A Person of Interest Read Online Free PDF Page B

in an unsteady sweat as if he’d sprinted to get into the car.
    “Likewise,” she said, without the slightest attempt at sincerity. She picked up her newspaper again.
    However her carsickness manifested itself, Ruth was stoic about it. She sat motionless and erect in her seat, the mousy brown top of her head barely visible over the headrest. Lee guessed that her sickness was in part claustrophobia. She had rolled down her window all the way to the sill, and as they left town and pulled onto the country highway, a roar of cold wind filled the car and the air seemed to turn to a mass and pin them where they sat. Then it was too loud, and the cold was too numbing, to speak. Aileen’s newspaper snapped angrily and was torn in so many directions she couldn’t fold it; Lee held on to one edge, and together they tried until Aileen mashed it into a ball and put it under her feet. Then they went back to staring ahead in silence.
    Lee couldn’t see Gaither’s face in the narrow rearview, but Gaither drove through the howl of gelatinous wind in the dying daylight with the loose motions and confident shoulders of a man at the helm of his yacht. He seemed to smile beatifically with the back of his head. Lee twisted away and gazed out his window. He hadn’t been outside the confines of their small college town since the late August afternoon eight months before when he’d arrived on a bus from the nearest big city, ninety minutes away—the same city to which Gaither and Ruth, he’d soon learn, commuted each Sunday by the same bus to go to their church.

    22 S U S A N C H O I
    The drive seemed to last hours, but when Gaither turned off the road into trees at a sign for the Corn Creek State Park, Lee was startled to see by his Seiko that it had not been even thirty minutes since they’d picked him up at the bus stop. The two-lane highway had left town for flat, stubbled cornfields that reached off endlessly; then the land had grown very slightly uneven, like a rumpled bedsheet, and unremarkable trees lined the sides of the road. Lee glimpsed a magnolia that had formed fuzzy buds; all the rest of the branches were still bare. Leaving the highway, they had dropped onto a drab gravel road that for no topographical reason pursued a meandering path through the scraggly woods; the occasional burnt-wood sign pointed on to a parking lot, picnic meadow, and lake. But the sun was now setting between the tops of the trees and the ground, pouring its blaze sideways into the car; in spite of the wind, Lee felt it hot against his cheek, and when he glanced at Aileen, he saw her skin illumined with reflected sunlight. The gathering had been planned, with permission from the park manager, to coincide with the park’s closing time, so that the lakeside pavilion and its tables and barbecue grills could be had privately. Coming around a last bend, they could see, through the bare trees, the homely “pavilion,” a sort of large shingled roof up on poles, already glowing blue under-neath from its fl yspecked fluorescents, and with a small stage set up.
    Lee thought he sensed Aileen recoil; perhaps she was embarrassed by the gathering’s scrappy sincerity, its dowdy religiousness. And these were not even mainstream American Christians, they were marginal evangelicals—but as the car arrived in the parking lot, Lee saw that the lot was almost a third full and that men and women and children were ambling to greet each other on the blacktop, clasping hands beneath the afterglow sky. Gaither switched off the engine and turned around to the backseat. “We’re here!” he said. The wind had matted his thinning brown hair, and Lee realized that in this context—in his shirt-sleeves in the open air, outside a classroom, but most of all in the midst of his own beloved people—Gaither was a very handsome man. He had a strong-boned but delicate face, rangy arms, at least half a head’s more height than Lee. Lee looked again at Aileen. She was pulling a