Past, Present, Future

Neither the steady hum of the overhead fluorescents, nor their rhythmic flickering had an effect on Detective Wilson as he sat alone, bent over, and intently studying the hand-written words in front of him. His surroundings were as familiar as his own home, and like the unique noises of the detective’s house, the idiosyncrasies of Interview Room #3 were ingrained in his subconscious.

Wilson turned another page in the diary that lay before him on the tabletop. Over the past twelve years, the pages on which Charles Douglas Lane had written had yellowed around the edges. Many were stiff, and most retained a fine coating of latent print powder.

Wednesday, 9 January, 1985


Three days ago, I opened my front door, coffee in hand, and I bent down to pick up my morning paper. As I stood up, a small envelope drifted to the ground in a slow, zigzagging motion. It came to a rest on the doormat revising the message to WE      ME. I guessed that the envelope had been slipped under the rubber band that held the folded newspaper, and for the second time that morning, I bent over while trying not to spill the contents of my coffee cup onto the porch. I thought it was an advertisement of some type and almost threw it away.

The envelope lay unopened on my kitchen table until after I’d finished reading the news. Then, before I really knew what I was doing, I opened it and removed a note card. Three words stared up at me:

FRIDAY YOU DIE.


The letters that made up the words hadn’t been cut from magazines and pasted to the card like in some horror movie. They were printed in large, neat, block letters. At the time, I thought it was a teaser for an ad campaign. I flipped the card over looking for a logo, a product name, or some further clue, but there was nothing.

Detective Wilson paused and stretched, and as he moved, the hard, wooden chair groaned. Satisfied, he rocked gently on the chair’s uneven legs as he rummaged through the pages of the case file that rested on the table beside the diary.

Three or four pages from the file’s top, he found the interview list he was looking for and scanned it. Near the bottom of the almost page-long list, he found the name he sought: Doctor E. Martin Duncan. The note “Lane’s psychiatrist” had been written in parentheses next to the doctor’s name. Wilson recognized the tight, clean cursive as his own handwriting.

The detective remembered that at the time of the murder, Lane had been under Dr. Duncan’s care for just over one month, and the diary entries from which he read were part of the doctor’s suggested therapy.

Detective Wilson turned his attention back to the diary.