LITMIR.BIZ

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from three years earlier. Angela read and re-read the news pieces, concentrating on the five women who had gone missing, and cataloguing everything that had been reported about each victim. She collected photos and created her own biographies. She knew so much about each woman that she felt connected to them.

      Angela worked hard to hide from Thomas the full scale of her affliction. There had been stretches in the past when her obsessive-compulsive disorder had consumed her, overwhelming her mind in ways that prevented routine rituals of daily life. During the darkest times, the illness tethered Angela to the completion of redundant tasks her brain insisted were necessary. And the more she tried to break free from those tumultuous duties, the more paranoid she became that something terrible would happen if she interrupted the cycle of meaningless assignments. The loop of paranoia fed itself until Angela was lost to its power.

      She felt that pull happening again now, and knew she needed to tame this current bout of obsession if she hoped to avoid a relapse. But she felt helpless when her mind focused on the missing women and the anonymous man who was taking them. Angela believed she could find a link between the victims. What she would do with her discovery, Angela hadn’t decided. Perhaps she would share her findings with the authorities. But Angela was careful not to get too far ahead of herself. Thinking too far into the future opened her mind to wild speculation that caused angst and fear. If Thomas noticed her missing lashes and thinning eyebrows again, he’d worry about a relapse. This would send her back to her therapist’s office, which would spell the end to her research. She couldn’t let that happen. The women who stared back from the newspaper clippings deserved her attention, and Angela was powerless to ignore them.

      After the press clippings were catalogued and ordered, she packed up her files and placed them back in the chest at the foot of her bed. It was 10:00 A.M. when she brought her coffee out to the garage. She carried with her two homemade breakfast sandwiches wrapped in foil. The garage was a detached two-car unit behind their bungalow-style home. A cement walkway led from the patio off the kitchen and ran to the utility door at the back of the garage, the front of which opened into the alley. The previous night, Angela had allowed her imagination to create irrational nightmares of what waited in the dark shadows after the cat ran from behind the trashcans. This morning, the sun was bright and her fear was gone.

      She walked through the utility door and hit the opener on the wall, causing the large garage door to rattle upward, and allowing the morning’s sun to brighten the area. Because she rarely ventured into the garage, it was incongruent to the home she kept. If the space were hers and not Thomas’s, Angela would have it ordered and meticulous the way everything else in her life needed to be. Instead, it was a mess of cluttered shelving filled with tattered books and dusty storage containers; there were paint cans coated with the drippings of a home project from when she and Thomas had painted the bedroom; there was car repair equipment, which Thomas had stacked in the corner, and an old couch they had meant to sell, but had never gotten around to. The couch was now filthy from dust and dirt, and covered by old magazines and newspapers. It was her morning project.

      Wednesday was garbage day, and Angela’s task was to drag the old couch into the alley for the garbagemen to haul away. The breakfast sandwiches were her bribe to the guys for hauling away such a large piece of trash. Before she could get to the couch, though, Angela started with the magazines and newspapers that covered it, dumping them in the trash. After ten minutes, the couch was empty of the clutter that had covered it. Positioning herself near the entrance of the garage, she grasped the arm of the couch and pulled. It was weighty and her progress was slow, but after ten minutes, Angela managed to drag the couch into the alley. She needed to move it another twenty feet to the garbage area, but she had spent her strength hauling the heavy piece of furniture this far. She walked into the garage to catch her breath and regain her energy.

      As she took deep, recovering breaths, she looked anxiously at the cluttered shelves, knowing that Thomas would be upset if she took her obsessiveness for order to the rest of the garage when she had told him she planned only to move the couch out to the garbage. But her fingers tingled as she looked at the chaotic shelving. Inspecting the items, she found things she had forgotten existed—old glassware from before she had married, and holiday decorations she and Thomas had never used.

      On another set of shelves, Angela stumbled over old wedding gifts that were both impractical and unwanted. She found a picnic basket flanked on each side with compartments for wine bottles. Never in her life had she been on a picnic, and the idea of sipping wine while sitting among insect-infested grass caused her skin to crawl. She lifted the top of the basket. Something inside caught her eye. A closer inspection revealed a thin jewelry box.

      She looked around the garage, and then out into the alley, as if she had just discovered a hidden treasure and worried about another learning her secret. She pulled the box from the depths of the basket and opened it. A sliver of morning sunlight slanted through the side window of the garage and struck the diamonds of the necklace, brilliantly highlighting the green peridot they encircled. It wasn’t unusual for Thomas to make extravagant purchases. He’d done so in the past and Angela’s birthday was just a week away. She immediately felt guilty for having spoiled his surprise.

      “Can I offer you a hand?”

      The deep, unfamiliar voice caused Angela to jump. She dropped the necklace back into the basket and spun around, finding herself face-to-face with a man she did not know. Her lungs expanded in an unintentional gasp, and a whine escaped into the air. The man stood in the alley by the couch, but his presence felt much closer. He had deep-set eyes darkened by the morning light, which shined down from behind him and silhouetted his form. The black presence of his shadow crept across the garage floor, coming so close to Angela that her skin tingled with goose bumps.

      “Looks like you’re stalled.”

      “No, no,” Angela said without thought. She was backing away toward the utility door behind her, her feet staggering. As a general rule, Angela Mitchell avoided eye contact whenever possible. But the charcoal holes in the man’s face were too cryptic to ignore.

      “I’ll just give it a push with you,” the man said. “Help you get it over to the trashcans. You’re throwing it away, yes?”

      Angela shook her head. Her mind flashed to the biographies she had amassed on the missing women. The newspaper articles she had scanned and studied. The map of the city she had marked with the locations of the disappearances, and the bright yellow pentagon she had highlighted to demark the area of the city to avoid. She was filled now with the same sense of dread as when the stray cat had hissed from behind the trashcans. Last night, she had sensed another’s presence, and she had run back into the house before her mind could dwell too heavily on the feeling. And since then, Angela had worked hard to compartmentalize the thought, to suppress the idea that someone had been present with her in the alley, watching from the shadows. To allow her mind to concentrate on that fear, to permit her psyche to continuously strike the flint that might throw sparks onto the tinder of her anxiety, had the power to drive her mad. Once that thought was ignited, she would be unable to stifle the flames.

      Years before, a vagrant thought like that could send her into a weeks-long state of paranoia and obsessiveness where she’d lock herself in her home, checking and double checking the door locks, climbing from bed in the dark of night to make sure every window was secure, lifting the phone one hundred times in a row to make sure a dial tone was present to prove it was functional. Angela had worked too hard over the last few years to allow her new life to be ruined by the inner workings of her convoluted mind. But now, as she stared at the man in the alley, she wished she’d paid closer attention to the warnings her brain had sent last night.

      “My husband will be right out,” she managed to say. “He’ll help me the rest of the way.”

      The man looked beyond Angela, through the frame of the open utility door behind her, and to the back of the bungalow. He pointed at the house. “Your husband is home?”

      “Yes,” Angela said too quickly.

      The man took a step forward to the precipice of the garage, bringing his murky shadow closer until it bent off the floor and climbed up her legs. Angela could almost feel it.

      “You

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