Page 41 of A Future To Remember

I swallowed hard, realizing I was trembling and wondering if I could trust him enough to ask the thing I really wanted to ask him.

“Hon?” he said, stepping closer. “What is it? Do you remember something?”

When he stopped in front of me, I blurted out, “Who was shot here?” For emphasis, I pointed to the curb. “Who was murdered on this spot, Cash?”

He stared at me for a long time, his gaze pivoting back and forth between me and the curb where I was pointing. At last, he said, “My dad, Maddy. My dad was shot right here where you’re pointing to. But how could you know that?”

I turned my full attention back to the curb. I could feel the violence that’d stamped its imprint onto the pavement, like a dark stain that’d never been fully washed away by the rain or bleached away by the sun. It lingered without the degradation of time.

In my mind’s eye, I saw a hand holding up three fingers. “Three,” I muttered.

“What’s that?”

I almost didn’t want to repeat myself. What was going on inside my brain? Clearing my throat, I spoke louder: “Three. I keep seeing a reference to the number three.”

Cash nodded slowly, his eyes like saucers while he stared at me. “He was shot three times.”

“Ah,” I said. “That explains it.”

Did it, though? How did I know that? Where were these thoughts coming from?

And just as I was asking myself that, my mind formed the image of a dusty, cardboard banker’s box, sitting on a shelf. Scrawled across the box in red ink was the word unsolved.

My gaze lifted to Cash, and I asked, “Was the case never solved?”

He shook his head slowly, and there was a hint of pain behind his eyes. “No. No it wasn’t. But not for lack of trying.”

The flash of that bronze star floated across my inner eye again. “Your dad was also a cop?”

“Sheriff,” he said, staring at me critically. “How do you know about him, Maddy? Did someone tell you about my dad’s murder? Or did you read about it somewhere?”

I squinted at him. Where would I have read about a twenty-five-year-old unsolved murder in a small town?

Wait…how did I know that the murder took place twenty-five years ago?

“No,” I said simply. “I just…I just know.”

Cash stared at me, his mouth hanging open slightly. I allowed him his reaction. I had no way of proving to him that I simply knew without being told or having read that there’d been a murder here decades ago, and I didn’t know how I knew it, but knew it I did. Almost like it’d been part of my own history.

To change the subject, I pointed toward the diner, cognizant of the passage of time. “I should get back for my shift.”

Cash ignored the hint. “Is this like that night you warned my deputy not to chase after the pickup?” he asked. “Another vision you’re having?”

I considered his question for a moment, trying to find the words to explain the difference between now and my vision of that night. “In a way. This time it doesn’t have the same sense of urgency, but it’s similar.”

Cash took off his Stetson and twirled it between his fingers. I could tell he was trying to figure out how to explain the unexplainable to himself, and I was doing the exact same thing, but the oddest sense of it all was that, whatever this…ability? Gift? Intuitive stuff was…it felt natural. No, not just natural…familiar, like I’d done this kind of stuff before and I’d done it often.

And that I’d been good at it. Being good at it felt like a certainty too.

Had I been famous for this power? Was I well known?

If so, why hadn’t anyone reported me missing?

Almost as a way to test out the theory that I’d been good at this kind of thing in some previous life, I actively assessed the sheriff critically while simply letting go of the control over my thoughts, and goddamn if a whole new set of images didn’t begin to play across my mind’s eye.

A series of visions, crystal clear and well defined, trotted out across my mind’s eye, starting with a big black plaque and a bronze bell above that plaque.

To my utter shock, I recognized that this was a symbol for a university.