When the GPS on the dashboard of their Outback announced that they would be arriving at their destination in another five hundred feet, Gurney slowly pulled over onto the road’s gravelly shoulder and came to a stop by an antique iron gate in a high drystone wall. A freshly graded dirt-and-gravel driveway proceeded from the open gate in a wide curve up through a gently rising meadow. He took out his phone.
Madeleine gave him a questioning look.
“I need to make a couple of calls before we go in.”
He entered the number of Jack Hardwick, a former New York State Police investigator with whom he’d crossed paths a number of times since they’d met many years earlier pursuing in different jurisdictions a solution to the sensational Peter Piggert murder case. Their unique bond was formed through a kind of grotesque serendipity—when they discovered, separately, thirty miles apart, on the same day, the disconnected halves of Piggert’s last victim. Who happened to be Piggert’s mother.
Gurney and Hardwick’s subsequent relationship had had its ups and downs. The ups were based on an obsession with solving homicides and a shared level of intelligence. The downs were the product of their conflicting personalities—Gurney’s calm, cerebral approach versus Hardwick’s compulsive need to debunk, irritate, and provoke—a habit responsible for his forced transition from the state police to his current role as a private detective. The recording on the man’s phone was, for him, relatively inoffensive:
“Leave a message. Be brief.”
Gurney complied. “Gurney here. Calling about White River. Wondering if you know anyone there who might know something that’s not already in the news.”
His second call was to the cell number Sheridan Kline had given him earlier that day. Kline’s recorded voice was as oleaginously cordial as Hardwick’s was curt. “Hello, this is Sheridan. You’ve reached my personal phone. If you have a legal, business, or political matter to discuss, please call me at the number listed on the county website for the office of the district attorney. If your call is personal in nature, when you hear the beep leave your name, number, and a message. Thank you.”
Gurney got directly to the point. “Regarding your description earlier today of the situation in White River, I came away feeling that some critical factor had been left out. Before I decide whether to get involved, I need to know more. The ball’s in your court.”
Madeleine pointed at the dashboard clock. It was 6:40 PM.
He weighed the pros and cons of making a third call, but making it now in Madeleine’s presence might not be a good idea. He restarted the car, passed through the open gate, and headed up the spotless driveway.
Madeleine spoke without looking at him. “Your security blanket?”
“Excuse me?”
“I got the impression you were touching base with the reassuring world of murder and mayhem before having to face the terrifying unknowns of a cocktail party.”
Half a mile into the Gelters’ property the driveway crested a gentle rise, bringing them suddenly to the edge of a field planted with thousands of daffodils. In the slanting sunlight of early evening the effect was startling—almost as startling as the massive, windowless, cubical house overlooking the field from the top of the hill.
6
The driveway led them to the front of the house. The imposing dark wood facade appeared to be perfectly square, perhaps fifty feet in both height and width.
“Is that what I think it is?” asked Madeleine with an amused frown.
“What do you mean?”
“Look closely. The outline of a letter.”
Gurney stared. He could just barely make out the distressed outline of a giant G—like a faded letter on a child’s alphabet block—imprinted on the house.
While they were still gazing at it, a young man with chartreuse hair, wearing a loose white shirt and skinny jeans, came running toward the car. He opened the passenger door and held it while Madeleine got out, then hurried around to the driver’s side.
“You and the lady can go right in, sir.” He handed Gurney a small card bearing the name “Dylan” and a cell number. “When you’re ready to leave, call this number and I’ll bring your car around.” Flashing a smile, he got into the dusty Outback and drove it around the side of the house.
“Nice touch,” said Madeleine as they walked across the patio.
Gurney nodded vaguely. “How do you know Trish Gelter?”
“I’ve told you three times. Vinyasa.”
“Vin . . .”
She sighed. “My yoga class. The one I go to every Sunday morning.”
As they reached the front door, it slid open like the pocket door of an enormous closet, revealing a woman with a mass of wavy blond hair.
“Mahdehlennnne!” she cried, giving the name an exaggerated French inflection that made it sound like a jokey endearment. “Welcome to Skyview!” She grinned, showing off an intriguing Lauren Hutton gap between her front teeth. “You look fabulous! Love the dress! And you brought the famous detective! Wonderful! Come in, come in!” She stood to the side and, with a hand holding a frosted blue cocktail, waved them into a cavernous space unlike any home Gurney had ever seen.
It seemed to consist of a single cube-shaped room—if anything so big could be called a room. Cubical objects of various sizes were being used as tables and chairs on which clusters of guests perched and conversed. Sets of cubes pushed together served as kitchen counters at each end of a restaurant-sized brushed-steel stove. No two cubes were the same color. As Gurney had noted from the outside, the five-story-high walls had no windows, yet the whole interior was suffused with a sunny brightness. The roof was constructed of clear glass panels. The sky above it was a cloudless blue.
Madeleine was smiling. “Trish, this place is amazing!”
“Get yourself a drink and have a good look around. It’s full of surprises. Meanwhile, I’ll introduce your shy husband to some interesting people.”
“Good luck with that,” said Madeleine, heading for a bar that consisted of two four-foot-high cubes, one fire-engine red, one acid green. Trish Gelter turned to Gurney, moistening her lips with the tip of her tongue. “I’ve been reading all about you, and now I get to meet the supercop in person.”
He grimaced.
“That’s exactly what New York magazine called you. It said you had the highest homicide arrest and conviction rate in the history of the department.”
“That article ran more than five years ago, and it’s still an embarrassment.”
His NYPD record was a distinction he didn’t mind having, since it occasionally had the practical value of opening a few doors. But he also found it embarrassing. “Magazines like to create superheroes and supervillains. I’m neither.”
“You look like a hero. You look like Daniel Craig.”
He smiled awkwardly, eager to change the subject. “That big letter out there on the front of the house—”
“A postmodern joke.” She winked at him.
“Pardon?”
“How much do you know about postmodern design?”
“Nothing.”
“How much do you want to know about it?”
“Maybe just enough to understand the big G.”
She sipped her blue cocktail and flashed her gap-toothed grin. “Irony is the essence of postmodern design.”
“The G is an ironic statement?”
“Not just the G. The whole house. A work of ironic art. A rebellion against humorless, boring modernism. The fact that this house and everything in it was designed by Kiriki Kilili says it all. Kiriki loves to stick it to the modernists with his cube jokes. The modernists want a house to be an impersonal machine. Pure efficiency.” She wrinkled her nose as if efficiency had a foul odor. “Kiriki wants it to be a place of fun, joy, pleasure.” She held Gurney’s gaze for an extra couple of seconds on that last word.
“Does the big G stand for something?”
“Giddy, goofy, Gelter—t
ake your choice.”
“It’s a joke?”
“It’s a way of treating the house as a toy, an amusement, an absurdity.”
“Your husband is a playful fellow, is he?”
“Marv? Omigod, no. Marv’s a financial genius. Very serious. The man shits money. I’m the fun one. See the fireplace?” She pointed to one of the walls, at the base of which was a hearth at least ten feet wide. The flames across the width flickered in the full spectrum of a rainbow. “Sometimes I program it for all those colors. Or just green. I love a green fire. I’m like a witch with magic powers. A witch who always gets what she wants.”
Mounted on the wall above the hearth was a TV screen, the largest he’d ever seen. It was displaying three adjacent talking heads in the divided format of a cable news program. Several of the party guests were watching it.
“Trish?” A loud male voice from a corner of the room broke through the general hubbub.
She leaned close to Gurney. “I’m being summoned. I fear I have to be introduced to someone horribly boring. I feel it in my bones.” She managed to make her bones sound like a sex organ. “Don’t go away. You’re the first homicide detective I’ve ever met. An actual murder expert. I have so many questions.” She gave his arm a little squeeze before heading across the room, sashaying through an obstacle course of cubes.
Gurney was trying to make sense of it all.
Postmodern irony?
The big G was a symbol of absurdity?
The whole house was a multimillion-dollar joke?
A witch who gets whatever she wants?
And where the hell were the other rooms?
In particular, where was the bathroom?
As he looked around at the chatting guests, he spotted Madeleine. She was talking to a willowy woman with short black hair and catlike eyes. He made his way over.
Madeleine gave him a funny look. “Something wrong?”
“Just . . . taking it all in.”
She gestured toward the woman. “This is Filona. From Vinyasa.”
“Ah. Vinyasa. Nice to meet you. Interesting name.”
“It came to me in a dream.”
“Did it?”
“I love this space, don’t you?”
“It’s really something. Do you have any idea where the restrooms are?”
“They’re in the companion cube out back, except for the guest bathroom over there.” She pointed to an eight-foot-high pair of vertically stacked cubes a few feet from where they were standing. “The door is on the other side. It’s voice-activated. Everything in this house you either talk to or control with your phone. Like it’s all alive. Organic.”
“What do you say to the bathroom door?”
“Whatever you want.”
Gurney glanced at Madeleine, searching for guidance.
She gave him a perky little shrug. “The voice thing actually does work. Just tell it you need to use the bathroom. That’s what I heard someone do a few minutes ago.”
He stared at her. “Good to know.”
Filona added, “It’s not just the bathroom. You can tell the lamps how bright you want them. You can talk to the thermostat—higher, lower, whatever.” She paused with a half-somewhere-else sort of smile. “This is the most fun place you could ever find out here in the middle of nowhere, you know? Like the last thing you’d expect, which is what makes it so great. Like, wow, what a surprise.”
“Filona works at the LORA shelter,” said Madeleine.
He smiled. “What do you do there?”
“I’m an RC. There are three of us.”
All that came to mind was Roman Catholic. “RC?”
“Recovery companion. Sorry about that. When you’re in something, you forget that not everyone else is in it.”
He could feel Madeleine’s be nice gaze on him.
“So LORA is . . . pretty special?”
“Very special. It’s all about the spirit. People think taking care of abandoned animals is about getting rid of their worms and fleas and giving them food and shelter. But that’s just for the body. LORA heals the spirit. People buy animals like they were toys, then throw them out when they don’t act like toys. Do you know how many cats, dogs, rabbits are tossed out every day? Like garbage? Thousands. Nobody thinks about the pain to those little souls. That’s why we’re here tonight. LORA does what no one else is doing. We give animals friendship.”
The voices of the TV talking heads had gotten louder, more argumentative. Occasional words and phrases were now clearly audible. Gurney tried to stay focused on Filona. “You give them friendship?”
“We have conversations.”
“With the animals?”
“Of course.”
“Filona is also a painter,” said Madeleine. “A very accomplished one. We saw some of her work at the Kettleboro Art Show.”
“I think I remember. Purple skies?”
“My burgundy cosmologies.”
“Ah. Burgundy.”
“My burgundy paintings are done with beet juice.”
“I had no idea. If you’ll excuse me for just a minute . . .” He gestured toward the cubical structure housing the bathroom. “I’ll be back.”
On the far side of it he found a recessed door panel. Next to the panel there was a small red light above what he guessed was a pinhole microphone. He further guessed that the red light indicated that the bathroom was occupied. In no hurry to get back to the discussion of burgundy cosmologies, he stayed where he was.
The variety of people with whom Madeleine cultivated friendships never stopped surprising him. While he tended to be attuned to the dishonesty or loose screw in a new acquaintance, her focus was on a person’s capacity for goodness, liveliness, inventiveness. While he found most people in some way warranting caution, she found them in some way delightful. She managed to do that without being naïve. In fact, she was quite sensitive to real danger.
He checked the little light. It was still red.
His position by the bathroom door gave him an angled view of the wide screen above the hearth. Several more party guests, drinks in hand, were gathering in front of it. The talking heads were gone. With a fanfare of synthesized sound effects, a swirling jumble of colorful letters was coalescing into words:
PEOPLE—PASSIONS—IDEAS—VALUES
THE AMERICAN DREAM IN CRISIS
The list then contracted into a single line to make room for three statements covering the width of the screen, accompanied by a martial-sounding drum roll:
EXPLOSIVE CRISIS—HAPPENING NOW
SEE IT ON BATTLEGROUND TONIGHT
NOTHING’S AS REAL AS RAM-TV
A moment later these statements burst into flying shards, replaced by a video of a nighttime street scene—an angry crowd chanting, “Justice for Laxton . . . Justice for Laxton . . . Justice for Laxton . . .” Demonstrators with signs bearing the same message were thrusting them up and down to the rhythm of the chant. The crowd was being contained by waist-high movable fencing, backed up by a line of cops in riot gear. When the video source was switched to a second camera angle, Gurney could see that the demonstration was taking place in front of a granite-faced building. The words WHITE RIVER POLICE DEPARTMENT were visible on the stone lintel above the front door.
At the bottom of the video screen, the words BATTLEGROUND TONIGHT—ONLY ON RAM-TV were flashing in a bright-red stripe.
The video shifted to what appeared to be another demonstration. The camera was positioned behind the demonstrators, facing the speaker addressing them. He spoke in a voice that rose and fell, paused and stretched in the cadences of an old-time preacher. “We have asked for justice. Begged for justice. Pleaded for justice. Cried for justice. Cried so much. Cried so long. Cried bitter tears for justice. But those days are over. The days of asking and begging and pleading—those days are behind us. Today, on this day that the Lord hath made, on this day of days, on this day of reckoning, we DEMAND just
ice. Here and now, we DEMAND it. I say it again, lest there be deaf ears in high places—we DEMAND justice. For Laxton Jones, murdered on this very street, we DEMAND justice. Standing on this very street, standing in the place anointed by his innocent blood, we DEMAND justice.” He raised both fists high above his head, his voice swelling up into a hoarse roar. “It is his sacred RIGHT in the sight of God. His RIGHT as a child of God. This RIGHT will not be denied. Justice MUST be done. Justice WILL be done.”
As he spoke, his dramatic pauses were filled with loud amens and other cries and murmurs of approval, growing more insistent as the speech progressed. An identifying line was superimposed on the video like a foreign-film subtitle: “Marcel Jordan, Black Defense Alliance.”
The group standing in front of the Gelters’ TV, holding colorful cocktails and little hors d’oeuvre plates, had grown larger and more attentive, reminding Gurney that nothing attracts a crowd like aggressive emotion. In fact, that one nasty truth seemed to be propelling the race to the bottom in the country’s political discourse and news programming.
As the demonstrators began to sing the old civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” the video scene changed again. It showed a crowd outdoors at night, but very little was happening. The people were loosely assembled with their backs to the camera on a grassy area just beyond a treelined sidewalk. The illumination, evidently coming from overhead streetlights, was partly blocked by the trees. From somewhere out of sight came bits and pieces of an amplified speech, its rhythms indistinctly captured by the camera’s microphone. Two patrol officers in modified riot gear were moving back and forth on the sidewalk, as if to continually vary their lines of sight around the trees and through the crowd.
The fact that nothing of significance was happening in a video selected for broadcast could mean only one thing—that something was about to happen. Just as it occurred to Gurney what it might be, the video frame froze and a statement was superimposed on it: