What does he know, and what is there yet to learn before he acts?
There is no man in Sunbeam’s life. No husband or boyfriend who lives with her, he is fairly sure. He’s been watching her for the better part of the last several days and hasn’t seen one come or go, and she sleeps at home each night. So no husband or boyfriend, or even one of those popularly, and disgustingly, referred to as “friends with benefits.” He could be wrong, the significant other could be out of town, or merely a much more infrequent visitor, but he just has a feeling: she’s alone.
He’s learned she works at Crossroads Hospitality Group, which oversees a group of mid-level restaurants, according to their website, in a freestanding building off Rangeline. He knows she parks next to the building and that the lot is too well lit. And that her daily jogging is limited to daylight hours, with plenty of traffic on the streets, and that the sidewalks and paths she uses have too many people on them for his taste. On an inclement day he saw her drive her Honda Accord to a fitness center that has a row of treadmills and stationary exercise bicycles displayed behind a plate-glass window, where she and her brethren worked themselves into a repetitive sweat in the name of health. He admires it as much as he doesn’t understand it. The only strength building and fitness he is familiar with is the kind that comes with hard labor. Muscles built by and for utility, and not for vanity or as a mere hobby.
Still, he just can’t seem to get her good and alone outside the house. Darkness has fallen while he’s been sitting outside, waiting and watching. She doesn’t lead an external life. She doesn’t bebop down to local bars, or to liquor stores like Cinnamon did, so her home will have to do. In fact, she is home now. He clicks open his car door and feels the cold night air flood in, washing over him like river water. He closes the door behind him and walks deliberately across the street. He doesn’t belong, but nothing announces that more than creeping about, lurking and hoping not to be spotted.
He nears her front door. It is solid and well fitted with shiny, new-looking locks. The windows appear almost new as well, weather-tight and strong. He can test them and see if any are unlocked, but there is risk to it—if neighbors catch sight of him doing that, they’ll call Sunbeam or the police right away. Instead, he steps out of the throw of the streetlights and melts into the shadows along the side of her house, then heads toward her backyard.
The yard itself is more of a patch of grass, bordered by her neighbors’ chain-link fences on two sides and on the other her detached garage—which she doesn’t seem to use since she parks her car in front. There are a few skinny young trees, red maples maybe, without leaves, and he stays near them in order to break up his silhouette, although he isn’t much worried about being seen now. The lights are on inside, which makes her visible to him and prevents the opposite. From where he stands, he sees her emerge from the depths of the house and enter the kitchen. She pours herself a glass of red wine. She opens the refrigerator and cabinets repeatedly as she prepares some kind of food. She shakes and moves as she works, and he realizes music must be playing because she is dancing.
He glances at the glass sliders—which wouldn’t be difficult to bypass unless she was smart enough to place a bar or wooden dowel in the track. Then he looks past them and stares for a long moment and drinks in her life force. It is beautiful. It is why he is here. He wonders if she takes that energy for granted, if she recognizes how important her life is right now. Then he wonders how long she’s lived in the house, wonders from where she’s moved, where she grew up …
Suddenly he knows how he’ll get inside and be with her, and he won’t need to break any locks or climb through any windows to do it. No, she’ll invite him in. He doesn’t have his hit kit with him right now, so it won’t be tonight. But it will be very, very soon. It is practically done already.