Sometimes she’d injured others beyond what they deserved. Sometimes even good people died. This was the price for delivering justice to those who did evil. Like Alan West. There was no guilt over him and she bet her mom smiled down with pride. After all, her mom did a little vigilante work herself. If she’d only shared the secret with her daughter before her murder, she may have lived. Perhaps secrets were the reason she died.

As Greg stood and grasped her hands, his face like an expectant puppy awaiting his reward, her heart shimmered with pain. How could she do this to him, to her, to them? When she opened her mouth to say “no, I can’t,” she felt as though a wind blew through her mind, stealing away her will.

She heard her answer as if it had been spoken by someone else, and thought, I’m going to regret this for the rest of my life.

32

When Morris turned to face him, his appearance made William gasp. He couldn’t have been more surprised if the man, who he’d once considered one of his greatest allies, had grown fangs and cat-slit eyes. Copious tears ran down his face and he looked desperate, like a trapped, startled animal. Then at seeing William his mouth fell wide open as his head cocked backward in obvious surprise.

“Morris? Are you okay?”

His ex-agent continued to stare at him as if processing this new scenario only to find he kept arriving at the wrong answer. William wondered if he should reach out and pull the man away from the water’s edge in case he jumped right there and then.

Morris still hadn’t said a word. Odd, as he was never short of an opinion. The whole scene felt surreal. The dark river, the lamplight, Morris acting like a zombie. And the tears. Now that was bizarre.

The agent half-turned and looked back across the water, then as if finally coming to a decision, he swung to face him. If he attempted to kill himself at this moment, big trouble would come looking for him. Big, big, you-have-motive trouble. So William began to talk, saying anything that sprung to mind.

They did that in the action films when someone took a one-way walk on a ledge. His thoughts wandered as he considered if many people really died jumping from a height. Certainly, you didn’t see it in the news. Guns, pills, razor blades, yes. Not so much step-into-the-air-and-bye-bye suicides. So why did they feature so much in movies?

Oh, where was his mind? He was all over the place, but he snapped his attention back to Morris, his once-sworn enemy who he now wanted to help. For a very good reason. This man kept a secret. And that secret might hold the answer to lifting the Orelia Mason curse from his life. He needed to win his confidence and that was all he cared about at this strange, Twilight Zone second in time.