Time-Travel Duo

by James Paddock

  “The reason for my return to Chicago was to use the medical university to help place me in a job. I turned down several offers before Roper Hospital came along. It was perfect – practically in the back yard of a major naval base and shipyard. And they needed me as fast as I could get there.”

  “When Sam told me he was leaving again,” Francine said, “I decided I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself and beg to go with him. Instead I became angry and spiteful. When he asked me to go with him, my “NO!” spilled out among a stack of four-letter words. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was pregnant.”

  “With Rebecca?” Abigail said.

  “Yes. That was a very humiliating time. I waited just a bit too long to quit my job and when I did, everyone knew why. I had to face my parents and ask for help. And I didn’t hear from Sam for a year and a half. If I had, I would have read him the riot act again and then moved to Charleston whether he asked or not.”

  “It wasn’t like I didn’t write,” Sam said. “I just never sent the letters, until a year later, summer of ‘43. I forced myself to mail one. It came back, addressee unknown, the day before Anne’s arrival. I remember seeing her in the exam room that first time, thoughts of Francine fresh on my mind. My heart jumped because she looked like Francine. Of course I realized right away she wasn’t. It was twenty years later before I understood the reason for the resemblance.”

  Chapter 77

  Saturday ~ November 14, 1987

  “I walked away from the beach house 44 years ago today. It took me well over a week to get to Chicago, get cleaned up, both physically and mentally, and find Francine. Someone else lived in her apartment. The people at the bookstore, where she no longer worked, wouldn’t tell me anything. It wasn’t like they didn’t know. They just weren’t going to say. Later I was standing on the sidewalk outside the store when one young clerk grabbed my arm, shoved a piece of paper into my hand and said, ‘This is where she’s living now. With her parents.’”

  Francine said, “I was hiding with my parents because back then women didn’t get pregnant without a husband. When Sam showed up at my door, I didn’t know what to do, or what to feel. He dumped me once and I dumped him the second time. This time his daughter was asleep in my bedroom.”

  “But she invited me in anyway and I knew immediately there was a baby in the house. I can’t even remember how I knew – a smell or baby things lying about – I’m not sure. Her parents weren’t home. We sat and talked for some time before I got up the courage to ask the question – ‘When did you become a mother?’ ‘She was nine months old yesterday,’ she told me. It didn’t take me long to figure out she was born February 27, just as Anne foretold. ‘She’s yours you know.’ I went into shock.”

  Francine said, “I thought it was the sudden news that he was a father that created the blank look on his white face.”

  “What she didn’t know was I wasn’t shocked that we shared a baby. I was shocked that somehow, Anne Waring, traveler from the future, knew about it, knew all about me.”

  “So I told him to leave.”

  “I pulled myself out of my deep thoughts long enough to ask if I could see her, our baby.”

  “I told him again to leave, that he could see Rebecca as soon as he was ready to deal with my father. That meant not to come back until he had a plan for his family.”

  “‘Otherwise my father will kill you,’ she added. I hardly even heard those words because it was right then I remembered that not only did Anne tell me what and when, but also who. Only seconds before she was shot and disappeared into the Atlantic, she said that my daughter’s name was Rebecca.”

  “So you knew way back then,” James said, “that Rebecca would become Anne’s mother?”

  “Oh, Lord no. It never even occurred to me that we might be related. I left Francine’s house in a daze. Didn’t return for three weeks. I spent about four days hanging around my Aunt’s house trying to think it all out. I finally came to the conclusion that no matter how much I thought, I wasn’t going to sort it out. I did figure that sometime in the next 44 years, Anne Waring would turn up in my life and it would all make sense, so lacking anything else to do, I put it away. I did start questioning my aunt, though, about my parents’ death.

  “‘I guess it’s time you knew,’ she said to me and she went on to tell me about the underground and the fact that they weren’t killed by American forces, but by the German Army. When I got angry at her for not telling me twenty-five years before, she only shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘You were just a child.’

  “I was just a child!

  “Between my departure in 1923 and my showing up at her house in November of 1943, Aunt Aileen saw me only a couple times, and that was during medical school. She knew virtually nothing about me other than what was written to her by cousin Otto, and I don’t know what that was. Whatever it was, she didn’t want me hanging around. She handed me a wad of cash, and said, ‘Thanks to your folks, you’re an American citizen. Get yourself one of those new social security cards and a job,’ and then kicked me out.

  “I was 37 years old. I couldn’t remain in medicine as my degree was linked to Nathaniel Bronson. I had to lose that name and everything associated with it. My American citizenship was under Nathaniel Samuelson Frick. I found a job as a security officer for a manufacturing warehouse. From there I worked my way on up, marrying Francine in January of ’44, and moving down to Will County where I eventually was hired on as a sheriff’s deputy. In 1960 I won election for sheriff and remained in that job until I retired in 1974.”

  “How did you build this company, Broad Horizons?” James asked. “It must have taken millions to finance this project.”

  “Between myself and these people here, including Broad Horizons, we are worth close to a billion. Would you think that’s about right, Henry?”

  “Close.” Henry nodded his head.

  “And every one of us has one person to thank. Annabelle Waring, my granddaughter. When I returned to the beach house before departing for Chicago, I retrieved a dozen and a half vinyl records – recordings of my sessions with Anne in 1943 when she was trying to sort out her memories. Recall that when she was making those recordings I knew who she was, how she got there. She didn’t. She told me not only of her life but also about the society in her head – one full of technical progress and highly successful companies.”

  James and Abigail’s mouths dropped and their eyes went from person to person down the table, until they arrived back at Sam.

  “That’s right. It’s a big circle. The question is, at what point did it start? Anne Waring gave me the information necessary so that I could build enough wealth to begin a project which would eventually send her back in time so that she could give me the information.”

  “I get a headache thinking about it,” Gracy said.

  “When Francine and I were married, I boxed up the records and the recorder in a chest under lock and key. Then I raised enough fuss about it the first time she asked, that she never asked again. They remained in that chest for 18 years, pretty much forgotten, until July of ‘62 when Becky introduced Robert Hair to us.”

  Francine said, “I remember Sam saying, ‘We need to talk. I need to show you something.’ He led me into his den where I found the chest he guarded our whole married life and a stack of records. Talk about confused. I’d lost my daughter and his explanation was going to involve music. I was dressed for church, feeling very badly the need to attend that morning. ‘This is much more important,’ he said. ‘I’m going to answer all your questions.’ So I sat down and for the next couple of hours, forgot about the records and church. I learned instead that my husband was a Nazi spy.”

  “Was!” Sam said. “‘Was’ is the key word.”

  “Yes, yes. But at the time it made no difference. I was devastated.”

  “I told her everything beginning with the death of my parents and ending with my leaving South Carolina. I left out anything about Anne and time tr
avel. I figured I had to get past this part first. She took it as badly as I feared, a lot worse than I hoped.”

  “I left him. I walked out of that room, forgetting that he hadn’t yet explained why he kicked out my daughter. I packed a suitcase and left. I equated Nazis with Communists and in 1962 they were both dirty words. He made no attempt to stop me. What he did say before I went out the door was, ‘If you believe all of that, then you have to believe that it all ended in 1943. I’m now as American as anyone. But, there’s a lot more. When you’re ready to hear it, I’ll be here.’

  “I went to my parent’s house who were off in New York celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. It was hot. The temperatures were hanging in the mid-nineties and the house had been closed up. I sweltered there, with hot blowing fans, for a couple hours and tried to understand how Sam being a Nazi led to my losing my daughter. When I couldn’t stand it any longer – the heat and not knowing – I returned home.”

  “Needless to say,” Sam broke in, “it took a while to convince her.”

  “But you did,” Abigail said.

  Sam looked at Francine who then said, “Not right off. I spent all night listening to those recordings and Sam’s explanations of it all. What I heard was some woman babbling about her loss of memory and then recollection of a life that couldn’t possibly exist. The very last record that he played, the first recorded but which he saved for last, sent a shiver down my spine like you wouldn’t believe. The words from the woman were, ‘I’m Annabelle Carol Waring. My maiden name is Annabelle Carol Hair. I was born March 20, 1963 in Fargo, North Dakota. My mother’s name is Rebecca Patricia Hair. My father’s name is Robert William Hair.’

  “But I still didn’t believe him. I figured he concocted this entire thing, got someone to play the part and make the recordings, and I told him so. All he said was wait eight months. He said that if Annabelle Carol isn’t born to our daughter, he would gladly be checked into a mental hospital.”

  “Eight months?” Abigail said. “Then Rebecca was already pregnant. Did you know that?”

  “No. I talked to her. I made secret phone calls. She didn’t go to the doctor to find out until she was nearly two months. There was no way Sam could have known. So I waited until March and sure enough, as she said on the record, Annabelle was born on the first day of spring. I arrived at the hospital in time to witness the birth. Later Becky and Robert argued over the name. This is the funny part. They argued and argued, asked my opinion and his mother’s opinion, both of which they didn’t get, and then settled on Nancy Anne Hair.”

  “Nancy!” James said.

  “Yes, Nancy.” Francine laughed.

  James and Abigail looked at each other.

  “Needless to say, Sam was perplexed. He, of course, had no doubt that this baby would be Annabelle Carol so the news was quite a shock to him. I, on the other hand, saw a deranged husband. I didn’t forget that he got absolutely everything else correct. I just figured that somehow he made it all up. A few days later I called to ask how Becky and Nancy were doing and got a very curt response that her name wasn’t Nancy; it was Annabelle. Annabelle Carol. They changed it at the last minute, after I left.”

  “And so, here we are,” Sam said.

  “And you knew everything that would happen,” James said matter-of-factly.

  “No, no. Certainly not everything. After I was burglarized in September of ’43, I knew I would be found out, so I had to disappear. It was after that when Anne started receiving communications from Steven and the team. Of this I had no such knowledge. Instructions were coded in the letter that I lost in the burglary; a code I suspected was there but could never make sense of. I did learn she was going back, and where she was living, only by accident. I was having lunch downtown when your mother, Anne and the Thigpen girls sat down at a table behind me. I was well disguised. They talked about the fact that Anne was returning to her husband and never coming back. At that time I considered my overhearing the conversation and learning where she was living as a stroke of good luck. Now, of course, I see it as a stroke of design. It was meant to take place. It couldn’t happen any other way. Anne and I were only puppets in this bizarre play, just as you and everyone else in this room.

  “After Nancy Anne became Annabelle Carol, Francine believed me. She insisted on listening to the recordings again, which we did and then a dozen times more in bits and pieces over the following years – and we began investing. It was from things Anne said about her 44-year advanced society that we figured out what investments to make. We were not bad off even though a sheriff’s pay is not all that great. I had been investing already based on some things I remembered Anne talking about - primarily IBM and AT&T - and had a pretty good base to begin our serious wealth building. At first, that was all we were doing - building wealth.”

  Francine broke in. “Sam doesn’t know that I didn’t entirely believe. There was still that doubt in my mind. What if he got to Becky and convinced her to change the name? I never asked Becky - we didn’t communicate much anymore - as I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I really did want to believe. What ended up nailing it was something Anne said on one of the records. She said that President Kennedy would be assassinated on November 22, 1963. That was a fact I could focus on, something that Sam could not arrange. It was a strange feeling to sit in front of the TV that morning and watch it happen. All doubt was gone and I began fully supporting Sam in his investments, eventually taking control of the books. It became my job to keep track of it all. I became a stock market expert.”

  “When did you start Broad Horizons?”

  “Much later,” Sam said. “First things first.” He picked up his coffee cup, looked at it and said, “I need a refill.” Then there was a bustle as everyone got a coffee, juice, pastry; whatever was to their liking, and settled back down.

  “And so we invested and watched Annabelle grow up from a distance. Something inside me said I had to stay away. I could not get to know my granddaughter. I think Becky remained angry at my throwing her out in ‘61. Although Francine visited her a few times over the years, Becky remained rather cold to her as well. That was something I always regretted, but, as you know, there was probably nothing I could have done differently.

  “And then came the day I thought my life was over. It was a Monday morning in 1972. There had been a murder/suicide over the weekend, unheard of in Will County, and I was trying to sort through the paper work and reports when a young woman asked to see me about something very personal. She didn’t want to talk there. She wanted to go somewhere more private. I argued that I could close the door and we would have all the privacy we needed. I was in no mood to go running out. When there’s a murder on your watch you start feeling like things are falling down around your ears. I ended up leaving with her without so much as a blink of an eyelash. All she said was, ‘We need to talk about Nathaniel Bronson.’”

  “Who was the woman?” James was riveted to the story.

  Sam smiled and then his eyes went to the woman sitting at the opposite end of the table. James and Abigail’s heads turned to follow.

  “Remember that day in ‘46 when you and my father visited the beach house?” Gracy said.

  “What were you? Thirteen maybe?” James asked.

  “Twelve. I was entranced by the idea of a German spy.”

  “And you asked questions enough to drive both me and your father crazy.”

  Gracy laughed. “I was just getting into diaries at that time and I wrote everything you both told me in mine, asked more questions of my father, and wrote more. Eventually, though I lost interest in that and the whole diary thing. The diary wound up in a chest full of dolls, games, and things I outgrew. The entire thing was forgotten until 1957. I was a journalism major. My professor assigned us to report on something that happened well in the past – at least ten years. This was a semester-long assignment designed to force us to do some serious research, interviews, probing, etc. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t come up with any
thing. Anyway, I was sitting in the Student Union Building, reading a life magazine – being lazy – when I overheard a couple of guys talking. All I remember now from the conversation is, ‘Do you think there were German spies in the United States during the war?’