by Rex Bolt
“You’re saying go back further,” Pike said. “And derail this shit from the beginning.”
“Why yes. Although the actual beginning may not be feasible.”
“But put distance on the situation.”
“Exactly,” Mitch said.
Pike had had enough, but before he hung up he figured let the guy brag for a second, so he asked how his research was going.
“Splendidly,” Mitch said. “I believe I’ve narrowed it down to six residents who might have been living in Hillsdale when the UFO appeared.”
“Good then, go get ‘em,” Pike said, and they said goodnight. Again he felt crummy about talking down to Mitch so much, but he hoped the guy understood that he wasn’t in a celebrating mood.
It was late, and Pike was tired despite the monster nap, and it was time to go.
He took it slow driving home.
If he was a hundred percent honest with himself, something he was so far avoiding, this is exactly what he was worried about.
Which is why, back in the car with Audrey coming home from Manhattan Beach, he pressed the heck out of her about her parents and the specifics of their past. And Audrey had obviously thought he was over-the-top, but had given him that piece of binder paper a couple days later, filled in with a lot of the details.
Meaning . . . What it all was adding up to . . . To be able to take your shot, you’d have to go further back . . . Stop them from moving into the house, the neighborhood . . . maybe even into Beacon period.
Which might mean, he and Audrey . . .
It was overwhelming to try to conceive of right now. Tomorrow was another day.
Chapter 10
Thursday morning Pike got up around 10, no humans in the house which was great, and after breakfast he sat down on the living room recliner and started flipping channels on TV.
Everything on looked appealing for some reason, from the home improvement show where the lovey-dovey couple in Texas re-configures houses, to the anything-can-happen pawn shop show, to the one where the guy goes into badly-managed restaurants around the country and saves them. He yells at everyone, but he gets results.
Pike figured that guy’s act was mostly fake, but it was fun to watch.
Bottom line, it was refreshing to free up his mind this morning, which had been getting clogged and cluttered and slammed for a while now.
This was Thursday, the last day of his dumb suspension, so you might as well kick back and essentially do nothing.
Except for . . . There was that strange, abrupt ending last night to the conversation with Dani.
What the heck . . . ?
She’d killed the other dude for sure, she admitted it . . . what was his name again, Marcus?
That was legit. Everything pointed to the Marcus guy deserving what he got. Waving a gun around in one hand and a liquor bottle in the other, making threats. The extent of the damage, with the wall becoming the dude’s final resting place--yeah that would interest the police, for sure, but what could they conclude except she’d delivered one heck of a drop-kick.
But a different individual now? What did she say, he died in a hot tub, or drowned in it or something?
Pike couldn’t remember if Dani was specific but he did remember the guy’s name being Chuck.
Someone’s iPad was sitting there on the low coffee table and Pike hated to get out of the recliner but he grabbed the device and made himself comfortable again.
It seemed too easy, but for the heck of it he googled Chuck hot tub. Nothing there, all kinds of disjointed stuff. He substituted Charles.
Nope. What about adding Dead. Death. Died. Fatality.
Still zip . . . Final long shot before shutting the stupid thing off: may as well throw Andriessen into the mix.
Charles Hot Tub Fatality Andriessen.
Something popped up.
Son . . . of . . . a . . . bitch.
Pike opened it. It was a posting from the Daily Desert Chronicle, which according to the blurb under the title was the Written voice of Palm Springs, California, and beyond. Pike wasn’t believing this.
Vacationer Dies in Thunderbird Motel Spa, by Chris Blink
November 26th, 2016 - An Idaho man on vacation died yesterday evening after apparently collapsing while using the hot tub spa at the Thunderbird Motel on Sunrise Boulevard.
Charles Kolskie of Pocatello was pronounced dead at the scene at 9:04 pm, authorities said.
The victim’s girlfriend, Dani Andriessen, also of Pocatello, reportedly administered CPR until emergency personnel arrived, in a desperate attempt to revive Kolskie.
Andriessen told Palm Springs PD that Kolskie had experienced heart palpitations earlier in the day while jogging, but that he hadn’t seemed concerned and was conducting his evening as normal.
The couple was on vacation from southeastern Idaho, where Kolskie was a union steamfitter and Andriessen is a kindergarten teacher who was reportedly on Thanksgiving break.
It was the second area-fatality of 2016 involving a tourist. In February, Michael Woolworth of St. Louis died after coming up short in an attempt to jump into the Harmony Resort main pool from a 3rd-floor balcony.
Pike read the report a second time. It sure seemed credible enough. The dude has a heart thing, and then he gets too heated up in the tub when he should have been seeing a doctor. Maybe he was on something as well, something speed-like and illegal that makes everything race. Pike wouldn’t doubt it, given what he knew of the type of guy Dani selected.
But then . . . what was all that about her being in some trouble?
Right now she’d be at school, busy--unless God forbid she was under house-arrest or something--but that was ridiculous of course. He’d catch up with her soon enough.
The other thing today . . . Hailey.
There were a bunch of texts from her last night, and three more this morning and he hadn’t returned any of them.
Something had obviously gelled from two months ago in fake time. It would be good to know the degree of what might be going on. You couldn’t just pick someone, say Clarke or Gina or Colton or one of Hailey’s friends from her tennis group and ask them: Am I going out with Hailey?
If he started texting her back without committing to much, he’d probably figure out the answer, but that’s the last thing he wanted to add to his load right now.
Another thing . . . had Mr. Milburn still gone crazy those couple of times and gone after Mr. Foxe? They’d had that confrontation in Safeway, and somewhere else too that Pike couldn’t remember . . . Oh yeah, it was at the Foxes’ house--Mr. Milburn rang the bell and then cracked Mr. Foxe over the head with a baseball bat.
Had that stuff still happened? If not, and Mr. Milburn hadn’t himself gotten arrested--along with added the stress on Audrey of all the legal fallout--then maybe Pike had done one thing good by going back there.
He pulled up that iPad again . . . But no . . . there were the two incidents still being talked about, slight variations of the way they went down the first time, but the same deal. Mr. Milburn was still in hot water, and Foxe still had a slick lawyer who was putting the little Beacon police department through the ringer, challenging the charges. Which this time involved criminal reckless driving instead of DUI, but there was really no difference.
And then there was one more situation. Pike himself messing with Mr. Foxe at the skating place . . . He didn’t even want to know if that had happened again, and he left it alone.
It occurred to him: was Mitch any different?
Pike didn’t think so, despite Mitch talking in some legal mumbo-jumbo last night.
Taking it a step further, is it possible the Dani incident with Chuck happened any differently the second time around, as a result of him making the trip back to October 1st?
Jeez, for the matter, did any of the football game results come out different?
Pike looked those up, and everything was exactly the same, and they got beat by the same score the same day at the same big stadium in
Fresno to end the season.
Pike had nothing to go on, only his instinct again, but none of the stuff with Mitch or Dani seemed likely that it got changed either. His sense of the whole thing was you had to be pretty connected to the deal he was tweaking to be affected by it, and that for everyone else it was business as usual.
At least that’s how he was comfortable looking at it, it was something semi-logical that he could hold on to, and for now that was that.
***
It was lunchtime, and he needed to get his ass moving out of the house and find something to eat, and today he settled on the taqueria, one of his good-old standbys, and then he decided for whatever reason to go back to the library.
The nice librarian was there again, same desk in back, conscientiously doing her job. Pike said hi.
“Well hello again, young man,” she said. She was reserved the way librarians are supposed to be, but Pike was pretty sure there was a bright light underneath it all. The woman probably wasn’t all that old. She had a little gray hair creeping in but when you looked at the full picture Pike would put her maybe mid-30s.
“I appreciate you remembering me,” he said, “and setting me up last time, and everything.”
“Yes . . . now how did that work out?” the librarian said.
“Excuse me?”
“You educating yourself on the subject of traversing time,” she said.
“Oh fine,” he said. “Do you . . . believe in that stuff? I mean not as a librarian, but personally.”
She hesitated for a moment. “All I can tell you, is I’d like to believe in it.”
“Have you ever heard any stories? People that claim they did it?”
“Well, my ex-husband had a friend, Julian,” she said, lowering her voice, maybe because it was the library and they weren’t supposed to be talking, but maybe because of the subject matter. “Julian would tell tales of going places as an adolescent, by way of an apparent portal of sorts under his family’s summer cottage in New Hampshire.”
“Were they . . . credible?” Pike said.
“Quite so. Mesmerizing, in fact. One could listen to him for hours . . . Now certainly it’s possible he had an extraordinary mind and thereby manufactured it all . . . But I must say, the detail was quite exquisite.”
“Where did he go?”
“Mostly the 1920’s, curiously enough. A few times, as I recall, he pre-dated that.”
“He always . . . made it back okay, and stuff?”
“As far as I know, yes he did,” she said.
“Jumping around for second,” Pike said, “you’re already divorced?”
“My, that’s quite a direct question,” the librarian said, but Pike could see she was okay with it. It was true, he had gotten more direct with people, less beating around the bush. He wasn’t sure if it had to do with his situation or not.
“But yes I am,” she said. “He was largely a wonderful man, but there were issues.”
“That’s what I’m learning,” Pike said, “there always are.”
She laughed and asked him if she could help with anything further today, or had he just stopped by her desk to say hello.
“Well if possible,” Pike said, “could you direct me to something on 1990’s Chico?”
“Are you referring to Chico, California?” the librarian said. “In Butte County?”
“Yeah . . . please. I’m thinking early to mid ‘90’s actually.” Stupidly not having brought the piece of binder paper from Audrey with him, but pretty sure he had the time frame.
“Well of course,” she said, “we’ll see what we can come up with. Is there a particular focal point? Demographics, industry, geography, urban planning . . . something else?”
“What I’m trying to do,” Pike said, comfortable enough with this woman to not worry about blurting stuff out, and what she might think, “is find a family from back then, a husband and wife . . . My girlfriend’s parents actually, but she wasn’t born yet, neither was her sister.”
“I think I understand.” Though Pike could tell she was hoping for more.
“Actually she’s not my girlfriend, currently, I don’t think . . . I kind of screwed that up with the time travel element.”
The librarian didn’t miss a beat and said, “Nonetheless, your aim is to uncover information about this family when they resided in Chico during the given years. Do I have that correct?”
“If you can, that’d be great,” Pike said. The librarian tapped around on the computer and then once again led him to a room off the main library, different than the reference room last time, more modern and full of cubicles. This time, instead of climbing up a ladder to get him the leather book out of a special case, she lied down in a back aisle and began thumbing through what looked like thousands of old phone books that were filed at ground-level.
“You probably aren’t familiar with one of these,” she said, her voice slightly muffled. “Are you?”
“I know what they are,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever opened one though.”
“These are somewhat out of order,” she said, struggling a bit.
“That’s okay,” Pike said. “Forget it then. You’re doing all this physical work for me. Accommodating my weird requests.”
“All in a day’s duties,” she said, lifting her head and standing back up. “And it’s my pleasure. I was in the C’s hoping for Chico. It’s a smaller town, but we’re normally pretty thorough within California. No directory for it that far back though, I’m afraid.”
“But you’re saying, if I can find an old phone book, like in Chico itself, that’d be one way.”
“We’re not done yet here,” she said. “Now we look online. One of the few things the internet has been deficient in keeping up with is the telephone white pages. It’s not as easy as it should be to find 25-year-old phone numbers and addresses.”
They went back to her desk. “All right now, the names?’
Pike realized, shockingly, he couldn’t remember Audrey’s parents’ first names. “Jeez, my bad,” he said, “all I have right now is Milburn.” And he spelled it.
“Nada,” the librarian said before long. “See this is the problem, we’re shut out. There’s apparently a paid service, for what it’s worth.”
“I can pay, that’s fine,” Pike said.
“No. Come with me,” she said. This time they went into an office.
“This is the head librarian’s office,” she said. “But he’s a bum, frankly. They transferred him here from San Diego but he’s never around. Make yourself comfortable.”
Pike did as he was told, there was a comfy couch, and she fired up the head librarian’s computer and a couple minutes later was writing something down.
“We have a special program reserved for departmental administrative searches,” she said, handing him the slip of paper. “It allows us to bypass a great deal of consumer databank issues.”
“Oh,” Pike said. “So this was departmental?”
“It positively was not,” she said. She let it hang, a little mischief in the woman under the surface.
Pike looked at the paper. There was an address, 2730 Buttercup Lane, Chico. Rose and Preston Milburn. She included the year from the directory apparently, 1993.
He studied the information a moment. “I think my dad’s been fooling around on my mom,” he said.
Again, without seeming to be thrown off stride, the librarian said, “I’m sorry to hear that. These things happen.”
“And my deal,” Pike said, “If I can go back to when I need, and intercept people, or sidetrack them, or whatever else--I’m not sure--”
For one of the few times since he’d discovered his empowerment he felt himself breaking down, that it all may simply be too big a weight.
“It’s okay,” the librarian said softly.
“Anyhow,” Pike said, recovering a bit, “I’m sorry to lay it on you, who barely knows me. There’s no excuse for that.”
“How would you p
roceed in terms of the Chico family?” she said.
“Wow . . . do you really want to hear?’
“I certainly do.”
“Well . . . If I can go there--the first thing is nail that part, which can definitely be tricky--then I find the people, the Milburns, and . . . I screw ‘em up somehow. I’m not quite sure how.”
“And . . . screw them up, what does that mean?”
“It means I stop them from moving their rear ends back to Beacon and having kids here and settling down and raising them for twenty years.” Pike was tensing up a little bit, starting to visualize a few things.
“And this is required, because? . . . Wait a moment, was that the woman who perished recently?”
“Okay, yeah. I should have thought of that, that you’d recognize the name.”
“My gosh what a tragedy.”
“It was. The daughters, particularly one of them, is all messed up now, the dad is too, plus he acted out and could end up in some serious trouble, if you can believe it . . . Even the kid of the asshole who did it, he’s on big-time drugs and maybe breaking into houses, from what I heard.”
“So, if I’m following you correctly,” she said, “your intent is to alter history.” Saying it perfectly steady, like it was no big deal.
“I tried to once already. I’m learning I have to cut it off deeper. To have any shot at all . . . Even then I have no idea if it’s workable.”
The librarian looked at him for a minute and didn’t say anything. He was pretty sure she thought he was wacko, even though she was being polite.
But then she said, “I must tell you, your scenario bears resemblance to some that our friend Julian related. The need to pursue depth to effect significant change.”
If Pike didn’t know better, he’d say that she was nuts.
But he supposed it was encouraging to get some feedback that he could relate to, even if her friend Julian was making it all up. Or maybe she was, who knows. But still . . .
“So,” he said, “I’ll get out of your hair.”
The librarian said, “If I may inject a final question. And please stop me if I’m butting in.”