This book is dedicated to my readers, who have allowed me to write something different each time out. We all like the familiar, but in the end I think we’re all the richer for going new places with new characters. You may not like every book as much as your favorite, but at least you — and I — won’t be bored. This novel is a wild one, so settle in and open your memory and imagination. (And for those who write in to ask, you may just see some familiar characters here and in the future, but probably where you least expect them.)
The normal man is a fiction.
—HEATHCLIFF, Wuthering Heights
Eve Sumner appeared on the first day of fall. Not the official first day — there was nothing official about Eve — but the first day the air turned cool, blowing through John Waters’s shirt as though it weren’t there. It was chilly enough for a jacket, but he didn’t want one because it had been so hot for so damn long, because the air tasted like metal and his blood was up, quickened by the change in temperature and the drop in pressure on his skin, like a change in altitude. His steps were lighter, the wind carrying him forward, and deep within his chest something stirred the way the bucks were stirring in the deep woods and the high leaves were pulling at their branches. Soon those bucks would be stalked through the oaks and shot, and those leaves would be burning in piles, but on that day all remained unresolved, poised in a great ballet of expectation, an indrawn breath. And borne on the first prescient breeze of exhalation came Eve Sumner.
