The air was tinged with Canadian cold that had drifted down through Vermont. She closed the front door quietly and pulled a knit cap down over her ears, then took off fast up the street, wanting to get away from the house before anyone could tell her not to do what she was doing. Whatever risk was involved, it rapidly fled from Ashley’s thoughts as she accelerated hard, forcing her heartbeat to warm her hands, going fast enough to leave even the cold behind.
Ashley ran hard, seeming to keep up a rhythm to her thoughts. She let the pounding of her feet turn her anger into a sort of runner’s poetry. She was so fed up with being restricted and ordered around and constrained by her family and by her fears that she insisted to herself that she was willing to take a chance. Of course, she told herself, don’t be so stupid as to not make it difficult; she traveled an erratic, zigzag path.
What she wanted, she thought, was the luxury of acting rashly.
Two miles became three, then four, and the morning’s spontaneity dissolved into a steadiness that she hoped protected her. The wind was no longer cold and burning on her lips and drawn into her lungs, and she could feel sweat around her neck. When she turned and started back toward her home, she felt some fatigue, but not enough to slow her down. Instead, what she felt was an unsettled heat that burned inside her. She scanned the path ahead and suddenly saw movement. She was nearly overcome by the sensation that she was no longer alone. She shook her head and kept moving.
Some eight blocks from her house, a car sliced dangerously close by. She gasped, wanting to shout an obscenity, but kept running.
Six blocks from her house, a loud voice called out a name as she ran past. She could not tell if it was hers, and she didn’t turn to look, but started to move faster.
Four blocks from her house, someone nearby honked a car horn. The sound made her nearly jump out of her skin, and she started to sprint.
Two blocks from her house, she suddenly heard tires squealing behind her. She gasped for breath and, again, didn’t turn to investigate, but leaped from the roadway to the uneven cement sidewalk, broken up by tree roots that had pushed the surface into a ripple of cracks and breaks, like the unsettled surface of the ocean before a storm. The pavement seemed to snap at her ankles, and her feet complained with the difficulty. She ran harder. She wanted to close her eyes and tried to shut out all sounds. This was impossible, so she began humming to herself. She religiously kept her eyes straight ahead, refusing to turn in either direction, like a racehorse with blinders on, sprinting as fast as she could manage toward her home. She jumped across a flower bed and dashed across the lawn, almost slamming into the front door, before she stopped and slowly turned around.
She stared up, then down the street. She saw a man backing his car out of his driveway. Some laughing children overloaded with bulging backpacks heading toward a school bus stop. A woman with a long, bright green overcoat tossed over her nightgown, reaching down for the morning paper.
No O’Connell. At least nowhere that she could see.
She leaned her head back, gasping in drafts of cold air. Her eyes strayed across the morning normalcy and she gasped back a sob. In that moment, she realized that he no longer actually had to be present in order to be present.
From a spot a short ways down the street, Michael O’Connell feasted his vision upon Ashley as she stood hesitantly on the front porch of her mother’s house. He was sipping from a large coffee cup, hunched down behind the wheel of his car. He believed that if she knew how to look, she might see him, but he made little other effort to conceal himself. He simply waited.
He had considered, then dismissed, trying to stop her as she ran. The surprise might cause her to panic, and it would have been too easy for her to flee. She was far more familiar with the side streets and backyards of the neighborhood, and as quick as he was, he was unsure whether he could have caught her. But, more important, she might have screamed, gotten the attention of neighbors, and somebody might have called the police. If she had made a scene, he would have had to back down before he had a chance to speak with her. More than anything, what he did not want was to have to make some sort of explanation to some skeptical police officer as to what he was doing.
He had to find the right moment. Not this one, on the street where she’d grown up. It resonated her past. He was her future.
Easier, by far, he thought, to drink in her vision. He particularly liked watching her legs move. They were long and supple, and he wished that in their sole night together, he’d paid even more attention to them. Still, he was able to picture them, naked, glistening, and he shifted about in his seat as he felt the first heat of being aroused. He wished that Ashley would remove her knit cap, so that he could see her hair, and when he looked up and she did this, he smiled and wondered if he could send her all sorts of subliminal messages, directly from his thoughts to hers. It just reinforced in his mind how linked they were.
Michael O’Connell laughed out loud.
He could simply look at Ashley from afar and feel her warmth throughout his body. It was as if she energized him. He reached out, as if driven by passion, unable to sit still, and opened his door.
A short ways away, Ashley turned at that same moment and, without seeing the movement, filled with despair, stepped back into the house.
Michael O’Connell stood up, half in the car, one leg on the ground behind the door, staring at the spot where Ashley had disappeared. In his imagination, he could still see her.
Steal her, he said to himself.
It seemed so simple to him.
He smiled. It was just a matter of getting her alone.
Not exactly alone, he thought. But alone in his world. Not hers.
I am invisible, he thought, as he slid back into the car and pulled away from the curb.
He was wrong about this. From the window in her upstairs bedroom, Sally stood, watching. She gripped the window frame with white-knuckled fingers, close to breaking the wood, her nails digging into the paint. It was the first time she had seen Michael O’Connell in the flesh. When she’d first spotted the figure behind the wheel of the car, she had tried to tell herself that he wasn’t who she thought he was, but, in the same thought, knew she was deluding herself. It was him. It could be no one else. He was as close as he’d always been, right beyond their reach, shadowing Ashley’s every step. Even when she could not see him, he was there. She felt dizzy, enraged, and almost overcome by anxiety. Love is hate, she thought. Love is evil. Love is wrong.
She watched the car disappear down the street.
Love is death, she thought.
Breathing hard, she turned away from the window. She decided against instantly telling everyone that she’d spotted O’Connell on their street, only yards away from the front door, spying on Ashley. The family would be enraged, she thought. Angry people behave rashly. We need to be calm. Intelligent. Organized. Get to work. Get to work. Get to work. She turned back and found the pad of paper where she was making her notes. Notes for a murder. When she picked up her pencil, though, she noticed that her hand was quivering just slightly.
In the late afternoon, Sally went shopping for items she believed were integral to their task. It was not until early in the evening that she got back, checked once on Ashley, who appeared oddly bored, curled up on her bed reading, wondered where Hope was, as she listened to Catherine fiddle about in the kitchen, and then got around to calling Scott on the phone.
“Yes?”
“Scott? It’s Sally.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes. We got through the day more or less without incident,” she said without mentioning that she had seen O’Connell lurking about their street that morning. “How much longer that will be the case, I have my doubts.”