He is baffled.
Deeply.
Mr. Vess's simple life is not often touched by mystery. There are things that can be killed and things that can't. Some things are harder to kill than others, and some are more fun to kill than others. Some scream, some weep, some do both, some only tremble silently and wait for the end as if having spent their whole lives in anticipation of this awful pain. Thus the days go by-pleasantly straightforward, a river of raw sensation upon which enigma seldom sets sail.
But this woman in a red sweater is an enigma, all right, as mysterious and intriguing as anyone Mr. Vess has ever known. What experiences he will have with her are difficult to imagine, and he is excited by the prospect of such novelty.
He gets out of the Honda and closes the door. For a moment he stands staring at the forest in the cold rain, hoping to appear unsuspecting if the woman should be watching him from inside the motor home. Maybe he is wondering what happened to the driver of the Honda. Maybe he is a good citizen, concerned about her and considering a search of the woods.
Multiple bolts of lightning chase across the sky, as white and jagged as running skeletons. The subsequent blasts of thunder are so powerful that they rattle through Mr. Vess's bones, a vibration that he finds most agreeable.
Unfazed by the storm, several elk suddenly appear from out of the forest, drifting between the trees and into the bordering sward of ferns. They move with stately grace, in a silence that is ethereal behind the fading echo of thunder, eyes shining in the backwash of the headlight beams. They seem almost to be apparitions rather than real animals.
Two, five, seven, and yet more of them appear. Some stop as though posing, and others move farther but then stop as well, until now a dozen or more are revealed and standing still, and every one of them is staring at Mr. Vess.
Their beauty is unearthly, and killing them would be enormously satisfying. If he had one of his guns at hand, he would shoot as many of them as he could manage before they bolted beyond range.
As a young boy, he began his work with animals. Actually, he'd begun with insects, but soon he had moved on to turtles and lizards, and then to cats and larger species. As a teenager, as soon as he had gotten a driver's license, he had roamed back roads some nights and in the early mornings before school, shooting deer if he spotted any, stray dogs, cows in fields, and horses in corrals if he was certain that he could get away with it.
He is flushed with nostalgia at the thought of killing these elk. The sight of their blood would intensify the redness of his own and make his arteries sing.
Though usually reticent and easily spooked, the elk stare boldly at him. They do not seem to be watching with alarm, are not in the least skittish or poised to flee. Indeed, their directness strikes him as strange; uncharacteristically, he feels uneasy.
Anyway, the woman in the red sweater awaits him, and she is more interesting than any number of elk. He is a grown man now, no longer a boy, and his quest for intense experiences cannot be satisfactorily conducted along the byways of the past. Edgler Vess has long ago put aside childish things.
He returns to the motor home.
At the door, he sees that the woman is in neither the pilot's nor the copilot's position.
Swinging in behind the steering wheel, he glances back but can see no sign of her in the lounge or the dining area. The short and shadowy hall at the end appears deserted as well.
Facing forward but keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror, he opens the tambour-top console between the seats. His pistol is still there, where he left it, sans silencer.
Pistol in hand, he swivels in his chair, gets up, and moves back through the motor home to the kitchen and dining area. The butcher knife, found on the service-station blacktop, lies on the counter as before. He opens the cabinet to the left of the oven and discovers that the 12-gauge Mossberg is securely in its spring clamps, to which he returned it after killing the two clerks.
He doesn't know if she is armed with a weapon of her own. From the distance at which he'd seen her, he hadn't been able to discern whether she was empty-handed or, equally important, whether she was attractive enough to be a fun kill.
Farther back, then, through his narrow domain, with special caution at the end of the dining nook, behind which lies the step well. She's not crouched here either.
Into the hall.
The sound of the rain. The idling engine.
He opens the bathroom door, quickly and noisily, aware that stealth isn't possible in this reverberant tin can on wheels. The cramped bathroom is as it should be, no stowaway on the pot or in the shower stall.
Next the shallow wardrobe with its sliding door. But she isn't in there either.
The only place remaining to be searched is the bedroom. Vess stands before this last closed door, positively enchanted by the thought of the woman huddled in there, unaware of those with whom she shares her hiding place.
No thread of light is visible along the threshold or the jamb, so she no doubt entered in darkness. Evidently she has not yet sat upon the bed and found the sleeping beauty.
Perhaps she has edged warily around the small room and, by blind exploration, has discovered the folding door to the closet. Perhaps if Vess opens this bedroom door, she will simultaneously pull aside those vinyl panels and attempt to slip swiftly and quietly into the closet, only to feel a strange cold form hanging there instead of sport shirts.
Mr. Vess is amused.
The temptation to throw open the door is almost irresistible, to see her carom off the body in the closet, then to the bed, then away from the dead girl, screaming first at the sewn-shut face of the boy and then at the manacled girl and then at Vess himself, in a comic pinball spin of terror.
Following that spectacle, however, they will have to get down to issues at once. He will quickly learn who she is and what she thinks she is doing here.
Mr. Vess realizes that he doesn't want this rare experience with mystery to end. He finds it more pleasing to prolong the suspense and chew on the puzzle for a while.
He was beginning to feel weary from his recent activities. Now he is energized by these unexpected developments.
Certain risks are involved, of course, in playing it this way. But it is impossible to live with intensity and avoid risk. Risk is at the heart of an intense existence.
He backs quietly away from the bedroom door. Noisily, he steps into the bathroom, takes a piss, and flushes the toilet, so the woman will think that he came to the back of the motor home not in search of her but to answer the call of nature. If she continues to believe that her presence is unknown, she will proceed on whatever course of action brought her here in the first place, and it will be interesting to see what she does.
He goes forward again, pausing in the kitchen to pump a cup of hot coffee from the two-quart thermos on the counter by the cooktop. He also switches on a couple of lights so he will be able to see the interior clearly in the rearview mirror.
Behind the steering wheel once more, he sips the coffee. It is hot, black, and bitter, just the way he likes it. He secures the cup in a holder bracketed to the dashboard.
He tucks the pistol in the open console box between the seats, with the safeties off and the butt up. He can put his hand on it in a second, turn in his seat, shoot the woman before she can get near him, and still maintain control of the motor home.
But he doesn't think that she will try to harm him, at least not soon. If harming him was her primary intention, she would have gone after him already.
Strange.
"Why? What now?" he says aloud, enjoying the drama of his peculiar situation. "What now? What next? What ho? Surprise, surprise."