Free Let the Devil Sleep by John Verdon Page A

den, he took Kim’s project folder out to the kitchen table. Madeleine was still sitting in her armchair by the flickering woodstove at the far end of the room.
War and Peace
had moved from her lap to the coffee table in front of her, and she was knitting.
    “So have you figured out where that arrow came from?” she asked, without looking up.
    He glanced over at the sideboard, at the black graphite shaft and its red fletching. Something about it made him feel almost queasy.
    Then, as though the feeling had been the herald of a rising memory, he recalled an incident in the apartment house of his Bronx childhood. He was thirteen. It was dark out. His father was either working late or out drinking. His mother was at one of her ballroom-dancing lessons at a studio in Manhattan—a consuming mania that had displaced her former obsession with finger painting. His grandmother was in her bedroom, muttering over her rosary beads. He was in hismother’s bedroom—hers exclusively, ever since his father had begun sleeping on the living-room couch and keeping his clothes in a closet in the hallway.
    He’d opened one of the two windows from the top. The air was cold and smelled of snow. He had a wooden bow—a real one, not a toy. He’d purchased it with money saved from two years of allowances. He dreamed one day of hunting with it in a forest far from the Bronx. He stood in front of the wide-open sash with the cold air flowing over him. He notched one scarlet-fletched arrow on his bowstring and, driven by a strange sense of excitement, raised the bow toward the black sky outside that sixth-floor bedroom window, drew back the bowstring, and let the arrow fly out into the night. With sudden fear gripping his heart, he listened for the sound of its impact—its thwack on the roof of one of the lower buildings in the neighborhood, or its metallic clunk on the roof of a parked car, or its sharp bang on a sidewalk—but he heard nothing. Nothing at all.
    The unexpected silence began to terrify him.
    He imagined how silent the impact of a sharp arrow on a person might be.
    For the rest of the night, he considered the possible consequences. The possible consequences scared him to death. But the lasting disturbance, the piece of the experience that was indigestible, the piece that plagued him even now, thirty-five years later, was the question he was never able to answer: Why?
    Why had he done it? What had possessed him to do something so patently reckless, so lacking in any rational reward, so full of pointless danger?
    Gurney looked again at the sideboard and was struck by the bizarre symmetry between the two mysteries: the arrow he’d shot from his mother’s window, with motive and landing place unknown, and the arrow that had landed in his wife’s garden, with motive and starting place unknown. He shook his head, as if to clear it of some internal fog. It was time to move on to another subject.
    Conveniently, his cell phone rang. It was Connie Clarke.
    “There’s something that I wanted to add—something I didn’t mention this morning.”
    “Oh?”
    “I didn’t purposely leave it out. It’s just one of those vague things that sometimes seems related to the situation and sometimes not.”
    “Yes?”
    “I guess it’s more like a coincidence than anything else. The Good Shepherd murders all happened exactly ten years ago, right? Well, that’s also the same time that Kim’s father dropped out of sight. We’d been divorced for two years at that point, and he’d been talking all that time about wanting to travel around the world. I never thought he’d actually do it—although he could be amazingly impulsive and irresponsible, which is part of the reason I divorced him—and then one day he left a phone message for us saying that the moment had come, it was now or never, and he was going. I mean, it was absurd. But that was it. The first week of spring, ten years ago. We never heard another word from him. Can you believe