Free Think of a Number (Dave Gurney, No.1) by John Verdon

where I sent the $289.87 check to Arybdis—he sent it back to me with a note saying there’s nobody there by that name, that I must have gotten the address wrong. But I checked it again. It was the right box number. Davey? Are you there?”
    “I’m here. Just trying to make sense of that.”
    “Let me read you the note. ‘I found the enclosed piece of mail in my post-office box. There must be a mistake in the address. There is no one here named X. Arybdis.’ And it’s signed ‘Gregory Dermott.’ The letterhead on the notepaper says ‘GD Security Systems,’ and there’s an address and phone number in Wycherly.”
    Gurney was about to explain that it was now almost certain that X. Arybdis was not a real name but a curious play on the name of a mythological whirlpool, a whirlpool that tore its victims to pieces, but he decided that the issue was already disturbing enough. The revelation of thisextra twist could wait until he got to the institute. He told Mellery he’d be there in an hour.
    What the hell was going on? It made no sense. What could be the purpose of demanding a specific amount of money, having the check made out to an obscure mythological name, and then having it sent to the wrong address in the likelihood that it would be returned to the sender? Why such a complex and seemingly pointless preamble to the nasty poems that followed?
    The baffling aspects of the case were increasing, and so was Gurney’s interest.

Chapter 10
The perfect place
    P eony was a town twice removed from the history it sought to reflect. Adjacent to Woodstock, it pretended to the same tie-dyed, psychedelic, rock-concert past—while Woodstock in turn nourished its own ersatz aura through its name association with the pot-fogged concert that had actually been held fifty miles away on a farm in Bethel. Peony’s image was the product of smoke and mirrors, and upon this chimerical foundation had risen predictable commercial structures—New Age bookstores, tarot parlors, Wiccan and Druidical emporia, tattoo shops, performance-art spaces, vegan restaurants—a center of gravity for flower children approaching senility, Deadheads in old Volkswagen buses, and mad eclectics swathed in everything from leathers to feathers.
    Of course, among these colorfully weird elements there were interspersed plenty of opportunities for tourists to spend money: stores and eateries whose names and decor were only a little outrageous and whose wares were tailored to the upscale visitors who liked to imagine they were exploring the cultural edge.
    The loose web of roads radiating out from Peony’s business district led to money. Real-estate prices had doubled and tripled after 9/11, when New Yorkers of substantial means and galloping paranoia were captivated by the fantasy of a rural sanctuary. Homes in the hills surrounding the village grew in size and number, the SUVs morphed from Blazers and Broncos into Hummers and Land Rovers, and the people who came for country weekends wore what Ralph Lauren told them people in the country wore.
    Hunters, firemen, and teachers gave way to lawyers, investment bankers, and women of a certain age whose divorce settlements financed their cultural activities, skin treatments, and mind-expanding involvements with gurus of this and that. In fact, Gurney suspected that the local population’s appetite for guru-based solutions to life’s problems may have persuaded Mark Mellery to set up shop there.
    He turned off the county highway just before the village center, following his Google directions onto Filchers Brook Road—which snaked up a wooded hillside. This brought him eventually to a roadside wall of native slate, laid nearly four feet high. The wall ran parallel to the road, set back about ten feet, for at least a quarter of a mile. The setback was thick with pale blue asters. Halfway along the stretch of wall, there were two formal openings about fifty feet apart, the entrance and exit of a circular drive.