The old house smelled familiar- mixed with cardboard and must. The brown boxes were stacked on every shelf, jammed and somehow still upright. Papers, dusty vases, age-old cassettes and various antiques were sitting eerily still throughout my grandma's home. She had lived here her whole life. Too many memories were lurking in the walls as I pictured them slowly moving, as if dying... Dying along with her. I walked over to touch her collection of glass bottles in the window as the sun shined through them. They speckled the room with tiny dots of colored light like stained glass. I used to find so much joy in seeing that light. I used to find joy in every little thing...
My mom died, was murdered, actually, and I came to sort through her stuff. My sister would be coming later to help, but I was meaning to get started. The clock on her kitchen wall ticked. Tick. Tock. It was so quiet. So, so quiet.
"Clank!"My heart almost stopped. I watched wide eyed as all of the glass bottles fell to the floor- except for one that rolled across the tile floor and bumped into one cardboard box. It was right in the middle of the room and I wondered how I hadn't noticed it earlier. Curiously, I walked to the box and picked up the only thing inside it. It was a single book. I blew off the thick dust and it swirled around me as I opened the cover. The pages were yellow and aged, without a single word on any. Why would she save this?
I scrolled my thumb across the edges of the pages, skimming my eyes on each tattered paper until- there. It was the page that would change lives forever. I was about to touch this page, the only page that had been used, and somehow go back in time with one mission: to stop the murderer who killed my mom- and hundreds of others.
*~*~*
It was peculiar, how it happened, I mean. How I twisted into the most predictable yet scary place. How I traveled to the past. It wasn't fast like how you might picture time travel to be. Rather, it was like falling through your life, through each second and sound in a confusing, slow motion whirlwind of me- and then everything became still. I was in my Mom's house again. Had anything even changed?
But I knew something changed. Everything had changed. I just didn't know what.
"Ruth! Dinner!" I heard a grating voice from the dining room as I stood, awkwardly unaware in the kitchen. The thumping of
