The deer

The drive home was miserable in a way Gurney couldn’t at first identify. He was both distracted and seeking distraction, seeking distraction and unable to find it. Every radio station was more intolerable than the one before it. Music that failed to reflect his mood struck him as idiotic, while music that did only made him feel worse. Every human voice carried within it an irritant, a revelation of stupidity or cupidity or both. Every commercial made him want to scream, Lying bastards!

Turning off the radio refocused him on the road—refocused him on the shabby villages, the dead and dying farms, and the poisonous economic carrots being dangled in front of poor upstate towns by the gas-drilling industry.

Jesus, he was in a hell of a mood.

Why?

He let his mind drift back over the meeting, see what it would fasten on.

Ellen Rackoff, of course, in cashmere. Zero pretense of innocence. Warm and cozy as a snake. The danger itself a perverse part of the attraction.

The original evidence team’s report on the crime scene, reprised by Lieutenant Anderson, that made the murder sound like a professional assassination: Even the traps under the bathroom and kitchen sinks had been scrubbed.

The facts uniting the missing graduates: their common arguments with their parents, their extravagant demands that were sure to be refused, their prior contacts with Hector and Karnala Fashion and the elusive photographer, Alessandro.

Jack Hardwick’s cold prognosis: There’s a good a chance they’re all dead by now.

Rodriguez’s personal agony, as the father of a troubled daughter, echoed and magnified by the potential horrors of the case in front of him.

Gurney could hear the hoarseness in the man’s voice as clearly as if he were sitting next to him in the car. It was the sound of a man being stretched out of shape, stretched like a rubber band too small to encompass everything it was given to hold—a man whose constitution lacks the flexibility to absorb the accidental elements of his own life.

Which set Gurney to wondering: Are there really any accidental elements? Don’t we, in some undeniable way, place ourselves in the positions in which we find ourselves? Don’t our choices, our priorities, make all the difference? He felt sick to his stomach, and suddenly he knew the reason. He was identifying with Rodriguez: the career-obsessed cop, the father without a clue.

And then—as though the turmoil of this realization were not enough, as though some malignant god were seeking to contrive the perfect external disaster to match the collision of emotions within him—he hit the deer.

He had just passed the sign that read ENTERING BROWNVILLE. There was no village, just the overgrown remnants of a long-abandoned river-valley farm on the left and a forested upslope on the right. A medium-size doe had emerged from the woods, hesitated, then dashed across the road far enough ahead of him that there was hardly any need to brake. But then her fawn followed her, it was too late to brake, and although he swerved as far to the left as he could, he heard and felt the terrible thump.

He pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped. He looked into his rearview mirror, hoping to see nothing, hoping that it was one of those fortunate collisions from which the remarkably resilient deer ran off into the woods with only superficial damage. But that was not the case. A hundred feet behind him, a small brown body lay sprawled at the edge of the roadside drainage ditch.

He got out of the car and walked back along the shoulder, holding on to a faint hope that the fawn was only stunned and would at any moment stagger to its feet. As he got closer, the twisted position of the head and the empty stare of the open eyes took that hope away. He stopped and looked around helplessly. He saw the doe standing in the ruined farm field, watching, waiting, motionless.

There was nothing he could do.

He was sitting in his car with no recollection of having walked back to it, his breathing interrupted by small sobs. He was halfway to Walnut Crossing before he thought of checking the damage to the front end, but even then he continued on, pierced by regret, wanting only to get home.