Sublime Messages

Epilogue

A fresh row of birch trees stood sentinel outside the gymnasium entrance, drawing one's eyes toward the central flagpole, where the red, white, and blue colors rippled brightly in the warm breeze. The late fall day had begun; school was in session. All the students had filed into the building's doors like ants, awkward and joking and flirting and shy as adolescents tended to be. Vanessa Tan sat in her champagne sedan, windows rolled down to appreciate the crisp air. She watched the doors of the gym as if waiting for something, one of them to open, perhaps, while she held her cell to her right ear.

"It's a favor I'm asking. You're the best, Vanesssa, always have been."

The woman sighed, not taking her eyes from the high school's doors. "You know I don't do that sort of stuff anymore, Eli. I left the bureau after—well, for reasons."

"Will you think about it, at least?"

"How long have I got?"

Eli hesitated. "Well, not too long. I'll need an answer in about twenty minutes."

"Then it's no!" She slapped the steering wheel. "No. When are you going to stop asking me for favors?"

"What do you mean?" Eli's tone revealed genuine umbrage. "This is the first time I've ever asked for a—"

"Got another call coming! Goodbye Eli."

"Vanessa! Va—"

She ended the conversation. He'd be annoyed, but she didn't doubt he'd find another profiler. Besides, shit work she'd done the last time he'd called her in on a job, whether he remembered it or not.

A last look toward Palm Valley High, and Vanessa started the car, pulled onto the street, and headed toward town center. She'd come in from Reno, quit the archival work she'd taken up the last few months, to close on an apartment, and she was taking time to meet an old friend who'd gone to school with her, back in the day. Vanessa's life, the one she was pretty sure she'd lived in this chronology, had been predictably dull. Mother died at her birth; family friends raised her for a bit; father managed to return to the US and take her back in. She'd spent her own adolescent years quite normally, going to various schools, and after her father had died of cancer when she thought she was about twenty-one, Vanesssa had gone into law enforcement and worked her way through the necessary schooling and experience to put her where she was, now. The incident that had upset her career path, pushed her into a desk job . . . well, she didn't care much to think about it, largely because she didn't even know where or when it existed in the span of her timeline, though she was quite sure it'd happened maybe along an alternate path that had somehow crossed into the current one, or maybe to some other iteration of one of her reincarnations. She didn't know, but she was sure, at least, that she wasn't entirely insane. She wasn't the only one that remembered.

Fran's directions had been accurate: a charming and relatively large green space replete with butterfly-shaped benches and picnic tables sat snugly between two strips of commercial buildings, the tops of which weren't too tall to allow through a fair amount of sunshine. Vanessa found street parking and, before exiting her car, texted a message: Main Street and Lincoln, park is between gift shop and ice cream place.

"Nessie! Oh my God, Ness!"

Not even out of her car, yet, Vanessa found herself hug-bombed by a petite Black woman wearing the most perfect-fitting jeans she'd ever seen in her life. "Fran! Where are these from?" Vanessa amiably held off her old friend and examined her lower half. "Damn, they look amazing!"

"Oh, I know! Little boutique about a block over; expensive, but definitely worth it. I can show you when you head out. They're closed on Mondays, I think. Too bad! But look at you, Nessie! Not a wrinkle annywhere! How do you do it? God, you have the most amazing skin. You look hardly thirty! I need you to give me your entire skincare routine."