Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel

by John Verdon

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that we need to come up with hard data, firsthand observations by credible witnesses. So far none of the narratives has any verifiable facts to support it. It’s too damn easy to get carried away by a good story. You can get so emotionally invested in a certain view of the case that you don’t notice it’s all wishful thinking. Let’s eat. Maybe food will help my brain.”

  Madeleine put a large bowl of shrimp and pappardelle with a tomato-and-garlic sauce in the middle of the table, along with small bowls of shredded asiago and chopped basil, and they began eating.

  After a few mouthfuls, Madeleine started toying with a shrimp. “The little apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Mother and daughter have a lot in common.”

  “Both a bit erratic, you mean?”

  “That’s a way of putting it.”

  There was another silence as Madeleine lightly tapped her shrimp with the tines of her fork. “You’re sure there was no place to hide?”

  “Hide?”

  “In the cottage.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “There was a terrifying movie I saw a long time ago—about a landlord who had secret spaces between the walls of the apartments, and he’d watch his tenants through tiny pinholes.”

  Their landline phone rang. “The cottage is pretty small, only three rooms,” he said as he stood to go and answer it.

  She shrugged. “Just a thought. It still gives me the shivers.”

  The phone was on his desk in the den. He got to it on the fourth ring. “Gurney here.”

  “Detective Gurney?” The female voice was young, tentative.

  “That’s right. Who am I speaking to?” He could hear the caller breathing, apparently in some distress. “You still there?”

  “Yes, I … I shouldn’t be calling, but … I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Who is this?”

  The caller answered after another hesitation. “Savannah Liston.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Should I?”

  “I thought he might have mentioned my name.”

  “Who might have mentioned it?”

  “Dr. Ashton. I’m one of his assistants.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s why I’m calling. I mean, maybe that’s why I shouldn’t be calling, but … Is it true you’re a private detective?”

  “Savannah, you need to tell me why you’re calling me.”

  “I know. But you won’t tell anyone, will you? I’d lose my job.”

  “Unless you’re planning to hurt someone, I can’t think of any legal reason I’d have to divulge anything.” That answer, which he’d used a few hundred times in his career, was about as meaningless as it could be, but it seemed to satisfy her.

  “Okay. I should just tell you. I overheard Dr. Ashton on the phone with you earlier today. It sounded like you wanted the names of girls in Jillian’s class that she hung out with, but he couldn’t give them to you?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why do you want them?”

  “I’m sorry, Savannah, but I’m not allowed to discuss that. But I would like to know more about the reason you’re calling me.”

  “I could give you two names.”

  “Of girls Jillian hung out with?”

  “Yes. I know them because when I was a student here, once in a while we hung out together, which is kind of why I’m calling you. There’s this weird thing going on.” Her voice was getting shaky, like she was about to cry.

  “What weird thing, Savannah?”

  “The two girls Jillian hung out with—they’ve both disappeared since they graduated.”

  “How do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”

  “They both left home during the summer, their families haven’t seen them, nobody knows where they are. And there’s another horrible thing about it.” Her breathing now was so uneven it was more like quiet sobbing.

  “What’s the horrible thing, Savannah?”

  “They both talked about wanting to hook up with Hector Flores.”

  Chapter 30

  Alessandro’s models

  By the time he got off the phone with Savannah Liston, he’d asked her a dozen questions and ended up with half a dozen useful answers, the names of the two girls, and one anxious request: that he not tell Dr. Ashton about the call.

  Did she have some reason to be afraid of the doctor? No, of course not, Dr. Ashton was a saint, but it made her feel bad to be going behind his back, and she wouldn’t want him to think that she didn’t trust his judgment completely.

  And did she trust his judgment completely? Of course she did—except maybe she was worried that he wasn’t worried about the missing girls.

  So she’d told Ashton about the “disappearances”? Yes, of course she had, but he’d explained that Mapleshade graduates often made clean breaks for good reasons, and it wouldn’t be unusual for a family not to have contact with an adult daughter who wanted some breathing room.

  How did the missing girls happen to know Hector? Because Dr. Ashton had brought him to Mapleshade sometimes to work on the flower beds. Hector was really hot, and some of the girls got very interested in him.

  When Jillian was a student, was there anyone in particular on staff in whom she might have confided? There was a Dr. Kale who was in charge of a lot of things—Dr. Simon Kale—but he’d retired to Cooperstown. She’d found Gurney’s home phone number through the Internet, and he could probably find Kale’s number the same way. Kale was a cranky old man. But he might know stuff about Jillian.

  Why was she telling Gurney all this? Because he was a detective, and sometimes she lay awake at night and scared herself with questions about the missing girls. In the daylight she could see that Dr. Ashton was probably right, that a lot of the students had come from sick families—like her own—and it would make sense to get away from them. Get away and not leave any forwarding address. Maybe even change your name. But in the dark … other possibilities came to her mind. Possibilities that made it hard to sleep.

  And oh, by the way, the missing girls had another thing in common besides both of them having shown a major interest in Hector with his shirt off working on the flower beds.

  What was that?

  After they’d graduated from Mapleshade, they’d both been hired to pose, just like Jillian, “for those really hot fashion ads.”

  When Gurney returned to the kitchen, to the table where they’d been eating when the phone rang, Madeleine was standing there with the Times Magazine open on the table. As he joined her, staring down at that unsettling depiction of rapacity and self-absorption, he could feel the hairs rising on the back of his neck.

  She glanced at him curiously, which he interpreted as her way of asking if he wanted to tell her about the phone call.

  Grateful for her interest, he recounted it in detail.

  Her curiosity sharpened into concern. “Someone needs to find out why those girls are unreachable.”

  “I agree.”

  “Shouldn’t their local police departments be notified?”

  “It’s not that simple. The girls Savannah is talking about were in Jillian’s class, presumably her age, so they’d be at least nineteen by now—all legal adults. If their relatives or other people who saw them regularly haven’t officially reported them as missing, there’s not much the police can do. However …” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and entered Scott Ashton’s number.

  It rang four times and was switching to voice mail when Ashton picked up and responded, apparently, to the caller-ID display. “Good evening, Detective Gurney.”

  “Dr. Ashton, sorry to bother you, but something’s come up.”

  “Progress?”

  “I don’t know what to call it, but it’s important. I understand Mapleshade’s privacy policy, as you’ve explained, but we’ve got a situation
that requires an exception—access to past enrollment records.”

  “I thought I’d been clear about that. A policy to which exceptions are made is no policy at all. At Mapleshade privacy is everything. There are no exceptions. None.”

  Gurney felt his adrenaline rising. “Do you have any interest in knowing what the problem is?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Suppose we had reason to believe that Jillian wasn’t the only victim.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Suppose we had reason to believe that Jillian was one of a number of Mapleshade graduates targeted by Hector Flores.”

  “I fail to see …”

  “There’s anecdotal evidence suggesting that some Mapleshade graduates who were friendly with Hector Flores are not locatable. Under the circumstances we should find out how many of Jillian’s classmates can be accounted for at this time and how many can’t.”

  “God, do you realize what you’re saying? Where is this so-called anecdotal evidence coming from?”

  “The source is not the issue.”

  “Of course it’s an issue. It’s a matter of credibility.”

  “It may also be a matter of saving lives. Think about it.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “I’d suggest you think about it right now.”

  “I don’t care for your tone, Detective.”

  “You think my tone is the problem? Think about this instead: Think about the possibility that some of your graduates might die because of your precious privacy policy. Think about explaining that to the police. And to the media. And to the parents. After you’ve thought about it, get back to me. I have other calls to make.” He broke the connection and took a deep breath.

  Madeleine studied his face, smiled crookedly, and said, “Well, that’s one approach.”

  “You have others?”

  “Actually, I kind of liked yours. Shall I reheat the dinner?”

  “Sure.” He took another deep breath, as though adrenaline could be exhaled away. “Savannah gave me the names and phone numbers of the families of the girls—the women, I should say—who she claims are missing. You think I should call them now?”

  “Is that your job?” She picked up their pasta plates and carried them over to the microwave.

  “Good point,” he conceded, sitting at the table. Something in Ashton’s attitude had gotten to him, was pushing him to respond impulsively. But how to pursue the issue of the “missing” Mapleshade graduates, as he forced himself to think about it calmly, was a question for the police. There were procedural requirements for the “missing person” designation and for the subsequent entry of the descriptive and last-sighting information into state and national databases. More important, it was a manpower issue. If, in fact, it turned out that the case involved multiple mis-pers with a suspicion of felony abduction or worse, a lone investigator was not the answer. The following day’s meeting with the district attorney and the promised BCI representative would provide an ideal forum for discussing Savannah’s call and for passing the matter on.

  In the meantime, however, it might be interesting to speak to Alessandro.

  Gurney got his laptop from the den and set it up where his plate had been.

  A search of the Internet white pages for New York City turned up twelve individuals with that surname. Of course, “Alessandro” was far more likely to be a first name, or a professional name invented to convey a certain image. However, there were no business listings involving the name Alessandro in any of the categories that might relate to the Times ad: photography, advertising, marketing, graphics, design, fashion.

  It seemed odd that a commercial photographer would be so elusive—unless he were so successful that the people who mattered knew already how to contact him and his invisibility to the masses was part of his appeal, like an “in” nightclub with no signage.

  It occurred to Gurney that if Ashton had acquired his photo of Jillian directly from Alessandro, he’d have the man’s phone number, but this was not the best moment to ask for it. Conceivably, Val Perry would know something about it, might even know Alessandro’s full name. Either way the following day would be the appropriate time to pursue it. And, very important, he needed to keep an open mind. The fact that two former Mapleshade students whom Ashton’s assistant was having trouble contacting had posed for the same fashion photographer as Jillian might be a meaningless coincidence, even if they did have an eye for Hector. Gurney closed his laptop and laid it on the floor beside his chair.

  Madeleine returned to the table with their plates, the shrimp and pasta steaming again, and sat across from him.

  He picked up his fork, then put it down. He turned to look out through the French doors, but the dusk had deepened and the glass panes, instead of providing a view of the patio and garden, offered only a reflection of the two of them at the table. His eye was drawn to the stern lines on his face, the serious set of his mouth, a reminder of his father.

  It set him off on a tangent of loosely linked bits of memories—images from long ago.

  Madeleine was watching him. “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. About my father, I guess.”

  “What about him?”

  He blinked, looked at her. “Did I ever tell you the rabbit story?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He cleared his throat. “When I was a little kid—five, six, seven years old—I’d ask my father to tell me stories about the things he did when he was a little kid. I knew he grew up in Ireland, and I had an idea of what Ireland looked like from a calendar we got from a neighbor who went there on vacation—all very green, rocky, kind of wild. To me it was a strange, wonderful place—wonderful, I guess, because it was nothing like where we lived in the Bronx.” Gurney’s distaste for his childhood neighborhood, or maybe for his childhood itself, showed in his face. “My father didn’t talk much, at least not to me or my mother, and getting him to tell me anything about how he grew up was almost impossible. Then finally, one day, maybe to stop me from pestering him, he told me this story. He said there was a field behind his father’s house—that’s what he called it, his father’s house, an odd way to put it, since he lived there, too—a big grassy field with a low stone wall separating it from an even bigger field with a stream running through it, and a distant hillside beyond that. The house was a beige cottage with a dark thatched roof. There were white ducks and daffodils. I’d lie in bed every night picturing it—the ducks, the daffodils, the field, the hill—wishing I were there, determined that someday I would be there.” His expression was a mixture of sourness and wistfulness.

  “What was the story?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You said he told you a story.”

  “He said that he and his friend Liam used to go hunting for rabbits. They had slingshots, and they’d go off into the fields behind his father’s house at dawn while the grass was still covered with dew, and they’d hunt for rabbits. The rabbits had narrow pathways through the tall grass, and he and Liam would follow the pathways. Sometimes the pathways ended in bramble patches, and sometimes they went under the stone wall. He described the size of the openings of the burrows the rabbits dug and how he and Liam would set snares for the rabbits along their pathways, or at their burrows, or at the holes they dug under the stone wall.”

  “Did he tell you if they ever caught any?”

  “He said if they did, they’d let them go.”

  “And the slingshots?”

  “A lot of near misses, he said.” Gurney fell silent.

  “That’s the story?”

  “Yes. The thing is, the images it painted in my mind became so real, and I thought so much about them, spent so much time imagining myself there, following those little narrow pathways in the grass, that those images became in some peculiar way the most vivid memories of my childhood.”

  Madeleine frowned a little. “We all do that, don’t we? I have vivid memories of things I ne
ver actually saw—memories of scenes someone else described. I remember what I’ve pictured.”

  He nodded. “There’s a piece of this I haven’t told you yet. Years later, decades later, when I was in my thirties and my father was sixty-something, I happened to bring it up on the phone with him. I said, ‘Remember the story you told me about you and Liam going out in the field at dawn with your slingshots?’ He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. So I added all the other details: the wall, the brambles, the stream, the hillside, the rabbit paths. ‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘That was all bullshit. None of that ever happened.’ And he said it in that tone of his that seemed to imply I was a fool to ever have believed it.” There was a rare, barely perceptible tremor in Gurney’s voice. He coughed loudly as if trying to clear whatever obstruction had caused it.

  “He made it all up?”

  “He made it all up. Every speck of it. And the damnable part of it is, it’s the only thing he ever told me about his childhood.”

  Chapter 31

  Scottie dogs

  Gurney was leaning back in his chair, studying his hands. They were more creased and worn than he would have pictured them had he not been looking at them. His father’s hands.

  As Madeleine cleared the table, she appeared deep in thought. When the dishes and pans were all in the sink and she’d covered them with hot, soapy water, she turned off the tap and spoke in a very matter-of-fact way. “So I guess he had a pretty awful childhood.”

  Gurney looked up at her. “I would imagine so.”

  “Do you realize that during the twelve years of our marriage that he was alive, I only saw him three times?”

  “That’s the way we are.”

  “You mean you and your father?”

  He nodded vaguely, focusing on a memory. “The apartment where I grew up in the Bronx had four rooms—a small eat-in kitchen, a small living room, and two small bedrooms. There were four people—mother, father, grandmother, myself. And you know what? There was almost always just one person in each room, except for the times when my mother and grandmother would watch television together in the living room. Even then my father would stay in the kitchen and I’d be in one of the bedrooms.” He laughed, then stopped with an empty feeling, having heard in that sardonic sound an echo of his father.