November 2004
Maybe some people are just predisposed to loneliness and depression. Life wasn’t particularly bad or good for me in those days, but it had taken on a boring monotony. I just felt lonely and out of sorts much of the time.
I was happy to hear from my two best friends and hang out on occasion, but being the third wheel sucked, and we all had professional lives that kept us busy. As a result, we saw each other less and less. For me, meeting other people was hard. I’d dated a few women over the past several years, but nothing had lasted more than a month or two.
I’d gotten up the nerve to perform at open-mic nights several more times since Laura’s twenty-first birthday. Once I got used to it, usually imbibing some liquid courage, getting up in front of a crowd wasn’t so hard. Mike and Laura didn’t know about the other occasions, and I didn’t volunteer the information. I enjoyed letting my creative side loose with the music, but I also did it as a way to pick up women. Musicians just had a mystique that increased their appeal to the female sex. It seemed to work even for me, and most of those nights, I didn’t go home alone even though my hook-ups only turned out to be one-nighters.
The day job was tiresome at times but mostly tolerable. I had been the branch VP in Westminster for nearly a year. The pay and benefits were good, and my heavy investing in devalued stocks was paying off nicely already. There was talk of expanding the company across the state to additional locations in Grand Junction, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, and Fort Collins. I was hoping for the former so I could put in for a transfer and get closer to home and away from the big city.
I tried unsuccessfully to recapture some of those addictive highs I used to experience after using the time-travel device. I looked at Laura and Mike, happily married and successful in their careers. Mike was talking about applying with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. He’d never joined the military and now had no reason to. Laura was still happily employed as a CPA for a small accounting firm. Their lives had turned out nicely, if not the way I had envisioned.
The nightmares resumed though I wasn’t certain why—perhaps because another kidnapping had occurred a couple months earlier, as well as one before that, back in 2001. Tina had dutifully given me the reminders, and I read about the details afterward on the Pinehaven Press website. I wondered if the Press had a premade boilerplate ready to go for each incident, with only the names and dates plugged in to update each article, for that’s how similar they all were, sadly.
I’d accomplished nothing in attempting to track the killer—that was the hard truth. He was back to his regular pattern of activity. An anxiety had been slowly building in me, accompanied by the inexorable notion that I was destined to confront him again, and the next time might cost me my life. Unconvincingly, I tried to chalk the feeling up to a foolish and overactive imagination.
Days turned to months and years, and I felt a strange déjà vu from my older timeline, when I’d worked at the grocery store, even though I scarcely remembered it. I just felt the parallels of wasted years, wasted opportunities, and the ever-present temptation to sink into a dark place.