Matt Cramer lowered the binoculars from his face with a tired sigh that tried to vent his exhaustion. Then, blinking to clear his vision, he shook his head to clear his fuzzy head.

What had he been doing? Why was he here?

Resting an arm on the window of his truck, he forced himself to take a long, deep breath that pressed him back in the front seat of his truck.

He was hot. Of course, it was hot in his truck as he was parked right in the bright New Mexico afternoon sunshine, sitting in a dusty parking spot overlooking a small, ratty trailer park. He chuckled. It wasn’t really a trailer park, except by Silver City standards, just four ancient double-wide trailers sitting in a line along a back street behind the Food Basket.

But why was he there?

He picked up the donut from the passenger seat and took a bite. then tossed it back on the seat where it landed next to a Styrofoam cup that appeared to be half-filled with coffee. The donut was stale and dry. That begged the question of how old it was. He couldn’t remember buying the donut or the coffee.

He turned his attention back to the scene in front of him. He seemed to be working, doing his private investigator bit, watching one particular trailer ... but which one? It would be nice to know what he was looking for.

Patience paid off, and a few minutes later a man came out of a trailer carrying a large cardboard box. The way he struggled with it made it look heavy. He staggered slightly as he came down the steps, then put the box down on a step while he opened the hatchback of a small red car.

Matt decided he should find out what was in the box. He was an investigator, after all, even if he had no idea what he was investigating.

As he considered how he could find out, he realized he had a camera hanging from a strap around his neck. It was the single-lens reflex Canon he used for investigations. He must have had a reason for bringing it, so he raised it and snapped off a series of photos of the man awkwardly picking up the box and sliding it into the red car.

“Hey, Matt.”

Matt turned to see Cliff sitting in the seat next to him. The Indian looked as surprised to be there as Matt was to see him.

“My ass is wet,” Cliff said.

“You are sitting on my coffee and donut,” Matt told him. His brain stumbled for a second before he thought to ask the obvious questions: “Why are you sitting on them? And how did you get there?”

Cliff squirmed in the seat, scowling, then raised a finger. “I’ll get back to you on that,” he said. Then he blinked. “But I don’t think it was my fault.”

“What isn’t your fault?” Matt asked.

But Cliff was gone. Only the squashed coffee cup and donut suggested he’d ever been there.



“Is there something wrong with your coffee?” Donna asked him.

Matt blinked. Now he was sitting outside under a clear morning sky. It took him a few thundering heartbeats and a few breaths of honeysuckle to identify his exact location — the courtyard of a coffee shop downtown. Donna, who owned the place along with her husband Mel, stood beside his table, looking at his hand. When he looked where she was looking, he saw he was holding a coffee mug. One of her mugs. He had been drinking from it and the taste of her special blend was in his mouth.

How did he get there? Wasn’t he working? Where had Cliff gone?

So many questions, but then, this was still Silver City, New Mexico (as far as he could tell). He looked at Donna, wondering if she had something to do with the blatant fuzziness of events. Besides being the co-owner of this establishment and a good friend, she was a witch. He’d gotten used to being around magic, somewhat at least, but this sort of thing was totally new to him.

Rather than make a fuss (or a fool of himself), the best course seemed to be to wait and see if Donna would explain what was going on (assuming she knew) or if whatever it was would reveal itself to him.

Things were seldom that easy, however, and with Donna waiting for his answer, he raised the mug to his mouth and took a sip. The coffee tasted fine. “The coffee is fine. Why?”

“The face you made.”

“What?”

“When you took your first sip, you made a sour face.”

“Did I? I must have been upset about something else.”

“About time,” she said.

That set him back slightly. “About time for what?”

She cocked her head and looked at him curiously. “I have no idea.”

“But you said ‘about time.’”

“Because you said you wanted to ask me about time. Time and place. I assumed you were upset about time.”

“I said that?”

“You did.”

“What did you tell me?”

She laughed. “Not much. I don’t know much.”

Matt tried to recall what he wanted to know about time but drew a blank.

Of course, he was still trying to work out how and why Cliff had appeared in his car a moment ago. Now he seemed to be investigating time travel.

“I thought a witch would know about such things,” he said. It was lame, but he was improving.

“A witch sees so very many exciting things in the worlds around her. They all cry out for a thorough exploration. There simply isn’t enough, if you will excuse the expression, time, to do it all. So we pick and choose. Time travel and its various aspects have never been something that called to me. If you are seriously interested in the subject, ask Mel. He has done more along those lines. I can ask him to pop out and chat with you when he’s finished baking brownies.”

As enticing as brownies sounded, Matt pictured Mel popping over and asking what it was he wanted to know about time. That would be Mel’s first question, and he had no idea what he wanted to know. Or why.

“Thanks, that won’t be necessary.”

“Are you okay, Matt?” Donna asked.

He smiled at her, appreciating the concern. “I can’t exactly say for certain,” he said. “All I know is that something strange is going on.”

Her knowing smile warmed him. “Is that all?” She waved a hand in dismissal. “Something strange is always going on. It needs to be. If it wasn’t ... well, when there is nothing strange happening, that’s when we need to worry.”

She touched her finger to her ear. “Of course, if you want to worry anyway ... well, that is entirely up to you.”

She sounded so confident, so sure, that it reassured him. It calmed him enough that he thought about ordering a brownie. They made great ones, but if Mel was baking new ones, they might be out of the last batch.



“I think you will find the case is pretty straightforward,” the large man in the rumpled brown suit, one far too heavy for a New Mexico summer, said as he walked up to where Matt sat.

As the man sat down and slapped something on the table, Matt glanced around and coughed, stalling for enough time to get his bearings.

He was in his office, sitting at his desk. Apparently, he had been minding his own business, basking in the yellow afternoon sun that flowed in through the window, when the man came in.

Matt glanced at the object the man had slapped down. A business card. Curiosity had him reaching for it, holding it up.

“Taylor Simpson, Mindful Insurance Company,” it said.

“Insurance.”

“Liability.”

“Short of buying a policy, which I don’t want and can’t afford, how can I be of help?” he asked.

After all, business was business and the man mentioned a case. Even if things ... well, his life, was skipping about more than normal, he needed to focus on the task at hand.

Was there a normal amount that your life could skip out of sequence? If so, who decided such things?

“Straightforward, as I said,” Simpson said. “Simply help us do our due diligence so that we can settle a claim. I need to be able to decide if we should pay.”

“That’s a service I can provide,” Matt said. He wasn’t sure it was, but what the heck. It was, as he had told Donna (hadn’t he?), a strange day.

Simpson nodded. “An employee over at the mine was injured at work. It was an accident, nothing fishy about it at all. The mine sent him to the hospital and got him proper treatment.”

“So far, so good.”

“But he has filed a disability claim with our company. We don’t provide medical insurance, but we are one of the underwriters the mine uses for liability coverage.”

“And you don’t want to pay the claim?”

The man sat up straight. “Of course not. If we started paying claims, hell, that would set a disastrous precedent,” he said. Then he grinned. “Joking!”

Sure, Matt thought.

“No, the thing is we doubt he is hurt so badly he can’t work. The medical report is vague; heck, so is the doctor. We have heard a rumor that he is working at another job. If that is true, we can disallow the claim. He can go back to work in the mine.”

“And you want me to find out if he is faking?”

Simpson nodded. “Yes. We need local eyes on the man. Find out the truth without letting him know we doubt his claim. We don’t want him to know he’s being watched.”

“What if he is hurt? What if I don’t find evidence that he is working?”

“Watch for two weeks. If you find nothing and your reports are thorough, we will pay the claim. If he is working or is physically active, we need photos.”

“Did the rumor suggest where he is working?”

“Just that he was working with someone repairing cars.”

Simpson slid an envelope across the table. “All we ask is that you find out the truth.”

He patted the envelope. “This contains the information we have on him, including his address and the details of his accident and injuries. There is also a check for a retainer. Invoice me by email for your hours every Friday.” Then he stood up. “Call me with any questions or when you have something to report.”

The man turned and walked out of the office.

Matt opened the envelope and dumped the contents, the reports, and the check out on his desk. He needed to read up on the man.

But he saw the address. The man they wanted him to investigate lived in one of the mobile homes behind Food Basket.

That was exactly where he had been staked out when Cliff showed up, when ... well, whatever happened happened.

He flipped through a report and reached for his mug of coffee.



But his hand closed around a glass. He looked and saw it contained an amber liquid. He lifted it and sniffed it. Jack Daniels.

“Don’t like my booze?” Cliff asked.

Matt was sitting by a fire pit dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. The smoke smelled like mesquite. In the distance a large promontory loomed. It had to be the one his friend Lamron had named Prominent Promontory. That meant he was out at Lamron’s place near Red Rock.

Cliff sat on the dirt to his left, leaning up against a rock with his own glass in his hand.

“It’s fine,” Matt told him. “I just lost the thread of things for a moment.”

“That happens a lot out here,” Cliff said, nodding. “Places like Prominent Premonitory, spooky places, that is, do that.”

The hillside was spooky. It seemed to glow as red as the firelight in the dark.

A large Mexican gray wolf curled up at Cliff’s feet and snorted. It might be he was agreeing with Cliff, but Matt’s ability to understand wolves was pathetically limited. He understood the fundamental concept of a snarl, lips pulled back, teeth bared.

Harvey didn’t do that, however. Harvey just snorted.

Cliff went on. “Not only is this area one that researchers have officially designated as spooky, but there is no reason it is likely to change anytime soon.”

“As if time means anything,” Matt said.

Just then, as the moon rose, a rich chorus of thin, shrill voices swept across the prairie.

“Exactly. Time confuses things. And Harvey here was telling me that we can thank those coyotes for helping keep it that way.”

“Coyotes? What have they got to do with anything.”

“They like their tricks, see.”

“Do they?”

Cliff took a sip. “That’s what Harvey says.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I’m planning on asking a coyote that myself—directly. I need to get a face-to-face with one but they don’t like to socialize, except with each other, of course. I’ve been trying to convince Harvey to introduce me to one.”

“That should be interesting,” Matt said. “Do coyotes know anything about time travel?”

The thought occurred to him right then, and the way time was working he thought he better ask it fast.

Cliff shook his head. “No one does. That’s part of the problem.”



Matt stared through his truck’s dirty and pitted windshield, looking down at the trailer (a mobile home, according to the county) and the red hatchback car sitting in the yard beside it.

It bothered him that he didn’t know what kind of car he was staring at. How was it that he knew so little about cars that he couldn’t even make a guess, even a wild one, about its make?

A serious private investigator, a diligent one, would take a course in how to recognize them, learn to tell them apart. You didn’t just put “red car” in a report to a client. No, you needed the make, model, year, and license number.

This red car looked Japanese to him but then, for no reason he could think of, he thought of all small cars as Japanese.

The man who got out of the red car wasn’t small, or Japanese. He was a tall man who perfectly matched the image in the photo Simpson had included in the envelope of a mine employee named Pete Peterson.

The cervical collar he wore now matched the nature of the injury he claimed to have.

Pete shut the car door and glanced around as if he was worried about being seen, then walked up the steps to the door of the trailer and went inside.

“Turns out it is my fault,” Cliff said from the passenger seat of Matt’s truck.

“Squashing the coffee and donuts?” Matt asked.

Cliff shifted uncomfortably, looking down. “Again?”

“I didn’t look this time, but they were there before.”

Cliff squirmed. “Still there. But I wanted you to know that the whole damn thing is partly my fault.”

“Which damn thing? And only partly?”

Cliff looked glum. “I should never have trusted him in the first place, but even so, I’d have it sorted out now ... I could have unwound it and this situation wouldn’t be so complicated ... but you had to go and involve the witches.”

Matt found this irritating.

“So, now it is my fault? And how, exactly, did I involve them? And in what?”

“You asked for their help. You could have come to me, but no, you talk to Donna and Mel. Now, with European old-world magic tangled in the mesh ... I am going to need some time.”

“Seems like this is all about time, isn’t it?” Matt asked.

Cliff stared at him. “Everything is.”

“I don’t understand.”

Matt looked up to see Mel, Donna’s husband, looking at him.

“It’s about time for what?” he asked, holding out a plate that held two, fresh, luscious brownies, their heady chocolate smell rising up, tempting him.

Mel frowned.

“I asked if you wanted a brownie.”

Matt tried to organize his thoughts. Where was Cliff? “I’m not sure I have time,” he said.

“No time to eat a brownie?”

Matt sighed and reached for one. Maybe if he stalled and ate just one it would give things time to work themselves out. That would be nice. A relief.

“You have to keep trying, otherwise you are just swept up in it all,” he said as he bit into the chewy, chocolatey mess of calories.

The brownie tasted as real as Mel’s brownies ever did.

Mel put the plate down. “All of what?”

Matt struggled to decide what he had meant, if he had meant anything at all. He was still not tracking things well.

“The issue is that I don’t seem to be in control of things.”

“Oh that,” Mel said. “We never truly are.”

“You seem to be. And you mess with magic.”

Mel laughed. “I don’t mess with it, but I get your point. And one thing I’ve learned from studying magic is that even when you think you’ve mastered some force, say time—since you mentioned that one—you quickly learn that any control you think you have is just an illusion. At best your influence is temporary. As temporary as that brownie you just ate.”

“Things seem out of order.”

Mel tipped his head to one side as if that might let him understand better. Then he pursed his lips.

“Skipping around, you say?”

“Yes!”

“From here to there?”

“And from now to before now and then after now.”

Mel nodded thoughtfully.

“I’ve sensed that myself once or twice. Not recently. It usually means, unless there is an external force at work, that is ... it usually means you are trying too hard to control the sequence of events.”

“I’m not aware of trying to do anything at all. I’m caught up in things and can’t get out of them. I want them to just play out however they need to, but they jump around.”

Mel sat down and leaned an elbow on the table, taking him seriously.

“Do they repeat?”

Matt ran through what he remembered. “Yes.”

“The same each time, or different?”

“Different. Overlapping bits.”

Mel scowled. “Well, then I doubt you are the problem. But the bad news is that the skipping suggests you are caught in the middle of something, trapped in some kind of loop.”

Wasn’t that what he’d said?

“What can I do to make it stop? I almost don’t care where I am in the sequence if I can run through it one last time and move on with my life. I’m sick of piecemeal reruns.”

“That should be possible,” Mel said. “Unless of course, you actually are in two places at once.”

“What?”

“Or more.”

“Is that possible?”

“Not probable, but everything is possible if magic is involved.” Mel rolled his eyes, thinking. “Being in two places but trying to process them through a single consciousness ... that might produce the same result.”

“How?”

“The real question, the important one, is why.”

“Then why?”

“That,” Mel said, standing, “will require some research. I’ll need to collect some data.”

Cliff’s words came back to him. “Cliff said that he has it under control and if you get involved ...”

Mel scowled. “That, you see, is because your shaman friend doesn’t appreciate the subtleties or power of our art,” he said.

“He is working with Harvey.”

“Harvey?”

“The wolf.”

Mel snorted. “It figures that Cliff would drag a stray spirit like that into a mess of his own making.”

Mel liked Cliff well enough, but it seemed to Matt that magicians liked to think their kind of magic was the only one that meant anything. He could understand a certain amount of professional rivalry, but to Matt, it was all, well, magic.



Walking down to the trailer, to the red car (he wished he knew the make of it. Simpson would probably ask) and peering in through the back window.

Car parts. The box the man had put in the back was filled with car parts.

That fit in with the idea that he might be working doing car repairs. It was hardly proof, but Matt took some photos.

He wondered if the photos would be in the right order in his camera when things (time) were untangled.

He didn’t even know if he was experiencing this in one, rather jittery and jumpy timeline or several. It might be that in some he had photos and in others, he didn’t.

And if the timelines overlapped somehow ...

“Stop it!” he said out loud, not wanting to follow that particular line of illogical reasoning. It wouldn’t go anywhere at all.



And suddenly, just as he’d asked, things stopped.

It wasn’t exactly what he intended, but he found himself in a bit of a blur. That was the only way he could think of to describe it.

He was on some sort of chair in a blur.

Cliff and Mel were there too, and they both looked surprised.

Nothing else was there, although Matt wished the glass of Jack Daniels was handy. Even a brownie.

“Where are we?” Matt asked.

“It’s a when and where kind of thing,” Cliff said.

Mel nodded. “We messed up.”

“Messed up what?”

“Time and space,” Mel said. “In short, pretty much everything.”

“I went one way and Mel went the other,” Cliff said. “Neither of us knew.”

“Knew what?”

Cliff grinned. “About the time wrinkles and that the other person was sorting out.”

“Until you told me about Cliff being there,” Mel said. “Then I figured it out.”

Cliff nodded. “Turned out to have nothing to do with you at all.”

“But I was being tossed around.”

“You were in the wrong places and times and the wrong times and places.” Mel shrugged. “Just caught there.”

“But what happened?”

Cliff cleared his throat. “Well, like I told you, I was talking to Harvey about meeting a coyote. He arranged it for me, but it had to be on the other side of Red Rock. I got lazy and decided to use ancestral magic to get to the meeting.”

“Which is never really a good idea,” Mel said.

“Thanks, pal, I worked that out for myself. Anyway, when you travel that way you are even more ethereal than normal. This coyote thought it would be funny to shift everything. I didn’t see it coming and he sent me into your car.”

“To squash my donuts.”

“It was the coffee that was the real problem.”

Mel chuckled. “He couldn’t reverse the spell precisely because his pants were soaked.”

“And I overcompensated and overshot my destination in both time and space,” Cliff said. “That’s where Mel came into it.”

Mel made a sour face. “I should learn to mind my own business, but when I feel temporal displacements going on I get curious.”

“Understandable,” Matt said, just to stay involved in the conversation. He had no idea what they were talking about.

“So, I saw the timeline had gotten knotted, well, more twisted.”

“He set out to straighten it,” Cliff said.

“I’m a little OCD when it comes to time,” Mel said, grimacing. “I admit it.”

“But I was in the time flow, so he amplified my overcorrection and that put us, you and me, Matt, into a spiral for a bit.”

“After you told me about Cliff and Harvey ... well, I’d sensed a wolf spirit, and I realized, sort of, what was going on.”

“He jumped in with us,” Cliff said. “A brave thing to do.”

“Why? What could happen?” Matt asked.

The other two shook their heads. “You don’t really want to know.”

“Fine.”

“Anyway, I pulled Cliff into this vortex. Think of it as a safe spot. Then together we brought you in.”

“Now what?” Matt asked.

The men looked at each other. “If all goes well ...” Mel began.

“And we didn’t create another anomaly ...” Cliff said.

“We can wait this out and things will get back to normal,” Mel said.

“Assuming that’s what you want,” Cliff said. “I didn’t mind the spiral much myself. Kind of fun swirling about time and space like that.”

“The stop would be killer,” Mel said.

Cliff wrinkled his nose. “Yeah. Probably true.”

The blur increased and Matt felt his pulse race. “What’s going on?”

Mel shrugged. “The space/time continuum is looking for us. We were there and now we aren’t. Entropy doesn’t like that much. Give it a minute and it will cool down.”

A minute. Matt wondered what that meant, given the circumstances.



And then Cliff refilled his glass. “You probably need this,” he said. “Good thing the bottle was still here. That was a rough ride.”

“Where are we?”

Cliff looked around. “Looks like Lamron’s place. Again. The real question is when. It looks a lot like last Tuesday to me.”

Matt tried and failed to imagine what a Tuesday looked like.

“Is this over? The skipping?”

Cliff wet a finger and held it up. “Feels right.”

“Isn’t that what you do to test the wind?”

“Could be.” He smiled. “But we know the vortex dissolved and we didn’t die or vaporize or become one with the cosmos, so it must be over.”

Matt let out a long breath, then took an even longer sip of the whisky.

“I wonder if the case I was working on is over,” he said.

“The insurance thing?”

“Yeah.”

Cliff shrugged. “Maybe it hasn’t even started yet. Maybe your client walks in your door a week from now and tells you about the case.”

“I already took some photos of the person of interest.”

“Already, but possibly in the future. If that’s the case, try getting your hands on them. They’ll upload to your computer, but not until that part happens.

“I wonder how I can find out?”

Cliff raised his glass. “When you get home, check your bank account and see if you deposited the retainer yet.”

“And if I did, I should see when I did it. With luck, it’s over and I’ve gotten paid for the work. I hope so because somewhere in that tangled mess the monthly bills are coming out of my account.”

Cliff laughed. “Well, that particular knot in the time stream could have been hours or weeks ago, or two weeks from now. My advice is to take it easy with making any decisions until you are damn sure all the events that got caught up in this mix up are well in the past. You don’t want to repeat anything that you did, but you sure as heck don’t want to skip anything because then it won’t have happened.”

“That sounds crazy.”

Cliff laughed. “Time is fickle. So is space. What are you going to do?”

“You sure can’t trust time around here,” Matt said.

“I never have,” Cliff said. “Not any time or any place. It’s a good rule to live by.”

Harvey let out a little yip that sounded like agreement and the three of them sat back and listened to the high chorus of little girl voices that came rippling down the hill.

“Damn coyotes,” Cliff said.