Chapter 1

“Excuse me, lady!”

The angry voice caught Karena Walsh by surprise. She looked up from the petition she was signing and saw an old man glaring at her as he stood just outside the automatic door of the grocery store. The signature gatherer had set up her table under the awning to avoid the spring rain showers, but there was still ample room for the man to get by.

“I’m sorry,” Karena said, stepping to one side of the table to clear the path even more. As she returned her attention to filling in the blanks on the form, she saw the woman behind the table give an exaggerated roll of her eyes as the man walked by. “I used to find signature gathering annoying, too,” she commented as she handed the petition back to the woman. “Funny how you can meet someone who changes how you look at things like political involvement.”

“Thanks,” the woman said, sounding bored as she took the clipboard from Karena and briefly skimmed over it.

Karena picked up her sacks of groceries and walked briskly to her car, urged on by the cool air and threat of more rain. It didn’t take her long to load her groceries into the back seat, and a few minutes later she was on her way through the quiet streets of Branner Glen toward her apartment. When she reached her home, she was pleased to see that she could park close to her apartment. A light rain began to fall again as Karena grabbed her bags and headed for the nearest door.

The message light blinking on her answering machine caught Karena’s eye when she entered her apartment. She assumed it was another telemarketer, so she put her groceries away before leisurely returning to the machine to press the play button.

“Paul Johnson is dead. Dan Starney might be next,” a familiar-sounding voice said. The machine beeped twice to indicate that the message was over and that it was the last message.

Karena felt as if she had just gone down the long drop of a roller coaster. She had not known Paul very well, but the thought of him suddenly being dead was still shocking and unpleasant, and the apparent threat against Dan made her feel even worse. Karena checked the Caller ID log but saw that the call was listed as PRIVATE CALLER. She quickly moved to her computer and turned it on so that she could check news sites to confirm that Paul was dead and to find out why or how.

Before the start of Dan’s prison sentence, Dan and Karena agreed that she would have minimal contact with him as long as she still worked at Branner Glen High School. In-person visits would be out of the question. They expected bad feelings and suspicion among everyone in the school community, and they did not want to remind people about the events that landed two former teachers in prison.

They intended to keep in touch by mail, to minimize public awareness of her continued connection to him, but after the first few weeks their letters were increasingly short and infrequent. They never considered the idea that she might need to contact him for anything urgent. Faced with the implied threat against Dan, she knew she would need to choose between a slow warning through mail or going against their agreement to make an in-person visit.

“That voice,” she said to herself as her computer finished booting up. “I know that voice, I just can’t place it.” She logged in to her computer’s operating system, giving a quick thought to how this was another way that Dan had changed her life. In the past she had mostly ignored online privacy and data security, choosing convenience over other concerns. Dan helped her understand how rapidly her personal data could travel worldwide to criminals or others who wanted to abuse it.

In the past she considered her computer literacy to be above average, but that was before Dan introduced her to terms like botnet and public key infrastructure. To him, those things had political implications, but she found that the technology appealed to the same analytical side of her that had pushed her, years ago, in the direction of teaching math. She found it ironic that a history teacher had taught her so much about computers and networks.

As she checked her normal sources for local news, Karena grew frustrated that there was no mention of Paul’s death. Of course, the caller had not said anything about when it had happened, so it might have either been too recent to be in the local news or too far past to show up in the front page headlines. She tried searching, but all she could find were references to the RALA conspiracy.

Karena now understood that the Real America Liberation Army was something Dan was involved with. She still wondered how deep that involvement ran, though, and he persistently refused to explain it in detail. Dan insisted it was for her protection, telling her that the less she knew the safer she would be. Although they had only been romantically involved for a short time before he went to prison, there were a number of heated arguments in their past, and that topic was usually at the core of them.

“Nothing. This is frustrating,” Karena said with an irritated sigh as she pushed herself back from her computer. “There must be some way of finding out what happened, or if its even true.” She moved across the room to look out through the sliding glass door that opened out onto her balcony. There was still a light rain falling, but the sun was also poking through the clouds, and Karena absently wondered where she would need to be in order to see the rainbow.

“I wonder if Sergeant Fisher could tell me. Or maybe he wouldn’t even take my call,” she said softly. “I’m sure he suspects there’s more to Dan than was found out in court, but maybe if he knew about the threat to Dan… well, maybe he wouldn’t care. And maybe Dan wouldn’t want him to know. Oh, I knew this whole mess was not going to go away so simply!”

With a resigned shake of her head, Karena turned her attention to her work. She had a stack of quizzes to correct, as well as lesson plans to complete. At first it was difficult to set aside this new problem and her concerns about Dan, but she kept reminding herself that she had nothing to go on and was powerless at the moment to do anything for him. Eventually she was able to focus on the papers in front of her. When she took a break to make and eat dinner, she turned on her TV to catch the evening news in hopes that it might mention Paul, but she was again frustrated by the lack of any news about the former art teacher. The threat against Dan made it hard for her to sleep when she finally went to bed.

The next morning Karena awoke late, forcing her to rush through her shower and breakfast before leaving her apartment. She used her single-serving coffee maker to fill a travel mug, then grabbed her attache case and scurried out the door. The cold morning air abruptly increased her alertness, but the drive to the school with the heater blasting made her feel drowsy again, despite consuming the entire mug of coffee. As she parked her car and got out, she realized that she might hear about Paul’s death through the break room grapevine, if in fact he truly was dead.

Some teachers chose to spend a lot of time in the break room when they weren’t teaching, but Karena normally took her breaks in her classroom. To her, the break room was just a place to refill her coffee cup. She avoided the break room even more after Dan went to prison. This would be a day to make an exception, although she was running too late to do more than refill her coffee before her first class. The awkwardness of spending extra time there would have to wait for her planning period.

“We thought maybe we would have Calvin teach us today if you weren’t going to show up, Ms. Walsh,” one of Karena’s students said as she entered her classroom a minute after the second bell announced the start of first period.

Ms. Walsh gave a light laugh. “I’m sure you would have liked that, Madison,” she replied as she set her attache case on her chair and started unloading papers from it onto her desk. “However, you should be learning Algebra in this class, not how to be a better class clown. Besides, I’m sure Calvin doesn’t want to be cheated out of working with logarithms today, it’s his favorite subject!”

One of the freshman boys in the classroom started tapping rhythmically on his desk. “Dropping those trees on the grass, whether I’m inside or outside of your class, they go down, bam, two, three, there goes another dead tree, ’cause I got log rhythm for your—”

“Calvin!” Ms. Walsh interrupted. “Keep it appropriate. Better yet, keep it for after class. We’re going to work on your logarithms, not your log rhythms, because that’s what your quiz score shows you need to work on. And that’s not just Calvin,” she continued, sweeping the whole class with her gaze, “I can see that what I thought you were understanding was actually not really sinking in. Either that, or you were all copying off Calvin’s paper and need glasses to read his mistakes more clearly.”

“Aw, way to single me out,” Calvin commented.

“Madison started it,” Ms. Walsh said with a smile. The banter between her and her students sometimes focused on various individuals in the class, but she tried to keep it light-hearted and evenly distributed, and she reminded her students regularly that it was meant to keep the class from becoming too dull and also to help focus on the areas where everyone in the class was struggling.

When she identified a student who was having unique problems, Karena never discussed it openly in class. Instead she would reach out to the student privately, and she would try to involve the student’s parents if that seemed necessary. Often an after-class or after-school meeting would be enough to help them catch up with the class before their lack of progress became obvious to other students. Unfortunately, this did not always work due to students or parents who did not seem to value education. Even when other students did notice one of their peers was falling behind, Ms. Walsh did not allow that student’s problem to become a subject of teasing.

After first period, Karena had Pre-Calculus and Geometry before her planning period and lunch. Her final two classes of the day were Advanced Algebra and another Pre-Calculus class. When her Geometry students finally left her classroom on their way to their lunch or their next class, she looked at her empty coffee mug and steeled herself for the break room experience. When she reached the break room, however, she found it empty. She was annoyed to see that the person who took the last of the coffee just left the pot empty. Karena set about preparing a fresh pot and was just finishing when she heard the door open.

“Ah, Karena,” she heard the voice of Ed Roberts, the school’s principal.

“Hello, Mr. Roberts,” Karena answered over her shoulder. “Just starting a new pot of coffee, so if that’s what you’re here for, you’ll have to wait a bit.”

Principal Roberts crossed the room toward her. “Yes, that was what I had in mind, although with the school buying cheaper coffee now, I’m not sure it’s worth the wait. Budget cuts, don’t you just love them? Anyway, I wanted to talk with you earlier, but I didn’t see you this morning before first period.”

“No,” she answered, “I was unfortunately running late. What is it you wanted to see me about?”

Karena hoped that he might have some news about Paul Johnson, but at the same time she was painfully aware of the connection between the principal, Paul, Dan, and her. It was amid the school trying to craft a response to a public showing of the art teacher’s homoerotic works that Dan and Karena had been brought together to serve as a way to “leak” statements to the press. That act, despite seeming simple, triggered far-reaching consequences that might have literally led to Paul’s death. As she put away the can of coffee, she hoped she didn’t show any awareness of what might be on the man’s mind.

“I received some troubling news this morning,” he replied, causing Karena’s heart to jump a bit. “Word reached me unofficially that Paul Johnson was caught up in a prison fight and that he was killed.”

“Oh, that’s terrible!” Karena responded, hoping that she sounded as surprised as she should have been. “I can’t imagine Paul getting into a fight, he seemed like someone who would try to stay on the sidelines.”

Ed nodded. “That’s part of the problem. There is speculation that this wasn’t just a random fight and a matter of him being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It may have been a premeditated attack on him. Murder, in other words.”

“Murder?” Karena asked. “Who would want to murder Paul? I know there was some crazy stuff going on with him and the whole ‘liberation army’ thing, but sending him to prison took care of that. How did you heard about this?”

The principal shook his head. “I’m not supposed to be talking to anyone about this until it is announced through regular channels. I know you’re still in touch with Dan and I thought you might also be in touch with Paul, so I thought I should tell you. This is just between you and me for now. Please?”

“Yes, of course,” Karena agreed. “It’s just so… shocking.”

“It is. If it was intentional, I hope they can find out who did it and what it’s all about.”

“Yeah, hopefully,” Karena said, her thoughts already racing toward what she should do next. She knew she should not tell Ed about the apparent threat against Dan, it was better to let him believe that she knew nothing about what had happened to Paul.

The two stood in silence as they waited for the coffee to finish brewing. While they waited, the door opened and two teachers from the English department came in, but they seemed to pick up on the awkward silence between Karena and Principal Roberts and their discussion promptly faded. Once the coffee was done, they all filled their mugs and went their separate ways.

After school, Karena promptly packed her work into her attache case and left the campus. Instead of driving home, Karena headed toward the edge of town where Dan’s large house sat vacant. She had agreed to check on it a couple times each week to make sure nothing was amiss. At his suggestion, she varied her schedule of visits to his house so that if someone wanted to make trouble for her they would not have a pattern of behavior to plan around. Although she was able to enter the house if she wanted to, she often just drove by or parked for a short time outside. Walking around in the cold, empty house was often unnerving to her, but she did it from time to time to be thorough.

As she left the outskirts of the small town, Karena noticed that the same car that she had seen behind her shortly after leaving the school was still behind her. She considered many of Dan’s concerns to be exaggerated, but the news of Paul’s violent death put her on edge. The longer the car stayed behind her, the more nervous she became and the more frequently she looked in her rear view mirror. It wasn’t until she was almost to Dan’s house that she saw the car pull off the main road and head down a gravel side road. She pressed the accelerator harder, eager to get her check on Dan’s house over with.

Karena pulled through the open gates into Dan’s driveway and gave the property a quick glance from one side to the other before approaching the house. Everything looked as it should, so she drove up to the garage and used her remote to open the door. Once she was parked in the garage and the door was securely closed behind her car, Karena got out of her car and went through the doorway that led into the main house. As usual, everything looked normal and the house was completely silent. She was not in the mood for a complete inspection, so after standing quietly and listening for a few moments, she returned to her car.

“Don’t get paranoid,” Karena chided herself as she drove back to town. There was no sign of the other car as she made her way directly toward her apartment complex. She made good time on the way to her home, and she felt a wave of relief as she parked her car. “A cup of tea, that’s what I need,” she said quietly as she got out of her car.

“Miss Walsh?” an elderly female voice caught her attention as she was locking her car door.

“Oh, hello Mrs. Iverssen,” Karena said, glancing over at her new neighbor who was approaching her as quickly as her walker allowed. “How are you today?”

“Worried,” the other woman said directly. “Worried about you. There were some men at your apartment today. They went in! I think you should call the police. I saw those men when I was going home after checking my mail. I’ve never seen them before. They weren’t the maintenance crew. I don’t think it’s safe for you to go up there!”

Karena stared wordlessly at Mrs. Iverssen for a moment. The older woman was generally very friendly, but she also seemed to be suffering from mild dementia. She lived alone and almost never had visitors, and Karena wasn’t sure if the woman was properly in touch with reality. “Are you sure, Mrs. Iverssen?” she asked. “Are you sure it was my apartment? And that they went in, but weren’t the maintenance team? I haven’t given anybody a key, and I’m sure I locked my door this morning.”

“Locks can be picked, honey,” Mrs. Iverssen said with a knowing wink. “And yes, I’m sure I’ve never seen them before, and it was definitely your apartment. Oh, please call the police and don’t go up there by yourself. I really don’t think it’s safe. You’re a nice, quiet neighbor and I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

“I appreciate your concern,” Karena answered with a friendly smile. “Maybe I will check with the police and see what they say. I don’t know if they’re willing to send someone out, but it doesn’t hurt to ask, right?”

“That’s right!” Mrs. Iverssen answered with a little too much exuberance. “Well, you take care of yourself. I’m going to walk down to the park. I always walk down to the park at this time of day. It’s my walk to the park time.”

Karena smiled again. “I’ve seen you walk to the park a lot. It’s good to stay active and get exercise and fresh air. I should probably do more of that myself. Well, have a nice walk!”

“Thank you, dear,” Mrs. Iverssen said before turning away and walking toward the nearby street.

After the other woman was gone, Karena looked up at the balcony of her apartment thoughtfully. If there really was someone there now, they would have been able to watch the whole exchange between her and Mrs. Iverssen. Karena was skeptical about the woman’s story, but it was poor timing to be told that someone had broken into her home. “Don’t get paranoid,” she repeated to herself half-jokingly. “Do I, or don’t I?”

While she pondered whether to go up to her apartment or not, Karena decided to check her mailbox. She figured that if she decided to leave instead of going to her unit, she could pretend that something in the mail caused her to change plans, in case anybody really was watching. She hoped she looked casual as she strolled over to the multi-box mail center, mulling over her options for how to respond to Mrs. Iverssen’s claim. Karena was disappointed to find that there was no mail waiting for her, and at that point she decided to just go up to her apartment as usual.

Karena couldn’t help feeling nervous as she climbed the stairs to her apartment. She had her key out well in advance, and more than once she reminded herself to loosen her grip on the handle of her attache case. When she reached her door, she hesitated for a moment. A glance at the door knob and frame showed no signs of any problem. She finally inserted her key into the lock, and her heart skipped a beat when she thought she felt the door move before she turned her key. Karena pressed lightly against the door to see if it would move, but it did not. She slowly pulled her key from the lock without unlocking it, and tested the knob to see if it was already locked. The knob did not move.

“This is silly,” Karena said softly to herself, but she still held her key more tightly than necessary as she unlocked her door. She slowly opened the door and let light spill into the apartment ahead of her. Nothing looked out of place, and she could hear nothing unusual, so Karena slowly entered her apartment. She cautiously moved throughout the unit, steeling herself to run or fight if somebody jumped out at her, but everything seemed normal and there was nobody else in her home. When she was satisfied that she was alone, she closed and locked her front door.

Before tackling her paperwork for the day, Karena took time to change out of her work outfit, opting for a more comfortable outfit of sweatpants and a t-shirt. She then poured a glass of apple juice for herself and settled in to work on her students’ homework. Going through her daily routine helped eased her concerns enough that she was able to shift her focus toward her work.

As often happened, the time flew by as she was engaged in the school paperwork, and it did not seem long before her stomach reminded her that the time for dinner was approaching. Karena stood up from her work and stretched. After deciding that she was in the mood for something with chicken, she went to her kitchen to retrieve some frozen meat to thaw in the microwave.

“That’s not….” Karena’s voice trailed away as she looked in her freezer. “I didn’t….”

A plastic container of leftovers from the night before was now sitting in her freezer, but she was sure she had put it in the refrigerator. “Okay, now who is getting dementia? I had to have put that in the fridge. There’s no point putting salad in the freezer, it’s probably ruined now. I wouldn’t have done that….” With little regard for the cold air pouring out, Karena stood and stared at her freezer for several moments. “Okay. Okay, this is just too much.”

Karena slammed the freezer door shut. She quickly moved back to her sofa and shoved her paperwork back into her attache case. After grabbing a zipper hoodie from her bedroom and making sure that she had her mobile phone, Karena turned off her lights and promptly left, triple-checking that the door was locked behind her. She was in her car and driving out of the parking lot before she had even decided on where she was going.

“Is Sergeant Allan Fisher available?” Karena asked the young-looking uniformed man at the front desk when she found herself at the police station a short time later.

“No, ma’am,” the police officer answered. “Do you need to see him specifically or can someone else help you?”

Karena hesitated slightly. “I guess someone else could help me with my main concern. There was something else I wanted to ask Sergeant Fisher.”

“I see,” the officer responded. “I believe he may be in tomorrow if you would like to check back. What is your primary concern?”

“When I came home from work, my elderly neighbor told me that she had seen some men whom she did not recognize enter my apartment while I was at work,” Karena explained. “I’m not sure she’s all there, if you know what I mean, so I didn’t take her comments too seriously. Still, I was cautious when I went in, but at first everything seemed in order. Just before I came here, though, I found something had been moved and put back where I would definitely not have put it.”

“I see,” the young officer said again. “Was there any other sign of a break-in?”

Karena shook her head. “No, none that I could see.”

“Okay,” the man said with a slight nod, “that is not a lot to go on. One misplaced item is most likely something that you put in the wrong place by accident. You know how you can have your mind on something and do something silly, like putting a dirty coffee mug in your oven instead of your dishwasher? We all do it from time to time. Usually we catch ourselves in the process, but not always. It sounds to me like that is what happened, and it was just a coincidence that your neighbor told you a story about strange men in your apartment. Have you had anything weighing on your mind lately?”

“Well, yes, sort of,” Karena admitted, “but I really… well, I guess that might be all it is.”

“If you find more evidence or have any serious concern for your safety,” the officer continued, “we can certainly stop by and take a look around. You should call 911 in that case. You should definitely do that, without entering your home, if you ever arrive there and it is obvious someone has broken in. For now, though, there doesn’t seem to be anything to really worry about.”

Karena’s gaze dropped and her shoulders slumped. “All right, I guess there’s nothing else I can do about it.” She wasn’t convinced, but she also could understand that she wasn’t going to get very far with the police unless she had more to give them. She looked back at the front desk officer. “Could you tell Sergeant Fisher that Karena Walsh stopped by to speak with him?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the officer said. Karena wasn’t sure but she thought she caught a look of recognition from him when she gave him her name. It wasn’t too surprising considering the high profile of the arrest of Paul and Dan, but that didn’t make the notoriety any more pleasant.

Karena thanked the officer and promptly left the police station. As she walked back to her car, she realized that she had few places she could go where she would feel safe. Regrets echoed in the back of her mind. Her resistance to Dan’s urging her to train with and carry a handgun seemed less wise now.

Buried in her purse was a keychain canister of pepper spray. She disagreed with Dan about it being “essentially worthless,” but she also had to admit it wouldn’t offer much protection. At best it might deter a casual attack, but it would not keep her safe from a determined attacker. If there really were strange men in her apartment while she was at work, anything they might do to her now would not fall into the casual attack category.

Checking her back seat before climbing into her car was also something Karena originally resisted. When her father, a decorated Vietnam war veteran, was still alive, he regularly urged her to check every time. Dan also offered the same advice. Normally she didn’t bother at all, but sporadically she would give a quick glance in back and then dismiss the idea that it was a useful safety measure. Now her senses and fears were heightened. When she returned to her car after leaving the police station, seeing nothing in her back seat did not trigger any thoughts of it being pointless to look.

“Now what?” Karena asked herself as she pulled out of her parking space. “I wish I could talk to Dan.” She drove through the streets of the small town without having a specific destination in mind. She thought about calling her college roommate, Donna Firenza, because she valued Donna’s clear thinking and logical approach to analyzing a problem. She didn’t want to sit in her car and talk, though, nor did she want to return to her apartment. Eventually her attention was caught by the warmly colorful sign of Mindee’s, a local coffee shop that was briefly a favorite place for her and Dan to spend time together. She decided to retreat to that friendly and familiar environment for awhile.

After buying coffee and a sandwich for her dinner, Karena found a quiet table away from other customers and sat down to eat and consider her options. Although she wouldn’t be able to talk as freely as she would want, she finally decided to call Donna. Donna’s answering machine answered instead, so Karena left a brief message and returned to her meal in silence.

The idea came to her that she could spend the night at Dan’s house. She wasn’t really comfortable with the idea, but she also knew it would be completely unexpected by anybody who might be keeping track of her movements. She had never spent the night there since Dan went to prison. Karena wished that all of Dan’s firearms had not been confiscated, but she knew the house was more secure than an average house due to surveillance systems that Dan installed long before she met him.

“Oh, I might as well try it,” Karena said softly. After sitting for a few more moments in the warmth of the coffee shop, she stood slowly and left the restaurant reluctantly. She glanced around, trying to look casual, as she returned to her car. Again she made the effort to check the back seat. Once she was on the road she wasted no time driving out of town toward Dan’s house. When she arrived at his darkened house she breathed a sigh of relief arrive with no sign of being followed.

Karena parked in the garage and went into the house, where she turned on more lights than were really necessary. She stood for a few moments in the living room, staring at the cold and dark fireplace. She wanted to light a fire for comfort, but she eventually decided against it. To make herself feel better, she did a thorough search of Dan’s house to make sure everything was in order. She hesitated when it came time to descend into the basement, not out of fear but due to a rush of memories.

Years ago, long before Karena knew Dan as anything more than a fellow teacher, Dan had excavated an underground firing range that was accessed through his basement. A large collection of rifles and handguns once filled storage cases along one end of the range. When Dan was arrested his firearms were removed by federal agents. Upon conviction, part of Dan’s sentence involved “decommissioning” his firing range, which was accomplished by removing all furnishings and then bricking over the entrance.

Karena pushed away the flurry of memories and emotions. She quickly descended the stairs into the basement. As with the rest of the house, everything looked normal. With her inspection complete, Karena returned to the living room and removed the dust cover from the sofa. It was not easy to focus, but she forced herself to complete her work so that she would be ready for school in the morning. Once that was done, she packed away her papers and realized that she did not have a clean set of clothes for the morning.

“Guess I’ll be getting up extra early,” she said, shaking her head. She knew this meant going back to her apartment in the morning, and she did not relish the thought of the vulnerability of taking a shower there. “I sure wish I had thought to grab some clothes before leaving. I’d say this day couldn’t get much worse, but that would just curse my luck even more.” Karena felt the sting of tears as her feelings of anger, fear, and frustration washed over her. “I’m going to bed,” she told herself firmly. “I’m through with this day.”