A Timely Murder

by Max Parrott

  "Parking spaces," she said. "Something about parking spaces at Wildwood. That's all I saw."

  "Talk about vague," said Luffy.

  She shook her head. "They usually start off this way. They get more detailed as they go. I can't believe this is happening again. Can't I catch a break?"

  Luffy whined nervously. "So you think someone's going to..."

  "...end up dead?" she said, frowning. "I mean, what happened the last two times the visions happened?"

  "Good point," said Luffy, his eyes shifting around nervously. "Let's get inside. Suddenly I don't feel very safe out here."

  Jasmine used a tree branch to pull herself to her feet, smiling shakily. "Luffy doesn't want to be outside anymore? There's a first time for everything."

  "Yeah, well, there's a first time for getting murdered too," Luffy said. "I'm sure you wouldn't be the first psychic to foresee your own death. I don't want that to happen."

  Jasmine dusted herself off, collecting her mail and heading for home.

  "I'm not psychic," she said.

  "Yeah? And how do you explain the visions?"

  She shrugged. "They just come to me. I don't seek them out. I don't even want them at all. Not right now. I've got too much other stuff to focus on."

  "Maybe you're more like an antenna, right?" Luffy offered. "You catch incoming signals now and then. Little snippets. Doesn't mean you aren't psychic. You have visions, and you can talk to your dog."

  Jasmine shrugged again. She didn't want to think about any of that. She had already thought about it for years, without finding an answer. She hadn't come to Wildwood to solve mysteries; she had come to prepare herself for a normal life.

  But it seemed like the world might have other plans.

  Jasmine climbed the outside stairs to the second level of her building and turned a corner at the top, readying her key to unlock the door.

  But there was someone standing in her way, right outside her apartment. He was a small bearded man in his thirties. Scrawny, verging on malnourished, though he had filled out a bit since arriving in New Market. And he did not look very happy.

  "Joe," she said with a sigh. "What are you doing here? I thought you had a place?"

  He winced. "I had a bad day, Jasmine. A really bad day. I just wanted to..."

  "It's okay, you don't have to say anything," she said, stepping past him to unlock her door. "I have to go to work in a little while, but you can come inside for now."

  "Actually I was hoping I could... spend the night."

  She looked back at him. "You don't actually have a place, do you?"

  He shrugged.

  "At least tell me you aren't sleeping inside a ceiling cavity again," she said.

  "No!" he replied. "Nothing like that. I made a friend in town. He was letting me crash on his couch. But I guess his wife put her foot down."

  Jasmine pushed the door open. "I guess you should find a single guy next time."

  "I don't want to impose," Joe said. "It's just one night. I know people always say that, but I really mean it. I just had a bad day, that’s all."

  Jasmine nodded. "One night."

  She stepped aside to let him enter, then shut the door. Joe stood around awkwardly as she went into the kitchen. She came back with two glasses of water and handed him one.

  "You can sit down," she said.

  Joe made his way to the recliner and sat gingerly, resting on the very edge of the seat. Jasmine sat on the floor where she could rub Luffy's belly.

  "Is it anything you want to talk about?" she asked.

  Joe shrugged. "Maybe. Not right now, though. I just wanted to see a familiar face. This town..."

  "It's hard, I know. Suddenly you're thrust into this big, loud place full of strangers. It's not even easy for me."

  He sighed. "I'm happy to hear you say that. I thought there was something wrong with me."

  She shook her head. "You're perfectly sane, Joe. The world is just a crazy place. You'll figure it out. And if you're still struggling at the end of the semester, you can ride back to Blackwood Cove with me. It's a lot smaller. It might be easier for you. Maybe I could even hook you up with a job. The Sheriff there kind of owes me one."

  "I don't think I could work at a police department," Joe said.

  Jasmine shrugged. "Just take it one day at a time. Breathe. Nobody has their whole life figured out, written down in bullet points. We're all pretty much winging it."

  "Even you? You seem like you've got things pretty much nailed down, Jasmine."

  She laughed. "That's rich. I didn't even know if I was going to college for sure before I got the acceptance letter from Wildwood. I was half tempted to use the money I saved up just to travel."

  "But now you're here," Joe said. He finally sat back, rubbing his eyes as he sunk into the chair. "And so am I."

  "You'll get there," she said. "But not without some help. You might want to start thinking about reaching out. There are organizations-"

  His eyes snapped open. "If I tell them about my life, I'll just get into trouble. I don't know how, but it'll all come back to that rest area. You know they don't like charging cops with murder. Somehow they'll pin on me and..."

  He seemed to shiver from head to toe, as though the cold of that winter blizzard was still sunken deep in his bones.

  "I get why you're paranoid," Jasmine said. "But take it from me, a gal who has her head on reasonably straight... who has something of an understanding of how reality works. No one's going to blame you for what happened to Kirk. We were all there, we can all testify about what really happened. And no one's going to care that you spent all those years in the rest area. When you talk to people about that kind of stuff, there's a thing called confidentiality that comes in."

  Joe nodded slowly, let out his breath. "I'm sure you're right."

  "I usually am," Jasmine said, beaming. She checked the time on her phone, then jumped to her feet. "Crap, I gotta go! Hey, since you're going to be taking over my living room tonight, I'm bequeathing you the honor of giving Luffy his dinner. Kibble's in the closet. If he's really good, he can have a little bit of whatever you eat."

  "Just a little?" Luffy asked, his eyes as big as saucers.

  "I don't have any food," Joe said.

  "Yeah, but I do," Jasmine called as she disappeared into the bedroom. "There's some random leftovers in the fridge. Some junk in the freezer. If you get really creative, there is some actual fresh food in there too. You could whip up an actual dish of some kind."

  She shut the door so that it was only open a crack. Of course, Luffy nosed it halfway open and came in to watch her change. The fact that he could speak English, at least inside her head, made it all feel a bit strange. But she just had to remind herself that he was, in fact, a dog, and not a person stuck inside a dog's body. At least as far as she knew.

  Getting ready for work was as simple as slipping her shirts and pants off and slipping new ones on. A dark, collared short sleeve and a pair of gray jeans she'd brought from home. She slapped the visor on her head, fixed her hair into a ponytail, and grabbed her nametag as she exited the bedroom.

  "I'm not going to bother taking my keys," she said. "Don't lock me out."

  Joe nodded, looking glum as she shut the front door behind her. But not quite so glum as Luffy, who took her leaving for each shift like she was going off to war, and wouldn't be home for untold years.

  "See you soon, buddy," she said under her breath as she hurried down the stairs.

  Chapter 3

  As Jasmine entered the next week of classes, she felt sick with worries and distraught with tension. Every shouting voice and every sudden noise made her heart pump with venomous fear. When she saw a student napping out on the grass one day, she assumed he had been murdered and was ten feet away, creeping up with trembling hands, when he suddenly rolled over and started looking at his phone.

  Time wore on. The first vision seemed destined never to be followed up by a second. Days passed in perfec
t normalcy, and it was beginning to seem like the whole thing had been a fluke. A random vision connected to nothing, that meant nothing. Just to be sure she wasn't missing anything, she scoured the parking areas at Wildwood and asked around to see if something was going on. The only thing she heard was that the student council was vying for assigned parking. But that was just one part of a packaged proposal which included other things, such as renovations to the already well-appointed school. She assumed it meant nothing... and no second vision came to tell her otherwise.

  By Thursday she was calm again, back to her usual self, no longer looking over her shoulder at shadows that weren't there. She went to class and work, she read books and wrote reports. She wrote some of her own stories for her creative writing class as well, and received glowing reviews from Professor Sampson.

  But reading was what took up most of her time. It was a heavy week for her international fiction class, and she was reading heavy books that had been translated to English and were loaded with footnotes. She read things from Russian, from Mandarin, from French, and even something from Swahili. She read until her eyes burned, used some eye drops, and read some more. She was glad for the long hours at The Book Nook; they had primed her brain for these marathons.

  It also helped that the professor of her international fiction class was a very nice young woman who had not yet been beaten down by decades of teaching into a curmudgeon like Keller or a loose cannon like Hawke.

  Professor Lucille Whitaker was only six years older than Jasmine. She seemed to have an angelic aura around her, a radiance that could be felt as well as seen. Perhaps that was because she was pregnant with her second child; Jasmine had read somewhere that hormones during pregnancy could give women a certain "glow." But she couldn't imagine Lucille as anything but beautiful.

  She was also a rather more lenient professor than some at Wildwood. It was a school with a long history of stiff scholars and strict rules, a trend which she bucked with surprising ease. Paradoxically, the students in her class seemed to do better than those of most others. At Wildwood, that was really saying something.

  "Okay, class," Professor Whitaker said during their Thursday session. "Seeing as I won't see any of you until Monday, I think we ought to get our weekend homework in order. I guess we've all been doing more than enough reading lately, haven't we?"

  The class groaned in agreement and Whitaker groaned right along with them, rolling her eyes and flapping a hand in her face. Then she leaned on a table beside which was stacked with identical books.

  "So I thought I'd give you something easier," she went on. "I have here enough copies for everyone to take home. This is The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov. I'd like you all to pick one story, as short or as long as you'd like, and write a review of it. That's all. An honest to God critical review, stating all opinions and feelings you had while reading. Seeing as reviews are a very subjective medium, I'll be giving everyone an automatic A on this assignment. You just need to turn something in, and it needs to be at least a thousand words. That will be all."

  That pretty much summed up Lucille Whitaker's class. She understood what so few professors seemed to, that a mind at rest was often a mind more capable of serious thought. When you filled your day up with too much busy work, it was impossible to focus your thoughts on anything beyond the scope of your own life.

  Jasmine always left international fiction feeling buoyant and carefree. And so it was that Thursday. It was the very last busy day of the week. She had a shift on Saturday, giving her the next forty-eight hours to decompress. Other than an errand she had to run on campus tomorrow morning, she had nothing planned.

  "We can go to the park," Luffy suggested as they walked down the busy hall.

  "Sure," said Jasmine.

  "Maybe you'll meet someone," Luffy added, trying to sound perfectly natural and casual but failing miserably.

  "This isn't the first time you've brought that up," Jasmine replied. "Why are you so adamant about me 'meeting someone'?"

  Luffy gave her a look of pure, canine innocence. "You just seem lonely. I guess you're not used to living on your own yet."

  "I'm not on my own. I have you."

  "You know what I mean. Sometimes I hate to admit it, Jasmine, but I know the truth. I'm a dog, right? Just because I can, you know, beam my thoughts directly into your head or whatever, doesn't change the facts. I'm not a fellow human. We can't talk about the same things. We can't share all the same experiences."

  Jasmine laughed, ignoring confused looks from other students. "What are you talking about? We share everything. We're always together."

  "Except when you go to work," Luffy grumbled, staring forward.

  "We've talked about this. We were lucky to get into Wildwood. But not every place is forgiving about pets. Not that you're my pet, but that's what everyone else sees."

  Luffy said nothing. Jasmine had no idea what he was in a tizzy about, so she decided to ignore him. The good thing about him being a dog was that he forgave and forgot in the space of seconds. You couldn't keep him upset for very long.

  "Joe and I talked that night when he stayed over," Luffy finally said.

  "Is that what this is about?" Jasmine asked. "Wait... did you say you and Joe talked?"

  "Not like that, don't worry," said Luffy. "He talked to me and I just sat there and stared at him, tilting my head from side to side. You know, dog stuff. Little did he knew I understood every word. I really am the perfect spy. People will say anything when it's just me and them."

  "What did he say?" Jasmine asked. "Something about me?"

  "Not specifically, but kind of. He said 'people like us spend our lives alone.' He said some more stuff, but that was pretty much the gist of it. He said he didn't think he'd ever be able to make a true friend, and you were the closest thing. But that you two had the same tendencies... you're loners. And that was why you would never be as close as you could be."

  "He said all that?" Jasmine shrugged. "I don't know what he's talking about. I'm not a loner."

  "That's what I tried to tell him," Luffy said. "But he just thought I needed to go outside again. Anyway, I saw how miserable Joe was that night. And I don't want you to ever get that way. You've got a leg up on him because you have me and not just a stack of old books to keep you company. I might be man's best friend, but I don't know if I should be man's only friend."

  "That's a bunch of crap, Luffy. I already have Alicia. And Charles, I guess."

  "They're school friends. As soon as you get home you go back in your shell, Jasmine. Don't lie. If you were ready to open up and have friends, seems like you'd maybe invite them over or something."

  "Invite Charles to Lockwood Village? That would be the day."

  "Don't make excuses."

  "I'm not."

  "Sure you are."

  Jasmine sighed. "Shut up, Luffy."

  "Alright then, I will."

  "Good!" Jasmine said.

  They walked in silence down the wide side hall. To the right were doors into class rooms, spaced out. To the left were high windows, impossibly high they seemed letting in the slanting light of late afternoon. Amber beams of sunlight stabbed down onto the polished stone floors at an oblique angle, swimming with dust mites. By now most of the crowd had dispersed and it was just Luffy and Jasmine, their footsteps clicking and echoing in the huge space.

  But Jasmine wasn't in the mood to appreciate the splendid architecture, or the deep sense of history that seemed to ooze out of every little filled-in crack in the ancient floor. She stared at Luffy, her heart aching, ashamed of snapping at him. He would forgive her right away, but forgiving herself would take a little longer.

  So much for a stress-free period.

  Soon they turned the corner into the so-called nexus of the school, a crossroads where two side corridors intersected with the main hall that stretched down the length of the main structure. A few people were passing by, looking small and widely spaced in the cavernous
hallway, their footsteps echoing to even greater heights and fading into distant knocking sounds. It was here that Jasmine felt a change in her mind, a shadow passing over her thoughts, a premonition arriving like a kiss of cold air.

  She found the nearest bench, outside the professors' lounge. But she didn't sit. Not right away. Instead she stood facing away from it, ready to collapse into it if need be, and held herself almost upright with a hand on the arm of the bench.

  "Jasmine, be careful," Luffy warned.

  She nodded, taking a deep breath. That was all she had time for. Suddenly she was someplace else, seeing things that had not yet come to pass.

  When she came to she was still somehow on her feet, though wobbling dangerously like a drunkard trying to get her sea legs. She did collapse then, falling onto the seat, but in a controlled sort of way.

  "What was that about?" Luffy asked. "You could have gotten hurt."

  "I had to try," Jasmine replied, wiping sweat off her forehead. "I can't keep letting this sideline me. One day, I'm going to have one of these visions at a very inopportune time. I'm not going to allow myself to be vulnerable."

  "Fair enough. So, what did you see?"

  She frowned, trying to hold the image. "It was Alicia. She was in the gym locker room, crying..."

  "It could be something," Luffy said.

  "Or it could be nothing," Jasmine replied.

  However, the sound of Alicia's crying kept echoing in her mind. It was a sound of pure and total anguish.

  Suddenly nervous, she took out her phone and dialed her friend.

  "Hello?" Alicia asked, sounding perfectly calm.

  "Hey!" said Jasmine. "Where are you right now?"

  "Halfway home, girlfriend. Why?"

  "Oh. I was just wondering..." She looked at Luffy, giving him a nod. "I was just wondering if you want to hang out tonight. If you don't have anything else planned."

  "Let's see... I was going to sit around in my pajamas and watch TV. But I guess I can do that just as easily at your place."

  "Or I could come over," Jasmine offered.