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“They were a couple kids who jumped off Terrel’s Peak a year or two ago.”
    “Yeah. I remember ’em,” she said. “Real bookworm, that Margaret was. It’s a shame she had to go do a thing like that. But I can’t help you on when it was they went. I think it was in the fall, both of ’em. Why don’t you just ask their families? They still live here in town.”
    “I don’t want to bother them,” he lied.
    Mrs. Malone unlocked the door to a room near the study carrels. She pointed to a row of small cardboard boxes, not much bigger than packs of cigarettes, stacked behind the microfilm reader. “Well, here’s the stacks of Terrel Daily Times film. I don’t think you’ll find much though. They don’t write much about kids who go and do stuff like kill themselves. Best not to talk of such things.”
    With that, the old lady took her silver hair and eagle eyes from the room and left Joe to figure out the workings of the microfilm reader.
    It didn’t take too long before he was scrolling speedily through issue after issue of the Times . He started with the film from last December and worked backward, not relying on a cranky old woman’s memory for much.
    His heart jumped when his eyes picked out the words “Terrel’s Peak” from a death notice in the November 2 issue. But then his eyes saw the deceased was a Parker Matthews, age thirty-four, a salesman from out of town who had apparently parked his car to watch the sun set from the edge of the cliff and then dived after it.
    If he caught up with the sun, it wasn’t in this dimension.
    Joe kept scrolling backward, and was beginning to despair of ever finding a death notice for people he’d heard of when he saw it.
    Margaret Kelly, 18, died on May 22. The wake will be held tonight at Folter’s Funeral Home. Services will be held tomorrow at St. Patrick’s Church at 11 A.M. The family has requested in lieu of flowers, that donations be made in Margaret’s name to the Troubled Children’s Fund, 535 Argathe Way, New Brunswick, NJ 08901.
    Well, he had a date now, if no other information. Just over a year ago. On a hunch, he scrolled back a year to the previous May, and began looking through the obituaries.
    And found one for William Sander.
    Who died on May 22.
    Joe felt the hair on the back of his neck begin to rise. Today was May 26. His obituary for James Canady had run two days ago, the day after the body had been taken out of the ocean. Which meant that James Canady had jumped off Terrel’s Peak on May 22. What were the chances that three teens would each jump from the same place on the same anniversary?
    Three years in a row?
    What the hell was going on here?
    Joe grabbed another box of film from the wall. And searched for the Terrel Daily Times of May 23, 2001. His heart raced faster than the scrolling film as he advanced to the section of the paper that held obituaries.
    There were none.
    He continued through the film of the May 24 and May 25 editions, and found nothing. Nobody died the whole last week of May 2001 in Terrel or the surrounding suburbs.
    He slumped back in his seat.
    OK. So the chain wasn’t very long. But it couldn’t be just a coincidence that three kids had all jumped from the same cliff on the same day, one year apart each.
    Why?
    What was so special about May 22?
    He picked up the rolls of film that were scattered around the viewer and began reinserting them into their boxes. And then stopped.
    What if the chain had only skipped a year? And what about that death in October?
    He pulled the film for 2003 back out and rethreaded it through the reader. The gears protested with an increasingly high-pitched whine as he advanced to the end of October. Nothing for May 30 or 31. Then he found it. November 2. But the date of the actual death was earlier, naturally.
    October 31, 2003.
    A shiver ran through Joe’s spine.
    Why didn’t he believe that the out-of-town salesman who took a dive off that cliff last year had been suicidal?
    He