TIME RESETS TO 1:16.
Zoe doesn’t take the ten seconds to tuck her folder under her shirt or the five extra steps to dump it into the trash. She just clutches the pack of papers, but doesn’t worry if she loses bits and pieces of it—the story of her former life—as she runs as fast as she can to Independence Street. To the Fitzhugh House. She slams the front door so hard that a man—possibly the M. Van Der Meer of “M. Van Der Meer, Designer”—opens his first-floor door to peek out at her.
She scowls, not even exactly in his direction, and he retreats back into his room.
A moment later, she hears Daniel’s voice as he takes leave of the second-floor office.
Zoe has remained by the foot of the stairs, safe from Daniel’s touch. Safe from the blueness of his eyes.
He’s about to start down the stairs when she calls up to him, “Are you a policeman?”
Daniel ponders her, or the question, a moment before answering, “No …”
Zoe considers turning and leaving.
Instead, she says, “But you’re carrying a gun.”
Daniel glances around the foyer. Perhaps he doesn’t like her broadcasting this information. Perhaps he’s being alert for ambush, which either a policeman or a bank robber might be. Even more slowly than he gave his previous answer, he says, “Yes …”
Every nerve ending is telling Zoe to get out of there.
She’s getting pretty good at ignoring her instincts.
But she does have her arms wrapped around herself, ready. She can say playback faster than he can get downstairs. Faster, she hopes, than he can draw the gun, if that becomes his intent. Though it’s hard to think of him doing that. She asks, “Are you planning on robbing the bank?”
Like ANYONE would answer yes, Zoe chides herself.
His expression says he’s surprised by her question, incredulous that she would ask, and that he’s wondering who the hell she is.
Instead of sharing any of that, he tells her, “No, to the bank question. Let me show you something. Don’t be alarmed.” He’s started down the stairs again, while simultaneously reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket.
And as soon as he’s said not to be alarmed, Zoe is more alarmed than ever.
“Don’t come any closer,” she warns, stepping backward, toward the door.
Daniel stops partway down. He’s holding a card, which he tosses in her direction.
Of course, Zoe is totally distracted by trying to catch it—and yet still manages to miss. But fortunately Daniel doesn’t take advantage, and stays where he is even while she goes to pick it up off the floor.
The card is laminated, and there’s a picture of Daniel. For a moment Zoe thinks he’s showing her his driver’s license. Then the words sink in:
Daniel Lentini
Private Investigator
“OK?” he asks. “May I come down? You’re not afraid of me?”
She looks up at him and doesn’t know what to say.
Private investigator. It was not a possibility that had even crossed her mind.
I almost let him die, Zoe thinks. I assumed the worst, and I was prepared to let him die.
He takes her silence as permission to move.
She’s aware of him walking down the stairs slowly, evidently to avoid spooking her—either that, or for dramatic effect—and she has yet to make up her mind if this is a good thing or bad.
She still hasn’t decided, even when he’s standing directly in front of her.
He’s not exactly annoyed, but neither is he amused. He says, “And now it’s my turn: Who are you? What’s going on?”
ANYBODY can have a card printed, she tells herself. She also tells herself that if she hadn’t changed her mind, he would have died, and it would have been on her soul.
She says, “I—I saw the gun, and I …” The identification card has started vibrating.
Oh.
No, it hasn’t: It’s Zoe’s hand that is shaking. “I thought … I thought …”
Somehow or other that image has come back into her head: Daniel, his eyes wide and blue and frightened and defiant, saying “Take the shot,” and the guard taking the shot. The guns going off, near simultaneously. The feeling of Daniel’s blood hitting her skin.
He recognized the robber; the robber recognized him. And Daniel didn’t say out loud what he knew, so that the robber wouldn’t be provoked into killing anybody else.
He died then to protect them, and now she almost let him get killed yet again.
Her knees are about to buckle, and she puts her hand out to grab the banister. Either she misses entirely, or Daniel intercepts her, but in any case he takes her by the arm, telling her, “Sit.”
She sits, on the bottom step.
And suddenly Zoe is shaking so hard she can’t stop.
Ditto for Zoe crying.
She almost let him die.
She is less than worthless.
The door of 1C, the Designer, cracks open, and Zoe screams, “Go away!”
The door snaps shut.
Daniel sits down next to her and instinctively goes to put a comforting arm around her. Then clearly thinks better of that idea. Being in the system, Zoe has heard social workers talk about the conundrum. Adult guys who have any possibility of ever even potentially working with children—priests, teachers, caseworkers, police—Zoe knows they’ve all had it drummed into their heads: Under no circumstances are they to touch a minor unless it’s to actually pick them up off the floor if they’ve fallen, or out of the pool if they’re drowning, or away from a building that’s burning.
And, even then—witnesses preferred.
But Zoe can’t stop crying, and Daniel reconsiders again. He puts both arms around her and holds her, self-consciously but gently.
She buries her face in his chest and sobs. He’ll never be able to get all the tears and snot and drool out of his jacket, she tells herself.
He doesn’t say a word—which is good. He knows he doesn’t know what the situation is, so how can he assure her that everything is going to be all right? He just rocks her, very, very gently, and holds her.
Ridiculous as such a feeling is, Zoe has never felt safer in her life. And that is ridiculous. Daniel is right up there with President-for-only-thirty-two-days William Henry Harrison as a lightning rod for disaster. Who, with any sense at all, holds onto a lightning rod?
Eventually Zoe gains enough control to be mortified, to wish there were a restroom nearby that she could duck into so she could stick her face under some cold water. Like for maybe a day or two. Of course, to a certain extent, she could do this, but initiating a playback at this point seems a bit irrelevant, unless you count saving yourself from humiliation as relevant.
Daniel hands her a linen hankie and stands up to give her room to pull herself together.
She wipes her eyes first, then mops up the rest of her face. Now what? She has never had a guy—or anyone, for that matter—hand her anything more substantial than a disposable tissue. Is she supposed to return the hankie to him, all damp and nasty as it is, or consider it a gift? In the best of all possible worlds, she supposes she should launder it and return it at a later date.
But this is obviously not the best of all possible worlds.
She looks for him and finds him by the door, picking up her papers, which are strewn about the entryway. She has apparently once again dropped her folder—this time without even noticing when it left her hands.
He is unapologetically reading the papers.
And this time there are no lists of reindeer names.
Daniel comes and sits down next to her again. The top page is the intake form from when she moved into the first group home, the one on Alexander Street. It’s the part of the psych evaluation where Dr. Shaheen describes how Zoe is delusional, believing she can travel through time and space at will, making it sound all Syfy-channel stupid.
She tells Daniel, “The one on the green sheet is far less unsettling.” Even though, really, Daniel looks more interested than unsettled.
He sorts through the pages till he finds the transcript of her conversation with Dr. Shaheen where Zoe admits she made up the time travel stuff in order to get attention when her parents were getting divorced. Daniel says, “I’m not sure he sounds entirely convinced.”
Zoe says, “As well he shouldn’t have been. The divorce came about because of me, because of my perceived mental health issues. All he needed to do was check the dates.”
Daniel asks, “So you’re retracting your retraction?”
“Yes,” she admits.
“And … you brought these papers to me … why?”
“Actually I didn’t,” Zoe says. “I dropped them accidentally. My group home is shifting to a paperless office, so they’re in the process of uploading all of this stuff onto their computer. Once they’re done, the paper files will be shredded. I’m not the techie sort who can hack into computer systems. But anyone with a paper clip could pick the cheap little lock on the office door. I just wanted to see what they were saying about me. Decide for myself what I wanted to leave to be scanned into the computer. I really kind of specifically didn’t want you to see.”
“Oops,” Daniel says.
Zoe says, “They kind of make a bad first impression.”
Daniel gives a noncommittal grunt. Then adds, “Sort of like carrying a gun might do.”
“Hmm,” Zoe says. He doesn’t seem overly concerned by the fact that she’s been under psychiatric care, so she’s emboldened to ask, “So what do your papers say?”
He glances at the envelope which he’s left unguarded on the step behind her. But she’s been too busy making a spectacle of herself to snoop. “Just trust fund stuff.”
Ooh, trust fund. Zoe’s heard of trust funds. If she understands the concept correctly, they’re for people who have more money than they know what to do with—money, and irresponsible kids who can’t be relied on not to run through the family fortune faster than it’s made. She knew Daniel was out of her class, no matter what their ages.
He asks her, “Where, exactly, did you see me when I frightened you?”
“Here,” Zoe says. “About ten minutes ago. Or in about ten minutes. Depending on how you look at it.”
“Oh.” Daniel refuses to rise to the bait, to become visibly troubled at her words.
“I was supposed to tell you armadillo.”
“Were you?” he asks. “Told by whom?”
Zoe is charmed by his correct usage of whom. Rasheena has called her OCD about grammar. Zoe tells him, “Told by you.”
“The last time we met,” he finishes for her, “ten minutes … one way or the other.”
“Actually,” she says, “it was the time before the last.”
“I see.”
“As a code, or password,” she explains. “A shortcut. So you’d believe this … rather unbelievable story I’m telling you.”
He puts out his hand for her to give him back his ID card.
She looks at it one last time, then with uncanny precision of mind, she zeroes in on the single absolutely most irrelevant factor of the entire day. She says, “Lentini? You’re Italian?”
With his light brown hair and blue eyes, he looks close to the opposite of Italian, but he only shrugs as he puts the card away.
“So you’re a private eye?” Zoe thinks of Mrs. Davies and the old-time black-and-white movies she likes to watch. “Like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon?”
“Shit, no,” Daniel says with a sudden laugh, then immediately catches himself and hurriedly repeats a simple “No,” apparently in consideration of her young and presumably delicate ears. He says, “So you knew about armadillo, but not that I’m a private investigator?”
She nods.
“OK. And why are we here?”
Before answering, she asks him, “Can you keep track of the time? I absolutely need to leave by 1:38.”
His eyebrows go up, but he doesn’t ask her to clarify what, exactly, she means by leave. He takes out his cell phone and sets it on top of her folder. “No phone of your own?” he asks.
“No.” She sees that the time is 1:29. Now, she realizes that she’s been hearing for a few minutes the sound of rain hitting the front door and the window on the landing, though she hadn’t really noticed when it started.
Nine minutes. How could she have let this playback get so out of control? There isn’t enough time left to try to intervene at the bank. She must use these nine minutes to learn what she can, including how to convince Daniel about what is going on.
She says, “I really can travel back in time, but only to revisit the last twenty-three minutes. Nobody else realizes they’ve already lived through those twenty-three minutes. Only me. So people keep on doing and saying exactly what they did the first time, unless something I do or say causes them to react differently. And what I’m doing differently this time is explaining to you, planning with you. So that I’ll be better prepared for next time, knowing what to say, and what works, and what’s a waste of time.”
“OK …,” he says in the careful way she finds so appealing, not exactly buying into her story wholeheartedly, but not dismissing it either.
“The reason I’ve traveled back is because I saw the bank get robbed. You were there, too.”
“And you thought I was involved?”
“Not the first time, but … yeah, later on I came to doubt you.”
Daniel asks, “You can do this time travel thing over and over?”
The phone’s display shifts to 1:30.
“Not indefinitely,” Zoe admits. “Ten playbacks is it.”
“And which playback are we currently in?”
Stopping the woman with the two kids and borrowing the phone to call the police …
Trying to alert the bank guard, then watching from the card shop …
Returning to the bank and getting shot …
Sidetracking Daniel into Dunkin’ Donuts …
Seeing Daniel’s gun and going all freakazoid about it …
Coming to realize she couldn’t just let him get killed but that too much time had passed to intercept him …
Here and now. Where, again, she’s squandered valuable time.
“Oh crap.” It’s more often than she had realized. Dangerously more often. How could she have been so careless? “This is the seventh playback.”
“OK,” Daniel says. “So why, exactly, do you keep going back?”
“Because I keep trying, but I can’t fix it so nobody gets hurt. Because that first time, the robber shot you.”
“Shot?” he repeats.
“Killed,” she clarifies.
He’s still not one hundred percent with her, but he’s believing the possibility of what she’s saying enough to look at least somewhat apprehensive. Not panicked, but cautious. She supposes it’s pretty hard to be cavalier about someone—even someone with the papers to prove she’s officially been diagnosed as crazy—foretelling your death.
1:31.
Zoe says, “I went back in time, tried calling the police. Even more people got killed. Got you not to go in. Still, he ended up shooting a bunch of people. Nothing I’ve tried worked.”
“Why did you think having me not be there would keep him from shooting?”
“Because you recognized him,” Zoe explains.
“So who is he?”
Exasperated, Zoe says, “You didn’t say.”
“That was pretty unaccommodating of me.”
She worries he’s veering into skepticism again, but then he asks, “Well, what did he look like?”
Zoe wishes people wouldn’t keep asking her that. “Hard to say. White guy. Older than you.” She’s suddenly sidetracked. “By the way, how old are you?” Not that it really makes any difference, but it would be nice if he turned out to be younger than he looks.
“Twenty-five,” Daniel answers. Then changes that to, “Well … I will be. Soon.”
She guesses that he rounds his age up to give himself more credibility as a private investigator, to imply more experience. Still. Twenty-four, or almost twenty-five. “Yeah,” Zoe says. “Twenty-five. Me, too. Soon.”
Daniel flashes her a quick smile which makes her willing to forgive the almost-ten-year difference in their ages. Though, of course, there’s no way he would feel the same.
1:32.
Zoe says, “So I’m guessing he was closer to … I don’t know … forty, maybe. I noticed he was a bit shorter than you.” She indicates up to about the top of Daniel’s nose. “I couldn’t see his hair because he was wearing a Red Wings cap.”
“Ah!” Daniel says. “A Red Wings fan.”
“Does that mean something to you?” Zoe asks, relieved at how easy this has turned out to be.
Zoe tries to remember. “Yes,” she finally declares definitively. “Two.”
Daniel sighs. “Could you at least see his eyebrows? What color were they?”
Zoe considers. “Dark.”
Daniel asks, “So, probably brown eyes?”
She didn’t notice them the first time, but forces herself to picture when he aimed his gun at her. She flinches, then nods. “Yeah.”
Daniel notices, but doesn’t comment on, the flinch. “Beard?” he asks. “Scars? Birthmark? Tattoos? Gold teeth? One leg shorter than the other? Name tag, or place of employment embroidered on his shirt?”
Zoe has been shaking her head. Now she says, “I think you’re beginning to get off track.”
“Accent?”
She shakes her head again, then adds, “Didn’t sound so well educated as you.”
Daniel crosses his arms and looks at her, and she thinks he’s amused, but she’s not sure. Not even sure why he would be. He says, “This is not a lot to go on.”
1:33.
“Oh!” Zoe suddenly remembers. “His license plate is HDP … ahm … I think it was 374. No. 347. Definitely. I think.”
“No helpful logo on the door? Like a company name? ‘Don’t like my driving? Call …’?”
Zoe shakes her head.
“Parking sticker?”
“What kind of car?”
“I don’t know. Silver something-or-other. Not a truck. Not a van. Just a regular car. Not brand-new. Not obviously old. Don’t you have a friend on the police force who can run a trace on the license number?”
He’s just looking at her. Apparently he doesn’t think this is as brilliant a suggestion as she does.
She explains her reasoning. “Private eyes on TV always have helpful friends on the police force.”
“Yeah,” he points out, “and they also come with their own theme music and commercial breaks.”
“No police friends?” she presses.
“Nobody who can get me the information in five minutes.”
1:34.
Daniel amends that to, “Four minutes.” He says, “Why don’t you give me more details about how the robbery goes down. How many customers in the bank?”
“Maybe a half-dozen?” She tells him, “The guard is pretty generally useless.” She feels guilty as soon as she says it, taking into account that he, also, dies more often than not. A close second only to Daniel. She continues, “When you’re not there to set him off, I’m guessing maybe the robber suspects one of the tellers has pressed the silent alarm. One of them is a bit jittery about the whole armed robbery thing. The robber shoots her sometimes, too.” She’s thinking of the William-Henry-Harrison-coin teller, the one who squealed upon seeing the hold-up note.
“Which teller?” Daniel asks.
Daniel points out to her, “They aren’t always at the same stations.”
Zoe supposes this makes sense. She sighs at yet another description called for. “Kind of cold. And snooty. Has a tendency to look down her nose at you.” She considers, then amends this to, “Well, at me.”
Daniel looks as though he’s fishing in his memory, and coming up with nothing.
Zoe adds, “Curly auburn hair pulled back from her face with a hairband … green eyes. Teal-colored glasses …”
“Charlotte?” Daniel interrupts incredulously. “The robber shoots Charlotte?”
Zoe doesn’t remember seeing the woman’s name. She’s about to say, Well, yeah, if Charlotte is the one with the reddish hair and the curls and the glasses. But Daniel is looking so distressed at the thought of her getting shot, Zoe forgoes the snarkiness. He didn’t react that openly to news of his own death. She says, “Sorry. Friend of yours?”
She has no right, Zoe tells herself, to feel jealous.
But she does.
1:35.
However, Daniel is shaking his head. “Not really. It’s just … sad. Charlotte only recently suffered a miscarriage.”
This seems pretty personal information to have—for someone who describes their friendship as “not really.” Zoe presses on, observing, “But you’re close enough she told you about it.”
“No,” Daniel says. “But she was very obviously about six months pregnant. And then she was very obviously not.”
Zoe supposes private investigators need to be observant like that. Poor Charlotte, she thinks, willing—under the circumstances—to forgive the teller’s snappy impatience, her peeved-at-the-world attitude.
Daniel brings Zoe back to the matter at hand. “So the guard pretty much doesn’t notice the robber …?”
Zoe nods.
“… till Charlotte …?”
“Draws everybody’s attention by squealing,” Zoe finishes. “And once he starts shooting, the robber just … keeps on shooting people.”
Daniel is considering all of this, no doubt trying to picture the timing, everyone’s positions. He asks, “So he comes by car …?”
If he’s hoping that if he sneaks up on the question, she’ll be able to come up with more details about the vehicle, he’s sadly mistaken. She says, “He parks it across the street, in front of the card shop. There’s a woman with a baby who’s parked directly in front of the bank. She comes back to the car about 1:36.”
Daniel starts to ask, but then apparently decides he doesn’t want to know their fates. He’s watching the digital readout on the phone, evidently having finally run out of questions.
Zoe hopes that means he’s working on a plan. She tells him, “The rain starts at 1:23. I estimate the robber arrives at 1:29. With you not in the bank, it’s 1:37 when he’ll start shooting. Earlier, otherwise.”
“You’re pretty good for someone without a timepiece.”
She shrugs.
Just as the time changes to 1:36.
Zoe asks, “So what should we do?”
“I suppose it doesn’t make any difference who he is. The important thing is to stop him before he gets into the bank.”
“How do we do that?”
“Stop saying we. You’ll stay here. Inside.”
On the one hand, she’s relieved to be authoritatively told she’s to remain out of it. No chance of getting shot again. And she will not take that chance again. On the other hand …
“Except,” Zoe reminds him, “you won’t remember any of this conversation.”
“That’s a real pain in the butt,” Daniel says.
“Yeah, tell me about it. How do I win you over real fast?”
“Armadillo helped. As did your knowing I was carrying a gun.” He hesitates. “I hope this doesn’t sound as though I’m the kind of person who enjoys other people’s fear … but it was pretty convincing to see how you were so clearly afraid of me and yet just as clearly felt you absolutely needed to talk to me.”
“Can’t do that again,” Zoe points out. She’s amazed she could have been that distrustful of him. She’s also amazed at how vulnerable he makes her feel, and how feeling vulnerable … somehow … doesn’t feel bad.
Daniel finishes, “And the fact that you were unflinchingly honest about your earlier …” —he drums his fingers on the folder—“… troubles.”
“OK,” Zoe says.
“Oh. Got it: Mention the trust fund papers. Tell me that Nick Wyand”—Daniel nods his head upstairs to indicate the lawyer he was visiting—“finished by saying, ‘Give my love to your mother,’ and that kind of creeped me out, Nick being … well, Nick.”
Zoe says, “I have no idea what you just said, but fine.”
Daniel says, “Try not to let me get sidetracked …”
Zoe snorts and says, “Yeah, right.”
“No, really. Tell me: ‘We discussed this already. There’s no time.’”
The cell phone shows 1:37.
Daniel glances door-ward. His voice comes out small, and somewhat shaky. “Surely,” he says, “there has to be something—”
Zoe shakes her head. “Next time,” she tells him.
He’s very obviously fighting the inclination to be moving, to be doing something. But he takes her at her word. He picks up his phone and tries to hand both it and her folder to Zoe.
“Doesn’t make any difference,” Zoe says. “The folder will be back with me at 1:16 whether I’m holding it now or not. And the phone will once again be with you.”
Not being as familiar with the the ins and outs of playback as she is, Daniel nods slowly, taking her word for that, too.
From outside there’s a noise which they both recognize can only be the sound of gunfire.
If Daniel had any lingering doubt, this settles it. She thinks he looks pale and scared and young. He, too, she realizes, is used to being self-sufficient, and doesn’t quite know how to handle being dependent on someone else.
She really, really doesn’t want to try again. She also knows Daniel will not forgive himself—and, by extension, her—if she doesn’t. “See you,” Zoe tells him just as door 1C bangs open, and M. Van Der Meer sticks his head out, demanding, “Hey! Did you hear—”
Daniel, still sitting on the bottom step with his phone and her folder on his lap, raises a hand to her in farewell as Zoe puts her arms around herself and says, “Playback.”