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Sometimes he wondered if his experience was something like that of serial killers who talked about a compulsion, an inner pressure to hunt a victim whom they somehow recognized even if they had never met.
Sometimes he wondered if he’d gone off the deep end. Sometimes he wondered if he himself was the demon he was hunting.
But he was here, guided by God knew what to this out-of-the-way place, and fear of failing yet again made him follow this set path night after night. The only reassurance he had that he wasn’t the demon was his own distaste for making Trish Devlin nervous.
He wished there was another way.
But there wasn’t. He just knew he had to be on that bench at that time. Period. And he couldn’t explain it to another soul without getting himself committed.
Smothering a sigh, ignoring the grinding pain in his hip and the stabbing pain in his thigh and the incessant ache in his back, which probably came from limping around so much, he plowed through the night, feeling as if he were walking through an iceberg rather than air. At times it was almost as if something pushed back at him, told him to turn around. But the compulsion overrode everything else, and because he hadn’t trusted that compulsion before, to his great grief and horror, he had to trust it now.
Time, he reminded himself, was an artifact of the large-number world he existed in. At the quantum level, past and future became one in a timeless present. So his experience was possible.
Possible.
Just possible.
A lot of rational people would tell him he was nuts. There’d been a time he would have agreed. But not since the…accident.
Except now he lived in a world where he knew there were no “accidents,” only probabilities, and there was one probability he had come here to prevent.
It was possible he had already prevented it just by coming here and making this walk every night. But the compulsion remained, so he remained, too.
He lowered himself to the bench again with a gasp of both pain and relief. Maybe when this compulsion let go, maybe when he dealt with whatever he’d come to deal with here, he’d be able to allow himself the gift of the hip replacement the docs had wanted to give him. A hip replacement he’d denied himself out of guilt.
He almost smiled then, realizing that he might actually be doing penance for something that had arisen from the morass of quantum probabilities, probabilities over which he could exercise only minimal control by making decisions. He had made a rational decision that time.
This time he was making an irrational one in order to atone.
And he was evidently scaring the woman who lived in that house. He felt bad about that, but maybe his whole purpose in doing this was to scare her. Because if he was right, she needed to be scared.
The last thing he expected to see was Trish Devlin come out of her house and march toward him. After their meeting at the truck stop, he expected her to avoid him like the plague. Instead, here she was, striding purposefully toward him, her snorkel hood up on her parka, her hands in her pockets.
When she reached him, she stood over him. The snorkel hood, even though it wasn’t fully zipped, managed to shadow her face completely.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“A very cold guy who is sorry he keeps disturbing you.”
“I’m finding that hard to believe. The sheriff says you appear to be okay.”
“Then you shouldn’t worry about me.”
“Well, I can’t stop wondering about you. I go from being annoyed to being frightened to being just plain curious. Either way, I can’t sleep until you leave. So why don’t you just come into my house and tell me what the hell is going on?”
“Why should anything be going on?” He genuinely wanted to hear her answer to that.
“Because after what I told you about feeling stalked, a gentleman would have chosen a different bench tonight.”
“Reasonable,” he said. “But not possible.”
“Why the hell not?”
His answer was simple, and as true as he could give her. “Because I can’t.”
“That’s not true. You can walk any direction you want, sit on any one of another dozen benches.”
“Theoretically.”
She made a disgusted sound. “Why do I feel as if I’m caught up in a conversation with an evasive Zen monk?”
“I should be so lucky.”
“Then just give me your full name.”
“Why?”
“So I can do a Google search on you. So maybe then I’ll be able to sleep.”
“I don’t want you to sleep at this time of night.”
She swore then, a phrase he suspected was totally uncharacteristic. It didn’t seem to pass her lips easily. “Do you always talk in riddles?”
“Enigmas, actually. I can’t explain.” He hesitated, but sensed there was no danger in the revelation. And feelings were about all he had left to guide him in this unknown territory. “But I will give you my full name. The search engines should take you on an interesting journey.”
“I hope so.”
“My full name is Grant Frederick Wolfe.” He spelled the last name for her. “You’ll probably find me most often as Grant F. Wolfe, or even G. F. Wolfe, which is the name I used on most of my papers.”
“Thank you,” she said stiffly, then turned to walk back to her house.
This should be interesting, he thought as he watched her disappear inside. Because he had a pretty good idea what the search engines would bring up.
He glanced at his watch. Ten more minutes, then he could go back to the motel’s warmth.
Maybe, at some point, the universe would reveal to him why he’d been chosen for this particular hell.
Because he sure didn’t have any idea why.
The morning was chilly enough to cause Trish’s breath to fog. The rain yesterday had cleared the air so well that the trees seemed even more colorful, the sky even bluer and the sun even brighter. They were in the height of autumn, with a brief burst of Indian summer in the forecast for tomorrow. She looked forward to those few warmer days.
But this morning she had a mission. By nine-thirty, she was hammering on the door of Grant’s room at the motel. A few minutes passed, then the door opened and he looked out at her with sleep-puffed eyes.
“Come in,” he said. “Except you’ll have to excuse my state of dress. I haven’t even brushed my teeth yet.”
She stepped into the warmth and glanced around the room. It showed its age, of course, but Grant was evidently a neat person. His few possessions appeared to be stowed away.
On the other hand, Grant himself was something else. Maybe he slept in the buff, but he’d pulled on nothing but a pair of jeans to answer the door, and he hadn’t even bothered to snap them.
Trish’s thoughts raced down an alley she didn’t want to enter, but it proved impossible for her to ignore the fact that he had a broad, smoothly muscled chest, arms that said he could lift more than a laptop. And then there was that faint sprinkling of dark hair below his navel that acted like an arrow, pointing directly to the open snap of his jeans.
The man was beefcake, for crying out loud. He could have posed for