Page 6 of So Smitten

She rinsed her hands and wiped them on the kitchen towel, then headed for the door. She looked through the peephole and saw two men in black suits with sunglasses on. She gasped slightly, and when she looked behind them and saw the navy-blue van with the words FBI emblazoned on the side, she gasped again.

She opened the door a crack and said, “Um… hello? Can I help you?”

“Gina Burgess?” the man to the left asked in a humorless voice.

“Um… it’s Sawyer now,” she said, “Burgess is my maiden name. Is this… what is this?”

"I'm Special Agent Heath Dawson," the man said, "this is my partner, Special Agent Garrett Edgely. May we speak with you for a few moments?"

“Um… I’m sorry.” Gina took a step back and shook her head in confusion. “What is going on? Why is the FBI at my house?”

“Do you remember a Faith Bold, ma’am?”

“Faith Bold…” Gina’s eyes widened. “From high school?”

“Yes, ma’am. You two were lab partners in freshman chemistry.”

“Faith Bold from high school,” Fina repeated incredulously. “Why are you two here to talk to me about Faith Bold from freshman chemistry?”

“May we come inside?” Dawson asked.

“I mean…” Gina hesitated, “am I in trouble?”

Dawson and Edgely shared a look. “I think it would be best if we had this conversation inside, ma’am,” Dawson said.

Gina’s heart pounded. What the hell was going on? Faith Bold? “Well… do I need a lawyer?”

“No, ma’am,” Dawson said, “To be clear, you are not in any legal trouble, nor are you suspected of any criminal activity. However, we have a matter of a very sensitive nature that we must discuss with you.”

Gina’s heart continued to pound. If she wasn’t in trouble, then why was the FBI here? “Um… sure,” she said, “Come inside.”

She stepped back and allowed the two agents to enter. Their eyes immediately scanned the décor and the furnishings, observing everything and cataloguing it. Gina felt like a bug under a microscope.

“Can I offer you something to drink?” she asked.

"No, thank you," Dawson said.

Edgely shook his head.

“Okay,” she said, “Um, well, I suppose we can sit in the living room.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Dawson replied.

Gina thought about telling him to call her by her first name, but somehow the thought of that robotic voice uttering her name was even worse than being called ma’am.

The two agents sat, their postures as stiff as their expressions. Gina remained standing, arms folded protectively over her chest.

“Ma’am,” Dawson began, “there’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to be direct. We believe you may be targeted by a serial killer.”

When Gina was eleven years old, her cousin had died after falling down an open manhole cover that the city had neglected to cordon off or cover. Gina remembered finding her parents crying on the couch and hearing them tell her that Cousin Georgie had passed into Heaven. The first words out of her mouth were, “But I just talked to him this morning.”

She spent the rest of that week in a fog, unable to understand how Georgie could have been laughing and joking with her that morning and be dead that afternoon. It didn’t make sense. It felt like she had stepped into a dream from which she couldn’t wake up.

She felt the same fog now as she processed the agent’s words. Her legs felt suddenly numb, and she sat slowly and tried to wrap her head around everything.

“Um,” she said, “I… what?”

She hated that that was all she could think of to say, but her mind kept hitching back to those words like an old record player skipping over the last portion of the song.

---