After his head hit the ground, he had one terrifying vision, as real as anything he’d ever lived. Books, thin, wide, large and small, books and more books flying at him as if thrown by a tornado, each one hitting him with increasing force. As they landed on him, the weight built in seconds until he couldn’t breathe and couldn’t see.

Just before the lights went out in his world, everything became clear to him, clearer than since this whole Orelia thing had begun. Literature came to kill him because he’d been foolish. Oh so arrogant and foolish. In opening the door to Orelia Mason, he had destroyed all things precious to him and his world. His work and his dignity.

The travesty of his death here, now, was that the last words ever spoken to him were said with such enthusiasm by that girl in the bookstore.

Orelia Mason is something special.

What killed him, more than this heart attack, was dying with the knowledge he’d never get the chance to prove that statement wrong.

21

The book held a power Nem didn’t understand. That ignorance, she’d told herself, was why she couldn’t be completely at blame for what happened to Lacy Carmichael.

She was sorry, for sure, and guilt played around the perimeters of her conscience for years. When she grew older though and examined the results of the luck thing, she reminded herself she’d done more good than bad. Alan West and Dr. Shepherd, for example.

Sometimes bad things happened to good people. She’d heard Peg say it enough times, tutting as she did. Others believed in that truism, so why shouldn’t she?

When the luck thing struck those men, she’d guessed the power came from her anger. This book and what it could do was a weapon to punish bad people. After using the diary several times again, she’d learned to control what happened, to a degree. Though sometimes she thought of the results as clumsy and unreliable.

The bonus of the way it worked was that for every minus entry which occurred, there was a positive, as though the book balanced good and bad fortune in equal measures. Sometimes she recognized the people’s names and sometimes not.

The woman who’d lived in the next apartment to her. She’d sheltered her the night her mom died. She was in there. A nice lady who deserved her plus.

Lacy was a mistake, and what happened with that error wasn’t revealed until much later. By then, the book had created many minus and plus entries. She grew to understand she contributed to these, made the diary aware of these bad people, somehow. That’s how she’d been able to use it against Alan and the creepy therapist. But before then, before she’d learned how to control the power, there’d been mistakes. Lacy being one of them.

They had shared the same class at the school she had attended after coming to live with Peg and Ray. Nem wondered why someone so pretty, with such a sparkling personality, would befriend her.