He’d always had a habit of challenging the prevailing wisdom in any situation, as well as a talent for detecting discrepancies. But slowly he was becoming aware of something else going on inside him, something less objective. His intellectual bent for testing the logic of every opinion, every conclusion, had been infused with hostility—a hostility that ranged from a cranky contrariness to something verging on rage. He’d become increasingly isolated, increasingly defensive, increasingly resistant to any idea not his own. And he was convinced it had all begun six months earlier with the three bullets that had nearly killed him. Objectivity, once an asset he took for granted, was now a quality he needed to strive for. But he knew it was worth the effort. Without objectivity he had nothing.

A therapist had told him long ago, “Whenever you’re disturbed, try to identify the fear beneath the disturbance. The root is always fear, and unless we face it, we tend to act badly.” Now, taking a cool step back, Gurney asked himself what he was afraid of. The question occupied him for most of the remaining trip home. The clearest answer he could come up with was also the most embarrassing.

He was afraid of being wrong.

He parked next to Madeleine’s car by the side door of the farmhouse. The mountain air felt chilly. He went into the house, hung up his jacket in the mudroom, continued on into the kitchen, and called out, “I’m home.” There was no response. The place had an indescribable deadness about it—a peculiar sort of emptiness it had only when Madeleine was out.

He had to go to the bathroom, started in that direction, then remembered that he’d forgotten to bring in Kim’s blue folder from the car. He went back out for it, but before he got to the car, something bright and red to the right of the parking area caught his eye. It was in the middle of the raised garden bed where Madeleine had planted flowers the previous year—a fact that was responsible for his first impression: that it was some sort of red blossom atop a straight stem. A second later it occurred to him that the time of year would make any blossom unlikely. However, when he reached the bed and realized what he was actually looking at, the truth didn’t make any more sense than a rose in full bloom would have.

The straight stem was the shaft of an arrow. The arrow was sticking point-down into the soft wet earth, and the “blossom” was the fletching on the notched end—three scarlet half feathers, shining brilliantly in the angled sun.