When (30 page)

I let out a breath. “Sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m a little flinchy.”

“It’s okay,” Faraday said, getting back to the notebook. “Well, it turns out that DeFlorez used to be Silvia Carter. Rob Carter was her son.”

I was stunned. “Wait, what?”

“Silvia DeFlorez-Carter was your client. Her son was murdered. Patricia Tibbolt was your client. Her son was murdered. You and Schroder tried to warn Payton Wyly about her deathdate. She
was murdered. You babysat for the Murphy’s. Their son was abducted and nearly murdered.”

My mouth went dry, and that familiar chill began to creep up my spine. I believed him when he said he wasn’t accusing me, but I also wondered what his point was. “What’re you
trying to say?” I asked hoarsely.

Faraday stared at me. “I’m trying to tell you, Maddie, that whoever this killer is, I believe he’s obsessed with you. And I’m now convinced that he’s also been
stalking you and your clients. You’re connected to each of these kids—loosely in one case, but still connected, and it worries me.”

“Why would someone do that?” I asked. I shivered as that chill spread out from my spine to the back of my neck and along my scalp.

“I don’t know. But this is one sick bastard we’re dealing with, and right now you’re our only link to him.”

“Did you check out Mr. Chavez?” I asked. I was suddenly desperate for Faraday to find out who was responsible.

He nodded. “Yep. We checked out Chavez, Harris, and Kelly. Chavez admitted to being a jerk to you—something I doubt very much you’ll ever have to worry about from him again as
he got a pretty good lecture from us—but he swears he had nothing to do with driving by your house or stalking you. Of course we checked out his alibis, and it turns out Chavez works the four
to eleven shift at a bar not far from here. The bar has a security camera, which shows him working on all the days when the kids were abducted. Plus, he’s got a size eleven shoe.

“Harris also has a pretty good alibi. His mother’s in the hospital with pneumonia, and he’s been there practically every day since he got suspended from his job. Before that,
he had several witnesses placing him in a variety of administrative meetings or at the school at the time the abductions occurred. He was helping to paint the gym on the day Rob Carter went
missing—so he’s been eliminated as a suspect.”

“And Mr. Kelly’s son?”

“Jack Kelly works for his dad at their law offices in Parkwick. It’s a pretty big firm, and we’ve got more eyewitnesses than we know what to do with vouching for him on the
days the kids were abducted. Plus, he and his dad left for New Zealand right before Thanksgiving, which means he couldn’t have abducted Nathan Murphy. So Kelly’s out.”

“Mario Rossi and Eric Anderson?” I was grasping at straws now.

Faraday shook his head. “They also alibi out, Maddie.”

I was feeling worse and worse as Faraday talked. “Then who could it be?”

He sighed. “We have another lead that we’re still trying to check out.”

“Who?”

“Do you know a Mr. Pierce at your school?”

I blinked. “He’s my chemistry teacher.”

“He drives a dark gray pickup truck,” Faraday said. “We noticed it in the faculty parking lot when we went to check out Chavez.”

I looked at Faraday like he had to be kidding. “Mr. Pierce is one of the only teachers who’ve been nice to me during all of this,” I said defensively.

Faraday nodded. “Wallace and I have an appointment to interview him later today, but I doubt it’s one of your teachers.”

“Then who?” I repeated.

Faraday dangled the notebook from his fingertips. “I think it’s someone in here.”

I stared at the notebook. There had to be at least a thousand names and dates in there. I’d kept it for years and years, and I’d talked to dozens of clients and had written down the
names and dates of everyone I’d ever met.

“So what I need from you, Maddie,” Faraday continued, “is for you to think hard. Have any of your other clients ever gotten upset by what you’ve told them? Have they ever
threatened you? Threatened to hurt you or get even with you?”

I sat there trying to think, sifting through the vaguest of memories I had about any of my clients who could’ve overreacted, but no one was coming to mind other than Mrs. Tibbolt and Mr.
Kelly’s son.

“It’s likely this would have been a client you saw last summer, in the weeks before you went on vacation with your uncle.”

I sighed. I could barely remember the clients I’d read in October, much less the previous summer. I tried not to hold them in my memory, actually. That was the whole purpose of the
notebook, to write their names and deathdates down so that I could move on and forget them.

“I can’t think of anyone,” I said at last. And that was the truth.

Faraday nodded. “Okay. But keep thinking on it over the next couple of days for me, will you? Someone may come to mind.”

Faraday was still dangling the notebook, swinging it back and forth between his two fingers when he said, “You ready to go to lunch? Wallace was supposed to join us, but I think he’s
out running an errand or something….”

At that moment, the notebook slipped out of Faraday’s fingers, and it knocked over a stack of files, which slid into the picture frames he had arranged at the edge of his desk. We both
reached out to grab them before they hit the floor, and I managed to catch one that tipped toward me.

As I caught it, my eye happened to fall on the image. It was a photo of Faraday and Wallace, their arms slung across each other’s shoulders as they shared a beer together at what looked
like a barbeque.

The photo caught me completely off guard, and for a long moment all I could do was stare at it, openmouthed. “Maddie?” Faraday said. “What is it?”

I showed him the picture and pointed to Wallace. “He…his…his numbers are all wrong!” Across Wallace’s forehead were the numbers 12-6-2014.

Faraday’s brow furrowed. “What numbers?”

But I was so shocked I could barely talk. I reached out and grabbed the deathdate notebook. Turning to one of the last pages, I scrolled down to the line marked
Agent Wallace 8-7-2051,
the date I remembered seeing from the first time we met. Pivoting the page around I showed him the line, and then I pointed to the photo. Again, I couldn’t contain a gasp. Before my eyes,
Wallace’s deathdate went from 12-6-2014 back to 8-7-2051…and then back again. “It keeps flipping!”

Faraday leaned forward and looked back and forth between the photo and the name in the notebook. “Maddie,” he said firmly, “I don’t understand. Please take a breath and
try to tell me what you’re seeing.”

I stared hard at Wallace’s image. The two deathdates kept flicking back and forth between 2014 and 2051, and I couldn’t make sense of it. It had never happened before. “I…I
don’t know how to explain it!”

“Please try,” Faraday said. I could hear the worry start to creep into his voice.

I stood up and went around his desk, still holding onto the photo. “Agent Wallace’s deathdate should be August seventh, twenty fifty-one. But right now it’s changed. It’s
showing something different!”

“What’s it showing?” Faraday asked, peering at the photo in my hands like he was trying to see what only I could.

“It’s flipping back and forth between that date and today, Agent Faraday.
Today!
”

Faraday’s face drained of color. “Son of a bitch!” Seizing his phone he dialed quickly. He waited several seconds before he said, “Kevin, it’s me. Call me the
second you get this message.”

He then hung up and dialed again, waiting before hanging up and trying a third and a forth time. “Damn it! He might not answer my first call if he was in the middle of something, but
he’d never let a second or a third call go by.”

I continued to monitor the picture. Wallace’s deathdates kept switching back and forth, and I had a terrible feeling that, at that very moment, Agent Wallace was either hovering near
death, or he was in terrible danger.

Faraday jumped to his feet and scooted around me. Hurrying out into the hallway, he motioned for me to follow him. I brought the picture along, and we went into the open area where all the
cubicles were. Faraday silenced the room with one loud piercing whistle. “I need to hear if
any
of you knows where Agent Wallace is right now!”

Every person in the room simply stared at him with wide eyes. No one volunteered anything. But then one woman, sitting at the far end of the room, raised her hand. “I passed him on the way
in,” she said. “I asked him if he was headed home for the day, and he said that he was going to check on a lead.”

“What lead?” Faraday demanded.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, sir. He didn’t tell me.”

Faraday turned and pointed to a man wearing glasses in the opposite corner. “Steve! I need you!”

He put a hand on my upper arm to bring me with him. I walked along beside him, continuing to look at the photo. “What’s it say?” Faraday asked, as we headed back toward his
office.

“It’s the same! It keeps flickering back and forth.”

Faraday took us past his office down the hall to another door, which was locked. He stopped and pulled me to the side and said to the man following us, “Open it, Steve. Now.”

Steve fidgeted nervously, but Faraday stared him down until he produced a key card and slid it through a slot right above the handle. There was a green light, and then Faraday was turning the
handle and moving into the office. After switching on the lights he looked around Wallace’s desk—which was as cluttered as his. He moved behind the desk and jiggled the mouse and it
asked for a password. “I need in,” Faraday said to Steve.

Steve’s face flushed. “Sir, I don’t have proper authorization for—”

“Screw proper authorization!” Faraday roared. “I need to see what lead Kevin was working on before he left!”

But Steve wasn’t budging. “S-s-s-sir,” he stammered. “I need the director to authorize that.”

“Then go call the director!”

At that moment, another agent poked his head into the office. “I heard you’re looking for Wallace?”

We all snapped our heads toward him. “You know where he is?” Faraday asked.

“Maybe. He said he was talking to a couple of people in Poplar Hollow who said they’d noticed a delivery truck parked down the street from the Murphy house the day before the kid was
abducted. Wallace said it matched a similar statement taken by someone in the Wyly kid’s neighborhood, so he was gonna look into what deliveries were made to anyone in the area on those
days.”

“Did he mention the name of the delivery company? Was it UPS or FedEx?” Faraday asked, his voice straining to remain calm.

The man scratched his head. “Neither. I think it was a furniture store.”

I put a hand to my mouth. “Oh, my God…”

“What?
What?
” Faraday demanded.

I looked again at Wallace’s photo. The flickering back and forth was slowing down, and, alarmingly, the 12-6-2014 date was starting to settle in for longer and longer periods between
flashes. “Mrs. Duncan…my neighbor,” I said as I began to tremble. “She gets new furniture, like, all the time. And it’s always the same guys who bring it. This one guy,
Wes, he’s seriously creepy, and the last time he was at her house, he sort of leered at me.”

“What’s his last name?” Faraday asked me. I shook my head; I didn’t know. “What’s the name of the furniture store?”

I shook my head again. I’d seen that truck a half dozen times, and I’d never registered the name. And then I had an idea. “Call Mrs. Duncan! She’ll know!”

Faraday asked me for the number as he picked up the receiver on Wallace’s desk. I leaned over and dialed it for him. After a few seconds, I knew she’d answered, because Faraday said,
“Mrs. Duncan, it’s Agent Faraday with the FBI. I’ve got Maddie Fynn with me, and we have a very important question for you. Can you please give us the name of the store where you
buy your furniture?”

Faraday grabbed a pen and scribbled onto a sticky pad. “Culligan’s Furniture,” he said. “Got it, thanks.” He hung up with Mrs. Duncan and dialed 411, requesting the
warehouse of the furniture company. He put the phone on speaker so that we could all hear as it began to ring.

“Culligan’s warehouse,” said an older man’s voice.

“I need to talk to one of your delivery guys, first name Wes,” Faraday said, without even introducing himself.

“He ain’t here,” the man said, clearly annoyed.

“Is he out on delivery?” Faraday pressed.

“No.”

Faraday sighed impatiently. “Then where is he?”

“Dunno,” the man replied. “But I ain’t his answering service.”

“Listen,” Faraday said, his tone sharp as a razor. “This is special agent Mack Faraday. I’m investigating a series of murders, and I need to know—”

“Yeah, sure you’re a special agent,” the man interrupted with a snort. I could tell he didn’t believe Faraday. “What are you, double-oh-doofus?” And then he
snorted again and hung up.

Faraday’s face turned crimson, and he squeezed his free hand into a fist and pounded the desktop. Steve, who’d been standing next to me jumped and muttered, “I’ll go call
the director and get your authorization, sir.” And with that he ran out the door.

Faraday looked at me. I pointed to Wallace’s photo. “It’s starting to settle more and more on today!” I whispered.

Faraday grabbed up the phone again, redialing 411 but this time he asked for the address of the warehouse for the furniture store. After hanging up, he turned to the other agent who was still
hovering in the doorway and said, “I need to put a trace on Wallace’s phone.”

“It’ll take me at least an hour,” the man said.

“Do it!” Faraday snapped, then grabbed me by the elbow and backtracked to his office to grab his coat. Tossing me mine, he paused and said, “Will you come with me and keep
watching the photo?”

I nodded, and we were out the door in a rush.

Faraday drove like a madman, weaving in and out of traffic so much that he started to make me nauseous. “Is he still alive?” Faraday asked, taking a turn so fast that the tires
squealed.