Six Seconds

“I need this damn book right now for my sister’s birthday.”

After Maggie’s computer search showed it was out of print, the woman left muttering.

“What’s the G.D. point of a bookstore!”

Maggie was used to rude customers. Shrugging it off, she glanced at her watch. Nearly three. Her turn to take her afternoon break. She went to the children’s section and approached Louisa to cover for her.

“Did you see him, Maggie? He’s here again. He was in history and politics, but I lost him on the third floor.”

“Who?”

“The creep who pretends he’s reading.” Louisa stepped up on a toadstool and scanned every aisle she could see from the Enchanted Story Corner.

“Don’t be so paranoid. This is a bookstore. I’m going on my break, okay?”

“He stares at us all the time. I’m going to tell Robert to tell the creep to leave.”

“I’ll be back in fifteen.”

Maggie went to the public phone outside the staff room near the coffee shop. As Madame Fatima’s line rang, Maggie’s heart filled with anticipation. Would this lead her to Logan? She whispered a prayer. How had her life reached the point where she needed a reluctant mystic to help her find her son and husband?

I don’t care. I’ll do whatever it takes to find them.

Maggie fought her tears as the line was answered and she identified herself.

“Yes, Madame says come tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes, Maggie, at seven.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you so much.”

“There is no certainty she can help you in any way, you understand?”

“I understand.”

“You must come alone. Do you agree to come alone?”

“Yes.”

“Madame says to bring a personal item of your husband’s and one belonging to your son. Something they’ve touched many times, something metal if possible.”

“Yes.”

“Here is the address and directions. Do you have a pen?”

“Yes.”

Maggie jotted the details on the back of the page Stacy Kurtz had given her, folded it and put it in her pocket and returned to work, never noticing that the man Louisa had called “the creep” had been standing an aisle away in the magazine section.

He’d had a direct line of sight to Maggie.

During her phone call, he’d been reading The Economist.

Or so it seemed.

14

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

It was time to face his crime.

As Graham drove south he looked west beyond the skyline to the jagged peaks silhouetted against the setting sun, standing there like a monumental truth.

Hang on, he told himself.

He made good time escaping the fringes of the metropolis and its cookie-cutter suburbs. Some forty minutes south, he exited Highway 2, taking a paved, two-lane rural road that twisted west into the foothills.

His pulse quickened as he mentally counted to what awaited him.

One kilometer, two, three, four, five…

He tightened his grip on the wheel then pulled onto the shoulder and stopped.

He needed to do this. Confront it, even if it pierced him.

He turned off the ignition, got out and walked to the site.

A plain white wooden cross marked the spot where Nora took her last breath.

Where he’d killed her.

A car hurtled by, kicking up a gust that nudged him closer to the roadside memorial for her. Nora had taught the fourth grade. They’d met when he was in Traffic and had come to talk to her class about safety.

Safety.

He pushed away the irony and touched the cross. Caressed its smooth surface. It had been erected by her students who’d adorned it with artificial flowers, pictures, small stuffed toys and printed notes protected in clear plastic sandwich bags.

We love you and we miss you, Mrs. Graham, one said.

We’ll be together with the angels, said another.

The epitaphs pulled him back to that night.

They’d gone to a Flames game because they’d needed some time together. And between them, she was the bigger hockey fan. He’d been working a lot of double shifts on a joint-forces operation with Calgary city police. A stress-fest, costing him sleep. He’d yawned throughout the game.

“I can drive if you’re too tired,” she’d offered as they crawled with the postgame traffic from the parking lot.