White River Burning. John Verdon
her of the excavation now blocking the little trail she liked so much. It didn’t help that his approach to the site reminded her of the way he would have approached a murder scene in his days as an NYPD homicide detective.
One of the persistent sources of tension in their marriage was the gap between her desire for a clean break with their past lives in the city, an unquestioning embrace of their new lives in the country, and his inability or unwillingness to shed his career-long mindset, his persistent need to be investigating something.
She put on a determinedly cheerful smile. “It’s an absolutely glorious spring morning. I’m going to hike the quarry trail. I should be back in about two hours.”
He waited for the next sentence. Usually, after informing him that she was going out, she would ask if he wanted to come along. And usually he would make some excuse, involving something else that needed doing. The simple fact was that walking in the woods never gave him the same sense of inner peace it gave her. His own sense of peace, a sense of strength and self-worth, came not so much from enjoying the world around him as from trying to figure out what exactly was going on and why. Peace through investigation. Peace through discovery. Peace through logic.
This time, however, she didn’t offer him an invitation. Instead, she stated with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm, “Sheridan Kline called.”
“The district attorney? What did he want?”
“To talk to you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That you were out. He called just before you came back up to the house with those things.” She pointed at the pebble-teeth. “He refused to leave a message. He said he’d call again at eleven thirty.”
Gurney looked up at the clock on the den wall. It was now a quarter to eleven. “He didn’t give you any hint of what he wanted?”
“He sounded tense. Maybe it’s about the trouble over in White River?”
He thought about that for a moment. “I can’t imagine how I could help him with that.”
Madeleine shrugged. “Just guessing. But whatever he really wants from you, he’ll probably be less than truthful about it. He’s a snake. Be careful.”
2
While Madeleine was lacing up her hiking boots in the mudroom, Gurney made himself a cup of coffee and took it out to one of the Adirondack chairs on the bluestone patio next to the asparagus patch.
The patio overlooked the low pasture, the barn, the pond, and the little-used town road that dead-ended into their fifty acres of woods and fields. It was a long time since the place had been a working farm, and what he and Madeleine liked to refer to as “pastures” were now really just overgrown meadows. Disuse had made them, if anything, more naturally beautiful—especially now in the early days of May with the first burst of wildflowers spreading across the hillside.
Madeleine emerged from the French doors onto the patio wearing a fuchsia nylon windbreaker half open over a chartreuse tee shirt. Whether it was the exuberant sense of life in the spring air or the anticipation of her outing, her mood had brightened. She leaned over his Adirondack chair and kissed him on the head. “Are you sure you’ll hear the phone out here?”
“I left the window open.”
“Okay. See you in a couple of hours.”
He looked up at her and saw in her soft smile the woman he’d married twenty-five years earlier. He was amazed at how rapidly the tenor of their relationship could shift—how fraught small events and gestures could be and how contagious were the feelings they generated.
He watched as she made her way up through the high pasture, her jacket shining in the sun. Soon she disappeared into the pine woods in the direction of the old dirt road that connected a series of abandoned bluestone quarries along the north ridge. He suddenly wished that she had invited him along, wished that Kline’s call would be coming to the cell phone in his pocket rather than to the landline in the house.
He checked his watch. His thoughts about the objects he’d found in the old buried cellar were now fully eclipsed by his efforts to imagine what was on the district attorney’s mind. And how obscure the man’s intentions would be.
At eleven thirty Gurney heard the distant sound of a car coming up the narrow town road below the barn. A minute later a gleaming black Lincoln Navigator passed between the barn and the pond, hesitating at the point where the gravel surface ended, before lumbering up the rutted farm track through the wild pasture grass to an open area beside the house and coming to a stop by Gurney’s dusty Outback.
The first surprise was that it was Sheridan Kline himself who emerged from the big SUV. The second surprise was that he emerged from the driver’s seat. He’d come in his official car but without the services of his driver—a notable departure, thought Gurney, for a man in love with the perks of his office.
Sharply dressed, Kline gave a couple of quick tugs to straighten the creases in his pants. At first glance the man seemed to have gotten smaller since their last meeting, ten months earlier, in the messy legal aftermath of the Peter Pan case. It was an odd perception, as well as an unpleasant reminder of the occasion. A lot of people had died in the horrendous finale of the Pan investigation, and Kline had appeared quite willing to have Gurney indicted for reckless homicide. But as soon as the media’s preference for portraying Gurney as the hero of the case had become clear, Kline had supported that narrative—with a cordial enthusiasm that Madeleine had found nauseating.
He approached the patio now with a fixed smile, taking in the immediate area with a series of assessing glances.
Gurney rose to meet him. “I thought you were going to call.”
The smile remained in place. “Change of plan. I happened to be in White River, meeting with Chief Beckert. Just forty miles from here, forty-five minutes with no traffic. So why not do it face-to-face? Always better that way.”
Gurney inclined his head toward the Navigator. “No chauffeur today?”
“Driver, David, not chauffeur, I’m a public servant, for Christ’s sake.” He paused for a moment, radiating restless energy. “I often find driving relaxing.” A small tic was playing at the corner of his determined smile.
“You drove here directly from White River?”
“As I said. From a meeting with Beckert. Which is what I want to talk to you about.” He nodded toward the Adirondack chairs. “Why don’t we have a seat?”
“Wouldn’t you prefer to come inside?”
He made a face. “Not really. Such a beautiful day. I spend too much time indoors.”
Gurney wondered if the man was afraid of being recorded and considered the patio safer than the house. Perhaps that was also his reason for avoiding the phone.
“Coffee?”
“Not right now.”
Gurney gestured toward one of the chairs, sat down in the one facing it, and waited.
Kline removed the jacket of his expensive-looking gray suit, draped it neatly over the chair back, and loosened his tie before perching on the edge of the seat.
“Let me get right to the point. As you can imagine, we’re facing a hell of a challenge. Shouldn’t have been totally unexpected, given the inflammatory statements coming out of that BDA bunch, but something like this is always a shock. You spent twenty-five years in the NYPD, so I can only imagine how it feels to you.”
“How what feels to me?”
“The shooting.”
“What shooting?”
“Christ, how cut off from the world are you up here on this mountain? Were you even aware of the demonstrations going on all week over in White River?”
“For the