Page 1 of Daddy's Little Librarian
Chapter One
Scotti came awake in the night with a start. She bolted up in bed, her heart already beating in her throat, half because of her dreams and half because of what she’d just heard. Clutching the blanket with both hands, she listened.
Silence reigned through her small, split-level house. Outside, wind pushed against the roof. Downstairs, the living room clock was ticking.
She’d dreamed it. She must have.
Scared, sick to her stomach, and embarrassed to have let herself become so unsettled over something intangible that she couldn’t even remember, she lay back down. Rolling onto her side, she got comfortable on her pillow enough to close her eyes, and that’s when she heard it again. The soft, deliberate jostling of the kitchen window downstairs.
She knew that sound, just like she knew exactly which window, because that one had the iffy lock. The one that sometimes came open just by shaking the wooden frame. Having accidentally locked herself out of the house once, she’d discovered that trick while trying to find an unlocked window to crawl back in through. She’d shown that trick to Gopher once, back when they were dating and she still thought he might be The One.
They weren’t still dating now, however. And he definitely was not The One.
What he was, was the psycho mistake she wished she’d never made and the man springing the window lock that wouldn’t stay secure so he could break into her house.
The lock came undone with a click she could hear, the rattling stopped, and the window slid open.
Gopher was now in her house.
Grabbing her cellphone off the nightstand, Scotti threw herself off the bed and scrambled under it instead. At the point that she dialed 9-1-1, she could already hear his footsteps coming up the stairs.
“911, what is the nature of your emergency?” said the woman who answered the call.
“He’s in my house!” she whispered, panic rising the closer those footsteps brought him down the hall. Slow and measured, and not just him. Now she could hear a low scraping accompanying him as he closed the distance, walking past her Disney princess nightlight—temporarily blocking where the light splashed the ceiling and walls—and straight to her open bedroom door.
Scotti dropped her cheek to the carpet, peeking through the gap between the pink, ruffled bedskirt and the floor.
Tall and lean, dressed all in black from the hood over his head to the gloves on his hands and the boots on his feet, Gopher looked like a shadow as he stood there, frozen in her doorway. A shadow with a knife in his hand, with the tip still gouging a line in the wall where he had scraped. So she would hear it and know he was coming for her.
“He’s in your house?” the woman from 911 repeated. Unlike the pure calm, business voice she had used when first she’d answered the phone, now she only sounded annoyed. “Is this Scotlyn Moore again? Honey, you know pranking 911 is a crime, right? Usually it’s labeled a class 1 misdemeanor, but this is eight times you’ve done this in the last two months. Eight times. For you, they’d be justified in upping this to a felony!”
Gopher stepped into her bedroom, pausing just over the threshold, no doubt taking in her empty bed.
Tears burning her eyes, Scotti covered her mouth. Please just come.
“Hello?” the operator drawled.
She didn’t dare answer, but watched under the bedskirt as his booted feet circled from the foot of her bed to the side she liked to sleep on. He sat down practically right above her.
“Last time we were in this bed together,” Gopher said, “I had you tied to it.”
“Felonies mean you go to jail,” the 911 operator continued through the phone.
Closing her eyes, Scotti buried her face in the carpet. She was terrified he could hear her breathing. She was also positive he didn’t just suspect she was hiding nearby, but that he knew it.
He certainly sounded like he knew as, shifting on the mattress above her, he said, “Someday soon, babygirl, I’m going to have you in this bed again. Want to guess what we’re going to do then?”
Scotti shuddered.
“I hope you’re listening carefully,” the operator said as the mattress springs squeaked when Gopher stood and braced his knee on the bed. “I’m about to do you the biggest favor you’ll ever have.”
Scotti flinched, feeling the violence in every punching blow as Gopher brutally stabbed her pillow—her, in absentia—to death.
“I’m not going to do anything,” the operator said. “I’m not going to alert the police or log this call.”
Gopher’s knife slit through both pillowcase and memory foam, broadening his attack, cutting, slashing, and stabbing all down the length of her mattress as well. And Scotti felt every slice of his knife as if he were carving directly into her back.
“Do not call back here again,” the operator warned. “If you do, you will go to jail.”
