Dark Rivers of the Heart

room. He stepped through an archway into a small and equally empty dining room.
        Spencer thought of the Mayflower van across the street, but he didn't believe that Valerie's belongings were in it or that she had moved out of the bungalow since four o'clock the previous morning, when he'd left his watch post in front of her house and returned to his own bed.
        Instead, he suspected that she had never actually moved in.
        The carpet was not marked by the pressure lines and foot indentations of furniture; no tables, chairs, cabinets, credenzas, or floor lamps had stood on it recently. If Valerie had lived in the bungalow during the two months that she had worked at The Red Door, she evidently hadn't furnished it and hadn't intended to call it home for any great length of time.
        To the left of the dining room, through an archway half the size of the first, he found a small kitchen with knotty pine cabinets and red Formica countertops. Unavoidably, he left wet shoe prints on the gray tile floor.
        Stacked beside the two-basin sink were a single dinner plate, a bread plate, a soup bowl, a saucer, and a cup-all clean and ready for use. One drinking glass stood with the dinnerware. Next to the glass lay a dinner fork, a knife, and a spoon, which were also clean.
        He shifted the flashlight in his right hand, splaying a couple of fingers across the lens to partly suppress the beam, thus freeing his left hand to touch the drinking glass. He traced the rim with his fingertips. Even if the glass had been washed since Valerie had taken a drink from it, her lips had once touched the rim.
        He had never kissed her. Perhaps he never would.
        That thought embarrassed him, made him feel foolish, and forced him to consider, yet again, the impropriety of his obsession with this woman.
        He didn't belong here. He was trespassing not merely in her home but in her life. Until now, he had lived an honest life, if not always with undeviating respect for the law. Upon entering her house, however, he had crossed a sharp line that had scaled away his innocence, and what he had lost couldn't be regained.
        Nevertheless, he did not leave the bungalow.
        When he opened kitchen drawers and cabinets, he found them empty except for a combination bottle-and-can opener. The woman owned no plates or utensils other than those stacked beside the sink.
        Most of the shelves in the narrow pantry were bare. Her stock of food was limited to three cans of peaches, two cans of pears, two cans of pineapple rings, one box of a sugar substitute in small blue packets, two boxes of cereal, and a jar of instant coffee.
        The refrigerator was well stocked with gourmet microwave dinners.
        By the refrigerator was a door with a mullioned window. The four panes were covered by a yellow curtain, which he pushed aside far enough to see a side porch and a dark yard hammered by rain.
        He allowed the curtain to fall back into place. He wasn't interested in the outside world, only in the interior spaces where Valerie had breathed the air, taken her meals, and slept.
        As Spencer left the kitchen, the rubber soles of his shoes squeaked on the wet tiles. Shadows retreated before him and huddled in the corners while darkness crowded his back again.
        He could not stop shivering. The damp chill in the house was as penetrating as that of the February air outside. The heat must have been off all day, which meant that Valerie had left early.
        On his cold face, the scar burned.
        A closed door was centered in the back wall of the dining room.
        He opened it and discovered a narrow hallway that led about fifteen feet to the left and fifteen to the right. Directly across the hall, another door stood half open; beyond, he glimpsed a white tile floor and a bathroom sink.
        As he was about to enter the hall, he heard sounds other than the monotonous and hollow drumming of the rain on the roof. A thump and a soft scrape.
        He immediately switched off the flashlight. The darkness was as perfect as that in any carnival fun house just before flickering strobe lights revealed a leering, mechanical corpse.
        At first the sounds had seemed stealthy, as if a prowler outside had slipped on the wet grass and bumped against the house. However, the longer Spencer listened, the more he became convinced that the source of noise might have