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

overtly menacing in the second, and vengeful in the third. Putting aside the question of how seriously it should be taken, the message itself was clear: The writer (X. Arybdis?) was saying that he intended to get even with (kill?) Mellery for a drinking-relatedmisdeed in his past. As Gurney wrote the word
kill
in the notes he was making, his attention jumped back to the initial couplet in the second poem:
    What you took you will give
    when you get what you gave
.
    Now he knew exactly what the words meant, and the meaning was chillingly simple.
For the life you took, you will give your life. What you did will be done to you
.
    He wasn’t sure whether the frisson he felt convinced him he was right or if knowing he was right created the frisson, but either way he had no doubt about it. This did not, however, answer his other questions. It only made them more urgent, and it gave rise to new ones.
    Was the threat of murder just a threat, designed only to inflict the pain of apprehension—or was it a declaration of practical intent? To what was the writer referring when he said
“I do what I’ve done”
in the first line of the third poem? Had he previously done to someone else what he now proposed to do to Mellery? Might Mellery have done something in concert with someone else whom the writer had already dealt with? Gurney made a note to ask Mellery if any friend or associate of his had ever been killed, assaulted, or threatened.
    Maybe it was the mood created by the flashes of light beyond the blackening foothills, or the eerie persistence of the low thunder, or his own exhaustion, but the personality behind the messages was emerging from the shadows. The detachment of the voice in those poems, bloody purpose and careful syntax, hatred and calculation—he had seen those qualities combined before to horrible effect. As he stared out the den window, surrounded by the unsettledatmosphere of the approaching storms, he could sense in those messages the iciness of a psychopath. A psychopath who called himself X. Arybdis.
    Of course, it was possible that he was off base. It wouldn’t be the first time that a certain mood, particularly in the evening, particularly when he was alone, had generated in him convictions unsupported by the facts.
    Still … what was it about that name? In what dusty box of memories was it faintly stirring?
    He went to bed early that night, long before Madeleine returned home from her concert, determined that tomorrow he would return the letters to Mellery and insist that he go to the police. The stakes were too high, the danger too palpable. In bed, though, he found it impossible to lay the day to rest. His mind was a racecourse with no exits and no finish line. It was an experience he was familiar with—a price he paid (he’d come to believe) for the intense attention he devoted to certain kinds of challenges. Once his obsessed mind, instead of falling asleep, fell into this circular rut, there were only two options. He could let the process run its course, which could take three or four hours, or he could force himself out of bed and into his clothes.
    Minutes later, dressed in jeans and a comfortable old cotton sweater, he was standing outside on the patio. A full moon behind the overcast sky created a faint illumination, making the barn visible. It was in that direction, along the rutted road through the pasture, that he decided to walk.
    Past the barn was the pond. Halfway there he stopped and listened to the sound of a car coming up the road from the direction of the village. He estimated it to be about half a mile away. In that quiet corner of the Catskills, where the sporadic howling of coyotes was the loudest nighttime sound, a vehicle could be heard at a great distance.
    Soon the headlights of Madeleine’s car swept over the tangle of dying goldenrod that bordered the pasture. She turned toward the barn, stopped on the crunchy gravel, and switched off the headlights. She got out and walked