Jesus, he thought, I look… haunted.

He turned on the water and washed his face, as if to brush the look away. But the only change that occurred was his reflection now looked wet.

Screw it, he thought. It didn’t matter.

But just as he turned and reached for the shower faucets, he paused and listened intently.

Quinn grabbed the side of the shower door to steady himself. That couldn’t be right, could it? He walked into the hallway slowly and then to his window to look outside. His apartment faced the back, looking over a brief sparse of woods before another cluster of apartment buildings.

He opened his window. Over the sounds of traffic winding its way through Leesburg and beyond the call of birds, it was the sound of a horse running. The sound caused his stomach to seize up and he struggled not to be sick. It sounded close.

Quinn tried to dismiss it out of hand. Horses in Loudoun were hardly unusual, he thought. It meant nothing. But how could he hear these things? Most people wouldn’t hear the sounds of a horse if one were twenty feet away, much less through a bathroom wall-not to mention an apartment.

Quinn shut the window. He didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to remember it. It was nothing but a horse lover out for a ride and there was no sense in making it into some kind of demon. He had enough real demons to worry him, didn’t he?

He sighed as he stripped and turned on the shower. Mentally, he ticked off the things that had already gone wrong with his day: He got four hours sleep, began his morning threatening a door with a kitchen knife and was scooped by Summer Mandaville, Post reporter and pain-in-the-butt.

The only benefit to starting the day in such a lousy manner was that at least things weren’t likely to get any worse.

But he was wrong about that, too.

LH File: Letter #1

Date Oct. 1, 1994