A little after sunrise, feeling that he’d made a sufficient gesture in the direction of solving the chicken problem—by drawing a construction diagram for a coop and fenced run—Gurney put away his pad and settled down at the breakfast table with a second cup of coffee.

When Madeleine joined him, he decided to show her the photograph of Carl Spalter.

From her triage and counseling work at the local mental health crisis center, she was accustomed to being in the presence of the extremes of negative feelings—panic, rage, anguish, despair. Even so, her eyes widened at the vividness of Spalter’s expression.

She laid the photo on the table, then pushed it a few inches farther away.

“He knows something,” she said. “Something he didn’t know before his wife shot him.”

“Maybe she didn’t. According to Hardwick, the case against her was fabricated.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know.”

“So maybe she did it, and maybe she didn’t. But Hardwick doesn’t really care which, does he?”

Gurney was tempted to argue the point, because he didn’t like the position it put him in. Instead, he just shrugged. “What he cares about is getting her conviction thrown out.”

“What he really cares about is getting even—and watching his former employers twist in the wind.”

“I know.”

She cocked her head and stared at him as if to ask why he’d let himself be drawn into such a fraught and nasty undertaking.

“I haven’t promised anything. But I have to admit,” he said, pointing to the photograph on the table, “I am curious about that.”

She pursed her lips, turned to the open door, and gazed out at the thin, scattered fog illuminated by the sideways rays of the early sun. Then something caught her attention at the edge of the stone patio just beyond the doorsill.

“They’re back,” she said.

“Who? What?”

“The carpenter ants.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere.”

“Everywhere?”

She answered in a tone as mild as his was impatient. “Out there. In here. On the windowsills. By the cupboards. Around the sink.”

“Why the hell didn’t you mention it?”

“I just did.”

He was about to ride the argument over a self-righteous cliff, but sanity prevailed and all he said was “I hate those damn things.” And hate them he did. Carpenter ants were the termites of the Catskills and other cold places—gnawing away the inner fiber of beams and joists, in silence and darkness converting the support structures of solid homes to sawdust. An exterminating service sprayed the outside of the foundation every other month, and sometimes they seemed to be winning the battle. But then the scout ants would return, and then … battalions.

For a moment he forgot what he and Madeleine had been talking about before the ant tangent. When he remembered, it was with the sinking feeling that he’d been straining to justify a questionable decision.