The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “If you folks need a bathroom, I can point you toward one,” Marlin called out to us. He had appeared out of nowhere and was cleaning up the trash left behind by the St. Sunniva students. I was a little embarrassed for them.

  We did indeed need a bathroom. I was hopping from one foot to the other.

  “I paid to use the one at the motel,” Dr. Little said.

  Marlin approached with a selection of empty beer and Coke bottles hugged to his chest. The malodorous newspaper package, whatever it had held, was gone—another mystery lost to the sands of time. The bright morning sun revealed every leathery line above his scruffy beard, the result of both decades of Florida sunshine and age.

  “The motel owner is a friend of mine. Let me put these in a safe place”—he was speaking of the bottles—“and I’ll take the ladies over.”

  I stopped near Udo’s Ford Mustang, whose red was dusty and bug-splattered from the long drive south, and bent down to pretend-tie my shoe. Marlin had accepted an offer of coffee at the motel from the owner, a middle-aged woman with beads around her neck, and Dr. Little had stayed by the pier with our things.

  “That’s a sweet ride for a college student,” I heard Abigail say under her breath.

  The students were in the empty parking spot between the Mustang and the art bus, eating breakfast, some in lawn chairs, others on their feet, leaning against the art bus. When Xave had described it as being painted many different colors, he wasn’t kidding. Reds, blues, violets all swirled together like a fever-induced dream. The side door was open, revealing a messy interior—clothes, maps, bags, and other assorted belongings lay strewn on the seats. Soren—my dad, but he was too young for me to think of him that way—swung out and joined the others. So he had come along after all but must have spent the night sleeping inside the VW, probably because of his allergies.

  I suddenly realized that I knew who owned the art bus—my father did. In fact, I had a vague recollection of seeing a picture of him and my mother in front of some van or other, but it had been a black-and-white photo, so the vehicle hadn’t stuck in my memory. I hadn’t made the connection until this very moment.

  He offered Missy, who was in a lawn chair, a donut. She already had one, though, and had given half to Nathaniel. Some distance away Gigi was in a lawn chair pointedly reading a book (Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, I noticed; what did Udo think of that one?). Soren passed the pastry to her. She took it.

  It was all, for want of a better word, irritating. No one was acting like they were supposed to be, and none of the future life partners were neatly paired off. The pentagon I thought I had detected last night went something like this: Soren was only interested in Missy; Missy was mad at him for some reason and flirted alternately with Udo and Nathaniel; Nathaniel and Gigi seemed to have had a falling-out over Missy’s attentions, so Gigi was flirting with Udo; and Udo—he was like a eunuch, only interested in his art. He was draped over a lawn chair, not eating, silently studying the others, as if observing human behavior. There were bags under his eyes.

  No wonder Sabina had been able to come along with the book club—not only did Udo have only hours left but the others were all busy with their own problems.

  But where was she?

  “You don’t think she wandered away from the book club, do you?” I whispered to Abigail uneasily, having straightened up after taking as long as humanly possible to tie my shoelaces.

  But Sabina had come around from behind the VW. She paused briefly, and for a hopeful moment I thought she might have seen us from across the parking lot, but it was not to be—not just then, anyway. She had stopped to take in the ocean view, as many a visitor to Estero Island did. Someone offered her a donut and she took it. She was still in Dr. Mooney’s old lab coat and had unbuttoned it as the morning warmed up.

  Leaving the ten of them—Sabina, Udo, Missy and Soren, Gigi and Nathaniel, and four other students whose names I didn’t know—to enjoy their outdoor breakfast, we went to rejoin Dr. Little by the pier.

  He greeted us with a frown on his face.

  “What?” I said.

  “I was right.”

  “About?”

  “There does appear to be an impermeable bubble around the book club. I tried approaching them to ask for a cigarette light while you were using the restroom in the motel.”

  “You smoke?” I asked.

  “It was a pretext. I carry a pack for occasions such as this. Like I said, I tried to approach with a cigarette in hand, but History had other ideas. So it appears I may have been right. Because of the gravity of today’s events, the members of the book club are locked into their actions for the day.”

  Abigail and I had noticed the bubble, too. “Hopefully, there’ll be an opportunity at the estate, assuming they head there right after breakfast,” I said.

  “I wish we had confirmation that the CSI is on the Edison Estate. We only have your guess to go on, Julia.”

  If he had made the “guess,” he would have probably called it a deduction, or at least a hypothesis, but I didn’t quibble.

  Abigail gave a sudden peal of delight and pointed. “Is that a dolphin? I’ve never seen one except at the Minnesota Zoo. I wonder if it’s Fred.”

  The dolphin, gray and smooth-skinned, frolicked in the water. Everything on the island seemed smaller and more intimate in the light of day—the motels and hotels, the cars.

  Dr. Little noted, “We’re not here to sightsee. Better check that we haven’t left anything behind.” He unfolded the map Dr. B and Nate had sent us. “The Thomas A. Edison Winter Home & Museum is not within walking distance.”

  “It’s about twenty-five minutes by car, if we had one. We can hardly go on foot, so we’ll have to use the Slingshot.” As we finished packing up, I added, “If you’re right about the book club being locked into their day, Dr. Little, why don’t we skip going to the Edison Estate and jump to the causeway, after the accident?”

  Abigail lost her smile. “No, we should definitely try before.”

  There was something in her tone I couldn’t put my finger on. I assumed that, like me, she was disturbed about not being able to save Udo. Thinking it might help us all to bring it out into the open, I said, “I know now there’s nothing we can do for Udo. I wish there was, that’s all. When I talked to him in the middle of the night, I kept brainstorming about how we could help him…but we can’t.”

  “You talked to him?” Abigail asked.

  “I didn’t learn anything we didn’t know already…except about him as a person. I wanted to grab your cell phone, Abigail, and use it to record his words, preserve a bit of him.” I sighed. “Not much we could do beyond that, is there?”

  Dr. Little zipped his duffel bag crisply. “I’m afraid it might be worse than that.”

  My own backpack was ready, too, so I swung it over one shoulder and went over to face Dr. Little. “What’s worse than knowing somebody is going to die but being unable to stop it?”

  Abigail’s face crumpled. “He may very well take Sabina with him.”

  24

  “Uh, no,” I said in a brisk tone, as if this were an office problem to be dealt with and not a matter of life and death. Sabina’s. “The newspaper story said they were still searching for the driver’s body. There was no mention of any passengers.”

  Dr. Little spelled it out, though I already had an inkling of what he was going to say. “I don’t know how deep the waters are by the causeway, but the authorities might not realize that there was a second person in the car. If Sabina’s body is found weeks from now—well, she’ll just be a Jane Doe.”

  I brought out the only counterargument I could think of. “Wouldn’t the other students—Gilberte, at least, since she was the one who invited Sabina along—tell the police that there was a passenger in the car?”

  “For all we know, the others may assume Sabina wandered off as suddenly as she showed up. They must know by now that she’s not a student. Even if they mention it to the pol
ice, they may not be believed. After all, no such person as Sabina Tanner exists in 1976.” He was silent for a bit, then added, “I hate to say it, but History may be about to right itself by letting the girl be lost forever. The scales of time need to be balanced.”

  History may right itself by letting the girl be lost forever.

  I dropped my backpack on the sand in anger. “Did everyone see this possibility but me? Is that why Dr. B sent us to the beach last night, so we could try to save Sabina before it’s too late?”

  If Dr. Little was right, the cold, hard truth was that Sabina might perish in a watery death, from which we would need an abundance of good luck to save her. I had not come all the way here to let that happen. I said as much.

  “I’m with you on that, Julia,” Abigail said.

  Dr. Little stared at us. “I’m not saying otherwise. What I’m saying is…Well, all we can do is try. Assuming they’re heading over to the Edison Estate shortly, we should jump there and wait for a good moment to pull Sabina out. Why don’t you two go back to the parking lot to see if you can overhear anything that confirms the location of Udo’s CSI while I run the necessary calculations on my laptop?” Shielding the laptop from curious eyes behind the duffel, he bent over the Fort Myers map. “Let’s see. It looks like there’s a parking lot at the estate that would be a good place for us to jump…”

  Gigi had put away the hardcover book. The students were done with breakfast and, I couldn’t help but notice, had scattered more litter. How hard was it to find the nearest can and pitch your trash into it? Udo was already in the Ford Mustang, with the top down and the engine running. He revved the engine and, one hand on the leather steering wheel, waved Sabina over to the front passenger seat. It was a calculated decision, I thought, to avoid bad feelings between Missy and Gigi, who, with what could only be described as pouts, tumbled into the backseat. He took off, driving far too fast.

  Nathaniel and Soren, having stared at the retreating Mustang, gave a shrug and started to fold up the lawn chairs. Abigail was still a bit puzzled as to which of the students was who, and I explained that the woman in the sari had been Gilberte “Gigi” Dubois, who was not yet using her married name of Kirkland. Abigail listened to what I had to say, then, perhaps in an attempt to distract me from the more pressing matter, said, “If you want my honest opinion, I don’t think either of the women is attracted to Udo so much as what he represents.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “You know, writerhood. Besides, both Missy and Gigi are with other people, aren’t they?”

  “True.”

  “Speaking of being with people, are you and Nate thinking about marriage?”

  “What? No,” I said, a bit more loudly than I intended, causing Soren to throw a brief glance over one shoulder at us. Why was she even asking me this when I was out of my mind with worry about Sabina—and, I was sure, she was too? Besides, Nate and I had been dating only a few weeks, though admittedly it felt longer because of all the time travel. Plus my divorce from Quinn had only just gone through, not to mention the whole complication with Nate Sr. hanging out with my mother, which I was pretty sure meant nothing. I just wished I could be a 100 percent sure.

  “Marriage is the last thing on my mind.”

  “The last?”

  “All right, perhaps not the last, but it’s at the bottom of the list, right along with clearing the house gutters and repainting the mailbox.” Thinking that she might be a tad crushed to hear me speak of marriage that way (I knew there hadn’t been anybody in her life since Dave, who had moved on during our five-month disappearance in Pompeii, having assumed, along with everyone else, that we were dead), I clarified. “Look, all I’m saying is that there’s no need to rush into these things. Engagement, marriage, all that.”

  “Right, well, I guess that’s a good philosophy.”

  Nathaniel and Soren had stashed the chairs in the VW, with the other four students, whose names we didn’t know—two men and two women—helping. Everyone seemed excited to finally be heading to the CSI. Soon the art bus also pulled out of the parking lot, though it set a course in the direction of the mainland bridge at a far more moderate pace. Dad had always been a careful driver.

  There was nothing further to be gleaned from the empty parking spaces with their trail of litter, and Abigail and I turned to go. At least we had one thing going for us: a hint that we had been correct in our guess about where the book club was headed. As he was pulling out of the parking lot, Udo had called back to the others, “Onward to Edison’s tree!”

  Abigail and I headed back to the pier.

  Dr. Little wasn’t there.

  25

  Abigail and I had been gone no more than ten, fifteen minutes, but apparently that had been long enough for History to send the professor back—Dr. Little had left behind a hastily scribbled note, tucked into the gap between the cement pillar of the pier and the sand, the checkered page ripped out of one of his research notebooks:

  Starting to feel odd, light-headed. Shallow breathing. My birth cutoff. Will send the Slingshot back via STEWie. Good luck. — Dr. Steven Little

  Even though I was a month older, History had sent Dr. Little back first after all. Abigail and I concluded that he must already be home safe and sound, because we found the Slingshot nearby, wrapped in Dr. Little’s blanket. The professor had also sent the Edison Estate coordinates, the grid map of Fort Myers, some cash, two bags of trail mix, and his laptop—presumably in case we (meaning Abigail) needed to calculate new coordinates.

  “I wonder if he really did feel light-headed, or if the lack of shoes started to get to him,” Abigail said half jokingly, unwrapping the Slingshot and blowing a bit of sand off it.

  “I suppose I wouldn’t blame him if it was the shoes. It’s one thing to walk on the beach barefoot and quite another to do it all over town. Either way, I guess it’s just you and me now.”

  I shook the blanket out in case we had missed anything. There was nothing from Nate—no note. I fought off my disappointment. He was probably too busy with things at his end.

  I turned to Abigail. “If Dr. Little really did have to drop out and it wasn’t his footwear, and I suddenly do as well…”

  “Then it will be up to me to bring Sabina back.”

  “Count me in,” Marlin said. “ I got nothing planned for today. And I owe you for the shoes.”

  He was like a jack-in-the-box, popping up everywhere we went. I wondered if he had seen Dr. Little disappear into thin air and, just moments later, the Slingshot and other items reappear wrapped in a blanket, and if so, what he had made of it. I made a decision. If History was willing to let Marlin help us, who was I to object? There was no reason not to accept his offer of help. As familiar as I was with the future Fort Myers, he was obviously much more familiar with the current town.

  And—maybe—Marlin being allowed to help us was a sign that History was on our side, that Sabina would not be in Udo’s car when it went over.

  Besides, if I did have to drop out as Dr. Little had, I didn’t want Abigail to be in this alone.

  “Thank you, Marlin. We’re happy to accept your offer of help,” I said. Abigail sent a surprised look in my direction but didn’t say a word.

  “We gonna try to follow your students?” Marlin asked. “You want me to organize transport? A friend of mine runs an off-the-books taxi service. He’d give you a mighty proper discount.”

  “Thanks, but we already have transport.” So he hadn’t seen Dr. Little vanish off Estero Island in a seeming violation of the laws of physics and reality after all. Well, he was in for a surprise. I thought I’d better warn him. “You’re welcome to come along, Marlin. Just—well, be aware it’s a bit unorthodox.”

  “Unorthodox suits me just fine.”

  “All right then. Abigail, are you ready with the you-know-what?”

  She nodded and Marlin said, “Which way, ladies?”

  “We aren’t catching a ride. We’re going to have to, u
h, link hands—”

  “Well, Udo didn’t say they were going to come here directly,” I pointed out. Having a faster mode of transport, we had arrived at the estate ahead of the book club. But it had already been half an hour. I checked the parking lot again, as if the Ford Mustang and the art bus could have somehow snuck in past our post on the sidewalk by the lot entrance. The parking lot held a handful of station wagons—to my modern eye, it seemed odd that there weren’t any SUVs—and also a telephone booth tucked into one corner.

  “Could they have stopped for ice cream or coffee or whatever?” Abigail suggested.

  “But they just had breakfast,” I protested.

  “Nothing wrong with stopping for ice cream right after breakfast,” Marlin said. He had taken our Slingshotting from Estero Island to the Edison Estate in stride, his only comment being “What will they come up with next?” He had shaken his head at the speediness of it all, as if we were messing with nature. Were we? Probably, but like with any technology, there was no going back. Abigail and I had told Marlin that the Slingshot was an experimental apparatus and held back the important detail about us being from the future.

  “Could we have heard wrong? Maybe the tree is somewhere else?” Abigail asked after a few more minutes had passed.

  “You heard Udo. He definitely said Edison’s tree. It’s got to be here on the estate.”

  There were certainly plenty of trees all around. In fact, we were under one. Tall, graceful palms lined McGregor Boulevard like a squadron of slender, top-heavy soldiers, swaying gently in the calm morning. The estate sprawled on both sides of the boulevard, and there were trees of all kinds to be seen on either side of the road.