The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(50)
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.
Old rules with hard consequences came back to her so easily. It didn’t matter how long ago they had been instilled, or how long since they had been enforced. She called herself stupid before that terrible voice in her memory could do it.
Why should she bother Eric with her nerves over nothing? The note wasn’t even a threat. Would she call the police over it? No. They would laugh at her, roll their eyes, mock her when they got back into their car and drove away. She knew it happened. She’d seen it happen . . . and she knew what happened after they went . . . Not here, not now, not in this life, but the memory of it was so strong she could taste the copper of blood in her mouth.
I KNOW WHO YOU ARE
That was no secret.
I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE
Obviously so. She didn’t like that idea, but anyone could look up Eric’s name in the phone directory. If the mysterious “I” knew who she was, then he or she knew she was married to Eric. They weren’t living under witness protection.
Her husband was not the only Eric Burke in the Twin Cities, she remembered with the sudden hope that the note had been delivered by mistake. There was another Eric Burke! Eric’s second cousin—
But she was the only Evangeline Burke.
No one called her by that name. She didn’t use it. She never had.
She hugged herself and paced the small room, chewing on a thumbnail. She shouldn’t have looked at the mail. If she hadn’t opened the envelope, she would have been in bed asleep by now, blissfully ignorant, dreaming of her perfect day and her perfect life.
Her heart was racing. She was breathing hard. Angry with herself, she went to the front door and checked the locks again. She went to the kitchen and checked the patio slider. She went to the back door and unlocked and relocked the deadbolt.
Enough, she told herself. God, how disheartening it was to have those old thoughts and old patterns of self-loathing rise to the surface like they’d never left her—because they had never left her. No matter how she weighed them down with common sense and cognitive therapy, they could always slip loose and rise.
No. No, she wouldn’t allow it. She had worked too hard to be stronger. She had tattooed the word on her chest above her heart. STRONGER.
Nothing had happened, really, she told herself. Nothing could happen. She and Mia were safe inside their home. She was going to go upstairs to bed, and she was going to sleep. In the morning, she would take the note to work with her and show it to Grace and to Kate, just so they would know, just in case they got one, too. If this was something tied to Hope Anders, or to the article in the paper, all the directors at Chrysalis had probably gotten one just to shake them up. Kate would know what to do with it or about it. That would be that.
Hanging on tight to her false bravado, Evi turned off the television, left the lamp on, and went upstairs. She checked on her sleeping daughter, not allowing herself to go into the softly lit room. She didn’t want Mia to wake and sense her mother’s tension. Her daughter deserved better than to have her innocence tainted by her mother’s bad memories—no matter how badly Evi ached to go in and kneel down beside her bed and kiss her cheek and feel her daughter’s soft breath.
She went to her own room and pretended to be normal, brushing her teeth and washing her face. She climbed into bed with just the nightlight on and burrowed into the pillows. She pulled Eric’s pillow close and breathed in his scent, trying to calm herself. She went through the exercises she had been taught: breathe slowly, breathe deeply, in through the nose, out through the mouth.