The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART ONE: SALLY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  PART TWO: THE BOOK CLUB

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  PART THREE: THE TREE

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  PART FOUR: HOME

  31

  32

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Neve Maslakovic

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  The quotes in chapters 15 and 27 are reprinted, under fair use, from The Sirens of Titan, Kindle edition, RosettaBooks, © 1959 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The quote in chapter 19 is reprinted, under fair use, from Slaughterhouse-Five, Kindle edition, RosettaBooks, © 1969 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

  This is a Westmarch Publishing book.

  www.westmarchpub.com

  for Libby and John

  1

  A girl lost in time. A list of numbers that would shut down the time-travel lab. And a death.

  Only the first of those things was my fault. The rest just sort of…happened.

  Let me back up a bit, to the evening I found out that Sabina had jumped back into the past. No, to that morning, a crisp Saturday dawn. Because what happened then set it all into motion.

  Nate had driven to the house in response to my text message alerting him that rumors about Celer’s ancient Roman pedigree had started to seep out online. I would have called them wild rumors, except that they happened to be true—we had rescued the dog from the first-century eruption of Vesuvius, along with Sabina, the teen daughter of Celer’s owner. Pedigree was entirely the wrong word, though. Celer was a gray-brown animal of no particular breed, a shopkeeper’s companion.

  As to why we were in Pompeii at all—well, in my capacity as science dean’s assistant at St. Sunniva University, a school nestled in Minnesota’s lakes and hills country, I was called upon to help when a problem in the Time Travel Engineering (TTE) lab came up, which happens more often than you’d think. The SpaceTimE Warper (STEWie) was a tangled knot of mirrors and lasers in the oversized lab on the west side of campus. The contraption had sent a few companions and me on an unexpected voyage to ancient Italy. One of my fellow travelers had been Nate Kirkland, chief of campus security and a newcomer to our town of Thornberg.

  We’d returned from that foray into the past with an extra person. The thing about time travel is that there are rules, four of them—no, more than rules, unyielding cornerstones—one of them being that History cannot be altered, down to the course of a single person’s life. History protects itself. Had Sabina been slated to live through the eruption, to make it out alive as pumice and lava overtook her hometown, we wouldn’t have been able to link hands with her and use the Slingshot to get us all home. It was that simple.

  For the six of us from the twenty-first century, Pompeii had been what we at the university called a ghost zone, a well in time you did not want to fall into, as you were unlikely to make it out alive. The person Sabina had bonded with the most was a twenty-six-year-old TTE grad student, Abigail Tanner. Abigail had no family of her own and was quite happy to be guardian and mentor to Sabina, an arrangement eased by her working knowledge of classical Latin. I had invited the pair to live with me rent-free, which is how I’d become Aunt Julia to a thirteen-year-old girl.

  For the past four months Sabina had gotten to know modern life in all its glory and shortcomings. Cell phones. Chinese takeout. Chemistry class. Being a teenager was hard enough, and when you’re the only one in the world whose mother tongue is Latin—well, it’s that much harder. The immigration paperwork Nate had procured for her listed Italy as her place of birth, though Sabina was no more able to speak Italian than I was able to converse in Old English. For the method of entry into the country—the options were land, sea, or air—we had put down air, as it was the closest thing to spacetime warping.

  In my defense, I had been distracted by other matters. There had been my ex-husband’s failed attempt at blackmail, which had ended badly. The hold Quinn had over us was that he knew Sabina’s true background, that she wasn’t a typical immigrant from modern Italy. We had dodged a bullet with Quinn (quite literally in my case), but Sabina had been a bit quiet since. We had tried to shield her from the details, but the threat had left some scars.

  Then there was the other distraction, this one a good one. From the front steps of the house, I watched as Nate pulled into the driveway, and went to meet him. He hopped out of the Jeep, gave me a long kiss, and said, “Chilly this morning. Is Celer ready? My grandmother will look after him until the gossip dies down. I think they’ll get along just fine.”

  I had met Mary Kirkland and was the recipient of both her hospitality, in the form of one of her famous meals, and her sage advice, so I knew this to be true.

  Celer, whose name was pronounced with a hard k, had come outside with me and was lounging in the shaft of sunlight streaming into the open garage. “It will only be temporary anyway,” I said to the dog, as if he could understand me. One of his eyes was half-closed and the other on Nate’s dog, Wanda. The spaniel, having jumped out of the Jeep, was sniffing a walnut discarded in a flower bed by a squirrel, energetically wagging her tail all the while.

  Nate pulled away from me as Abigail joined us in the yard. She gave Nate a friendly wave and took a seat on the steps where I had been waiting just moments ago.

  Nate greeted her, then turned back to me. “Julia, why did you ask me to bring Wanda?”

  “I—we were hoping you could leave Wanda with us for a few days. To keep Sabina company. Also, so I can pretend Wanda is Celer if anyone takes the Twitter rumor seriously.”

  “Will that work?”

  “I researched it over breakfast,” I explained, watching Wanda, who had a royal bearing and a silky chestnut-and-white coat, push the walnut around with her nose. “Cavalier King Charles spaniels trace their lineage to exactly six mid-twentieth-century dogs. Meaning she could not have been brought back from 79 AD with genetic certainty. She’s too pretty and refined.”

  “Got it.”

  “It’s not exactly ethical to lie, but if it will protect Sabina from being outed as an ancient Roman and the blast of publicity that would ensue…”

  Instead of agreeing with me as I’d expected, Nate turned to where Abigail was silently following our conversation from her seat on the front steps. “What do you think, Abigail?”

  She and I had already hashed out the pros and cons over breakfast, and Abigail had reluctantly agreed to my plan. “Well, sooner or later we’ll have to tell the world who Sabina really is, but I guess swapping the dogs will buy us some time.”

  “What did Sabina say about it?” Nate asked.

  “She’s sleeping in,” Abigail said.

  “Sleeping in?” Nate repea
ted in some disbelief. After helping her father in his store for so many years—and having been in indentured servitude before that—Sabina was accustomed to waking up before first light.

  “I asked her to give it a try. That’s what normal teens are supposed to do on the weekends, right?” Having grown up in a series of foster homes, Abigail had never been a normal teenager herself.

  “Well, I certainly did my share of sleeping in on the weekends,” Nate said.

  “Me too,” I admitted. “It seems like a long time ago. Let’s let her sleep. Besides, why worry her? She has enough on her plate. The Twitter rumor is just Quinn’s way of sending us a message. No point in worrying Sabina. The Internet will move on by school time Monday—a day or two at the most, isn’t that the rule?—so she probably won’t even hear about it. We can come up with some excuse as to why Celer is at Mary’s, that he needs more vet shots or something.”

  Mary Kirkland lived in St. Paul, a two-hour drive away. It was a thin story, but Sabina was in the unenviable position of having to accept everything that was to her unusual as being normal here. I felt a slight pang of guilt but pushed it aside.

  Nate’s brow had acquired a dark furrow at the mention of my ex-husband. He nodded. “All right then. I’ll drop Celer off at my grandmother’s, then swing back here later with Wanda’s bed and grooming brush. C’mon, Celer.”

  Celer gave Nate a humph sort of look at being forced to move from his sunny spot but climbed into the passenger seat of the Jeep anyway.

  “Don’t worry,” Nate told him. “Kunshi will take good care of you.”

  Abigail went back into the house, closing the door behind her softly so as not to wake up Sabina. Nate hopped into the Jeep. “Wanda likes to be walked three times each day,” he instructed me.

  “Three?”

  “Four would be better. A good mile each time. One of my retired neighbors helps me out with that during the workweek.”

  “I didn’t know that. All right, will do.” As he snapped in a dog safety restraint and received an outraged look from Celer in return, I added, “When you bring Wanda’s things later, do you want to stay for dinner—and, er, breakfast? Abigail and Sabina are planning on pizza and a movie. I could pick up a bottle of wine and some Swedish meatballs from Ingrid’s for us.”

  “It’s a date. I’ll bring dessert.”

  “Can you make it something good and not, you know, fruit?”

  “What’s wrong with fruit?” We always teased each other about our opposite predilections for food—Nate opted for healthy choices, and I preferred taste to nutrition. Shaking his head at me in mock disapproval, he said, “I have a pecan pie in the freezer. Will that do?”

  “And vanilla ice cream?”

  “And vanilla ice cream.”

  Holding Wanda’s collar as a precaution against her running after the Jeep, I watched Nate back out of the driveway. It felt good to have outwitted Quinn. I didn’t think he was a real threat anyway. He was just needling us a bit, making sure he didn’t get into any trouble over the fallout of his miserably failed attempt at blackmail. It would all pass in a day or two, and we’d swap the dogs back. Everything would return to normal, or what passed for it. We were three adults—four, counting Quinn—who were playing games, making decisions as if Sabina’s opinion mattered not at all.

  Sabina rolled out of bed at around nine thirty, embarrassed to have slept so late. She didn’t complain when we explained that Celer had been sent to Mary Kirkland’s house for a few days, but she was quiet all day, even when dutifully helping me walk Wanda.

  The call came later, when I was sipping a refreshing cup of tea at the kitchen table, having just spent a good twenty minutes rolling a ball along the living room carpet for Wanda to chase after. Sabina was next door doing homework, and Abigail was on her way back from campus with pizza for the two of them. As for my part of the house, a plateful of Ingrid’s Swedish meatballs was warming in the oven, and I was expecting Nate’s footsteps outside the front door any minute. I thought the phone might be Nate calling to say that he was running late.

  It wasn’t Nate. It was Professor Mooney.

  “Julia, we have a problem.”

  I set the cup down. Xavier was not calling at dinnertime on a Saturday evening to tell me that we needed to order more staplers for the lab or that STEWie’s generator required a new part. What had gone wrong in the TTE lab this time? Another case of attempted murder? Had someone—again—used STEWie for a joyride into the past? I was ready for anything.

  “Sabina—she came here tonight. She’s gone, Julia.”

  “What? Where?”

  “Back in time.”

  I hadn’t been ready for this.

  2

  “That’s impossible,” I said, almost knocking over the teacup as I scrambled to my feet. “She’s next door, doing her homework. I can hear the TV—the Weather Channel is on. Abigail went to get some work done on her thesis and is picking up a pizza for the two of them on her way back from campus. They’re thinking of catching a movie later,” I added, as if that settled matters.

  Wanda had jumped up from under the table when I did, anticipating more playtime, and was hovering around my feet with her tongue hanging out.

  “Hold on, Dr. Mooney, I’m going next door to check.”

  “Julia—”

  But I was already out the back door, cell phone in hand, with Wanda at my heels. The mother-in-law suite shared by Sabina and Abigail had a separate entrance from the back deck. I knocked, as I always do—it was my house, yes, but it was their living space—then, when there was no answer, I peeked in through the window. The curtains were drawn, but a crack in their middle allowed me to see inside. The TV was on louder than usual and was showing some kind of blizzard disaster story. There was no one on the couch watching it.

  “Julia?” Professor Mooney’s voice crackled faintly through the phone in my hand.

  The door was not locked. Wanda and I went in and I turned off the TV, then called out, “Sabina? Abigail?” and received no answer. The suite consisted of a small living room, where Abigail slept on the sofa, a half kitchen, Sabina’s bedroom, and a bathroom. All were easily checked and all were empty.

  An odd impulse led me to slide open the closet in Sabina’s bedroom. She wasn’t inside, of course, but I glanced around, as if the neatly organized shelves might hold a clue to where she was. Her Pompeii clothes, a simple dress and sandals, were not on the top shelf where she usually kept them.

  Almost tripping over Wanda, who had quieted down a bit, as if picking up that something was wrong, I turned and took a good second look around the room. The walls, covered with photos we had taken in Pompeii and lists and notes Abigail and I had crafted to help Sabina acclimate to modern life, told me nothing. Her bed had been made—she excelled at keeping up with her chores, which had always made me uneasy rather than pleased. Like I said, she had toiled away much of her young life as an indentured servant, then as helper in her father’s shop, so it would have been refreshing to see her bedroom messy once in a while.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Julia?”

  I picked up the square wooden frame from the bedside table. What was usually in it was a snapshot, the same one that was on my desk at work, of Sabina with her twenty-first-century family: Abigail and me, Nate, Xavier, Helen, Kamal, and Jacob, all of us at our Fourth of July picnic two months ago by Sunniva Lake.

  The frame was empty.

  I sat down on the bed, wrinkling its crisp sheets. Wanda jumped up next to me, and I didn’t even have the heart to tell her to get down.

  She was gone. Sabina really was gone.

  3

  Pedal to the floor, I drove my aged Honda down Thornberg’s quiet streets to campus. Abigail, who had shown up at the house balancing a pizza box on her bike handlebars, was next to me in the passenger seat. She had left the bike and the pizza in the garage, both of us still not quite believing that Sabina wasn’t on some impromptu stroll around the neighbo
rhood. I had texted Nate to meet us at the lab.

  “Wait a second,” Abigail said as a red traffic light temporarily halted us. “Tell me again what Dr. Mooney said.”

  “Just that she has jumped back in time.”

  “To where? How?”

  I had no answers. “Did you know she came to campus today?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I wonder how she got into the lab without anyone noticing…And, more importantly, how did she know how to work STEWie?”

  “Well, the thing is, Dr. Mooney has been letting her help with his Slingshot experiments.”

  I hadn’t known that. Sabina often spent her after-school hours in the grad student office where Abigail had her desk, doing her homework, or just wandered the campus people-watching—and, apparently, hanging out in the time-travel research lab. As the light turned green and I slammed the pedal to the floor again, Abigail added, “Damn. Do you think she figured out that the real reason we swapped Celer and Wanda was to protect her?”

  “And decided to jump back to Pompeii, no longer wanting to be used as ammunition for Quinn to blackmail us with?…I don’t know. But it couldn’t be pre-eruption Pompeii she jumped to, could it? She was already there then.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “What?”

  “What if she jumped back straight into the eruption, or its aftermath?”

  Well, that was an awful thought. I shoved it aside as we pulled into the parking lot. “Whatever happened, we’re going to get her back. That’s all there is to it. Even if we have to check every nook and cranny of History to find her.”

  We hurried into the TTE building. Oscar, the security guard, gave us a friendly wave. Used to the various comings and goings in the TTE lab, he didn’t seem surprised to see us there on a Saturday night. Time travel does not fit neatly into a nine-to-five schedule, but then again neither does Oscar, who hardly needs any sleep and spends most of his day at his post.