From the Corner of His Eye by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

himself of suspicion. Good Naomi, who gave immeasurably more to everyone than she took, would forevermore stand in a shadow of doubt in his memory.
    After all, you could never really know anyone, not
really
know every last corner of someone’s mind or heart. No human being was perfect. Even someone of saintly habits and selfless behavior might be a monster in his heart, filled with unspeakable desires, which he might act upon only once or never.
    He was all but certain that he himself, for example, would not kill another wife. For one thing, considering that his marriage to Naomi was now stained by the most terrible of doubts, he couldn’t imagine how he might ever again trust anyone sufficiently to take the wedding vows.
    Junior closed his weary eyes and gratefully submitted as the paramedic wiped his greasy face and his crusted lips with a cool, damp cloth.
    Naomi’s beautiful countenance rose in his mind, and she looked beatific for a moment, but then he thought he saw a certain slyness in her angelic smile, a disturbing glint of calculation in her once loving eyes.
    Losing his cherished wife was devastating, a wound beyond all hope of healing, but this was even worse: having his bright image of her stained by suspicion. Naomi was no longer present to provide comfort and consolation, and now Junior didn’t even have untainted memories of her to sustain him. As always, it was not the action that troubled him, but the
aftermath.
    This soiling of Naomi’s memory was a sadness so poignant, so terrible, that he wondered if he could endure it. He felt his mouth tremble and go soft, not with the urge to throw up again, but with something like grief if not grief itself. His eyes filled with tears.
    Perhaps the paramedic had given him an injection, a sedative. As the howling ambulance rocked along on this most momentous day, Junior Cain wept profoundly but quietly—and achieved temporary peace in a dreamless sleep.

    When he woke, he was in a hospital bed, his upper body slightly elevated. The only illumination was provided by a single window: an ashen light too dreary to be called a glow, trimmed into drab ribbons by the tilted blades of a venetian blind. Most of the room lay in shadows.
    He still had a sour taste in his mouth, although it was not as disgusting as it had been. All the odors were wonderfully clean and bracing—antiseptics, floor wax, freshly laundered bedsheets—without a whiff of bodily fluids.
    He was immensely weary, limp. He felt oppressed, as though a great weight were piled on him. Even keeping his eyes open was tiring.
    An IV rack stood beside the bed, dripping fluid into his vein, replacing the electrolytes that he had lost through vomiting, most likely medicating him with an antiemetic as well. His right arm was securely strapped to a supporting board, to prevent him from bending his elbow and accidentally tearing out the needle.
    This was a two-bed unit. The second bed was empty.
    Junior thought he was alone, but just when he felt capable of summoning the energy to shift to a more comfortable position, he heard a man clear his throat. The phlegmy sound had come from beyond the foot of the bed, from the right corner of the room.
    Instinctively, Junior knew that anyone watching over him in the dark could not be a person of the best intentions. Doctors and nurses didn’t monitor their patients with the lights off.
    He was relieved that he hadn’t moved his head or made a sound. He wanted to understand as much of the situation as possible before revealing that he was awake.
    Because the upper part of the hospital bed was somewhat raised, he didn’t have to lift his head from the pillow to study the corner where the phantom waited. He peered beyond the IV rack, past the foot of the adjacent bed.
    Junior was lying in the darkest end of the room, farthest from the window, but the corner in question was almost equally shrouded in gloom. He stared for a long time, until his eyes began to ache, before he