Setting her notes aside, she turned up the volume on the TV to catch the day’s news, expecting the morning’s weather to be the biggest story of the day. Instead, the news crawl splashed across the screen with the station logo read: BRUTAL SLAYING HOME INVASION ROBBERY.
A history professor from the University of Minnesota and his wife had been killed in their home. Evi listened to the details with shock and horror at the sheer brutality of the attack, making a mental note to triple-check the locks tonight. The neighborhood where the crime had taken place, considered a very safe and desirable area to live, wasn’t that far away.
Evi found herself instantly wishing Eric hadn’t volunteered to work for his friend. Their cozy little house in their quiet neighborhood suddenly felt like a fishbowl. She realized anyone could be outside, staring in through the windows.
What was the world coming to when someone would do something like this: beating and slashing a middle-aged couple to death in their own home? For what? For whatever the perpetrator could carry away? A few hundred or a few thousand dollars’ worth of stuff?
Evi got up before the story was over and went around the house, checking the locks on every door and window, flinching at every shadow as she went. When she came back to the living room, she changed the channel to a cooking show and sat down to sort through the mail, thinking the mundane task would calm her.
Sale flyer, sale flyer, coupon, coupon. NEED A PLUMBER? CALL PETE! Bill, bill, bill. A small envelope addressed to her in block print: EVANGELINE BURKE.
It looked the size of an invitation or a thank-you note. She tried to think if she had been expecting either. There was no return address. No one she knew called her by her full name. She didn’t use it. She never had. She didn’t use it professionally. She didn’t even use it on her checks. She had only kept the shortest version of it possible to save the expense of legally changing it. Who would send an envelope hand-lettered to someone she had never really been?
She opened the envelope slowly, a strange sense of apprehension filling her chest as she extracted the note. She stared at it, a terrible chill spreading through her.
An otherwise blank piece of ivory paper with two lines in black ink.
I KNOW WHO YOU ARE
I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE
Evi’s hands began to tremble. She felt like she couldn’t breathe.
Why would anyone send her such a thing? She was no one special, just a social worker, a wife, a mom living a normal life.
The chill went through her again like a shard of ice. She was a social worker for Hope Anders, who had been threatened by a cult and by her own family. Hope Anders, who was potentially the target of a vicious criminal being hunted by law enforcement.
Evi had never equated her job with danger to herself. While the girls and young women she helped may have come out of dangerous circumstances, her job was simply helping them navigate the social services system. She was no threat to anyone. She didn’t even know where Hope Anders was staying. The addresses of the safe houses used by Chrysalis were known to only a few people. Evi was not one of them.
She worked at the Chrysalis offices downtown, in a nondescript building just a few blocks from the Hennepin County Government Center, where the courts were located. Her name wasn’t on the letterhead. It wasn’t on the door. Grace Underhill, the founder of Chrysalis, was the public face of the nonprofit, along with Kate Quinn, who served as an advocate and liaison between the young women and the prosecutor’s office and law enforcement.
But Evi had been quoted in the article the Star Tribune ran on the center. She had been included in one of the photographs.
Still, why would anyone seek her out?
She turned the envelope over again, as if she thought a return address might magically appear to answer her questions. Stupid. Then it occurred to her that she probably shouldn’t be handling the envelope or the note at all.
She popped up from the sofa and went to the kitchen, her skin crawling at the feeling that someone might be watching her as she passed through the house, catching glimpses of her through the blinds in the dining room as she hurried to get to the kitchen. She pulled open a drawer and yanked out a Ziploc bag, then hurried back to the living room and maneuvered the note and envelope into it, trying not to touch the paper any more than she absolutely had to.
She left the bagged note on the side table and stood back with her hands on her hips, staring at it as if it might morph into something. Maybe if she stared at it long enough, it would become an invitation to a holiday party or a thank-you for the baby monitor she had given her friend Kim at her baby shower.
I KNOW WHO YOU ARE
I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE
What should she do? Should she call Eric at work? And tell him what? A strange thing came in the mail . . . ?
She didn’t want to make a fuss. She didn’t want to inconvenience him. She shouldn’t disturb him at work.