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like soldiers.
    He began to eat, dipping the crackers in the soup, following them with peas one by one: dip, chew, pea.
    There had to be an even number of peas and an odd number of crackers, and the cracker with soup on it counted as two things. It took concentration to keep it all straight.
    By the time he had finished, light from the windows slanted in darker gold rays than before, and he still had to clean up.
    Pea can inside the soup can. Soup can in the cracker box and the box out the door, he decided. Hurled as hard as he could.
    Risky, but there was no help for it; leaving trash inside bred vermin. Rats, mice, fleas, flies …
    He opened the back door, peering out. The garden looked onto an alley and beyond that to the rear of a huge, white-clapboarded old church. There were no windows in the rear of the church. No view from the houses next door, either, through the lilacs.
    He threw the cracker box out into the ruined yard, where it was swallowed up by rank weeds between the trunk of a gnarled apple tree and a massive hydrangea, each blue bloom as big as a human head.
    Blue head. Blue face … Another memory flash, more hideous than the earlier one, took him by surprise, sending him reeling back blindly so that he nearly stepped off the rotten porch. He grabbed the decrepit porch rail; it held … barely.
    Gasping, he hurled himself back into the house and put his shoulder to the door until it shut with a groan. Staggering to his pack, he dug frantically in it for the pump bottle of hand sanitizer.
    He squirted the chemical-smelling stuff into his hands, then rubbed madly, scrubbing it onto his arms and slapping it on his face, where it stung his eyes and its taste nearly made him gag.
    But gradually he relaxed, his panicked breath slowing. The relief would not hold; he would have to do it again many times before the day was through.
    Still, now he could think again,
exist
again. If only, he thought as he tucked the germ killer into his pack once more—
    There was another bottle in there, too, and a third one just in case.
    If only he could drink the stuff.
    BY THE TIME JAKE AND ELLIE GOT BACK TO THE KEY STREET house, it was mid-afternoon and four more email messages had arrived.
    WATCHING YOU , said the first. THINKING OF YOU , declared the second. MISS ME? asked the third.
    And finally: YOU CAN’T ESCAPE , said the last one.
    Earlier, Jake had been using the computer to learn how much paint she’d need, to put two coats of exterior latex onto thirty-two hundred square feet of siding. But now she felt like pitching the thing through a window.
    Ellie appeared from the kitchen, where she’d been making tea, and saw the look on Jake’s face. “You know, maybe we should just call up Bob Arnold and tell him—”
    “What? That I want him to stop some anonymous pen pal from sending me mean messages?”
    With its elaborately tiled fireplace mantel, chair rails and wainscoting, and the original wavery-glassed windows hung with heavy green silk draperies, the dining room looked much as it had nearly two hundred years earlier. Ordinarily, Jake found it all immensely tranquilizing.
    Just not now. “I don’t think Bob’s got time in his holiday schedule for a wild-goose chase,” she added. “Besides, even if it is the bike guy, he can’t possibly really do anything to me. I’m surrounded here by my family and friends.”
    As if to emphasize this, Prill the Doberman stalked in with neck hairs raised and ears pricked. Not that she would really do anything, either; since her days as a rescue, Prill had mellowed so that now she only looked like a furry killing machine.
    Jake smoothed the dog’s hackles. “Don’t worry, girl. I’m just annoyed.”
    And really, calling Bob truly was out of the question. With the town so full of visitors they were practically spilling into the bay, he was already way overworked.
    On top of which, computer crime was hardly his specialty. If this even was a prosecutable