After ending the call to Hardwick, Gurney checked the time and saw that he had a couple of free hours before he’d have to leave for Long Falls. Feeling he should take some action on the chicken coop project, he put on a pair of rubber gardening boots and went out the side door to the area that he’d started measuring the previous day.

He was surprised to find Madeleine already there, holding the metal tape measure. She had one end of it hooked over the low retaining wall of the asparagus bed and was slowly backing up toward the apple tree. When she was nearly there, the end came loose and the tape went skittering along the ground, rewinding itself into the case in her hand.

“Damn!” she said. “Third time that’s happened.”

Gurney walked over, picked up the end, and pulled it back to the bed wall. “Is this where you want it?” he asked.

She nodded, looking relieved. “Thank you.”

For the next hour and a half he assisted with measurements for the coop and the run, helped hammer in corner stakes, squared the diagonals, and only once in the course of this work did he question one of Madeleine’s decisions. It was when she laid out the position of the run in a way that would result in a large forsythia bush being inside the fence instead of outside. He thought it was a mistake to let a bush take up so much of the fenced space. But she said that the chickens would like having a bush in their run because although they loved being outside, they were also fond of shade and shelter. It made them feel secure.

As she was explaining this, he could sense how much she cared about it. He felt a little envious of this remarkable ability of hers to focus on and care deeply about whatever was in front of her. So many different things seemed to matter to her. He had the rather silly-sounding thought that perhaps what mattered in life was that things mattered—a lot of things. There was something almost surreal in this thought, which he attributed partly to the odd weather. It was distinctly cool for August, with an autumnal haze in the air and an earthy fragrance rising from the wet grass. It made what was happening for that brief moment seem more like a soft-edged dream than the prickly reality of daily life.

Aegean Odyssey, the restaurant where he was meeting Adonis “Donny Angel” Angelidis, was on Axton Avenue, less than three blocks from the apartment building on which the investigation had centered. The two-hour drive from Walnut Crossing had been uneventful. Parking, as on his previous visit, was no problem. He found a spot within fifty feet of the restaurant door. He was exactly on time: two p.m.