The Viper

“He’s infatuated with her energy, ambition, drive.”

“And blind to her selfishness?”

“Not entirely. But in his mind the energy part outweighs everything else.”

“He’s got a lot to learn.”

“I know. I certainly did.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When he was telling me what he found attractive about her, I realized it was the same thing that had attracted me to his mother when I was twenty-one.”

“Did you describe to him how badly that ended?”

He shook his head. “I couldn’t figure out how to bring that up without it sounding like a direct criticism of his mother, which would create an emotional distraction. Besides, you can’t argue someone out of a romantic attachment. He’ll have to find out for himself. But it’s painful to see him repeating my mistake.”

“Maybe he’ll wake up before the mistake turns into a marriage. I hope so. He’s a nice young man.” She paused, her voice hardening. “But that woman is never to set foot in this house again. Never.”

58

AFTER A RESTLESS, INCREASINGLY PAINFUL NIGHT IN BED, Gurney struggled in the morning to get to his feet and maintain his balance. He felt as though all the emotional impacts of recent days had joined forces with the after-effects of his concussion to batter him into submission.

What he found most unnerving was the disjointed swirling of his thoughts—the hideous green snake rising out of the carton; Madeleine reeling back against the wall; Kim’s weirdly altered voice on RAM, suggesting to millions of listeners that he was capable of murder; Stryker’s threats; Lenny’s gas can in the quarry. All in a jumble. He headed for the shower, eager for the mental and physical balm it often provided.

Standing for ten minutes in the warm spray did take the sharp edge off the shooting pains that ran from his left temple down into his shoulder, but it did little to calm his racing mind.

Later that morning, as he was sitting at the breakfast table, gazing cautiously down toward the watchers’ car by the barn, Madeleine announced that she and Gerry would be joining the string group in the afternoon for a concert at the Oneonta nursing home.

“I thought you only did concerts there on Sundays,” he said, as though he found her departure from custom problematical.

She raised an eyebrow. “Today is Sunday.”

He responded only with a blink and a small grunt of recognition, but he was bothered by this evidence of his scattered state of mind more than he was willing to admit. Mental acuity, after all, wasn’t just his claim to fame, it was his identity.

Hours later, after Madeleine left for the concert, Gurney felt his anxious exhaustion finally morphing into a gentle doziness. He was wary, however, of falling into a deep sleep alone in the house, lest the security system alert on his phone fail to wake him in the face of an approaching police raid. After weighing the options, he strapped on his Glock, slipped into his jacket, and headed for his campsite.

HE AWOKE IN the cold darkness of his tent to the yipping of coyotes. His phone told him it was 9:35 p.m. The pain in his head and shoulder came back to life as he crawled out of his sleeping bag and got to his feet. The pain faded to a dull aching as he made his way by moonlight down the hill and across the back field to the house.

All the lights were out, which told him that Madeleine was either in bed or hadn’t come home yet. He knocked softly on the bedroom window, waited, and tried again. He heard movement inside. A flashlight was switched on. Coming closer, the beam was directed out at him, briefly blinding him. Then the flashlight was extinguished, the window sash was raised, and he climbed through the opening. By the time he was standing inside and had closed the window behind him, Madeleine was already back in bed.

She said nothing.

Neither did he.

He felt a new wave of exhaustion overtaking him. He removed his clothes, put his Glock and phone on the nightstand, got into bed, and fell immediately into a deep, restorative sleep.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Gurney awoke feeling a lot more like his normal self. Part of that normality was the presence of a plan.

The plan was to compare the dates of Lerman’s non-routine trips not only to the dates of his mood changes, but to the dates of the events in his diary and the dates of the calls from the anonymous phone.

As soon as he got dressed, he went straight to his desk in the den. He recalled that Thomas Cazo claimed Lerman appeared depressed for a period of about a month, then regained his bragging personality a week or so before quitting his job. That time frame corresponded with Adrienne’s recollection of the same period. Apparently Lerman descended into his bleak mood toward the end of September but was reenergized at the end of October.

Gurney created a list of the trips Lerman had made to places other than his habitual destinations. He also included on the list the four-hour blackout of Lerman’s GPS locator, the calls Lerman received from the anonymous phone, and his diary entries.