Gurney went into the house and stood in the middle of the kitchen, trying to absorb all the data encountered in the past hour. He stood at the sideboard. With the kitchen lights on, he couldn’t see out the window. So he turned them off. The moon was just a fraction shy of full—a ball with one slightly flattened side. The moonlight was bright enough to give the grass a gray sheen and the trees at the edge of the pasture distinct black shadows. Gurney squinted and thought he could just make out the drooping branches of the hemlocks.

Then he thought he saw something moving. He held his breath, leaning over closer to the window. As he leaned forward on the top of the sideboard, he uttered a sharp yelp at a stabbing pain that shot up through his right wrist. He knew, even before he saw the damage, that he’d carelessly pressed his hand down on the razor-edged head of the arrow that had been lying there for a week, and it had sliced deeply into the flesh. By the time he got the light back on, blood was pooling in his upturned palm and dripping between his fingers onto the floor.

Chapter 40

Facing Facts

Unable to sleep despite his total exhaustion, Gurney was sitting in semidarkness at the breakfast table, gazing out at the eastern ridge. Dawn was spreading like a sick pallor across the sky—a fair reflection of his state of mind.

Earlier, awakened by his cry of pain, Madeleine had driven him to the emergency room of Walnut Crossing’s minimal hospital.

She’d stayed with him through a four-hour process that could have been completed in less than an hour if three ambulances hadn’t arrived with the battered survivors of an unlikely accident in which a drunk driver had knocked down a billboard that acted as a ramp that launched a speeding motorcycle that landed on the hood of a car coming from the opposite direction. At least that was the story the EMS and ER people were telling and retelling each other outside the cubicle where Gurney had waited to be stitched and bandaged.

It had been his second visit to a hospital in less than a week, which in itself was troubling.

He’d been aware of Madeleine’s worried glances in his direction on their way there, in the waiting area, and on the way home, but they’d hardly spoken. When they had, it was mainly about how his hand felt or about the need to either get rid of the damn arrow or at least keep it in a safer place.

There were other things he could have spoken to her about, perhaps that he should have spoken about. The tracker he’d found on Kim’s car. The tracker on his own car. The third ice-pick murder. But he didn’t say a word about any of those things.