“Don’t say anything. Don’t ask anything. Just … make love to me.”
Twenty minutes later, we melded into one.
40
A baneful fate was slouching toward me like William Butler Yeats’s rough beast. The clock was ticking; I knew it, but Marc didn’t. I was clinging to the idea that at least one of us should be allowed to remain innocent for a while longer. Old Marc had protected me from my truth, but I wasn’t sure how long I could protect Young Marc from his.
Wednesday was Marc’s first day off in a scheduled rotation. We spent most of that day in bed. The sex was spectacular, and the tender hours between were ineffable, but the loom of crisis was never far from my consciousness.
By some unspoken understanding, Marc avoided cross-examining me any further about my enigmatic provenance. But the reprieve didn’t prevent the occasional collision between us as I attempted to adjust to a less well-informed decade than the one I had left behind.
The first incident began with my lame attempt at comedy. It ended on a more somber note. On Thursday morning, Marc made breakfast while I showered. When I heard his voice call, “Cat! Breakfast is ready!”—the exact words he would use on a different morning, thirty years from now—I swallowed the lump in my throat and forced myself to focus on a mini-mission of cross-generational education. I wrapped myself in my bathrobe and marched into the kitchen.
The kitchen banquette was neatly set, and Marc was in the process of deploying plates loaded with bacon and eggs and toast.
“You know,” I began, “a few things around here will have to change.”
“Yeah? What?”
I dipped my hand into the pocket of my robe and retrieved the red plastic bottle I’d found in the shower. I held it under his nose. The multihued label shouted: “GEE, YOUR HAIR SMELLS TERRIFIC.”
“My shampoo? What about it?”
“Forgive me for pointing out that your hair does not smell terrific! It smells like you spent the night in a Turkish bordello!”
He assessed me carefully. “You don’t look Turkish.” His eyebrows danced. “But I have to admit, you do have certain bordello skills.”
“You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
“You promise?”
I kissed him. “Promise.” I dropped the shampoo bottle into the trash bin and slid into my seat. “Another thing…”
“What?”
“I checked some of the junk food packages you’ve been hoarding.” I pointed toward one of the kitchen cupboards behind him. “Bad news!”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning chemical additives! Are you in the habit of eating plastic bags?”
“Of course not!”
“Same ingredients! After breakfast, we’re going shopping.” I surveyed the food arrayed on my plate—eggs sunny-side up, wheat toast, fried tomatoes, and … “Well, what do we have here?” I exclaimed. “Pancetta bacon!”
“Not many people would know that.”
“Learned it from you.”
“When was that?” Mark was standing over me.
Oh hell …
“Just now,” I answered, deflecting. I tasted the bacon. “Perfect!” I looked up. “Aren’t you joining me?”
He sat.
“There’s another thing.…”
“What?” Now he was on the defensive.
“I threw away your leisure suit. You’ll thank me one day.”
He blinked, but said nothing.
I cut my toast into strips, and then dipped a piece into a yolk. I popped it in my mouth.
Marc ate slowly, watching me.
“Watch closely. This is part of your education,” I said, mopping up more yolk. I was trying to keep the mood light … trying to make the best of the disorienting surrealism of living in a prequel to my own life.
“You’re talking in riddles.”
“Now you understand how I felt.”
He laid down his fork. One look at his face, and my brief foray into chatty superficiality cratered. I reached over and took his hand. “I’m in love with you, Marc. That’s all you need to understand right now. More will come, I promise, but right now, I just need your trust.”
“I love you, too, Claire. I do. But it’s like being under a spell. I know there’s something much bigger going on here, but I don’t understand it. The strange thing is … it’s making me afraid for both of us.”
I flashed on a memory: the ornate living room … the clear-eyed old lady … the quiet warning.
“A lovely old lady once warned me to prepare myself. ‘Ready yourself for the sorrows to come,’ she said. I think she meant both of us.”
Two more girls were going to die.
Very soon.
We would have to decide if we could save them.
Decide if we could change their history, and ours … and survive.
I didn’t know how to tell him.
* * *
The Yearling’s interior décor hadn’t changed much. The dining room I’d seen on the evening I followed Old Marc was a screened-in porch, but otherwise, the place looked pretty much the same in 1978 as I knew it would three decades later.
It didn’t take me long to adapt. I had worked tables in restaurants and bars all through my high school and undergrad years, so mixing drinks and slinging beer were no mystery to me. Nonie Friedrichsen, the bar manager, was the same woman who had been tending bar on the night of the brawl. This earlier version of her wasn’t much older than me, but already her hair was flecked with gray and her face was showing the miles she’d traveled. She definitely had her rough edges, but I liked her, and I admired the cool way she handled men twice her size when they became insulting or raucous.
Marc had written his schedule on a calendar for me, and I had planned to coordinate my part-time duties with his shifts. But it didn’t work out that way. While we were ravishing each other after I seduced him, the news blackout on the missing Herald reporter was lifted. On Friday morning, he was called back to work. He spent the next few nights at his apartment in town, leaving me to fend for myself at the cabin. To keep myself sane—perhaps an unusual concept for someone claiming to be a time traveler—I offered to work extra shifts at The Yearling. Marc and I tried to stay in touch, but the cabin’s old rotary-dial phone had no answering machine, and voice mail was a marvel yet to be invented, so our contacts were pretty much hit-and-miss while he was in Gainesville.
When I next saw him, late on Sunday, he told me he had to go back in on Tuesday. A string of severe thunderstorms had blown through—“old cacklers,” Nonie called them—and it was a cold night, so I had the fireplace going when he arrived. We sat on the couch in the lounge. He started talking about the frustrating dead ends the task force was encountering. Of course, having read all the reports, I could have predicted their next disappointment. But I stayed quiet. I waited for Marc to bring up our conversation on the first day, at the side of the road near Hawthorne, when I had spooked him with my knowledge of Pia Ostergaard’s unannounced disappearance.
He didn’t, so I decided to give him a nudge.
“Collect dental records.”
“What?”
“Track down the missing girls’ dentists and get copies of their charts.”
He hesitated. “I think someone’s doing that.”
He didn’t sound certain.
“Make sure, Marc. It’s important.”
“Good point. I will.” He leaned back and regarded me with interest. “Lawyer, huh?”
I didn’t reply. I could see that he still wasn’t ready for the truth. We were almost there, but if this slow waltz was ever to end, I needed to hand him irrefutable evidence.
I decided to start with a parlor trick.
I’d never been much of a fan of memorizing dates just for the sake of pleasing pedantic history instructors, but one specific date in 1978 was etched in my memory. When I was in third-year law, I had written a term paper analyzing the long-running lawsuit brought in U.S. Federal Court by the Gove
rnment of France against the Amoco Oil Company of Illinois. The suit had been launched after the infamous grounding of the supertanker Amoco Cadiz, a catastrophe that spilled more than 200,000 tons of crude oil into the North Sea and polluted nearly two hundred miles of the French coastline. The case finally reached the Seventh Circuit, where, after thirteen years of litigation, the Court’s award for prejudgment interest ended up being more than double its award for damages.
The Amoco Cadiz ran aground just before ten in the evening on Thursday, March 16, 1978. Twelve hours later, the ship broke in two and spilled its entire cargo. I had read and reread the law reports on the case at least a dozen times, and I knew the facts by heart. It was a turning-point disaster that led to the adoption of tough new maritime inspection standards for all ships operating in the North Atlantic Basin.
I was certain I couldn’t possibly change all that history, but at least I could use it for effect.
* * *
Marc kept an old flat-bottomed cypress-plank boat with a ten-horse kicker in a shed behind the cabin. On Monday, we went out on the lake, jigged for bass at Allen Point, and then went for a long cruise. It was late afternoon when we returned to the cabin. Neither of us felt much like cooking, so Marc made a run to The Yearling for takeout. As soon as he drove off, I went directly to the desk in the spare room, where I’d earlier noticed some notepads and envelopes. I filled one side of a sheet of legal-sized notepaper with writing, folded the sheet in four, and sealed it in an envelope. I left it in the desk.
That night, we ate pub food, drank wine … and made love.
Later, exhausted, I lay beside Marc with my eyes half-shut, savoring the afterglow. I felt him shift on the bed.
“Amazing!” he whispered.
“Yeah,” I replied. “And just think,” I added naughtily, remembering my first night with Old Marc, “you’ll get even better.”
I felt his finger tracing the tattoo on the small of my back. “I meant this.”
I bit my lip.
“I’ve never seen a tattoo on a woman’s body before.”
I sighed. “One day they’ll be all the rage.” I opened my eyes and glared. “And by the way, Mr. Man … exactly how many naked women have you seen?”
“A few.” His eyes ran down my body. “But none as beautiful as you, or…”
“Or, what?”
His eyes locked on mine. “Or … as intriguing.”
I kissed him. “Good answer.”
41
Early the next morning, while Marc was showering, I ducked into the spare room and retrieved the envelope. As he was getting ready to leave, I handed it to him.
“What’s this?”
“You’re a police detective.”
“Okay…” He waited.
“You must have a personal locker at work … one where only you have access.”
“I have an exhibit drawer. It’s secured with a steel bar and a padlock. Why?”
I tapped the envelope in his hand. “Lock that in your drawer and don’t open it until Friday. Where will you be on Friday? Here or there?”
“There during the day. I’ll probably be working late, but I’ve got the weekend off. I’ll try to get back here before midnight.”
“Does your squad room have a TV?”
“There’s one in the conference room.”
“Okay. When you get to the office on Friday morning, open that envelope. Inside you’ll find one sheet of paper. Read what I wrote on it and then turn on CNN.”
“What’s CNN?”
Dumb girl!
“Right. Sorry. Just turn on the news, any news.”
“What’s this about, Claire?”
“It’s about me getting your full attention.”
He shook his head in puzzlement, kissed me, and left.
* * *
Cross Creek was a tiny community. To deter gossip, Marc and I had agreed we should never be in the bar at the same time. But Nonie was no fool, and with me negotiating my shifts to suit Marc’s, I figured it wouldn’t be long before she concluded I was either involved in an illicit affair or hiding from the police. My refusal to be drawn into a discussion of my background, and my quick put-downs when one of the regulars tried to pick me up, could only reinforce that impression. Whatever her suspicions, Nonie never voiced them to me, and she refrained from asking questions—even when I lied and said there was no phone at the cabin where I was staying. She seemed happy to have an extra body available on a tips-only basis, and she was happy to work out my roster as we went along.
I walked to The Yearling late Tuesday morning, but the place was pretty dead during the lunch hour, so Nonie and I agreed that I’d work straight evenings until Friday. For the rest of the week, I spent part of each day out on the lake, or hiking the rustic trails behind the lakeshore, but mainly I sat on the porch reading.
I had found a pile of books stacked behind the couch in the lounge. This time—unlike my experience in Marc’s loft apartment of the distant future—there was no evidence of decorating artifice. After spending a fascinating afternoon lost in Kipling’s Rewards and Fairies, I found a copy of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. I was surprised Marc had it. The verso page reminded me that it had been published in 1970, and I recalled the book had become a bestseller, but I had never read it. Flipping through the chapters, I was struck by some of the author’s predictions. Runaway technology, homeschooling, digitally enhanced instant celebrities, superficial personal relationships, and the widespread use of drugs to treat stress—it was all there. But, then, so were underwater cities and family spaceships, which made me pretty sure I could have done a better job writing the book.
Of course, given my specialized knowledge, I’d have had a bit of an advantage.
I waited for Saturday.
But, for me, Saturday never came.
* * *
It started on Thursday morning. I woke up feeling shaky, and the sheets were damp from sweat. I made some coffee and tried to shrug it off. I took the boat out on the lake, but returned after half an hour. I couldn’t get interested in reading, so I dozed on the bed, trying to fight off what I was sure was just a cold. But after going to the bathroom a few times, I knew I was in trouble. Peeing was painful, and my urine smelled foul.
I had a bladder infection.
I rummaged through the bathroom cabinets and Marc’s dresser, hoping to find an unfinished prescription of antibiotics—any antibiotics—that might hold this thing off until Marc got home on Friday night and we could figure out what to do.
No luck.
The walk to The Yearling at five o’clock nearly destroyed me. I’d felt nauseated for most of the day and hadn’t eaten. I was desperately tired, and a dull pain had developed on the left side of my lower back. But it was a busy night, and for Nonie’s sake, I was determined to see it through. I’d heard once that cranberry juice is good if you have a bladder infection. I drank as much as I could force down while I worked, but as the evening wore on, I only felt worse. It didn’t help that a couple of boors at the bar were getting on my nerves. Eventually one of them started making ignorant comments about “pussy,” with his eyes fixed firmly on me. Nonie intervened as I was about to rearrange the drunk’s face with a beer pitcher.
Fifteen minutes later, it struck.
I was upending a bucket of ice into the reservoir when my knees buckled. I dropped the bucket, and a mini-glacier of diced ice splayed across the floor. I made it to the restroom just in time to throw up in the sink.
Days later, I learned what happened after that. Nonie found me in a restroom cubicle, burning with fever, with my jeans around my ankles and the toilet red with blood. Her first thought was that I’d had a miscarriage. She phoned for an ambulance. The following morning, Marc called the cabin. He wanted to tell me he’d opened the envelope and watched the news, and, yes, for fuck’s sake, I had his full attention. When I didn’t answer the phone, he wasn’t too concerned. He was used to me missing his calls.
He arr
ived at the cabin around eleven that night. He was disappointed that I wasn’t waiting, but he still didn’t worry. He figured I was working at the bar and I’d show up after closing.
By the next morning, he was frantic.
42
Munroe Memorial Hospital was in Ocala, twenty-five miles south of Cross Creek. I have hazy memories of the ambulance ride and of white-clad forms hovering over me, but nothing that I can fit into any logical continuum. When I eventually came to my senses, I was sweating in a malodorous, fully occupied eight-bed ward with an IV running into my arm and a catheter draining my bladder. Christ! For most of my life, I hadn’t seen the inside of a hospital except as a visitor, but since landing in 1978 less than three weeks ago, I’d been hospitalized twice. Harboring dark thoughts, I roused enough strength to press a call button mounted on the bed rail, and eventually a nurse came into the room. She was an older lady with kindly eyes. Her name tag read: D. BOWLES, LPN.
“What’s wrong with me?” I croaked at her.
“Nice to meet you, too, young lady! Welcome back!” Her voice was soft and comforting, like velvet. She checked my pulse. She stuck a thermometer under my tongue, disappeared into the bathroom, and returned with a wet facecloth. She gently wiped my burning forehead. She checked the thermometer. I couldn’t tell if her sigh was from relief or alarm.
“I thought I just had a bladder infection,” I said, trying to sound more polite.
“It’s much more serious than that, dear. The doctor says you have a kidney infection.”
I groaned. My imagination immediately ran wild with dread thoughts: Do these people have an antibiotic that will work? Did I transport a strain of bacteria from the future they can’t deal with … some flesh-eating superbug that will turn my insides into suppurating mush and trigger a pandemic?
Nurse Bowles offered a soothing answer to my unarticulated fears. “The doctor thinks the antibiotics are starting to work. He told us the latest lab results showed quite amazing improvement. But your fever was dangerously high.”
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