A click was a click. And the first click had a special power.

Chapter 24

All the Trouble in the World

Entering the kitchen, Gurney saw a plastic shopping bag, bulging with angular objects, and a note from Madeleine on the sideboard.

Tomorrow is supposed to be a nice day. I picked up some things from the hardware store so we could get started on the house for the chickens. Okay? My schedule got moved around today, so I came home for a couple of hours, now have to return to the clinic. Won’t be home tonight till around seven. You should go ahead and eat first. There’s stuff in the fridge. Love—M.

He looked into the bag, saw a retractable metal tape measure, a large ball of yellow nylon string, two canvas carpenter’s aprons, two carpenter’s pencils, a yellow legal pad, two pairs of work gloves, two bubble levels, and a handful of metal spikes for laying out corner positions.

Whenever Madeleine took a concrete step toward a project that would require his participation, his first reaction was always dismay. But due to their recent discussion of his relentless focus on blood and mayhem—or perhaps due to the intimacy they shared following that discussion—he tried to view the coop project more positively.

Perhaps a shower would put him in the right frame of mind.

Half an hour later he returned to the kitchen—refreshed, hungry, and feeling a bit better about Madeleine’s eagerness to get the chicken coop started. In fact, he felt revitalized enough to take the first step. He took the hardware store items from the sideboard, got a hammer from the mudroom, and went out onto the patio. He eyed the area where Madeleine had indicated she wanted the coop and fenced-in run to be located—an area between the asparagus and the big apple tree, where Horace and his little flock of hens would be visible from the breakfast table. Where Horace could crow happily and establish his territory.

Gurney went over to the asparagus patch—a raised planting bed enclosed by four-by-four timbers—and laid Madeleine’s purchases out on the grass next to it. He took the yellow pad and a pencil and roughed in the positions of the raised bed, the patio, and the apple tree. Then he paced off the approximate dimensions of the coop and run.

As he was getting the metal tape measure so he could be more precise about the distances, he heard the house phone ringing. He left his pad and pencil on the patio and went inside to the den. It was Hardwick.

“So who’s the fucking midget?”