could hear her yowling, trapped and raging inside his skull like a frustrated ghost.
Unless I am fucking nuts.
Eat. Get your shit together. Wait.
He’s too jittery to eat. It’s quiet in Pine Vista, nothing to see here, no signs of life in the Chaplin house, although the lights are on. The last commuters went by hours ago, heading home. He’s alone on this road, as far as he can tell. If someone else is out here in the dark somewhere, if there’s someone watching, Dan Carteret has no way of knowing. In fact, anybody could be parked out by the garden shed or behind the bank of oleanders that marks the property line and Dan wouldn’t know because he’s new to the territory. To him, Pine Vista is as bleak and strange as the face of Mars. And as still.
Waiting, he absorbs the night and silence in a neighborhood where nothing happens and nobody comes. After living on Ventura Boulevard where the traffic never sleeps, it’s like a soundproof headset. The silence is profound. Then a night bird cries and he jerks to attention. What was I thinking? Doh!
He slithers into the garage by a window on the far side, shielding his light. It picks up a dusty SUV, and in the space next to it, a patch of oil left by a second car. Chaplin’s been gone for hours. There’s nothing going on inside the house that he can see, but instinct tells him to wait.
He’s back in the car, gnawing his fajita wrap down to the paper when the front door opens. So he wasn’t, like, fantasizing about that blur in the tower window today, the pale face that came and went faster than you can say Mrs Rochester belongs to the woman coming out. So that was her he saw, flickering like a silent movie wraith. The man is put together like Bob Chaplin, tall and loose-jointed, but he’s so heavy that he shuffles. The two flick on the porch light and fuss over the keys in one of those practiced departure rituals, like pet owners patting the house and telling it be a good dog until they come back. Locking up against whatever comes.
Which will be Dan Carteret. With no evil intentions, exactly. He can’t be sure what his intentions are. If he’d known there were others living here, would he have come? Belching, he slouches behind the wheel, waiting for them to roll up the garage door and get the second car started, which takes a while, and back it out into the oyster-shell driveway and go.
Then he waits a little longer, to make sure.
What else does he have to do tonight, besides go back to his room at the Flordana and brood? He’s locked and loaded: flashlight and screwdriver from Ace Hardware in the messenger bag he’s wearing, in case. It’s big enough to conceal anything he decides to take. Another hour passes. Nothing moves. When he’s satisfied that there are no signs of life anywhere, he makes a cautious circuit of the house. He doesn’t know whether to be disturbed or grateful that these people are either timid or lazy. They left all the lights on.
Crunching through the bushes, he goes from window to window like a voyeur at a Times Square peep show. If he rocks forward and up on his toes, he can see in. For Dan, houses at night are like decorators’ display windows, advertising better ways to live. There are complete, happy lives available inside if he can just find the right place, and come up with the cash. Walking home from school in New London, he dawdled, lingering in spite of the cold. He stood around in the snow until his toes froze, waiting until people’s lights went on so he could look into those bright houses and will himself inside, happy Dan on his belly in front of their TV with brothers and sisters, snug in a tight family unit, waiting for suppertime. Night after night he prowled, stealing other people’s lives.
He does not yet know what he is here to steal.
His first glimpse of the lives inside this house is depressing. Through the front window he sees Victorian side chairs and threadbare brocade sofas, nineteen twenty-something to the day. Did Lucy sit here with Chaplin? Wait. Did they make out? More? The idea gives him the shudders. Next question. The mahogany table is thick with magazines and junk mail, neatly stacked according to size and type; he