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and went out through the French doors with a quick smile that seemed to be switched on by the bright sky.
    “How much I can help you will depend on how much you help me,” said Gurney.
    “What do you want me to do?”
    “I already told you.”
    “What? Oh … the lists …”
    “When you’ve made progress, call me back. We’ll see where we go from there.”
    “Dave?”
    “Yes?”
    “Thank you.”
    “I haven’t done anything.”
    “You’ve given me some hope. Oh, by the way, I opened that envelope today very carefully. Like they do on TV. So if there are fingerprints, they wouldn’t be destroyed. I used tweezers and latex gloves. I put the letter in a plastic bag.”

Chapter 7
The black hole
    G urney wasn’t really comfortable with his agreement to get involved in Mark Mellery’s problem. Certainly he was attracted by its mystery, by the challenge of unraveling it. So why did he feel uneasy?
    It popped into his mind that he should go to the barn to get the ladder to gather the promised apples, but that was replaced by the thought he should set up his next art project for Sonya Reynolds—at least enter the mug shot of the infamous Peter Piggert into his computer’s retouching program. He’d been looking forward to the challenge of capturing the inner life of that Eagle Scout who had not only murdered his father and fifteen years later his mother but had done so for sex-related motives that seemed more horrendous than the crimes themselves.
    Gurney went to the room he had set up for his Cop Art avocation. Once the farmhouse pantry, it was now furnished as a den and was suffused with a shadowless, cool light from an expanded window on its north wall. He stared out at the bucolic view. A gap in the maple copse beyond the meadow formed a frame for the bluish hills that receded into the distance. It brought his mind back to the apples, and he returned to the kitchen.
    As he stood entangled in indecision, Madeleine came in from her knitting.
    “So what’s the next step with Mellery?” she asked.
    “I haven’t decided.”
    “Why not?”
    “Well … it’s not the kind of thing you’d want me to get wound up in, is it?”
    “That’s not the problem,” she said with the clarity that always impressed him.
    “You’re right,” he conceded. “I think the problem actually is that I can’t put the normal labels on anything yet.”
    She flashed a smile of understanding.
    Encouraged, he went on, “I’m not a homicide cop anymore, and he’s not a homicide victim. I’m not sure what I am or what he is.”
    “Old college buddy?”
    “But what the hell is that? He recalls a level of comradeship between us that I never felt. Besides, he doesn’t need a buddy, he needs a bodyguard.”
    “He wants Uncle Dave.”
    “That’s not who I am.”
    “You sure?”
    He sighed. “Do you want me to get involved in this Mellery business or not?”
    “You
are
involved. You may not have the labels sorted out yet. You’re not an official cop, and he’s not an official crime victim. But there’s a puzzle there, and by God, sooner or later you’re going to put the pieces together. That’s always going to be the bottom line, isn’t it?”
    “Is that an accusation? You married a detective. I wasn’t pretending to be something else.”
    “I thought there might be a difference between a detective and a retired detective.”
    “I’ve been retired for over a year. What do I do that looks like detective work?”
    She shook her head as if to say that the answer was painfully obvious. “What do you invest any time in that
doesn’t
look like detective work?”
    “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “Everyone does portraits of murderers?”
    “It’s a subject I know something about. You want me to draw pictures of daisies?”
    “Daisies would be better than homicidal madmen.”
    “It was you who got me involved in this art thing.”
    “Oh, I see. It’s because of me that