Think Of a Number (2010) by John Verdon Read Free Book Online

you spend your time on beautiful fall mornings staring into the eyes of serial killers?”
    The barrette that was holding most of her hair up and away from her face seemed to be losing its grip, and several dark strands descended in front of her eyes, which she seemed not to notice, giving her a rare harried look that he found touching.
    He took a deep breath. “What exactly are we fighting about?”
    “You figure it out. You’re the detective.”
    As he stood looking at her, he lost interest in carrying the weight of the argument any further. “I want to show you something,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
    He left the room and returned a minute later with his handwritten copy of the nasty little poem Mellery had read to him over the phone.
    “What do you make of this?”
    She read it so rapidly that someone who didn’t know her might think she hadn’t read it at all. “Sounds serious,” she said, handing it back to him.
    “I agree.”
    “What do you think he’s
done?”
    “Ah, good question. You noticed that word?”
    She recited the relevant couplet: “‘I do what I’ve done / not for money or fun.’”
    If Madeleine didn’t have a photographic memory, thought Gurney, she had something close to it.
    “So what exactly is it that he’s
done
, and what is he planning to
do?”
she went on in a rhetorical tone that invited no reply. “I’m sure you’ll find out. You might even end up with a murder to solve, from the sound of that note. Then you could collect the evidence, follow the leads, catch the murderer, paint his portrait, and give it to Sonya for her gallery. What’s that saying about turning lemons into lemonade?”
    Her smile looked positively dangerous.
    At times like this, the question that came to his mind was the one he least wanted to consider. Had moving to Delaware County been a great mistake?
    He suspected that he’d gone along with her desire to live in the country to make up to her for all the crap she’d had to endure as a cop’s wife—always playing second fiddle to the job. She loved woods and mountains and meadows and open spaces, and he felt he owed her a new environment, a new life—and he made the assumption that he would be able to adjust to anything. Bit of pride there. Or maybe self-delusion. Perhaps a desire to get rid of his guilt through a grand gesture? Stupid, really. The truth was, he hadn’t adjusted well to the move. He wasn’t as flexible as he’d naïvely imagined. As he kept trying to find a meaningful place for himself in the middle of nowhere, he kept falling back instinctively on what he was good at—perhaps too good at, obsessively good at. Even in his struggles to appreciate nature. The damn birds, for example. Bird-watching. He’d managed to turn the process of observation and identification into a stakeout. Made notes on their comings and goings, habits, feeding patterns, flight characteristics. It might look to someone else like a newfound love of God’s little creatures. But it wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t love, it was analysis. Probing.
    Deciphering.
    Good God. Was he really that limited?
    Was he, in fact, too limited—too small and rigid—in his approach to life to ever be able to give back to Madeleine what his devotion to his work had deprived her of? And as long as he was considering painful possibilities, maybe there were more things to make up for than just an excessive immersion in his profession.
    Or maybe just one other thing.
    The thing they found so hard to talk about.
    The collapsed star.
    The black hole whose terrible gravity had twisted their relationship.

Chapter 8
A rock and a hard place
    T he sparkling autumn weather deteriorated that afternoon. The clouds, which in the morning had been joyful little cotton-ball clichés, darkened. Premonitory rumbles of thunder could be heard—so far in the distance that the direction from which they originated was unclear. They were more like an intangible presence in the