similar tone of loud, fast-talking indignation—and Gurney realized that what he was hearing was the cable news channel that made sitting in Huffbarger’s waiting room insufferable.
“Hello?” said Gurney with a definite edge. “Anybody there? Hello?”
“Just a minute, please.”
The voices that he found so abrasively empty-headed continued in the background. He was about to hang up when the receptionist’s voice returned.
“Dr. Huffbarger’s office, can I help you?”
“Yes. This is David Gurney. I have an appointment I want to cancel.”
“The date?”
“A week from today at eleven-forty A.M.”
“Spell your name, please.”
He was about to question how many people had appointments on that same day at 11:40, but he spelled his name instead.
“And when do you wish to reschedule it?”
“I don’t. I’m just canceling it.”
“You’ll need to reschedule it.”
“What?”
“I can reschedule Dr. Huffbarger’s appointments, not cancel them.”
“But the fact is—”
She interrupted, sounding exasperated. “An existing appointment can’t be removed from the system without inserting a revised date. That’s the doctor’s policy.”
Gurney could feel his lips tightening with anger, way too much anger. “I don’t really care much about his system or his policy,” he said slowly, stiffly. “Consider my appointment canceled.”
“There will be a missed-appointment charge.”
“No there won’t. And if Huffbarger has a problem with that, tell him to call me.” He hung up, tense, feeling a twinge of chagrin at his childish twisting of the neurologist’s name.
He stared out the den window at the high pasture without really seeing it.
What the hell’s the matter with me?
A jab of pain in his right side offered a partial answer. It also reminded him that he’d been on his way to the medicine cabinet when he’d made his appointment-canceling detour.
He returned to the bathroom. He didn’t like the look of the man who looked back at him from the mirror on the cabinet door. His forehead was lined with worry, his skin colorless, his eyes dull and tired.
Christ.
He knew he had to get back to his daily exercise regimen—the sets of push-ups, chin-ups, sit-ups that had once kept him in better shape than most men half his age. But now the man in the mirror was looking every bit of forty-eight, and he wasn’t happy about it. He wasn’t happy about the daily messages of mortality his body was sending him. He wasn’t happy about his descent from mere introversion into isolation. He wasn’t happy about … anything.
He took the ibuprofen bottle from its shelf, tapped three of the little brown pills into his hand, frowned at them, popped them into his mouth. As he was running the water, waiting for it to get cold, he heard the phone ringing in the den. Huffbarger, he thought. Or Huffbarger’s office. He made no move to answer it. To hell with them.
Then he heard Madeleine’s footsteps coming down from upstairs. A few moments later, she picked up the phone, just as the call was switching over to their ancient answering machine. He could hear her voice but couldn’t make out the words. He half-filled a small plastic cup with water and washed down the three pills that were starting to dissolve on his tongue.
He assumed that Madeleine was dealing with the Huffbarger problem. Which was fine with him. But then he heard her footsteps coming across the hall and into the bedroom. She walked through the open bathroom door, extending the phone handset toward him.
“For you,” she said, handing it to him and leaving the room.
Anticipating some unpleasantness from Huffbarger or one of his malcontent receptionists, Gurney’s tone was defensively curt. “Yes?”
There was a second of silence before the caller spoke.
“David?” The bright female voice was certainly familiar, but his memory failed to attach a name or a face to it.
“Yes,” he said, more pleasantly this time. “I’m sorry, but I can’t quite place—”
“Oh, how could you forget? Oh, I am so hurt, Detective Gurney!” the caller cried with jokey exaggeration—and suddenly the laughing timbre and inflection of the words conjured up the person: a wiry, clever, high-energy blonde with a Queens accent and a model’s cheekbones.
“Connie. Jesus. Connie Clarke. It’s been a while.”
“Six years, to be exact.”
“Six years. Jesus.” The number didn’t mean much to him, didn’t surprise him, but he didn’t know what else to say.
He remembered their connection with mixed feelings. A freelance journalist, Connie Clarke had written a laudatory article about him for New York magazine after he’d solved the infamous Jason Strunk serial-murder case—just three years after he’d been promoted to detective first grade for solving the Jorge Kunzman serial-murder case. In fact,