Ashton’s manor

Many of the houses on Badger Lane, especially those up toward Ashton’s end of the road, were old and large and had been maintained or restored with costly attention to detail. The result was a casual elegance toward which Gurney felt a resentment he would have resisted identifying as envy. Even measured by the elevated standards of Badger Lane, the Ashton property was striking: an impeccable two-story farmhouse of pale yellow stone surrounded by wild roses, huge free-form flower beds with herbaceous borders, and trellises of English ivy serving as passageways among the various areas of a gently sloping lawn. Gurney parked in a Belgian-block driveway that led to the kind of garage a real-estate agent would call a carriage house. Across the lawn stood the classical pavilion where the wedding musicians had played.

Gurney got out of his car and was immediately struck by a scent in the air. As he struggled to name it, a man came around from the rear of the main house carrying a pruning saw. Scott Ashton looked familiar but different, less vivid in person than on video. He was dressed in casually expensive country attire: Donegal tweed pants and a tailored flannel shirt. He noted Gurney’s presence without apparent pleasure or displeasure.

“You’re on time,” he said. His voice was even, mellow, impersonal.

“I appreciate your willingness to see me, Dr. Ashton.”

“Would you like to come inside?” It was purely a question, not an invitation.

“It would be helpful if I could see the area behind the house first—the location of the garden cottage. Also the patio table where you were sitting when the bullet hit the teacup.”

Ashton responded with a movement of his hand indicating that Gurney should follow him. As they passed through the trellis linking the garage and driveway area beside the house to the main lawn behind it—the trellis through which the wedding guests had entered the reception—Gurney experienced a feeling of combined recognition and dislocation. The pavilion, the cottage, the rear of the main house, the stone patio, the flower beds, the enclosing woods were recognizable but jarringly altered by the change of season, the emptiness, the silence. The odd scent in the air, exotically herbal, was stronger here. Gurney asked about it.

Ashton motioned vaguely toward the planting beds bordering the patio. “Chamomile, windflower, mallow, bergamot, tansy, boxwood. The relative strength of each component changes with the direction of the breeze.”

“Do you have a new gardener?”

Ashton’s features tightened. “In place of Hector Flores?”

“I understood he handled most of the work around the house.”

“No, he hasn’t been replaced.” Ashton noted the pruning saw he was carrying and smiled without warmth. “Unless by myself.” He turned toward the patio. “There’s that table you wanted to see.” He led Gurney through an opening in the low stone wall to an iron table with a pair of matching chairs near the back door of the house.

“Did you want to sit here?” Once again it was a question, not an invitation.

Gurney had settled into the chair that gave him the best view of the areas he remembered from the video when a slight movement drew his attention to the far side of the patio. There, on a small bench against the sunny back wall of the house, sat an elderly man in a brown cardigan with a twig in his hand. He was rocking his hand from side to side, making the twig resemble a metronome. The man had thinning gray hair, sallow skin, and a dazed look.

“My father,” said Ashton, sitting in the chair opposite Gurney.

“Here for a visit?”

Ashton paused. “Yes, a visit.”

Gurney responded with a curious look.

“He’s been in a private nursing home for about two years as the result of progressive dementia and aphasia.”

“He can’t speak?”

“Hasn’t been able to for at least a year now.”

“You brought him here for a visit?”

Ashton’s eyes narrowed as though he might be about to tell Gurney it was none of his business, but then his expression softened. “Jillian’s … death created … a kind of loneliness.” He seemed confused by the word and hesitated. “I think it was a week or two after her death that I decided to bring my father here for a while. I thought that being with him, taking care of him …” Again he fell silent.

“How do you manage that, going to Mapleshade every day?”

“He comes with me. Surprisingly, it’s not a problem. Physically, he’s fine. No difficulty walking. No difficulty with stairs. No difficulty eating. He can tend to his … hygiene requirements. In addition to the speech issue, the deficit is mainly in orientation. He’s generally confused about where he is, thinks he’s back in the Park Avenue apartment where we lived when I was a child.”

“Nice neighborhood.” Gurney glanced across the patio at the old man on the bench.

“Nice enough. He was a bit of a financial genius. Hobart Ashton. Trusted member of a social class in which all the men’s names sounded like boys’ prep schools.”

It was an old witticism and sounded stale. Gurney smiled politely.

Ashton cleared his throat. “You didn’t come here to talk about my father. And I don’t have much time. So what can I do for you?”

Gurney put his hands on the table. “Is this where you were sitting the day of the gunshot?”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t make you nervous to be in the same spot?”

“A lot of things make me nervous.”

“I’d never know it, looking at you.”

There was a long silence, broken by Gurney. “Did you think the shooter hit what he was aiming at?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you so sure he wasn’t aiming at you and missed?”

“Did you see Schindler’s List? There is a scene in which Schindler attempts to talk the camp commandant into sparing the lives of Jews whom he would normally shoot for minor offenses. Schindler tells him that being able to shoot them, having a perfect right to shoot them, and then choosing in a godlike way to spare them, would be the greatest proof of his power over them.”

“That’s what you think Flores was doing? Proving, by sparing you and smashing the teacup, that he has the power to kill you?”

“It’s a reasonable hypothesis.”

“Assuming that the shooter was Flores.”

Ashton held Gurney’s gaze. “Who else did you have in mind?”

“You told the original investigating officer that Withrow Perry had a rifle of the same caliber as the bullet fragments gathered from this patio.”

“Have you ever met him or spoken to him?”

“Not yet.”

“Once you do, I think you’ll find the notion of Dr. Withrow Perry crawling around in those woods with a sniperscope utterly ridiculous.”

“But not so ridiculous for Hector Flores?”

“Hector has proven himself capable of anything.”

“That scene you mentioned from Schindler’s List? As I think about it, I seem to remember that the commandant doesn’t take the advice for very long. He doesn’t have the patience for it, and he very quickly goes back to shooting Jews who aren’t behaving the way he wants them to.”

Ashton did not reply. His gaze drifted toward the wooded hillside behind the pavilion and rested there.

Most of Gurney’s decisions were conscious and well calculated, with one conspicuous exception: deciding when it was time to switch the tone of an interview. That was a gut call, and right then it felt like the right time. He leaned back in his iron chair and said, “Marian Eliot is quite a fan of yours.”

The signs were subtle; maybe Gurney was imagining them, but he got the impression from the odd look Ashton gave him that for the first time in their conversation he’d been thrown off stride. He recovered quickly.

“Marian is easy to charm,” he said in his smooth psychiatrist’s voice, “as long as you don’t try to be charming.”

Gurney realized that that had been his own perception, precisely. “She thinks you’re a genius.”

“She has her enthusiasms.”

Gurney tried another twist. “What did Kiki Muller think of you?”

“I have no idea.”

“You were her psychiatrist?”

“Very briefly.”

“A year doesn’t seem that brief.”

“A year? More like two months, not even two months.”

“When did the two months end?”

“I can’t tell you that. Confidentiality restrictions. I shouldn’t even have said two months.”

“Her husband told me that she had an appointment with you every Tuesday up until the week she disappeared.”

Ashton offered only an incredulous frown and shook his head.

“Let me ask you something, Dr. Ashton. Without improperly divulging anything Kiki Muller might have told you during the time she was seeing you, can you tell me why her treatment period ended so quickly?”

He considered this, seemed uncomfortable answering. “I discontinued it.”

“Can you tell me why you did that?”

He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then seemed to make a decision. “I discontinued her therapy because in my opinion she wasn’t interested in therapy. She was only interested in being here.”

“Here? On your property?”

“She’d show up half an hour early for her appointments, then linger afterward, supposedly fascinated by the landscaping, the flowers, whatever. The fact is, wherever Hector was, that’s where her attention was. But she wouldn’t admit it. Which made her communications with me dishonest and pointless. So I stopped seeing her after six or seven sessions. I’m taking a risk in telling you this, but it seems an important fact if she was lying about the duration of her treatment. The truth is, she ceased being my patient at least nine months prior to her disappearance.”

“Might she have been seeing Hector secretly all that time, telling her husband she was coming here for her appointments with you?”

Ashton took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’d hate to think something so blatant was going on under my nose, right there in that damned cottage. But it’s consistent with the two of them running off together … afterward.”

“This Hector Flores character,” said Gurney abruptly, “what kind of person were you imagining he was?”

Ashton winced. “You mean, as a psychiatrist, how could I have been so miserably wrong about someone I was observing daily for three years? The answer is embarrassingly simple: blindness in pursuit of a goal that had become far too important to me.”

“What goal was that?”

“The education and blossoming of Hector Flores.” Ashton looked like he was tasting something bitter. “His remarkable growth from gardener to polymath was going to be the subject of my next book—an exposition of the power of nurture over nature.”

“And after that,” said Gurney with more sarcasm than he’d intended, “a second book under another name demolishing the argument in your first book?”

Ashton’s lips stretched in a cold, slow-motion smile. “That was an informative conversation you had with Marian.”

“Which reminds me of something else I wanted to ask you. About Carl Muller. Are you aware of his emotional condition?”

“Not through any professional contact.”

“As a neighbor, then?”

“What is it you want to know?”

“Put simply, I’d like to know how nuts he really is.”

Again Ashton presented his humorless smile. “Basing my opinion on hearsay, I’d guess he’s in full retreat from reality. Specifically, from grown-up reality. Sexual reality.”

“You get all that from the fact that he plays with model trains?”

“There’s a key question one must always ask about inappropriate behavior: Is there an age at which that behavior would have been appropriate?”

“Not sure I understand.”

“Carl’s behavior appears appropriate for a prepubescent boy. Which suggests it may be a form of regression in which the individual returns to the last secure and happy time in his life. I’d say that Carl has regressed to a time in his life before women and sex entered the equation, before he experienced the pain of having a woman deceive him.”

“You’re saying that somehow he discovered his wife’s affair with Flores and it drove him off the deep end?”

“It’s possible, if he were fragile to begin with. It’s consistent with his current behavior.”

A bank of clouds, which had materialized out of nowhere in the blue sky, drifted gradually in front of the sun, dropping the temperature on the patio at least ten degrees. Ashton seemed not to notice. Gurney stuffed his hands into his pockets.

“Could a discovery like that be enough to make him kill her? Or kill Flores?”

Ashton frowned. “You have reason to believe that Kiki and Hector are dead?”

“None, apart from the fact that neither one of them has been seen for the past four months. But I have no evidence that they’re alive, either.”

Ashton looked at his watch, a softly burnished antique Cartier. “You’re painting a complicated picture, Detective.”

Gurney shrugged. “Too complicated?”

“Not for me to say. I’m not a forensic psychologist.”

“What are you?”

Ashton blinked, perhaps at the abruptness of the question. “I beg pardon?”

“Your field of expertise …?”

“Destructive sexual behavior, particularly sexual abuse.”

It was Gurney’s turn to blink. “I had the impression you were director of a school for troubled kids.”

“Yes. Mapleshade.”

“Mapleshade is for kids who’ve been sexually abused?”

“Sorry, Detective. You’re opening a subject that cannot be discussed briefly without the risk of misunderstanding, and I don’t have the time now to discuss it in detail. Perhaps another day.” He glanced again at his watch. “The fact is, I have two appointments this afternoon I need to prepare for. Do you have any simpler questions?”

“Two. Is it possible that you were mistaken about Hector Flores being Mexican?”

“Mistaken?”

Gurney waited.

Ashton appeared agitated, moved to the edge of his chair. “Yes, I may have been mistaken about that, along with everything else I thought I knew about him. Second question?”

“Does the name Edward Vallory mean anything to you?”

“You mean the text message on Jillian’s phone?”

“Yes. ‘For all the reasons I have written. Edward Vallory.’ ”

“No. The first officer on the case asked me about that. I said it wasn’t a familiar name then, and that hasn’t changed. I was told that the phone company traced the message back to Hector’s cell phone.”

“But you have no idea why he would use the name Edward Vallory?”

“None. I’m sorry, Detective, but I do need to prepare for my appointments.”

“Can I see you tomorrow?”

“I’ll be at Mapleshade all day—with a full schedule.”

“What time do you leave in the morning?”

“Here? Nine-thirty.”

“How about eight-thirty, then?”

Ashton’s expression flickered between consternation and concern. “All right. Eight-thirty tomorrow morning.”

On the way to his car, Gurney glanced back into the far corner of the patio. The sun was gone now, but Hobart Ashton’s metronomic twig was still rocking back and forth to a slow, monotonous beat.