Kevin moves to his left, hesitates as he squints into the late afternoon sun, wavers for a moment as he surely loses sight of the ball, then lunges to the side and stabs it inches above the ground. The gathering of parents and friends applaud the effort. Wisdom joins in, then turns around, faces the setting orange ball, and thinks again of the missing woman. She has become hard to forget. Perhaps the sun has been in his eyes too long. He’s missing something and realizes it’s become personal. He admits that the woman holds some physical attraction for him. He remembers an old film where a police detective investigates the suspected murder of a beautiful woman and becomes obsessed with her portrait, until events change and she turns up alive. In this case, the missing woman doctor named Heidi Kashani has not turned up, yet Wisdom feels an uncontrolled obsession beginning to grow. Perhaps that is why he carries the color photo of her in the pink-and-white dress that Stern gave him. There is an exotic sexuality in her eyes, and from the way Stern describes her, he can understand Stern’s own obsession.
