was to take inventory of the main items lost in the fire. The insurance company was sure to ask for that.
He didn’t feel like doing it, but he pushed himself. He got a yellow pad and a pen from the desk in the den, got into his car, and drove down to the charred ruins of the barn.
As he got out of the car, he grimaced at the acrid odor of wet ashes. From somewhere far down the road came the intermittent whine of a chain saw.
Reluctantly, he stepped closer to the heaps of burned boards that lay within the warped but still-standing framework of the barn. In the area where their bright yellow kayaks had once rested atop a pair of sawhorses, there was now an unidentifiable brownish, bubbled, hardened mass of whatever the kayaks had been made of. He’d never been especially fond of them, but he knew that Madeleine was and that being out on the river, paddling along under a summer sky, was one of her special delights. Seeing the little boats destroyed—reduced to a solidified petrochemical glop—saddened and angered him. The sight of her bicycle was worse. The tires, seat, and cables had melted. The wheel rims were warped.
He forced himself to move slowly through the ugly scene with his pad and pen, making notes of the major tool and equipment casualties. When he finished, he turned away in disgust and got back into his car.
His mind was full of questions. Most of them were reducible to one word: Why?
None of the obvious hypotheses was persuasive.
Especially not the enraged-hunter theory. The local countryside was full of No Hunting signs, but it wasn’t full of burned barns.
So what else could it be?
A mistake by an arsonist who’d gotten his target address wrong? A pyromaniac, hot to convert something big into flames? Mindless teenage vandals? An enemy from Gurney’s law-enforcement past, acting out a revenge fantasy?
Or did it have something to do with Kim and Robby Meese and The Orphans of Murder? Was the arsonist the basement whisperer?
Let the devil sleep. If that quote was taken from a story Kim’s father had told her in her childhood, as she claimed, then the admonition must have been meant for her. It would have special meaning only for her. Why whisper it to Gurney?
Could the intruder have believed that it was Kim who had fallen down the stairs?
Such an error seemed nearly impossible. When Dave fell, the first thing he heard was Kim’s voice in the little passageway at the top of the stairs—screaming, calling to him frantically—then the sound of her footsteps running for the flashlight. It was only after that, lying on the basement floor, that he heard, quite close to him, the ominously hushed voice—the voice of someone who at that point must have known he wasn’t talking to Kim.
But if he knew the person on the floor wasn’t Kim, then why …?
The answer struck Gurney like a slap in the face.
More accurately, it struck him like a crystal-clear melody from a Vivaldi violin concerto.
He drove back up to the house in such a hurry that he bottomed out the frame of the car twice on groundhog holes.
He went straight to his musical birthday card, looked at the back, and saw what he hoped to see—a company name and website: KustomKardz.com.
A minute later he was looking at the website on his laptop. Kustom Kardz was in the business of providing just that—individualized greeting cards bearing an embedded battery-driven digital playback device “with your choice of over a hundred different melodies from the world’s best-loved classical compositions and traditional folk tunes.”
In addition to the e-mail link on the “Contact Us” site page, there was an 800 number, which Gurney called. To start with, he had one key question for the customer-service representative. Rather than customizing the playback chip with a piece of music, could it be customized with spoken words?
The answer was yes, certainly. It would just be a matter of recording the message—which could be done over the phone—putting it in the proper audio format, and downloading it to the device.
He had two more questions, if she didn’t mind. What were the options for triggering the playback if such a device were used in something other than a greeting card? And how much of a delay between the triggering and the playback could be built into the device?
She explained that triggering could be done in a number of ways—by pressure, by release of pressure, even by