Think of a Number (Dave Gurney, No.1) Read Free Page A

intended. His son didn’t call often.
    “I asked him if I should get you. He said he didn’t want to disturb you, it wasn’t really urgent.”
    “Did he say anything else?”
    “No.”
    She turned and walked across the thick, moist grass toward the house. When she reached the side door and put her hand on the knob, she seemed to remember something else, looked back at him, and spoke with exaggerated bafflement. “According to the book jacket, your old classmate seems to be a saint, perfect in every way. A guru of good behavior. It’s hard to imagine why he’d need to consult a homicide detective.”
    “A
retired
homicide detective,” corrected Gurney.
    But she’d already gone in and neglected to cushion the slam of the door.

Chapter 3
Trouble in paradise
    T he following day was more exquisite than the day before. It was the picture of October in a New England calendar. Gurney rose at 7:00 A.M ., showered and shaved, put on jeans and a light cotton sweater, and was having his coffee in a canvas chair on the bluestone patio outside their downstairs bedroom. The patio and the French doors leading to it were additions he’d made to the house at Madeleine’s urging.
    She was good at that sort of thing, had a sensitive eye for what was possible, what was appropriate. It revealed a lot about her—her positive instincts, her practical imagination, her unfailing taste. But when he got tangled in their areas of contention—the mires and brambles of the expectations each privately cultivated—he found it difficult to focus on her remarkable strengths.
    He must remember to return Kyle’s call. He would have to wait three hours because of the time difference between Walnut Crossing and Seattle. He settled deeper into his chair, cradling his warm coffee mug in both hands.
    He glanced at the slim folder he’d brought out with hiscoffee and tried to imagine the appearance of the college classmate he hadn’t seen for twenty-five years. The photo that appeared on the book jackets that Madeleine printed out from a bookstore website refreshed his recollection not only of the face but of the personality—complete with the vocal timbre of an Irish tenor and a smile that was improbably charming.
    When they were undergraduates at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the Bronx, Mark Mellery was a wild character whose spurts of humor and truth, energy and ambition were colored by something darker. He had a tendency to walk close to the edge—a sort of careening genius, simultaneously reckless and calculating, always on the brink of a downward spiral.
    According to his website bio, the direction of the spiral, which had taken him down rapidly in his twenties, had been reversed in his thirties by some sort of dramatic spiritual transformation.
    Balancing his coffee mug on the narrow wooden arm of the chair, Gurney opened the folder on his lap, extracted the e-mail he’d received from Mellery a week earlier, and went over it again, line by line.
    Hello, Dave:
    I hope you don’t find it inappropriate to be contacted by an old classmate after so much time has elapsed. One can never be sure what may be brought to mind by a voice from the past. I’ve remained in touch with our shared academic past through our alumni association and have been fascinated by the news items published over the years concerning the members of our graduating class. I was happy to note on more than one
occasion your own stellar achievements and the recognition you were receiving. (One article in our Alumni News called you THE MOST DECORATED DETECTIVE IN THE NYPD
—
which didn’t especially surprise me, remembering the Dave Gurney I knew in college!) Then, about a year ago, I saw that you’d retired from the police department—and that you’d moved up here to Delaware County. It got my attention because I happen to be located in the town of Peony—“just down the road apiece,” as they say. I doubt that you’ve heard of it, but I now run a kind of retreat