Doug was halfway home before he realized that he had forgotten to buy a lottery ticket. He had been half-joking when he’d said that to Trish, but he had also been half-serious. He was not a gambler by any stretch of the imagination, but he did buy an occasional lottery ticket when he remembered. And though he was ostensibly a rational intelligent man, he was not entirely immune to superstition. He didn’t really believe in luck—good or bad—but it wasn’t something he ruled out as being entirely impossible. Besides, he wouldn’t mind winning a few million. It would be nice to be fabulously wealthy. It was something to which he would gladly adjust.

He turned the car around and headed to the Circle K. He bought a ticket, letting the machine pick the numbers, and read over his choices as he walked back out to the car. He was about to open the door when he saw, near the mailbox by the curb, the mailman. The postal carrier was kneeling on the ground, the door to the mailbox open, key and chain hanging from the lock, and was taking out the deposited mail. Only he wasn’t simply emptying the bin the way Doug had seen Ronda do; he was carefully examining each envelope, sorting through them. Some he placed carefully in a plastic tray beside him. Others he shoved unthinkingly into a brown paper sack.

There was something odd about that, Doug thought. From the careful way he handled the one group of envelopes and the casually rough way in which he dealt with the others, it seemed as though he was planning to hide some of those envelopes from Howard, as though he had plans for them other than delivery.

The mailman looked up and stared directly at him.

Doug glanced away, pretending as though he had been scanning the street and his gaze had accidentally landed for a second on the mailman as he’d looked around. But in the brief moment that their eyes locked, he had the unmistakable feeling that the mailman had known he was watching and that that was precisely why he had looked up at that moment.

You’re being stupid, Doug told himself. The man had glanced in his direction. That was all. It was a perfectly ordinary occurrence, a simple random event. There was nothing strange or sinister about it. But when he looked again at the mailman, he saw that the man was still staring at him and that there was a disdainful half-smile on the pale thin lips.