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was really good.”
    “Your own contributions helped make it good.”
    She smiled. “I guess we’re just on the same wavelength.”

Chapter 6
Home
    B y the time Gurney was nearing the end of his two-hour drive from the academy in Albany to his farmhouse in Walnut Crossing, dusk was settling stealthily into the winding valleys of the western Catskills.
    As he turned off the county road onto the dirt-and-gravel lane that led up to his hilltop property, the jazzed illusion of energy he’d received from two large containers of strong coffee during the afternoon seminar break was now sinking deep into its inversion phase. The fading day generated an overwrought image that he assumed was the product of caffeine withdrawal: summer sidling off the stage like an aging actor while autumn, the undertaker, waited in the wings.
    Christ, my brain is turning to mush
.
    He parked the car as usual on the worn patch of weedy grass at the top of the pasture, parallel to the house, facing a deep rose-and-purple swath of sunset clouds beyond the far ridge.
    He entered the house through the side door, kicked off his shoes in the room that served as a laundry and pantry, and continued into the kitchen. Madeleine was on her knees in front of the sink, brushing shards of a broken wineglass into a dustpan. He stood watching her for several seconds before speaking. “What happened?”
    “What does it look like?”
    He let a few more seconds pass. “How are things at the clinic?”
    “Okay, I guess.” She stood, smiled gamely, walked over to the pantry, and emptied the dustpan noisily into the plastic trash barrel. He walked to the French doors and stared out at the monochromelandscape, at the large pile of logs by the woodshed waiting to be split and stacked, the grass that needed its final mowing of the season, the ferny asparagus ready to be cut down for the winter—cut and then burned to avoid the risk of asparagus beetles.
    Madeleine came back into the kitchen, switched on the recessed lights in the ceiling over the sideboard, replaced the dustpan under the sink. The increased illumination in the room had the effect of further darkening the outside world, turning the glass doors into reflectors.
    “I left some salmon on the stove,” she said, “and some rice.”
    “Thank you.” He watched her in the glass pane. She seemed to be gazing into the dishwater in the sink. He remembered her saying something about going out that night, and he decided to risk a guess. “Book-club night.”
    She smiled. He wasn’t sure whether it was because he’d gotten it right or wrong.
    “How was the academy?” she asked.
    “Not bad. A mixed bag of attendees—all the basic types. There’s always the cautious group—the ones who wait and watch, who believe in saying as little as possible. The utilitarians, the ones who want to know exactly how they can
use
every fact you give them. The minimizers who want to know as little as possible, get involved as little as possible, do as little as possible. The cynics who want to prove that any idea that didn’t occur first to them is bullshit. And, of course, the ‘positives’—probably the best name for them—the ones who want to learn as much as they can, see more clearly, become better cops.” He felt comfortable talking, wanted to go on, but she was studying the dishwater again. “So … yeah,” he concluded, “it was an okay day. The ‘positives’ made it … interesting.”
    “Men or women?”
    “What?”
    She lifted the spatula out of the water, frowning at it as though noticing for the first time how dull and scratched it was. “The ‘positives’—were they men or women?”
    It was curious how guilty he could feel when, really, there was nothing to feel guilty about. “Men
and
women,” he replied.
    She held the spatula up closer to the light, wrinkled her nose in disapproval, and tossed it into the garbage receptacle under the sink.
    “Look,” he said. “About this morning.