since Jack and Jane were here, seems like you’ve been in another world.”
“I’m sorry. I guess I’m . . . just a little out of sorts.” She turned away and headed for the kitchen.
DINNER ENDED UP BEING A BRIEF AFFAIR CONSISTING OF BOILED potatoes, microwaved peas, haddock, and minimal conversation. As they were clearing the table he asked, “Did you let Sara know we’d be leaving a day early?”
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
“Yes.”
“If we open the chicken coop door in the morning to let them into the pen, someone will have to close it at night.”
“Right. I’ll call her.”
A long silence ensued with her washing and rinsing their dinner plates, the silverware, the haddock pan, and the potato pot, and setting everything in the drainer to dry. This ritual activity at the sink was a task she’d claimed as her own years earlier.
Gurney’s peripheral role in the ritual was to sit and watch.
When she was finished, she dried her hands; but instead of getting one of her books and settling into her regular armchair by the woodstove at the far end of the room, she remained at the sink island, staring into some private mental landscape.
“Maddie, what on earth’s the matter?” Even as he was asking the question he knew it was a mistake, driven by irritation rather than concern.
“I told you. I just seem to have a lot on my mind. What time do we have to leave?”
“In the morning? Eight? Eight thirty? Is that all right?”
“I suppose. Are you all packed?”
“I’m not bringing much.”
She gazed at him for several long seconds, then turned off the light over the sink island and left the kitchen through the hallway that led to their bedroom.
He looked out through the French doors and saw nothing at all. Dusk had long since turned to solid night, a night with neither moon nor stars.
Sometime after midnight there was a dramatic shift in the weather, with strong winds blowing away the overcast and flooding the maple copse outside their bedroom window with moonlight.
Awakened by the sound of the wind, Gurney got up and went to the bathroom, drank a glass of water, and stood for a while at the window. The moonlight illuminating the winter-faded pasture grass looked like a coating of frost.
He returned to bed, closed his eyes, and tried to empty his mind, hoping to slide naturally back into a comfortable sleep. Instead he found himself helplessly playing host to a succession of unsettling images, bits of the day, baffling questions and half-formed hypotheses—a needle stuck in a groove that went nowhere.
His thoughts were interrupted by a sound—something high-pitched above the wind. Then it stopped. He waited, listening. The sound came again, more distinctly now. The shrill yipping of coyotes. He could picture them, like small wolves, closing in on their prey on the rocky moonlit ridge above the high pasture.
Gurney awoke the next morning exhausted. He forced himself out of bed and into the shower. The hot pelting water worked its customary magic—clearing his mind, bringing him back to life.
Returning to the bedroom, he found the two duffel bags Madeleine had shown him the previous morning. They were resting on the bench at the foot of the bed. Madeleine’s was full and zipped shut, his was open and waiting for whatever he intended to bring.
He disliked packing for trips, probably because he disliked taking trips, especially ones he was supposed to enjoy. But he managed to gather and pack what he might need. He carried both bags out through the kitchen to the side door where Madeleine had stacked up their ski pants and jackets, snowshoes and skis. The sight fed his discomfort, as he realized that the only part of the planned excursion that held any interest for him was the brief segment they’d be spending at Wolf Lake.
He took everything out to the car. While he was fitting the bags into the hatchback space, he caught sight of Madeleine, bundled in a heavy coat against the cold morning, making her way up through the pasture from the direction of the pond.
He was back in the kitchen, brewing his coffee, by the time she’d circled back down to the house. When he heard her in the mud room, he called out. “Coffee’s on, you want a cup?”
He couldn’t make out her muttered answer. He repeated the question when she appeared in the kitchen doorway.
She shook her head.
“Are you okay.”
“Sure. Is everything in the car?”
“As far as I know. Duffel bags, ski stuff . . .”
“The GPS?”
“Of course. Why?”
“The detour we’re taking. I wouldn’t want us to get lost.”
“There aren’t that many roads up there to get lost on.”
She nodded with a touch of that same preoccupation he’d sensed in her the night before. As she was leaving the room, she added with a certain coolness, “There was a phone message while you were in the shower. It’s on the landline.”
He went into the den to check it, suspecting that it might be Rebecca.
He was right. “Hi, Dave. Four people with the same dream? Meaning what? Generally similar elements? Or precisely identical images? First meaning is a stretch. Second is nuts. Love to delve deeper into this. Listen, I’ve got a gig every Friday in the psych department at SUNY Plattsburgh. So I’ll be there tomorrow. Google says that’s just twenty-seven miles from Wolf Lake. Could that work for you? We could meet where I’m staying—the Cold Brook Inn. Coming from Wolf Lake, the inn is just before the campus. Call me.”
Gurney stood by his desk trying to sort out the timing and logistics of the proposed meeting, as well as the position it would put him in with Madeleine. Before he called Rebecca back, he’d need to give those issues more thought.
THE FIVE-HOUR DRIVE FROM WALNUT CROSSING INTO THE NORTHERN reaches of the Adirondack wilderness offered an alternately beautiful and bleak exposure to the rural landscape of upstate New York. Many of the little towns were dead or dying—patches of commercial decay that clung to the state roads like disease growths on tree trunks. There were whole valleys where the tumble-down condition of everything was so pervasive it seemed the product of a toxic contamination seeping up out of the earth.
As they traveled farther north, the patches of snow on the sepia farm fields grew larger, the overcast gradually thickened, and the temperature dropped.
Coming to a village with more signs of life than most, Gurney pulled into a gas station across from something called the Latte Heaven Deli-Cafe. After filling the tank, he pulled out of the station and parked in the first space he found.
He asked if Madeleine wanted coffee. Or maybe something to eat?
“I just want to get out of the car, stretch my legs, get some air.”
He crossed the street by himself, entered the little establishment, and discovered that it wasn’t exactly what the name suggested.
The “Deli’” component was a cooler displaying in the light of a dim bulb the bleak cold cuts of Gurney’s Bronx childhood—bologna, boiled ham, and an orangey American cheese—alongside trays of thickly mayonnaised potato salad and macaroni salad. The “Cafe” component consisted of two oilcloth-covered tables, each with four folding chairs.
At one table a pair of wizened women were inclined toward each other in silence, as though they’d been in the midst of a conversation during which someone had hit the