Wolf Lake. John Verdon
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over this uncharacteristic rush to be helpful, Madeleine came down from an upstairs room carrying two nylon duffel bags—one blue, one green. She set them down on the floor by his feet.
“Do you have a preference?”
He glanced at the bags and shook his head. “Whichever.”
“What’s the matter?”
He told her about the phone call.
Her eyes narrowed. “He’s coming . . . here? Now?”
“Apparently.”
“What’s his big hurry?”
“Good question. I assume we’ll find out when he arrives.”
On cue, from somewhere down the road below the barn, came the throaty rumble of a big V-8 engine. Half a minute later Hardwick’s classic muscle car, a red 1970 Pontiac GTO, was making its way up the snow-covered lane through the overgrown pasture.
“He’s got someone with him,” said Madeleine.
Gurney wasn’t fond of surprises. He went out past the mud room to the side door, opened it and watched while Hardwick parked the loud, angular GTO next to his own dusty, anonymous Outback.
Hardwick got out first, his thin-lipped grin exhibiting, as usual, more determination than warmth—the same message conveyed by his ice-blue eyes and aggressively colorless clothes: black jeans, black sweater, black windbreaker.
Gurney’s attention, however, was on the person emerging from the passenger side. His first impression was of a different kind of colorlessness—a drab anonymity. A large, plain woman, she was wearing a quilted winter coat and shapeless wool ski hat, perhaps in her early forties.
When she arrived at the door, Gurney offered her a pleasant smile and turned an inquisitive glance toward Hardwick—which seemed to make the man’s grin grow brighter.
“You’re asking yourself, ‘Where’s that camera equipment he was supposed to be bringing me?’ Am I right?”
Gurney waited, smiled patiently, said nothing.
“As your trusty guardian angel . . .” Hardwick inserted a dramatic pause before proceeding with relish, “I decided to bring you something of far greater value than a fucking trail cam. May we come in?”
Gurney led them into the kitchen end of the long open room that also included a dining area and, at the far end, a sitting area arranged around a fieldstone fireplace.
Madeleine’s fraught smile seemed to reflect Gurney’s history with his sometime colleague—a difficult man with whom he’d shared a series of near-fatal law enforcement experiences.
Hardwick’s grin widened. “Madeleine. You look fantastic.”
“Can I take your jackets?”
“Absolutely.” He helped the bulky woman beside him remove hers. He did this with a flourish, as if he were unveiling something grand. “Dave, Madeleine, may I introduce . . . Jane Hammond.”
Madeleine smiled and said hello. Gurney extended his hand, but the woman shook her head. “Very happy to meet you, but I won’t shake your hand, I’m full of germs.” She pulled off her knitted cap, revealing a shapeless, low-maintenance hairstyle.
Evidently sensing the absence of any recognition, Hardwick added, “Jane is the sister of Richard Hammond.”
Gurney’s expression suggested nothing but ongoing curiosity.
“Richard Hammond,” repeated Hardwick. “The Richard Hammond—the one in every major newscast for the past month.”
Madeleine showed a twinge of concern. “The hypnotist?”
Jane Hammond’s reaction was emphatic. “Not hypnotist—hypnotherapist. Any charlatan can call himself a hypnotist, dangle a pendulum, and pretend he’s doing something profound. My brother is a Harvard-trained psychologist who utilizes very sophisticated techniques.”
Madeleine nodded sympathetically, as though she were dealing with a touchy client at the mental health clinic where she worked. “But isn’t ‘hypnotist’ what they’re calling him in the news reports?”
“That’s not all they’re calling him. The so-called news programs today are nothing but trash! They don’t care how unfair they are, how full of lies—” She broke off in a brief fit of coughing. “Allergies,” she explained. “I seem to have a different one for every season.”
Hardwick spoke up. “Actually, could we sit down?”
Before Gurney could object, Madeleine offered them seats at the round pine table in the breakfast nook—where Hardwick, with a nod of encouragement from Jane Hammond, launched into the story of Richard Hammond’s bizarre situation.
“You know about the Adirondack Great Camps, right? Thousand-acre compounds, giant lodges, plenty of room for guests and servants, built about a hundred years ago by the richer-than-God robber barons—Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, et cetera. One of the lower-profile fat cats who built a place up there was a guy named Dalton Gall, a nasty bastard who’d made a fortune in tin mining. There’s a peculiar legend involving his untimely death, which I’ll come back to.”
He paused, as if to give “untimely death” extra emphasis. “Some of the Great Camps, with their huge upkeep costs, started collapsing with the stock market crash. Some became museums celebrating the lives of the greedy scumbags who built them. Some got converted into educational centers where nature fanatics could study the ecology of the frilly-frond fern.”
This jab at outdoorsiness provoked a narrow-eyed glance from Madeleine, who was preparing a pot of coffee at the sink island.
Hardwick went on, “Some of the camps continued to be maintained by the descendants of the original owners, usually by turning them into conference centers or upscale inns. Ethan Gall, great-grandson of Dalton, embraced the fancy-inn concept and added a few extras for the bored and restless wealthy. Learn while you’re being pampered—that kind of horseshit. French-Vietnamese cooking secrets. Nepalese serenity secrets. Secrets are always in demand. And since even the most privileged have bad habits they’d rather not have, Ethan hired world-renowned psychologist Richard Hammond to provide unique hypnotic solutions. So the place wasn’t just any old thousand-dollar-a-day Adirondack inn. It was the one where you got to have a therapeutic chat with none other than Richard Hammond—a chat you could regale your friends with at your next dinner party.”
Jane Hammond had been anxiously squeezing her used tissue into a tighter and tighter ball. “I have to say something here. I don’t want Mr. Gurney to get the wrong impression of my brother. I can’t comment on Ethan Gall’s motives. But I can assure you that Richard’s motives were pure. His life is his work, and he takes it very seriously. Which is another reason why these accusations are so . . . so offensive!” She looked down with dismay at the crushed tissue in her hand.
Hardwick resumed his narration. “So. Whatever Ethan Gall’s motives might have been, he gave Dr. Hammond a generous two-year contract, which, among other perks, included the use of a private chalet on the property. All went well until one evening approximately two months ago when Dr. Hammond got a call from a detective in Palm Beach.”
“Florida,” added Jane.
“Right. A twenty-seven-year-old male by the name of Christopher Wenzel had committed suicide a few days earlier. Cut his wrists sitting in his million-dollar condo on the Intracoastal. No indication of anything requiring special police attention. However, after the suicide was reported in the local news, a minister showed up at Palm Beach PD with an interesting story. Wenzel had come to see him a couple of days before he offed himself, complaining he hadn’t been able to sleep right for a whole week. Whenever he’d doze off he’d have this terrible nightmare—same nightmare every time. Said it was making him want to die.”