I’m standing on the muddy shoreline in the shadow of the Stone Arch bridge on the east bank of the Mississippi river. The morning sun is low, just brimming the horizon, gilding the water a deep, fire-orange, and turning the skyline of Minneapolis a brilliant gold. I’m watching my crime scene investigators tape off a wooded area of the historic Main Street Park just off Anthony and Main.
A woman’s naked body is covered, awaiting the CSI director—my former wife, although she has no memory of that—and the coroner is on his way.
I am nursing my second cup of coffee, the first one downed this morning at o-dark hundred as I crawled out of bed to the text of my assistant, Inspector Zeke Kincaid.
My head is fuzzy because, as I said, I’m trying to fit together pieces that aren’t made for this puzzle.
This puzzle belongs to Rembrandt Stone, Bureau Chief Inspector for the Minneapolis Police Department and head of the task force overseeing the Jackson serial killings.
I am Rembrandt Stone, former Investigator turned failed novelist, father to a seven-year-old daughter, gone missing in time, husband to a wife who can’t remember being married to him, and the owner of a time-traveling watch.
This is a lifetime I haven’t yet lived, and although the pieces are starting to form, I’m going to need a lot more coffee.
And help.
Here’s what I know—and you’d better write this down because I’m getting some of my facts mixed up as time folds upon itself.
Four days ago, while I was celebrating my daughter’s seventh birthday, with my beautiful wife Eve, my former boss, Police Chief John Booker gave me his old broken watch—bequeathed to me after his death—and a file box of my old cold cases.
Three days ago, I took said watch to a repairman who told me it was working just fine. Maybe, because as I was looking over my cold cases—specifically the first one involving the bombing of three coffee shops over twenty years ago—I inadvertently wound the watch.
And ended up at the scene of the first bombing.
I know what you’re thinking—me too. Maybe I’d had too much Macallan’s for a night cap. But stay with me—I solved those bombings and prevented the third. And woke up in a new reality. One where my wife stood on my doorstep and handed me divorce papers.
One where Ashley had been murdered, two years before.
One I desperately needed to escape.
So, two days ago, I sought out the watchmaker, and he—and his daughter—suggested that I’d overwritten the events of my previous timeline.
Intending to re-write them yet again, yesterday, I traveled back to my second cold case, one involving a young woman murdered near a diner. I’ll be honest—my goal wasn’t to solve her crime, but to stop another…the drive by shooting deaths of Eve’s father and brother.
Really, it’s not that hard to change history when you know the time and place history is going to happen. Danny and Asher lived. More on that later.
Yesterday, when I returned to this reality, I found Eve married to my partner, Burke.
Former partner Burke. I’m still figuring out that glitch.
And, worse, Ashley doesn’t exist. Has never existed.
Are you keeping up?
Maybe we should simply rewind time to yesterday when I arrived back—or should I say forward?—to now and discovered that my life wasn’t in tatters.
I’m not a drunk, I’m not on the verge of divorce, my daughter isn’t among the victims, strangled in her pajamas, torn from our lives as she slept in her upstairs bedroom.
On the contrary, I’m successful. Published.
And I still have my Porsche.
I have a good life.
It’s just not a life I want.
My house is the same—the 1930s craftsman, off Drew Avenue, close enough to the lakes for us—me—to feel like we’re near a park, but with the skyline just a stone’s throw away.
It’s not been remodeled, and that’s probably because I no longer have Eve in my ear drawing out her dreams on graph paper. Inside, my office bookcase is filled with a row of best-sellers, my name on the spine, so now I know what I do on my nights off.