One dark night in Springfield, Illinois, a man was sitting at his desk working on a story he was writing. He was using a blue notebook to write his story and an orange notebook to keep character and setting notes. He didn’t like to use a computer for his stories. He thought they were evil.

He was flipping through his orange notebook for a note about what color hair one of the secondary characters had, when he found something odd. There was a note that he did not recognize. Sometimes he writes when he’s tired and forgets what he wrote the next day, but this was not even in his handwriting.

“Kill her. Kill her. Take the gun and kill her. Margie must die.”

He heard the words whisper in his ear as he read them. He threw the
notebook to the floor as he got up to find the gun. It was in the closet under her pile of shoe boxes. He hated that she bought so many shoes. He walked out of the room. A gunshot was heard throughout the neighborhood.

A few days later, the case file got to the FBI building in Washington D.C. and to Agent Monica Reyes. She sat in her office reading the file and waiting for her partner, Agent John Doggett. Monica and her partner worked the unsolvable cases. It was their specialty. Monica was happy to be on the unit, but John enjoyed normal cases. He wasn’t much of a believer in the supernatural. Monica, on the other hand, loved those kinds of cases where nothing made sense.

“What’s up, Reyes?” John asked cheerfully as he walked into the office and hung up his coat. He sat down in the chair in front of the desk they shared.

“New case,” she smiled holding up the file. “Looks interesting.” She flipped through it. “A man in Illinois claims that a notebook told him to kill his wife.”

“You mean someone wrote ‘kill your wife’ in the notebook?” he asked.

She smiled. “Nope, he said it just appeared.”

John scoffed. “Sounds like he watched too much Harry Potter.

She laughed and handed him the file. It contained pictures of the dead wife, Marjorie Jane Miller, and a mug shot of the husband, Kirk Lee Miller. “I assume this is the happy couple.” He held up the photos.

“Well,” Monica explained, “they weren’t so happy. The neighbors said they talked about divorce many times, and the cops have been called to settle domestic disputes more than once.”

“Abuse,” John stated.

“It wasn’t really physical. It was more verbal. There was only one instance of physical abuse when Mrs. Miller slapped her husband across the face,” She told him.

“So he killed her because she slapped him?” John asked.

“I’m guessing it was a little more than that,” she laughed.

John looked through the paperwork. “Says here ‘no mental illness was
detected.’”

“Yeah,” Monica said. “I found that odd, too.”

“We should get out to Illinois.”

On the plane, Monica looked over at John. He was smiling, and that was odd for John.

“Why are you so happy?” she asked. “You never smile on a case.”

“I don’t know,” he said smiling at her. “I got good feeling about this case.”