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and keep a tidy, if imperfect, house. The house was a snapshot of
his life, and she liked its easy, comfortable feel.
She turned out the lights and collapsed on the couch. She picked
up the remote and surfed TV channels, trying to find something
interesting but not too demanding. It was coming up on ten
o’clock, she noted. An hour to go. She lay back on the couch and
started watching a show on the Discovery Channel, something
about volcanoes. She noticed a glare on the screen and stretched to
turn off the lamp on the end table, darkening the room. She leaned
back again. Better.
She watched for a few minutes, barely aware that every time she
blinked, her eyes stayed closed a fraction longer. Her breath
slowed and she began to melt into the cushions. Images began to
float through her mind, disjointed at first, thoughts of the carnival
rides, the view from the Ferris wheel. People standing in random
clusters, young and old, teens and couples. Families. And
somewhere in the distance, a man in a baseball hat and
sunglasses, weaving among the crowd, moving with purpose
before she lost sight of him again. Something she’d recognized:
the walk, the jut of his jaw, the way he swung his arms.
She was drifting now, relaxing and remembering, the images
beginning to blur, the sound of the television fading. The room
growing darker, quieter. She drifted further, her mind flashing
back again and again to the view from the Ferris wheel. And, of
course, to the man she’d seen, a man who’d been moving like a
hunter through the brush, in search of game.
40
Kevin stared up at the windows, nursing his half-empty bottle of
vodka, his third of the night. No one gave him a second glance. He
was standing on the dock at the rear of the house; he’d changed