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“Yes, honey.”
“Can you predict the future? You can, can’t you?”
I said nothing.
In a small voice she said, “Did you come here from the future?”
I said nothing.
She turned from the window. Her face was very pale. “Jake, did you?”
“Yes.” It was as if a seventy-pound rock had rolled off my chest. At the same time I was terrified.
For both of us, but mostly for her.
“How . . . how far?”
“Honey, are you sure you—”
“Yes. How far?”
“Almost forty-eight years.”
“Am I . . . dead?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. This is now. And this is us.”
She thought about that. The skin around the red marks of her injuries had turned very white and I
wanted to go to her, but I was afraid to move. What if she screamed and ran from me?
“Why did you come?”
“To stop a man from doing something. I’ll kill him if I have to. If I can make absolutely sure he
deserves killing, that is. So far I haven’t been able to do that.”
“What’s the something?”
“In four months, I’m pretty sure he’s going to kill the president. He’s going to kill John Ken—”
I saw her knees start to buckle, but she managed to stay on her feet just long enough to allow me to
catch her before she fell.
10
I carried her to the bedroom and went into the bathroom to wet a cloth in cold water. When I
returned, her eyes were already open. She looked at me with an expression I could not decipher.
“I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Maybe not,” she said, but she didn’t flinch when I sat down next to her on the bed, and made a
little sighing noise of pleasure when I began to stroke her face with the cold cloth, detouring around
the bad place, where all sensation except for a deep, dull pain was now gone. When I was done, she
looked at me solemnly. “Tell me one thing that’s going to happen. I think if I’m going to believe you,
you have to do that. Something like Adlai Stevenson and hell freezing over.”
“I can’t. I majored in English, not American History. I studied Maine history in high school—it
was a requirement—but I know next to nothing about Texas. I don’t—” But I realized I did know one
thing. I knew the last thing in the betting section of Al Templeton’s notebook, because I’d doublechecked.
In case you need a final cash transfusion, he’d written.
“Jake?”
“I know who’s going to win a prizefight at Madison Square Garden next month. His name is Tom
Case, and he’s going to knock out Dick Tiger in the fifth round. If that doesn’t happen, I guess you’re
free to call for the men in the white coats. But can you keep it just between us until then? A lot
depends on it.”
“Yes. I can do that.”