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The skin crawled on the back of Aaron’s neck.
“Would you please put it on the counter for me?” he asked.
Dani frowned. “Yes, certainly,” she said, and put itdown, then watched him put on a pair of nitrile exam gloves before removing the rawhide.
The first thing Aaron noticed was a small label on the spine. At some point, it had been processed into a library. And when he saw the name and the date, and the condition of the journal, he guessed it was authentic. He had no idea how this had gone from belonging to Brendan Pope to being donated to a library, but the odds of this coming full circle were beyond calculation.
Then he thought about the man who’d dropped it. People carrying handguns didn’t sound like someone they needed running loose in a tourist destination like Jubilee. He went behind the desk, dug around in the drawers until he found some evidence bags, and slipped the piece of rawhide and the journal inside one.
“I’m going to need you to tell the chief what you just told me. What’s your name?”
“Dani Owens,” she said, and took a seat in a chair against the wall as Aaron reached for the desk phone and called Sonny Warren’s office.
A couple of minutes later, Sonny entered the lobby. He’d just gotten word from county about Charlie Raines being shot, and now there was a woman in the waiting area talking about seeing a man with a gun.
“Miss Owens?”
Dani nodded.
“I’m Chief Warren. Will you please follow me to my office? Aaron, I’ll ask you to come, too.”
“Yes, sir,” Aaron said.
Dani’s heart skipped a beat. Calling attention to herself was the last thing she needed.
“I just wanted to turn in a lost book,” she said.
“This one,” Aaron said, holding up the bag.
“Yes, ma’am. If you’ll please follow me, I’ll explain,” Sonny said.
Dani was already regretting getting involved, but she did as she was told.
“Please, have a seat,” Sonny said as he closed the door behind them.
Aaron laid the journal he’d taken into evidence on the chief’s desk, then stood at attention beside the door as Dani sat down.
“Now, I need your name and phone number, and where you’re staying, then please tell me exactly what you saw and when,” Sonny said.
Dani nodded. “Daniella Owens, but I go by Dani,” then gave him her phone number and the Serenity Inn, the hotel where she was staying, before repeating everything she’d just told Aaron.
“I did unwrap it, and I did open the book to look for a name, but the name and date written in the flyleaf was obviously very old, which made me think it might be valuable, so I brought it here.”
Sonny eyed the evidence bag. “If this is legit, then Officer Pope is a direct descendant of the man to whom this belonged.”
Dani glanced at him again. “I guessed it was something like that when he introduced himself.”
“Can you please describe the man you saw?” Sonny asked.
She thought a moment. “He was probably in his late forties, maybe early fifties. He was tall and thin, with a long blond ponytail and beard. He looked like he’d been running for miles. His clothing was soaked with sweat, and he was staggering and crying as he came up from the creek. Then just as he reached his car in the parking lot, he stumbled and fell.”
Sonny nodded. “And you said he had a gun. Was it a rifle or a handgun?”
“A handgun,” Dani said. “What’s going on?”
“Someone shot a young boy named Charlie Raines up on Pope Mountain this afternoon. They think he was shot with a handgun. His family just found him. He’s still alive, but barely, and they have no clue as to what could have happened. And then here you come with this story, and this book that appears to be a journal belonging to the very man for whom Pope Mountain was named. The man who founded Jubilee. And the man you saw was in possession of a gun.”
Aaron grunted like he’d been punched.
