I glanced around. From what I saw, everyone within twenty feet of us could hear Faraday going off on what appeared to be his ex-wife, and they were all carefully keeping their gazes averted, pretending not to hear. It was a joke.
The receptionist cleared her throat very loudly once more, and Faraday’s posture stiffened. He peeked over his shoulder at us and said, “I gotta go. We’ll talk about this later.” As he was setting the phone down in the cradle I could hear the high-pitched voice of his ex yelling at him through the receiver. I felt sorry for their kid caught in the middle.
“You’re back,” he said as if he hadn’t been expecting me to be on time.
The receptionist smiled awkwardly and said, “Agent Faraday will take it from here.” She then made a hasty retreat back down the corridor.
“If you’re not ready…” I said.
“It’s fine. Come in.” Faraday motioned me forward, and I walked into his office, noticing that most of the items on his desk had been removed. What had been a surface cluttered with paper and files and picture frames was now clear of everything except the computer monitor and a stack of papers about a quarter-inch thick. On the top sheet of paper was a color copy of an old man, surrounded by balloons. He seemed to have a slight resemblance to Faraday.
On the far side of the room were several photo albums, some looked quite old, and on a tripod was a camera aimed right at the desk. I ignored the camera and started for the chair but Faraday held up his hand. “Your phone, Maddie?”
I pulled it out of my back pocket and handed it to him. Then I stood with raised eyebrows until he motioned for me to sit down. Once I took my seat I looked around the desk. “I need something to write on. And something to write with.”
Faraday turned his computer screen all the way around so that the back was facing me before he reached into his desk and pulled out a set of sticky notes and a pen. “Write the date on the sticky note and put it on the photo,” he instructed. He then held up his phone and said, “Do you want me to count it down?”
Taking up the pen and setting the pad of stickies in front of me, I couldn’t help but smile a little. “Sure.”
“Three…two…one.”
I got to work.
The stack was interesting. Most of the pages were color copies of what I assumed were family photos. Some of them contained more than one person, but within that group there was always at least one person circled, and I knew that was who Faraday wanted me to focus on. I didn’t spend more than five seconds per photo—that’s all it took. I simply looked and wrote down the date. Toward the middle, I saw that Faraday had tried to trip me up by circling the photo of a mature woman—taken at least several decades before—who was still alive. And would be for three more years. I wrote down her date, and next to it I also scribbled Nice try.
Other than that, only one photo really stood out. It was the image of a boy around ten or eleven with a big gap between his two front teeth. He was grinning ear to ear and wore a shirt with an oversized collar. His deathdate was 1-21-1974. There was something eerily familiar about him, but I couldn’t put my finger on it, and as I was worried about the time, I forced myself to move on.
After clearing through the deck I set the pen down and stood up. Faraday seemed surprised. He looked down at his phone. “You still have two minutes.”
I shrugged. “Don’t need them.”
He eyed the stack of photos with sticky notes neatly attached, like he didn’t quite know what to do next.
“I’ll wait in the lobby while you grade the photos.” And without another word I moved out of his office and headed to reception.
Faraday left me to sit there for a very long time; nearly an hour and fifteen minutes went by before he came down the hall looking for me, and when he did, he seemed stunned. I had to be very careful to hide the satisfied smirk that wanted to work its way onto my lips.
He crooked his finger at me, and I followed him once more to his office. There he shut the door and sat down. I noticed at the top of the stack of photos was the picture of the young boy with the gap in his teeth. “How’re you doing it?” Faraday asked after a long pause.
I shrugged. “It’s something I’ve always been able to see.”
He squinted at me, those eyes so focused, like he wanted to figure out the magic trick.
“It’s not a trick,” I told him. “It’s real.”
Faraday sat back in his chair and ran a hand through his hair. “I’ve been over it and over it, and there’s no way you could know these dates,” he said. “I mean, some of these family members died eighty years ago in Ireland.”
I shrugged. “I’ve been trying to tell you.”
Faraday picked up the photo of the young boy. “Know who this is?”
I shook my head.
“He’s my little brother.”
That shocked me.
“He drowned when I was thirteen. We didn’t even know he’d gone to the pond that day. He wanted to play hockey like me. He got onto some thin ice and fell through. I was the one who found him.”
I squirmed in my chair. “I’m sorry.”
He nodded absently and set that photo aside only to pick up the next, which was the photo I’d called him out for—the one of the woman who hadn’t died yet. “This is my great-aunt Ginny. She lives in Dublin. She’s ninety-seven, and she’s always said she wants to live to see a hundred. You have her dying on the eighteenth of March, twenty seventeen. That’s the day after her one hundredth birthday, and it’d be exactly like Aunt Gin to check out the second she’s made an appearance. She does that at parties, too.”