Chapter 22: Time-Shifting, a Wrap-Up
You already know what time-shifting is: changing the characters’ perceptions of when a particular event took place. In this chapter, we’re going to go a little deeper, by discussing different ways your Villain might manage to pull this off.
Altering the Temperature of the Body
In the first season of Veronica Mars, our Sleuth, Veronica, tries to solve the mystery behind the death of her best friend, Lily. A turning point comes when she discovers a traffic cam recording of Lily driving her car, hours after she had supposedly died. This means that the crime must have been time-shifted, and everybody’s alibi is now called into question.
It turned out that Lily's parents, believing their son to be guilty of her murder, iced down her body to alter her liver temperature. By doing so, they would time-shift the death into a window of time when their son was playing field hockey, and thus had an airtight Occupied Alibi.
This tactic works just as well if the body is heated, rather than cooled. In an episode of Columbo called “Suitable for Framing,” our Villain tosses an electric blanket over the body to time-shift the murder into the late evening, when he’ll be hobnobbing with the city’s artistic elite.
One of the biggest challenges your Villain will face when choosing this method is cleaning up the evidence of whatever heating or cooling agent he used to change the body’s temperature. In Veronica Mars, Lily’s parents iced her body, then placed it by the pool to explain away any moisture. In “Suitable for Framing,” our Villain had an accomplice remove the blanket later that night.
Impersonating the Victim After Death
In the movie Knives Out, a nurse, Marta, is horrified to realize that she has accidentally given the wrong medicine to her employer, elderly mystery writer Harlan Thrombey. Harlan, knowing he will be dead in minutes, is determined to save Marta from prosecution. He instructs her in how to time-shift his death and give herself a perfect alibi. Marta leaves Harlan’s estate, making sure to draw attention to her departure. This begins her No Access Alibi. Because the estate grounds are monitored by cameras, it’s assumed that she won’t be able to re-enter the property.
However, Marta is able to sneak back onto the grounds and then into the house, by using a hidden entrance. She dresses in Harlan’s robe and nightcap and makes a very brief appearance downstairs. She’s seen only from a distance, through a wavy-glassed window, which distorts her appearance enough to make a member of the family believe that she is, indeed, Harlan. Since people don’t walk around after they’re dead, this time-shifts Harlan’s death to later that night—and well into Marta’s No Access alibi.
Using a False Attack
A false attack is a specific moment when witnesses believe the murder is taking place. Let’s see how it works in an episode of Monk called “Mr. Monk and the TV Star.”
Hit actor Brad Terry wants to kill his ex-wife, Susan, to protect his syndication payments. He buys a copy of her favorite exercise video and adds a scream to the soundtrack—his ex-wife’s scream, taken from a horror film she once appeared in.
Then he goes on a drunken bender, assaulting another patron in a bar, and ensuring that he’ll be the local paparazzi’s favorite target for a few days. He takes shelter at Susan’s house, sleeping on her couch, while the paparazzi camp outside. He switches out Susan’s exercise tape for the doctored one, knowing that she’ll be eager to start her workout and will play the tape as soon as he leaves.
On the front porch, he stops to talk with the paparazzi for a few minutes, waiting for the scream he knows is coming. When it does, he runs into the house and stabs Susan. Minutes later, other witnesses rush to the scene, and Brad pretends he has interrupted a deadly home invasion.
Susan’s scream is a false attack. It makes witnesses believe the murder is happening while Brad is still on the front porch—but in fact, the murder didn’t happen until he went inside.
Altering the Signals Used to Mark Time
Most people mark time using signals, such as the time display on their watch or phone. If your Villain changes these signals, he can confuse witnesses about what time it is, and therefore, when a particular event took place. For example, he might change all the clocks in a house to ensure that its occupants believe a shot was fired at 9:45 instead of 10:15.
But while clocks may be our most precise method for marking time, they aren’t the only thing we use. Most people estimate what time it is by observing the scheduled or predictable activities they see going on around them. Let’s say you’re sitting in a cafe working on your novel one morning, and you’ve lost track of time. If you see several groups of people entering the cafe, you’ll probably think it’s getting close to lunch hour. Or if your husband always comes home from work around six, when he walks through the door you may find yourself thinking, “Is it six already?” All of the little predictable activities around us create our sense of what time it is.
Before the advent of streaming services, the television schedule was a major signal people used to mark time. That’s what’s used in an episode of Remington Steele called “Stronger than Steele.”
Movie producer Jennifer Davenport wants to kill her boyfriend, who’s cutting her out of a major film they’ve been working on, and out of his love life as well. She cues up a VCR tape to play an episode of “Atomic Man”—the same episode that’s scheduled to play later that night. She also changes the time on the clock, and asks a custodial worker, Hazel, to come into her office and clean it. While Hazel cleans, they watch the first ten minutes of Atomic Man, and the altered clock slowly ticks from 11:00 to 11:10.
Then Jennifer asks Hazel to leave, quickly changes into a disguise, and runs to her boyfriend’s office to kill him. She makes sure that her escape is seen by the film studio’s security team, so that everyone will know the murder happened a few minutes after 11:00—the same time that Hazel is certain she was watching television with Jennifer.
This, of course, is a time-shifted alibi, not a time-shifted murder. But for Jennifer’s purposes, the effect is the same—it appears that the murder, and her alibi, are simultaneous.
Murders and alibis are the events your Villain is most likely to try to shift around, but you might also consider letting him time-shift:
the signing of a will or other document
the discovery of a piece of evidence
the onset of an injury
the writing of a suicide note
Of course, whatever he time-shifts, he will inevitably leave behind clues that allow your Sleuth to puzzle out the true timeline. Let’s talk about what those clues may look like in the next chapter.