Punishments distributed by her as a child were minor. Bikes stolen, bags lost, scraped knees, broken arms. Nothing serious until a girl called Lacy ended up sick. Very sick, according to her line. He wondered if she survived. A tear drop drawn beside suggested the young Nem regretted what she’d done. Back then she owned a conscience it seemed. He found other signs of remorse against several other names as if their misfortune might have even been a mistake.

When did she become the heartless creature of today?

He jumped forward again and found the name Alan West. His punishment listed was short and not so sweet.

Dead

His crime, if it was true, meant he probably deserved his fate.

Murderer

He picked up his phone and Googled Alan West along with Nem.

The answer came back in several news articles with interesting, if not bizarre headlines, like The Unluckiest Killer.

As he read he began to understand her a little better. This man, who killed her mother and orphaned her when she was so young, was a monster. As a convicted criminal, he survived a stem cell transplant in prison, only to die in a freak accident. There was the requested death.

He Googled information on another entry. Dr. Ken Shepherd who was titled as child hurter.

His punishment: cancer, along with the words painful.

A news article confirmed he died from the disease. Prostate. Kind of ironic if he was a pedophile. Three entries inscribed beside his name, looked to be appointments at the same time every week. Commentary on Shepherd’s demeanor was also noted.

Watching me. Tricking. Thinks I don’t know.

Was he her therapist? That would make sense after her mother’s violent death.

His final entry: an underlined single word justice next to a date. He referred to the news article and saw this was the same day he died. This could be coincidence, and she might have added dates and details after events. Easy to believe Nem was a child who’d suffered a terrifying tragedy and afterward formed a morbid preoccupation with dying and misfortune.

That would be a reasonable supposition. It made more sense than a world where there existed a person who could inflict death-by-book. After the stress of the past months, had his imagination run wild? No, worse than that, embarked on a rampage.

He closed the book and reopened it at the first page. These earlier entries were oddly not in Orelia’s hand writing, and they were dated from the early decades of the previous century.

His nervous fingers flipped to the first line, hoping to find the original owner’s name. He found no ownership information and only two blank pages before the written records began. The names weren’t known to him. Why would they be if the 1903 date was correct? A sense of nostalgia wafted from the pages as he scanned the inscriptions written in flowing fountain pen ink; the author’s strokes typical of the era’s precise, cursive style. The beauty of the writing did not soften the growing severity of the fate dispensed to the victims.