“It all fits.”
Faraday nodded. “Yep. I tried calling you again to ask you if you remembered reading for Kane, but I couldn’t get an answer on your line and I didn’t have your new cell. Your uncle wasn’t picking up my calls, either,” Faraday said with a frown.
“Donny probably went out with one of his girlfriends, and he doesn’t always hear his phone when he’s out,” I told him. I didn’t want him to think badly of Donny. None of this was his fault.
Faraday shrugged and got back to his story. “I tried to get patched through to the patrol officer assigned to watch your house, but I couldn’t get him to pick up his cell, either. I was worried he’d fallen asleep on the job, so I drove over to straighten him out, but when I pulled up I found him slumped over the wheel. It was a minute or two before I realized he’d had his throat slit. And, right as I was about to call it in, I heard a crash from inside your house….”
Faraday seemed to end his story there, and I dropped my gaze to my lap again. When I felt I could talk I said, “Thank you, Agent Faraday.”
I felt his hand on mine. “Hey, Maddie?” he said, and there was a little humor in his voice. “I shot a bad guy for you tonight. The least you could do is call me Mack.”
Donny arrived at the hospital around three A.M. as I was being wheeled out to Mrs. Duncan’s car. He pulled up driving one of those Smart cars, and to see him squeal to a halt and jump out wearing only his boxers, a T-shirt, and a panicked look on his face sent all of us into hysterics.
I knew I shouldn’t be laughing, but it was just so freaking funny that I couldn’t help it. Belatedly I also realized he had a sleepy-looking woman in the car, and I knew he’d been on a date and hadn’t had a choice as to how he got up to Grand Haven. It was her car or bust.
Once we’d all had a good laugh, Mrs. Duncan invited Donny and his girlfriend to stay at her house, but the girlfriend didn’t seem to want to go for that idea, so Donny checked her into a hotel and then came back to be with me and Mrs. Duncan.
She settled me into her daughter Janet’s room, and I lay back on the soft pillow and nestled into the flannel sheets and thought there was no way I was going to sleep that night. A moment later, I was out cold.
AFTER THE ATTACK I DIDN’T go back to school for a few days. All I wanted to do was sleep and let Mrs. Duncan take care of me. Also, I was having a hard time keeping my emotions in check. I’d start crying for no reason at all, and a lot of my dreams were more like nightmares. Donny made an appointment for me with a therapist named Susan Royce (12-30-2055), and after hearing what was going on with me, she told me that everything I was feeling was perfectly normal, but I had a few issues that she thought we could work on. I was a little surprised to hear that one of the issues she wanted to work on with me was Ma.
Still, after talking with Susan a couple of times, I started to feel better. I had fewer nightmares, and I felt okay about going back to school.
Stubs helped me a lot, too. My first day back to school, he picked me up on his scooter, and as a joke he wore his red cape. I laughed until my sides hurt.
At school there was a big shift in attitude toward both of us. Stubby and I were pretty banged up, but word started to spread that the serial killer, Rick Kane, had attacked both of us, and we’d fought him off until he was shot by the feds. Stubby did nothing to try to correct the rumor, and neither did I. We walked the halls with our heads held high, and I thought my dad might be proud.
And then, one afternoon right before Christmas break, there was a surprise assembly and the whole school was herded to the gym. Stubby and I sat next to each other on the bleachers, and we were shocked to see the person standing at the podium up on the stage was none other than Agent Faraday.
He didn’t look at either of us, but after everyone was seated he started his speech, and Stubby and I were blown away. It was all about us. Faraday told the whole school that Stubby and I had played a critical role in stopping Rick Kane, and if not for the two of us, more lives might’ve been lost.
I felt the whole school turn their eyes to Stubs and me, and for once it felt amazing. Stubby puffed his chest out and winked at me. And then Faraday said, “Maddie Fynn and Arnold Schroder, would you please come up here?”
Shaking a little, I got up, walking past Cathy Hutchinson, who was maybe even more stunned than I was, and headed with Stubby to the stage to stand next to Faraday.
From the podium, Mack lifted two plaques, one for me and one for Stubs. “I would like to commemorate Madelyn Fynn and Arnold Schroder’s bravery with these honorary badges from the FBI, and also, to give them each a check for fifty thousand dollars, or half each of the reward money posted by the families of Tevon Tibbolt and Payton Wyly for information leading to the arrest or capture of the man who murdered their son and daughter.”
Stubby looked at me incredulously. Fifty thousand dollars would give both of us a huge chunk of money to go to college with. It would change our lives.
But more than that, the standing ovation the whole school gave us as we accepted the plaques and the checks was enough to heal so many old wounds.
Later, after the assembly, when I was getting my books out of my locker, I noticed someone standing next to me. Turning I saw Mario Rossi there, smiling shyly at me.
At first I was a little alarmed. I mean, I knew Mario was back from his suspension, but I was really wary of him since getting beat up in the stairwell. “Hey, Fynn,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I simply waited for whatever was about to come next.
Mario seemed to read my wary expression, and he dropped the smile and shuffled his feet. “Listen, I want to say…I’m sorry. I…” his voice trailed off, and my brow furrowed. He sighed and added, “I really am. I think what you guys did to catch Kane was pretty awesome, and I only wanted you to know that I won’t bother you or Stubs ever again. In fact, anybody ever gives you trouble, you can ask me to step in, okay?”
He lifted his eyes back to me and there was nothing about his expression that seemed false. In fact, he looked hopeful.
For a long moment I stood staring at him, just completely shocked. I think he misread it for dismissal, because he dropped his gaze again and said, “Yeah. Okay. See ya.”
On impulse, as he began to turn away, I reached out and touched his shoulder. He stopped and looked back at me. I hesitated at first because Donny and I had had a long talk about the deathdates, and we’d both decided it was a good idea not to tell anyone about them unless I was absolutely positive there’d be no negative fallout. But I thought the risk might be worth it with Mario. “There’s something you should know,” I said as he eyed me quizzically.
“What?” he asked.
I bit my lip, hesitating again, hoping I was doing the right thing. “You know what I can see, right?” For emphasis I tapped my forehead.
Mario’s own brow furrowed. “Yeah?”
“Your date,” I whispered, pointing now to his forehead. “It’s the same as Eric Anderson’s. It’s on July twenty-fifth, twenty seventeen.”
Mario blinked a few times as he thought through what I’d just said, and then he sucked in a breath and his eyes opened wide. I held his gaze, though, refusing to look away. We stood there, staring at each other for a few seconds, and then, the most amazing and wondrous thing happened. Mario reached up and rubbed his forehead, and in an instant his date changed. It went from 7-25-2017 to 4-14-2076. My mouth fell open, and I pointed to his forehead. “Ohmigod! Mario!”
“What? What?” he exclaimed, rubbing his forehead even more.
I put a hand up to stop him. “It just changed! Your deathdate just changed to way out in the future!”
Mario eyed me cautiously. “You’re sure?”
I smiled. “Positive. And you know I’m never wrong about this stuff, so don’t worry. Now you’re going to live to be an old man.”
Down the hall, a voice yelled to Mario. “Yo, Rossi! Come on, dude!”
We both looked to see Eric Ander
son glaring at us impatiently. Mario turned back to me, and I offered him an encouraging smile. He turned back to Eric and yelled, “You go ahead! I gotta be somewhere!” And then he hurried away in the opposite direction from Eric.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed at the incredulous expression on Eric’s face. I had no doubt that once Mario got over his shock, he’d let Eric know what I’d said, and hopefully, his date would change, too.
Donny drove me to see Ma six days later. She looked thin, but her eyes were clear, and her speech wasn’t slurred. I could tell she was a little uncomfortable with us there, but she seemed to really be trying. We exchanged presents—Ma had made me a picture frame with wire and beads. In the frame was a photo of Dad holding me when I was an infant. It was the best Christmas present ever.
I STAYED AT MRS. DUNCAN’S house during the week for the next few months, enjoying her bright spirit and the way she fussed over me. As February began to wind down, I found myself growing sadder. The date on Mrs. Duncan’s forehead drew nearer, and I didn’t know how I was going to get through the days leading up to her deathdate without telling her.
The odd thing was, I swear, somehow she knew it was coming. On the weekends, Donny and I spent our days fixing up our house, and one weekend Mrs. Duncan insisted both her daughters come for dinner, and we heard the sounds of little kids playing in her backyard and adults laughing with one another. I watched through the window as Mrs. Duncan said good night to both her daughters, and I thought she squeezed them extra tight.
I also saw a lot of visits to her home from the Salvation Army truck that February. Mrs. Duncan said she simply felt like de-cluttering her home, which had always been full of stuff, from furniture to knickknacks, and slowly over the course of that month she whittled her belongings down to the bare minimum.
On Friday the twenty-seventh, I raced home from school to her house and found her busy in the kitchen. She’d been cooking all day. “I felt like making all of Mr. Duncan’s favorites!” she exclaimed. Afterward, I did the dishes while she sat in the living room sipping her tea. It wasn’t lost on me that after all that cooking, Mrs. Duncan had barely touched her own dinner.
I finished the dishes and came out to find her barely able to keep her lids open. “Oh, my,” she said with a chuckle when she saw me staring worriedly at her. “I must be more tired than I thought.”
I helped her up the stairs to bed and then went back down to take her teacup to the sink. There I sank to the floor and wept as softly as I could for a long, long time.
The next morning I was laying curled up into a ball on the couch when there was a soft knock on the door. I opened it to find Agent Faraday there. He looked very sad. In his hand was my notebook. “Is she gone?” he asked after taking one look at my tear-stained face.
I nodded, unable to speak. I’d found her twenty minutes earlier, after I’d woken up and gone to her room. She was lying so peacefully, with her hands folded under her head and the sweetest smile on her blue lips.
Faraday folded me into his arms while I mourned my sweet neighbor’s passing. Later, he called Uncle Donny and escorted me back over to my house to wait with me while they took Mrs. Duncan away. And then, about an hour after Donny arrived and was rocking me back and forth to comfort me, Faraday came back to the house and held out an envelope to me. “We found it on her dresser,” he said.
I took the envelope and realized it was addressed to me. Opening it up I saw that it was a copy of a letter that Mrs. Duncan had sent to the Cornell admissions office.
In the letter she told them that she and her husband had always been proud alumni supporters of the school, and that she would like them to consider very closely my application for enrollment as she found me to be an exemplary individual, and exactly the kind of student that would fit right in at Cornell. She also told them that she was enclosing a check for one hundred thousand dollars payable to the alumni fund. She hoped that the institution could find good use for it—perhaps to help support an incoming freshman—like me.
“THE MOVING VAN’S HERE, MADDIE,” Ma called.
I was upstairs going through old notebooks from school, trying to figure out which ones to keep and which ones to toss. School had let out a few days earlier, and I was sick of looking at the stack. I’d almost forgotten that a new family was due to move into Mrs. Duncan’s house.
“Maddie?” Ma called again. I smiled. She no longer called up the stairs impatiently, and we no longer had clients going into that back room. Ma had turned it into an office for herself. She’d started to take some courses to get her nursing certificate back, and she spent a lot of time in there studying.
“I see it, Ma!” I called down to her after standing up and taking a peek through the curtains.
“Why don’t you go over and introduce yourself?” Ma asked.
I realized she’d come up the stairs and was talking to me from the doorway of my room.
“Why don’t you?” I asked her playfully. These days I loved looking at her. Her skin glowed now that she was off the booze and the cigarettes. She’d even taken up yoga and had turned vegetarian. The rehab center had completely transformed her. In fact, according to the new date on her forehead, 8-16-2065, it’d actually saved her life.
She grinned. “Me?” she said, looking down at herself. ‘Oh, honey, I’ve been in the yard and I look awful!” Ma had been trying to do something with the garden in the backyard for days, but mostly all that was happening was that a lot of weeds were making their way into the garbage can. “You go over there first and tell me if they’re nice,” she urged.
I had a feeling she wasn’t going to let up until I said yes. Rolling my eyes, I gave in. “Okay, but text me in ten minutes in case I can’t get away.”
Ma laughed, and I smiled reflexively—hearing her happy never got old.
Once outside, I kept close to the house as I made my way down the drive. I was hoping to sort of scope out the neighbors before actually walking up to them. I heard the sound of a basketball bouncing off the pavement, but I couldn’t see who was playing with it through the pine trees that separated our properties.
Taking a deep breath I moved past the trees and looked up the drive. What I saw froze me to the spot. There was a boy taking aim at the basket above Mrs. Duncan’s garage. He was shirtless, and his shoulders were broad and his arms well-muscled, and he wore a halo of soft black curls.
I stood, unable to move for several seconds as he tossed the ball and it fell right through the hoop without touching the rim. “Nice shot,” I heard someone else say. A voice I recognized.
I turned my head and saw Agent Faraday coming down the back steps of Mrs. Duncan’s house. He spotted me, and his smile broadened. “Maddie!” he said happily. “I was about to come over and introduce you to my son.”
My mouth opened but no words came out. I swallowed and then said, “You live here now?”
Mac laughed and waved for the boy with the basketball to come over. “I bought it the second it went up for sale. I needed a place big enough for Aiden and me.” Turning to his son, Faraday said, “And this is my son, Aiden.”
My head swiveled again and I saw that Aiden was grinning at me, too. “I know you!” he said. “We met at the park last fall.”
Heat seared my cheeks as a thousand little pieces slid into place. Faraday at the Jupiter game, sitting in the stands—not running surveillance on me but in the bleachers to watch his son. The boots on his desk, and that memory of seeing them before—he’d bought a pair for Aiden. The conversations with his ex-wife…all of it came together in a moment of synchronicity that made me want to shiver with excitement. But then, I realized that both Aiden and his dad were staring at me curiously. “Uh…hi,” I said, trying to regain my composure.
“You two have met?” Faraday asked curiously.
Aiden nodded, never taking his eyes off me. And then he said, “Hey, Dad, is that your phone?”
In the distance I heard ringing, and Faraday patted his pockets and
said, “Must’ve left it inside. Excuse me.”
He took off and then Aiden and I were alone. “So you’re the famous Maddie Fynn?” he said.
I felt a giggle burble up from inside me, and I was helpless to keep it down. “I don’t think I’m famous,” I told him.
Aiden’s brow shot up. “No? Well, my dad says you’re amazing, and he’s usually right about stuff like that.”
The heat to my cheeks got hotter.
Aiden dribbled the basketball, and then he seemed to think of something. “Is it really true that you can tell when people are gonna die?”
That threw me, but Aiden had a smile and a kindness in his eyes that I thought I could trust. “Yeah,” I said. “It’s true.”
He cocked his head. “Even mine?”
I swallowed hard. “Yes.”
Aiden pursed his lips, looking at me with playful fascination. “Would you tell me?”
I started to shake my head, but he tucked the ball under his arm and put his hands together. “Please? I can take it. I promise.”
I started to laugh and then I almost couldn’t stop. “What?” he asked, but he still had that playful smile.
I took a deep breath and let it out. I felt in my heart that I could tell him. “Your deathdate is July sixth, twenty eighty-four.” And then I grinned so big I had to look away.
“What?” he asked again, knowing there was more.
I lifted my chin to look at him again. There was a secret I’d kept to myself about Aiden’s deathdate and why it’d felt like magic when I’d first seen the beautiful boy with 7-6-2084 on his forehead. “What?” he repeated with a chuckle, trying to coax it out of me.
“It’s the day after mine,” I confessed.
Aiden’s expression changed from playful to something a little more awestruck. “Think we’ll still know each other in twenty eighty-four?” he asked, his smile growing as big as mine.