Relentless

I was loath to act.
    “All right,” I said. “So what do you think we should do?”
    “Locks and alarms didn’t stop him tonight. They won’t stop him tomorrow night. This place isn’t safe.”
    “I’ll have the alarm company upgrade the system.”
    She shook her head. “That’ll take days. And it won’t matter. He’s too clever for upgrades. We have to get to a safe place, where he can’t find us.”
    “We can’t run forever. I’ve got a book deadline.”
    “And, good golly,” she said, “we haven’t even
begun
to do our Christmas shopping.”
    “Well, I
do
have a deadline,” I said defensively.
    “I didn’t say run forever. Just buy time to do some research.”
    “What research?”
    “Shearman Waxx. Where does he come from? What’s his story, his past, his associations?”
    “He’s an enigma.”
    She picked up the can of beets in which I had previously shown an interest. “Take the label off this can, the contents are a mystery—but only until you open it.”
    “I can open a can,” I said, because we had an electric opener that required of me no mechanical skill.
    “And if Waxx is this freaking weird with us,” Penny said, “he has to have been totally bizarro with someone else, maybe with a lot of people, so at the very least we should be able to find someone to support our claim that he’s harassing us.”
    I acquiesced. “All right. We’ll get someplace safe, then we’ll go on the hunt.”
    “Still no cops?”
    “Not till we know more about Waxx. I don’t want a media circus.”
    “Cops can be discreet.”
    “They’d have to talk to Waxx. He won’t be discreet. Come on. I’ll help you pack.”
    “I’d rather you took Lassie out to poop. Fix breakfast for Milo. Deal with your morning e-mails. I’ll pack after I shower.”
    “I don’t know why that can of shaving cream detonated in the suitcase. It didn’t have anything to do with me.”
    “Nobody said that it did, sweetie. Not either time. I just pack faster than you do.”
    “Because I like to make the maximum use of space. You can take fewer suitcases if you don’t waste a cubic inch.”
    She kissed me on the nose and quoted Chesterton: “‘A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool.’”
    We drew on each other’s strengths, but perhaps more important, we found our strength increased and our love enriched by being able to laugh at our own and at each other’s weaknesses.
    As Penny opened the pantry door, I suddenly
knew
that the critic would be there, armed with something wickedly sharp. I was wrong. We were alone.
    The specifics of the premonition proved false, but the essence was fulfilled a short while later. Before we left the house, Shearman Waxx would escalate the terror and deal us a devastating blow.

   At 5:30 that Thursday morning, a full half hour before dawn, when I went upstairs to wake Milo, he was sitting at his desk, working with his computer.
    On the back of his plain white pajamas, the word SEEK blazed in red block letters.
    Lassie stood on top of the highboy, peering down at me.
    “How did she get up there?” I asked.
    His attention fixed on the computer, Milo said, “The usual way.”
    “Which is how?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Milo?”
    He did not respond.
    Although the boy wasn’t touching the keyboard, groups of numbers and symbols flickered across the screen. On closer inspection, I saw multiple lines of complex mathematical equations chasing one another so fast from left to right that I could make no sense of them.
    In truth, I would not have been able to understand them at any speed. I’m grateful that Penny is willing to balance the checkbook and review bank statements every month.
    The screen went blank, and Milo at once typed in a series of approximately thirty numbers and symbols that, as far as I was concerned, might as well have been ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. When he finished typing, his entry remained on the monitor for a moment, but then blinked off. Once more, tiers of equations streamed across the computer without any further input from him.
    “What’s happening?” I asked.
    Milo said, “Something.”
    “Something what?”
    “Yeah.”
    When my son was at his most mystifying, when he turned so far inward that he seemed almost autistic in his detachment, I had always before been intrigued, enchanted by the single-minded