Then, out on the distant center of the lake, the diminishing howl of the engine was broken by a horrifying crack—then another, and another, like a rapid series of muffled gunshots as the ice gave way under the motorcycle’s weight. There was a sickening splashing impact . . . the hiss of the hot machine sinking . . . and silence.
The cloud now had obliterated every trace of the moon.
All was darkness. No sound. No light. No thought. No hope. No feeling.
And then, the scream. The scream rising with a feral life of its own, going on and on.
The scream that she came to realize only later had been hers.
The porcupine’s behavior was making no sense.
There was something deeply disturbing about its lack of logical purpose—disturbing at least to Dave Gurney.
On that raw morning in early December, he was sitting by the den window, gazing out toward a row of bare trees on the north side of the old pasture. He was fixated on one tree in particular, on one low-lying branch of that tree, as an unusually fat porcupine ambled back and forth along that branch—slowly, repetitively, seemingly pointlessly.
“Which snowshoes are you bringing?” Madeleine was standing in the den doorway, holding a traditional rawhide-on-wood pair in one hand and a contemporary metal-and-plastic pair in the other. Her short dark hair had the especially disarranged look it had when she’d been rooting around in the low-ceilinged attic or the back of a closet.
“I’ll decide later.”
They were planning to spend a few days at an inn in the Green Mountains of Vermont for some snowshoeing and cross-country skiing. Snow had not yet arrived that year in their own Catskill Mountains, and snow was the part of winter that Madeleine loved.
She nodded toward the den window. “Still obsessed with our little visitor?”
He considered several ways of responding to that, rejecting immediately any mention of the porcupine’s resemblance to a shambling, half-senile gangster he’d known in the city. Three years into his retirement from the NYPD he and Madeleine had finally reached a tacit understanding of sorts. Although he was officially no longer the homicide detective he’d been for over twenty years, it had become clear that he wasn’t about to morph into the biking, kayaking, all-out nature lover Madeleine had been hoping for. But some accommodation was called for. On his part, he agreed to stop relating how his current experiences in the rural mountains of upstate New York managed to bring to mind past criminal cases. On her part, she agreed to stop trying to convert him into something he wasn’t. All this, of course, could lead to some fraught silences.
He looked back out the window. “I’m trying to figure out what he’s up to.”
She leaned the snowshoes against the wall, came next to him, peered out for several seconds at the bristly animal meandering along the branch. “He’s probably just doing some normal porcupine thing. Same thing he was doing yesterday. What’s the problem?”
“What he’s doing doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe it makes sense to him.”
“Not unless he’s crazy. Or pretending to be crazy, which is unlikely. Look. Very slowly he makes his way out to the end of that branch. Then, very hesitantly, he turns around. Then he makes his way back the way he came. He’s expending energy . . . for what?”
“Does everything have to be explainable?”
“Everything ultimately is explainable. And in this case I’d like to know that the explanation is something other than rabies.”
“Rabies? Why would you think such a thing?”
“Rabies causes deranged behavior.”
“Do you know for a fact that porcupines get rabies?”
“Yes. I checked. I’m going to put a couple of trail cams out there, find out where he goes, what he does, when he’s not bumbling around on that branch.”
She made a face, maybe confused, maybe incredulous—he wasn’t sure which.
“Trail cams. Outdoor security cameras,” he explained. “Motion-activated.”
“Security cameras? Good Lord, David, the odds are he’s just going about his little porcupine life, and you’re treating him like . . . like he’s committing a crime.” She paused. “Where would you get these cameras anyway?”
“Jack Hardwick. He has a bunch of them.”
He didn’t remind her that they were left over from an aborted plan he and Hardwick had cooked up during the recent Peter Pan murder case, but, judging from her darkening expression, a reminder was unnecessary. He added, in an effort to pull the discussion back from an abyss of bad memories, “Once I can see how that animal behaves on the ground, I’ll have a better idea of what’s going on.”
“You don’t think you’re overreacting, just a little?”
“Not if the damn thing has rabies.”
She gave him one of those long looks that he could never quite decipher. “We’re leaving for Vermont the day after tomorrow.”
“So?”
“So when are you planning on doing whatever you’re going to do with those camera things?”
“As soon as possible. As soon as I can get them from Hardwick. In fact, I should call him right now.”
The indecipherable look changed to obvious concern. “When are you going to pack?”
“Christ, we’re only going away for three days.”
“Four.”
“What’s the difference?”
As Gurney left the den in search of his cell phone, Madeleine’s voice followed him. “Did it occur to you that the porcupine might be totally harmless and that the reason he’s walking back and forth on the branch might be none of your business?”
A half hour later the morning sun was well above the eastern ridge. Its rays slanting through the ice crystals in the dry, frigid air were creating random microscopic sparkles.
Largely oblivious to this phenomenon, Gurney was standing by the French doors in the breakfast nook of their farmhouse kitchen. He was gazing down over the low pasture toward the red barn, the point at which the narrow town road dead-ended into their fifty-acre property—once upon a time a functioning hill farm, a use long since abandoned in the collapse of the upstate dairy industry.
After retiring early from their careers in the city, he and Madeleine had moved to that pastoral part of the western Catskill Mountains because the countryside was breathtakingly beautiful despite its economic depression. Her enthusiasm for the place was obvious from the beginning. Her energetic, unpretentious character; her positive fascination with the natural world; and her visceral delight in simply being outdoors in any season—canoeing, berry-picking, or just wandering along old forest trails—suited her for country life. Adapting to their new environment had been for her an easy, happy process.
He, nearly three years later, was still working on it.
But that sometimes divisive issue was not what was preoccupying him at the moment. He was pondering the disconcerting phone conversation he’d just had with Jack Hardwick.
Hardwick had answered the phone quite pleasantly with none of his customary jibes. He’d sounded so friendly that Gurney had suspected it was a parody of cordiality to be replaced at any moment by some cynical remark. But that didn’t happen. Hardwick had responded to Gurney’s request