A Person of Interest Read Online Free PDF

several feet of spring snow.
    That the statewide federation of Gaither’s coreligionists had planned their open-air shindig for this time of the year poignantly indicated their faith, Lee reflected, as he turned up the collar of his thin black suit jacket and pulled the lapels closed across his sternum. The afternoon was already cold, although it was perfectly clear; the declining sun stained the drab campus buildings as if they’d been hosed down with wine. The wind was increasingly strong; Lee watched the tulips, 20 S U S A N C H O I
    already grown to full height and with their leaves raised like arms, flinging themselves supplicatingly onto the ground. It might have been his discomfort at the prospect of the evening ahead, but the wind-lashed flowers looked like penitents to him, prostrating themselves in abased ecstasy. Lee had inherited godlessness from his father, and it was one of his few characteristics about which he felt no concern. His discomfort arose not from suspicion that he did long for God but from the fragility of his belief that it was he and not Gaither who held the balance of power, that it was Gaither, in his desire for a convert, who was the real supplicant. By the time the car, a battered two-door sedan, pulled up at the bus stop with Gaither at the wheel, Lee felt his mood souring and detected in himself the first stirrings of resentment. Until now he and Gaither had never conducted their friendship entirely outside the classroom; even when they had sat in the campus tavern, where Gaither drank ginger ale or orange juice while Lee had a beer, their encounter had been framed by their status as equals within their department, both academically and socially. In meeting on a Friday night for reasons entirely unconnected to school, in driving together in Gaither’s car to a meeting of Gaither’s fellow Christians, in the company of Gaither’s friends and Gaither’s wife, Lee felt that Gaither had led him over a border on the far side of which they were vastly unequal. The front passenger door swung open, and Lee crossed his arms across his chest, as much in an unconscious effort to repel the car as because he was cold. A woman—small, brown-haired, with a stern, unremarkable, un-made-up face and in a brown blazer and long plaid skirt and loafers—got out of the car without so much as a glance at Lee, while Gaither leaned across the front seat and waved. “D’you mind riding in the back, Lee?” he called. “Ruth gets carsick.” The small brown woman wrestled with the front seat until it hinged forward and then stood aside silently so that Lee could climb into the back. “It’s my pleasure to meet you, Aileen,” he said, holding out a stiff hand. He was aware of a feeling of triumph, on fi nding that Gaither’s wife was as plain as he’d thought and, on top of that, rude.
    “I’m not Aileen, I’m Ruth,” the woman said, affronted. “Aileen’s in the back because I get carsick.”
    Clambering, then, clumsily into the car, ducking his head under-neath the low roof, feeling the too-long hair that hung over his forehead A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 21
    sticking into his eyes, hoping not to split the knees of his pants in the awkward position, because the pants were very old and overwashed and the knees had worn thin, Lee was doubly embarrassed, not merely because he had failed to hear Gaither name Ruth and had so made a gaffe. The woman in the backseat, whom he had not even noticed as the car had pulled up, seemed to exude such an air of intense disengagement, such a desire to be left alone, that Lee felt he’d been pushed through a window into her boudoir. As he struggled to insert himself into the seat beside her, she dropped a newspaper she’d been reading onto her lap and watched him, with indifference. She was shatteringly beautiful and as obviously bored.
    “Hello,” she said, when he’d settled himself. “I’m Aileen.”
    “It’s my pleasure to meet you,” he managed,