No Witnesses

NINETEEN

Someone was watching her.

Daphne had studied enough paranoids, had worked with some, and knew the symptoms well. Symptoms she now displayed: a heightened nervousness, the constant checking over her shoulder, insomnia, loss of appetite, the suspicious pauses to stop and listen. But it was an energy and she understood energy. An energy focused on her, and if she were imagining this, then she intended to compliment her imagination, because this was like nothing she had ever experienced.

Back there somewhere? Over there? she wasn’t sure. It seemed at times to be all around her. At others to be in a specific place-yet when she checked: no one. It made her skin crawl, this feeling. And it wasn’t just while out on a run, which was where she was at the moment. It was in the bedroom, in the car-she felt it when undressing even in the bathroom, which is where she changed clothes. The rest of her houseboat made her feel naked before she took off a thing. This filled her with a nauseating fear, a sense of violation she had not known.

Was that the same car? she wondered. It looked awfully familiar. Had it been parked across from the dock entrance to the houseboats? What was it, Japanese? Detroit/Japanese? She wished she were better with cars. It was the same color, she thought. Same size. Dark blue. Small. Nondescript. Just the kind of car one would use for surveillance! Just the kind of paranoid thinking that could get you in big trouble. “Conspiracy vision”-there were all sorts of slang terms for it. “Oliver Stone disease,” she had once heard it called; and that one had made her laugh. No longer.

She broke with her regular Tuesday evening running route and turned right up Galer and right again onto Eastlake, a procedure similar to the consecutive four right-hand turns used to spot moving surveillance when in a vehicle. She glanced over her shoulder. Watch it! a voice cried out inside of her. That was symptom number one.

She ran another quarter mile, and literally leapt into the air when a blue car overtook her from behind. A different blue car, she realized quickly enough. Upset with herself, she turned around, cutting short the run. It was dusk. It would be dark by the time she got back, and whereas normally her run would take place after work and therefore under the streetlights, tonight the idea bothered her. It cut her run nearly in half, but she could make up the difference tomorrow.

Daphne ran hard, working up a good sweat, pushing herself to go a little harder today since she had cut it short. Her gymnasium-gray tank top was soaked dark below her breasts and down her back. Her hair stuck to her neck, and her white wristband was damp from sponging her brow.

Typically, she used her runs as meditations-a quiet break devoted to nothingness, to thinking as little as possible. She waved to a walker, thankful for a familiar face, and the woman waved back at her with a broad smile. Although they had never formally met, she knew all about this woman-the houseboat community was like that. The woman was an M.D. who volunteered her time at a local clinic for the poor; her husband was a former minister turned author. They lived in a small houseboat, though it was one of the more charming ones-with very few pretensions. And they waved at you when out for a walk.

A scruffy dog crossed the road lazily, either not seeing or not caring about a sleek black cat that sat atop a shingled mailbox house at the end of pier 11.

She walked the last hundred yards, peeked into her mailbox for the second time today, and headed down the dock.

Halfway down the long dock her skin crawled, and she blamed it on a light breeze off the lake and the slight chill it induced.

Whether attributable to caution or paranoia, she took inventory of her houseboat as she approached. It was tiny, less than eight hundred square feet, but with the proportions that created an illusion of a house twice its size. From behind her came the constant drone of traffic from the interstate, distant but intrusive-it seemed so much closer at this moment. Edges and corners seemed sharper. Her motion seemed to slow, despite the quickness of her heartbeat. This increased awareness had come all of its own, and yet Daphne Matthews the psychologist knew better: Something had triggered this-nothing came all of its own. The cop she worked with in a survivors clinic described similar sensations moments before a firefight. But Boldt would talk instinct, Daphne would talk reflex. She had caught something out of place perhaps: a sound, a smell, an image; she fell victim to this stimulus, misinterpreted or not.

The air smelled of charcoal. She heard a seaplane taking off in the distance, and, much closer, the nauseating laugh track of a television show.

Her face felt hot from the run, her skin itched. Her mind worked furiously trying to sort things out.

At the same time, she began an internal dialogue, chastising herself for being such a paranoid. What a baby! She also wrestled with the internal voices of several friends, Lou Boldt among them, who had once attempted to talk her out of buying a houseboat. The investment had silenced her critics-the place was worth a fortune now, and her timing couldn’t have been better. But it was an isolated location, and tonight in particular it felt just a little too removed.

Get in the house! she told herself. She bent to retrieve the key that she had tied to her shoelace. Get in the house, her mind repeated more loudly.

She unlocked the door, leaving it slightly ajar until she got the light on, and hurried to the nearest lamp, on the entrance table along with her purse. Inside the purse was her gun. This thought did not escape her. The light flashed brightly and died-the bulb had blown.

She felt a gust of wind at her back. The front door thumped shut of its own accord. Startled, she leapt over to it, and swiveled the dead bolt, locking it. Issuing darkness. Nothing-not even the pitch black-was going to convince her to open that door again. Safe! She inched carefully forward, the picture of the downstairs emblazoned in her mind: directly ahead, the living room, a center post in the middle of the room, a small sofa and end table, a rocker, the wood stove; to her right, the narrow ladder ascending to the tiny bedroom and its balcony; to her left, the small galley, demarcated by a blue tile countertop with two ash stools looking across the Jenn-Air range; around the galley, the head to the left-and opposite this, a small hall flanked by two closets and the back door directly ahead.

Her eyes beginning to adjust, she reached out and found the arm of the rocking chair. Good, she knew exactly where she was. Some light off the lake found its way through the window behind the sofa, though not enough to help: the room oozed with a gray, ghostly paste. She inched ahead and slightly to her left and brushed up against the rough wood of the room’s central support post. Small waves lapped against the pier, sounding like an animal licking the floats. The refrigerator hummed loudly. The lamp she sought remained a few feet to her right and then directly ahead: its fuzzy image loomed before her.

She crossed the room. Just as she reached the lamp, she heard a board squeak. It came from the back of the house, past the galley by the head. She reminded herself that the houseboat was always making such noises. On any other night, she might not have noticed a squeak. But that particular sound was as individual, as distinct, as the voice of a friend. A year or so ago rain had leaked in under the back door and had warped the floorboards. When stepped on, one of the wide pine planks, and only one, chirped like a bird-the sound she had just heard.

With her thumb on the lamp switch and her voice caught somewhere between “Hello?” and a scream, she froze. It must have been something else, a voice inside her reasoned.

It’s nothing! Right?

But the voice warned: A person has to step on that board for it to make that sound.

Her heart hurt in the center of her chest. Her ears burned. I’m overtrained, she thought, as a dozen instructions from her police training flooded her head noisily. Paranoid is all. Each idea separate and individual, she processed them differently, sorting out contradictions as best she could.

Get out of the building. Call someone! Seek help.

Turn on the light and see … It’s nothing.