘Let the devil sleep’ mean anything to you?”
Her response was immediate and startling.
Her eyes widened with fear, and she took a small step backward. “Oh, my God! How did you know about that?”
Chapter 23
Suspicion
Surprised by her reaction, Gurney hesitated.
“Robby!” she cried. “Damn it, Robby told you, didn’t he? But if he told you, why are you asking if it means anything to me?”
“I’d like to hear about it from you.”
“This isn’t making any sense.”
“Two nights ago in your basement, I heard something.” Kim’s expression froze. “What?”
“A voice. A whisper, actually.”
The color drained from her skin. “What kind of whisper?”
“Not a very pleasant one.”
“Oh, my God!” She swallowed. “There was someone in the basement? Oh, my God! Was it a man or a woman?”
“Hard to tell. But a man, I think. It was dark. I couldn’t see.”
“Oh, my God! What did he say?”
“ ‘Let the devil sleep.’ ”
“Oh, my God!” Her frightened eyes seemed to be roving over some perilous terrain.
“What does that mean to you?”
“It’s … the end of a story my father told me when I was little. The most frightening story I ever heard.”
Gurney noticed that she was digging the fingernail of her middle finger into the cuticle of her thumb as she spoke, trying to gouge away bits of skin. “Sit down,” he said. “Relax. You’re going to be okay.”
“Relax?”
He smiled, spoke gently. “Can you tell us the story?”
She steadied herself by holding on to the back of the nearest chair at the table. Then she closed her eyes and took a series of deep breaths.
After a minute or so, she opened her eyes and began in a shaky voice. “The story … was actually pretty short and simple, but when I was little, it seemed so … big. So scary. A world I got pulled into. Like a nightmare. My father called it a fairy tale. But he told it like it was real.” She swallowed. “There was a king, and he made a law that once a year all the bad children in the kingdom had to be brought to his castle—all the children who’d gotten in trouble, who’d lied or been disobedient. Children who were so bad that thei
r parents didn’t want them anymore. The king kept them in the castle for a whole year. They had good food and clothes and comfortable beds, and they were free to do whatever they wanted to do. With one exception. There was a room in the deepest, darkest part of the castle basement that they were warned to stay away from. It was a small, cold room, and there was only one thing in it. A long, moldy wooden chest. The chest was actually an old, rotting coffin. The king told the children that it held a sleeping devil—the most evil devil in all the world. Each night after the children got into their beds, the king would walk from bed to bed, whispering in the ear of each child: ‘Never go down to the darkest room. Stay far away from the rotting coffin. If you want to live through the night, let the devil sleep.’ But not all the children were wise enough to obey the king. Some of them suspected he made up the story about the devil in the chest because the chest was where he hid his jewels, and once in a while a child would get up in the night and sneak down into that dark room and open the rotting chest that looked like a coffin. Then a piercing shriek would rise through the castle, like the scream of an animal caught in the jaws of a wolf. And the child would never be seen again.”
There was a stunned silence around the table.
Kyle was the first to speak. “Holy shit! That was the bedtime story your father told you when you were a little kid?”
“He didn’t tell it that often, but every time he did, it terrified me.” She looked at Gurney. “When you said ‘Let the devil sleep’ just now, that cold feeling came rushing back to me. But … I don’t understand how someone could have been waiting for you in the basement. Or why whoever it was would have whispered that in your ear. What sense does it make?”
Madeleine plainly had a question that was troubling her as well. But before she could ask it, there was a firm knock at the side door.
When Gurney went and opened it, the arson investigator was standing there. The man was older, heavier, grayer-haired, and considerably less athletic-looking than most BCI detectives. The outside corners of his unsympathetic eyes seemed permanently drawn down by a lifetime of disappointment in human beings.
“I’ve completed my initial inspection of the site.” His weary voice complemented his expression. “Now I need to get some information from you.”