been watching for months, and writing things down. I’ve done my homework.
After a few minutes I take the pages to the fireplace and lay them on the embers. The flames lick the edges of the paper and die. I stir them with a fire poker, shove them into the coals until they ignite. In a few seconds, all this careful research exists only in my mind.
The room has grown cold. I add some wood to the fire and warm my hands over the flames.
* * *
I can’t sleep now, even as the windows blush with early light. I pace around the house, check the doors and windows, turn on the radio and turn it off again. When the sun rises over the trees, I venture cautiously outside. There is a depression in the grass where he stood. I turn in circles on the spot, trying to imagine what he saw and what he thought, what it means that he was here.
Later in the morning, I find a cardboard box on my doorstep. It’s sealed with packing tape, but has no shipping label or address on top.
I take it to the kitchen and set it on the counter. With a paring knife, I slit the tape—first at the sides, then down the center. Inside is another box of thinner, white cardboard. I lift this out and set in on the counter. One more piece of tape to slice, and there, nestled in a bed of tissue paper, is a third box.
Jack’s box. The one I tried to steal.
I run my hands over the fine-grained cherrywood and trace the inset panels of satiny bird’s-eye maple. The brass hinges are so cleverly concealed and aligned that the slightest touch is enough to open the lid. Inside, the box is lined with black felt and filled with his belongings—and on top, a note, written in narrow black script on a square of cream-colored paper:
Alice ~
I’ll show you mine...
7:00 ~ Jack
Below his name, he’s written his phone number.
I set the note aside and peer into the box, lifting things out one by one and setting them on the counter. A set of spiky metal jacks with a few clinging fragments of blue and red paint; a business card, embossed with the name of an architectural firm in bold letters over the faint design of a blueprinted floor plan—Taylor & Fitch; a pair of heavy, unmistakably authentic handcuffs; a key on a plastic Motel 6 key ring; a piece of wax paper, folded into a square, and inside a perfect four-leaf clover; an old pair of eyeglasses with a crack in the lens; a black-and-white photograph of a dark-haired woman on the beach, winsome and laughing behind heavy sunglasses; a folded-up piece of paper with part of a handwritten Neruda poem; a man’s wedding band, which I slip over my thumb; and on the bottom, facedown, a last photograph. I pick it up and turn it over. A square of yellow window light on a dark wall, softened by a sheer, wavy curtain—and behind that, a wraithlike figure peering out from the space between the curtain panels. I recognize the tattoo on the girl’s arm before I know her face.
It’s me. Looking right into the camera without seeing it, as if at something very far away. He must have taken the picture from the forest behind my house. He must have been there, watching, for a long time. In fact, seeing the top I’m wearing in the photograph, he must have been there more than once. I haven’t worn that shirt in three days.
Awareness swells inside me. My skin is shivery-thin, barely able to contain me.
This is a language I understand. The language of secrets.
I’ll show you mine.
My gaze trails away, over the countertop and past the entryway corner, where I see my reflection in the hall mirror. The photo is pressed to my lips, and the expression in my eyes, caught in a wedge of late-morning sunlight, seems suddenly, vibrantly alive.
I smile, and my reflection smiles back.
CHAPTER FIVE
“How did you find this place?” I ask.
It’s 8:30 p.m., and we’re seated at a tiny table inside an equally minute Thai restaurant in Seattle, across the Sound from Vashon Island. The restaurant’s narrow facade is deceiving. Inside, the ceiling opens to a second-floor dining room with space for only six tables. We have a bird’s-eye view of the kitchen below, where a cloud of steam rises from an ancient hammered pot as the cook ladles up two bowls of soup.
“I came here with a friend,” Jack says. “And left with the waitress.”
A young woman appears at the top of the steps and deposits our dinner on the battered wooden table. When she’s gone, I give him a look.
“This waitress? She looks about sixteen.”
“Different one, actually.”
“And is this safe to eat?” I lift a spoonful of soup. “You know better than to piss off the person feeding you, I hope.”
“What makes you think I pissed her off?”
“Seems likely, let’s say.”
He lowers his head with an amused twist of his lips and begins to eat.
“It wasn’t like that. Her father was the cook. He went down on the job. Right there.” He points the top of his ceramic spoon at the kitchen below. “Had a stroke apparently, and fell into the wok on his way down. Spilled hot oil all over himself. The ambulance came for him and I gave his daughter a lift to the hospital.”
His expression doesn’t change, but I sense the reproach.
I drop my gaze to the table. “You do have a way of making me feel like an asshole.”
“Eat your soup.”
The liquid slides down my throat, tangy and unctuous. Slices of sour cucumber float in the broth.
“What happened to the old man?”
Jack pours out some fresh tea. A thread of steam rises from my cup.
“Dead,” he says. “Probably never felt the burns at all.”
He seems to consider this for the first time.
He didn’t ring the doorbell when he arrived at my house earlier this evening. By tacit agreement, we’ve already abandoned the notion of privacy. I left the door unlocked, and he simply walked in and came looking for me as if he owned the place, as if his previous visit had not been an illicit one.
I was at my dresser, clasping a fine silver chain around my neck.
He came to the bedroom doorway, leaned his shoulder against the wall, his sweater pushed up over his forearms. Clean jeans, clean work boots. I wondered what he thought of my clothes, which an old boyfriend described as having been “put together by a twelve-year-old gay boy with a boot fetish and twenty bucks to spend.” Lots of vintage and secondhand. Little discretion.
I cut my own hair, too. With the straight razor from my kit.
“So what’s that about?” he says now. “You follow guys, break into their houses and steal shit that has no value to anyone but them. Why? What’s so interesting?”
“Everything.”
