“Yes,” Dani whispered, and then gasped, when she heard another squeak. Every time she opened the door to her bedroom, one of the hinges squeaked, and that was what she heard. “Oh God, oh God, oh God. He’s here,” she whispered into the phone, and went silent.
Even though she’d been expecting it, that squeak nearly stopped her heart. The gun was in her hand now, and she was on her knees, leaning forward, peering through the slats.
When the dark figure appeared beside her bed, her worst fears were realized. Tony! Oh my God, he has a gun!
Before she could think, he began firing. POP. POP. POP. And didn’t stop until he’d emptied the clip.
* * *
Tony felt an adrenaline kick when he began pulling the trigger. It was almost as good as coming inside her. Once he’d emptied the clip, he turned to run. And then the closet doors flew open, and he watched Dani emerge. In the dark, she was little more than a shadow, and for a heartbeat he thought he was seeing her ghost.
He saw the gun in her hand too late. Her first shot went into his right knee. Even before he felt the pain, she had a bullet in his other knee. He dropped into a spreading pool of his own blood, screaming and writhing in a pain unlike anything he’d ever known.
“Help me! Help me! I need an ambulance!” he shrieked.
Dani leaned over, pushed the barrel of her gun between his eyes, and in a voice devoid of emotion said, “You are a worthless piece of shit! Shut up now, or I’ll put the next one between your eyes.”
He passed out, saving his own life.
* * *
There was no misunderstanding about what had happened.
Dani’s neighbors had heard the succession of gunshots when Tony emptied his weapon into her bed.
A 911 dispatcher had heard every shot.
And more than a dozen calls were made to 911 by Dani’s neighbors on her behalf.
And there was no mistaking the sound of two other gunshots that came seconds later, or that Dani Owens had defended herself. She had stopped her stalker when the police could not, but her way of life had come to a grinding halt.
During their investigation, the police discovered Tony had rented the empty apartment next door to her and was using the return air duct to get up into the ceiling and crawl to her room, letting himself into her apartment through the grate in the ceiling.
What they didn’t know was that Alex had been with him every time, holding the stepladder in the empty apartment while Tony crawled into the vent, and then crawling in behind him and giving him the lift back up from Dani’s apartment to help him escape unseen.
The police also found hidden cameras in Dani’s apartment, and camera equipment in the empty apartment where Tony had sat watching her. They suspected his brother, Alex, had been helping him, but the only fingerprints belonged to Tony. They couldn’t prove it, and Tony denied Alex was ever involved.
* * *
At his lawyer’s suggestion, Tony Bing opted out of a jury trial and threw himself on the mercy of the court. There was no lawyer on earth who could argue a good reason why Tony Bing shouldn’t go to prison for attempted murder.
His parents were horrified at what he’d done and disowned him, and then in indignation for their decision, Alex disappeared.
Tony Bing’s cold-blooded attempt at murder, his prior history of violent abuse, and the protection order he’d violated time and again didn’t go well with the judge who handed down his sentence. He got the full fifty years for an attempt at first-degree murder, with no possibility of parole. Soon afterward, Tony Bing and his wheelchair were transported to prison.
And after a year of living in hell, when the school year ended, Dani Owens resigned and began looking for a new teaching job, with the caveat that it had to be anywhere but the state of Louisiana.
Chapter 3
June—Washington, DC
Nyles Fairchild was a tall, thin man who’d turned forty-five on his last birthday—a confirmed bachelor who wore his long graying hair tied back in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. He had a master’s degree in English literature, a PhD in American history, and worked as a cataloger at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. He lived a quiet life in a tiny one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of an old apartment building in Alexandria, Virginia. His last pet, a cat named Willie Nelson, died a year ago last Easter. He wasn’t lonely, but there were days when he wished he had an alter ego beyond being a mild-mannered cataloger of books.
Still, he fully accepted his life—until he found the journal.
* * *
Nyles’s workday began one morning with orders to oversee the renovation of an old wing on the lower level of the library. It wasn’t about moving walls or changing the format. Just overseeing the installation of tiers of new shelving. He didn’t like dealing with the public or other employees beneath him, and was mentally cursing the ineptitude of the workers when he saw a packet fall onto the floor from behind an old set of shelves. He quickly retrieved it, opened the soft leather wrapping tied around it, and after a quick glance, realized it was out of place. It didn’t even belong in this area of the library.
Then one of the workers knocked over a set of shelving, and he laid it aside in the top drawer of a desk to deal with later and went to see what damage had been done. Hours later, the new shelving was finally in place, and everyone had stopped for lunch.
Nyles always brought his lunch from home and ate at his desk, knowing everyone else would be out and he could enjoy the brief privacy. It wasn’t until he was getting ready to leave the basement area that he remembered the packet, and took it back to his office and set it aside as he sat down to eat.
It occurred to him that he probably shouldn’t even be messing with it. He needed to check the provenance, and see when it had been entered into the system and where it was supposed to be. He checked the numbers and the coding, and then found the reference section to which it belonged.
NINETEENTH CENTURY JOURNAL DONATED IN 1942 BY JOHN DAVID POPE.
PERSONAL JOURNAL OF BRENDAN POPE CIRCA 1833. REF. STATE OF KENTUCKY.
“How the hell did you get down here?” Nyles muttered, but now he was curious. It was almost as if someone had gone to great pains to hide it. And in that moment, he ignored his first instinct to just return it to the proper area and decided to give it a once-over.
The journal was wrapped in unprocessed rawhide and bound with a long thin strip of the same material. He took a bite of his sandwich, and then as he was chewing, carefully unfolded the rawhide, revealing the book within. The tiny label at the base of the spine indicated it had been processed into the library at some point, but it was certainly in the wrong place.
His pulse kicked a bit when he saw the age and the style of it, then took another bite of his sandwich and opened it.
The pages were yellow with age, but they appeared to have been made from a thick, heavy paper of good quality. The front and back covers were dark leather that had cracked along the spine and at one corner, but he could see stitches in the paper through a crack on the spine, proving it had been hand-bound.
Gently, he opened the front cover and saw writing on the flyleaf. The script was old-fashioned, and the ink so faded it was difficult to read. He moved it closer to the light and leaned over.