Time-Travel Duo

by James Paddock

  “You can’t believe anything she says. She’s been out of her mind for years now.”

  “Actually, Dad, I don’t think she’s out of her mind. I think she is in her mind. She is stuck inside there with all her memories and every once-in-a-while one of the memories comes out.”

  “Should I be afraid to hear what strange thing she said?”

  “Why should you be afraid, Dad? I haven’t even said what it is yet.” She pulled the cake back toward her. “I don’t believe in superstition anyway.” She cut a thin slice and dropped it on her waiting plate. “Except the part about the birthday girl getting the first piece.” She cut a bigger one for her dad.

  Steven looked past it, his belly full of lasagna and his party appetite gone.

  “Great-grandma Frick said, ‘I still have it,’ and then she started going on about dying soon and that she wanted to make sure I knew she had it.”

  “It?” Steven said. “What is, it?”

  “I had no idea. But she thought I did. I asked her if she had it right there in the nursing home. She gave me this evil look like I would be so stupid to think otherwise. ‘Right in my jewelry box where it has been for fourteen years,’ she said. And then she told me to get the jewelry box so she could show me. She pulled out a ring box, so of course I thought she was talking about a special ring, maybe an old family heirloom. Instead, what was wrapped in tissue paper inside the box was a chunk of metal. She placed it in the palm of my hand and said, ‘This is the bullet that killed your mother.’”

  Steven looked away from his daughter’s piercing eyes, started to open his mouth to say something about great-Grandmother Frick being senile or having Alzheimer’s, or something. Don’t go digging a deeper hole, he told himself. She is way... way too smart. He pushed himself away from the table. “I need to be alone for a while.”

  In his study, Steven picked up the phone, dialed, drummed his fingers while he waited, and then said, “It’s time to tell her... I know she’s only fourteen. There’s nothing ‘only’ about her. She knows something and the sooner she learns the truth the better... Yeah, Sunday is good... at the house on Martha’s Vineyard.”

  Annie watched her father close the door to his study and then sit thoughtfully for a long time before cleaning up the dinner dishes. In her snooping and research, she came away with a lot of questions but not a single answer. She actually didn’t put a lot of credence in great-Grandma Frick’s words, until...

  “It happened fifty-eight years ago, and you’re getting onto old enough to know about it,” she said while still holding Annie’s open hand with the bullet resting in it, “but I’m too old and my memory is too gone. But I’ll tell you this...”

  “Francine. Time for your massage.”

  The two of them looked at the attendant poking his head in the door.

  “Damn!” Francine said. “Well, you just start asking questions.”

  “Ask who questions?”

  “Your Godparents.”

  “My Godparents! I have Godparents?”

  “Uncle James and Aunt Abby, Aunt Gracy, and Uncle Henry. Don’t forget Papa Hair. Great-grandpa Frick is no longer with us and I’m afraid, at 83 years old, I’m about as dependable as the weather.” She looked at the bullet in her great granddaughter’s hand and then closed Annie’s fingers over it. “This is now yours. Keep it safe. And you ask them, everyone of them, what happened fifty-eight years ago in 1987.”

  Fifty-eight years ago in 1987. If not for the fact that her great-grandmother was more lucid at that particular time than she had been for a year, Annie probably would have dismissed the comment. Now it kept playing in her head, like a riddle with a missing clue.

  After a time, she laid the puzzle aside and returned to her room, her mind flipping the pages of a book she had been reading, a book by her grandfather, Dr. Robert Hair. She was doing a research project just for fun to occupy her summer. She paged directly to chapter fourteen. It was titled Nuclear Tri-Generation. There was something about his theory that intrigued her. While digging through MIT’s library, she also ran onto a paper written by her father titled, Triple Jump Deviation, and then another coauthored by the two of them in 1982 combining the two theories. She had photocopies of them, as well as papers and books from Albert Einstein, Igor Novikov, Georg Bernhard Riemann, Edward Witten, and for fun, Carl Sagan.

  Well before the age of fourteen, Elizabeth Anne Waring chose her institute of higher learning even though they had yet to choose her. She would attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology because that was where her grandfather, her father, and most of all, her mother attended. On Sunday, July 22, 2001, 4 days after her fourteenth birthday, and her two-wish discussion across her birthday cake, Annie discovered her field of study. On that day, at the Cape house owned jointly by all the godparents – as Great-grandmother Frick called them in her lucid moment – Elizabeth Anne Waring learned the truth and discovered the answer to the riddle...

  ... Fifty-eight years ago in 1987.

  # # #

  Time Will Tell

  (Book 2)

  James R. Paddock

  Published by Desert Bookshelf Publishing

  Copyright © 2011 by James R. Paddock

  Cover photo and art by James R. Paddock

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locals is entirely coincidental.

  This book was printed in the United States of America.

  Thanks to my most loyal reader

  for her faith that I’d actually finish this one.

  Penny

  Annie seldom thought about her age, never talked about that summer in 1943 when her mother birthed her, about the fact that her mother died that same year, or that it might have been in 1987—there was no way of knowing for sure—or about the fact that after 64 years Annie had yet to observe her 20th birthday.

  Chapter 1

  February 5, 2007

  Annie swung her Toyota Camry Hybrid wide around a black government-looking sedan, pushed the button attached to her sun visor and turned into the long driveway. She slowed to wait for the garage door to fully open while glancing over her shoulder. Two men were getting out of the black car, one in a military uniform. Her heart quickened and her stomach twisted into a cold knot.

  No! Don’t be stupid, Annie, she told herself; probably someone to see dad.

  She looked into the triple-wide garage. The spot where her father’s SUV usually sat was empty. She brought the car to a stop without entering, put it in park and got out. The two men were coming up the drive; the bright day and contrasting snow exaggerated the blinding glare off the gold on the officer’s jacket. The brisk, cold wind that sent the already subfreezing temperature down to near zero and whipped her hair across her face was no match to the icy shiver already snaking down her spine.

  She shielded her eyes.

  “He’s not home.” She prayed that those simple words would turn them around and send them back into their huge black car. They did not turn around. They did not stop. “Did you hear me? I said my father is not home.”

  “Mrs. Caschetta?”

  “No.”

  “Mrs. Tony Caschetta?”

  She backed up a step, then another. “No!” But she knew. She had heard it on the radio only a couple of hours before: a roadside bomb, a single casualty, a half dozen injuries. It was terrible news, which, previous to Tony’s deployment not even two weeks before, she paid little attention to, news that she now had to assure herself over and over had nothing to do with him. Out of how many hundreds of thousands of troops in Iraq what were the chances one of those
in the news reports was him? She cautioned herself not to get worked up over every single grizzly news report.

  Name withheld upon notice of next-of-kin, the report had said, adding that the young marine was from the Boston area. How many Iraq-deployed marines were from Boston?

  The big military officer in the bright and shiny uniform kept coming.

  Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Please, no.”

  Chapter 2

  May 16, 2007

  “‘Over the last 30 years, the words ‘sustainable energy’ have gotten a little tired—not from overuse but from lack of progress.’ First of all, who said that?” A hand came up in the front row, the elbow failing to depart the armrest lest additional effort would be too strenuous. The professor looked down at the pear-shaped Charles Walshe who reminded Professor Grae of a parent squeezed into a kindergarten chair. He considered calling on him, the most intelligent student in his class, outside of Annie Caschetta of course, and then looked out over his head. “Anyone besides Mister Walshe? Come on people! It was only two years ago. Many of you, if not most, were undergraduates in this very college.”

  Grae’s eyes lighted upon a young man intent on the study of Ms. Caschetta’s upper anatomy. Annie Caschetta had come in late and was bent forward sorting through her backpack. She found what she was searching for and, without noticing the young man’s attention, came upright and turned to face the professor.

  “Are we ready to join the class, Ms. Caschetta?”

  “Sorry. Long way across campus.”

  “Yes, it is.” He turned to the admiring young man. “Mister Goodloe. I hate to interrupt you in your deep study, but could you tell us who made that statement?”

  Mister Goodloe jerked his eyes from Ms. Caschetta to his notebook, and then up at the professor. “Sir?”

  “The,” Professor Grae paused to count the words on his lecture stand, “twenty-two words I just spoke aloud less than a minute ago. Who said them?”

  Walshe’s hand eased up again. Professor Grae again ignored him. “Ms. Caschetta. Could you help us here?”

  “MIT’s President Hockfield, Sir.”

  “Really? And at what occasion did she say them?”

  “Her inaugural, May sixth of oh five, just a bare month before her announcement of the establishment of the Energy Research Council.”

  The professor clasped his hands behind his back and began slowly pacing. “The youngest first year graduate in my class, if I am not mistaken, who more often than not walks in late, yet who has always been able to have her full attention on my lecture the very second she steps through the door, and is the only one, besides Mr. Walshe, who can give me an answer to my question, and then expound on it with the exact point of my lecture, even though I haven’t gotten there yet.” He stopped and looked down at Ms. Caschetta. “How is it you do that, Ms. Caschetta?”

  She looked up at him, considered telling him it was the exact same advertisement, not lecture, that he gave last semester, then smiled and said, “Lucky guess . . . Sir?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Guess? You are a graduate student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the most prestigious academic institution of technology in the world. You, or should I say, we do not guess. We research. We study. We test. We apply new theories and from the results draw new conclusions. We then use those conclusions to develop new systems, and through more research and applied logic, as well as further testing, come to more conclusions, and so on and so forth and so on. On occasion we actually create new ways of doing things that become adopted by the general academic and scientific communities, and sometimes the general public, and thus change the world. At any time do we guess?”

  “No, Sir.”

  “Not guessing is ingrained in you I’m sure, Ms. Caschetta, especially knowing who your father is, and more precisely who your grandfather is. Do you ever guess, Ms. Caschetta?”

  “Well . . . I . . .”

  “You draw conclusions based on well grounded knowledge and observations.”

  A glow of soft crimson darkened her light complexion. She consciously forced her jaw not to tighten over the mention of her father and grandfather. Can’t anyone ever just give her credit, not find a way to point out that she might be riding on her paternal coattails, that she might, God forbid, be receiving special privileges? She thought things would get better when she married Tony and changed her name to Caschetta.

  But now . . . now what? Who am I now, and why did he have to remind me?

  She took a deep breath, held it for a second and then let it out. “An educated conclusion . . . Sir.” This drew laughter from the seventeen graduate students seated around her.

  Professor Grae smiled. “Certainly, Ms. Caschetta. Certainly.” He turned his attention away from his brightest student and looked at the back of the lecture hall. “It has been nearly two years since the formation of the Energy Research Council, of which I am a member.”

  As Professor Grae droned on about the long-range goals of the council, Annie Caschetta opened her notebook and pretended to be focused on preparing to short-hand his lecture once he was through with his ERC advertisement. In actuality, Annie seldom needed to take serious notes, having a mind quicker than her father’s, as sharp and brilliant as her mother’s.

  She ran her fingers through her hair. But that was before . . .

  “Hi, Annie.” While the remainder of the class rushed out, Beth Traner slid into the seat next to her friend and took her hand.

  “Hi.”

  “How you feeling?”

  Annie shrugged her shoulders. She was tired of having to tell people how she felt, or having to force a smile and lie, especially to Beth.

  “Ms. Caschetta.”

  Annie and Beth, the only students now left in the lecture hall, turned their heads up to face Professor Grae.

  “Do you have to be anywhere right now?” he asked.

  “No, Sir.”

  “Could I have a private word with you, then?”

  “Sure.”

  Beth stood. “I’ll catch up with you later. Why don’t you come over tonight and we’ll cook up something fancy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease.” She dragged out the please until she nearly ran out of breath. “You haven’t been over in ages.”

  Annie didn’t really want to, but she knew she should be getting out. She just felt so empty. When they were undergraduates, the year before they were married, she and Tony used to get together with Beth and Mikhail at least once a week, more often to study when they had classes in common. It was after graduation, when they were all still aglow and talking about graduate school, and while she was preparing for their wedding, when Tony announced that he was joining the Marines. It was after much consternation, and then rage that turned into silence, that Annie acquiesced. What choice did she have? He was joining the Marines whether she agreed or not. They married on the first day of July and cut their originally planned long honeymoon in half so that he could ship off to Quantico. After that it was one training after another. Their last wonderful time together was New Years Eve. He returned to training the next day. Their last kiss was three weeks later, the night before he flew away following their next to last fight. Their last fight, the following morning, January 22nd, didn’t end in a kiss. It started when they got out of bed, or maybe continued from the night before; one big last fight. It was the end of two days home prior to deployment. They stood in the airport arguing until she said something horribly regretful, her last words, and he walked away from her, or she from him, and he dropped his bag on the stainless steel counter to be sent through the airport x-ray machine. The last thing she remembered about her husband of less than a year was his reaching down to pick up his shoes and then looking up at her and mouthing something. That was it. Her last mental picture—shoes in hand and a white toothed grin—and she didn’t smile back because her angry words were still burning on her tongue.

  Over the months
prior to that, while Tony was away training, Annie would still join her friends for an occasional evening . . . the third wheel. Sometimes Beth and Mikhail’s neighbors joined them and she would become the fifth wheel. Now . . . it was too hard. She preferred it as a single wheel . . . no, that would imply movement; a monopod would be more accurate, no motion at all other than to school, and she often wondered why she even did that.

  “Mikhail is going over to his parents so it’d just be the two of us,” Beth said. “Like old times. We’ll throw on a crappy movie and then talk so much we won’t even pay any attention to it. Popcorn and wine.”

  Popcorn and wine. There was a time when that would have made her smile.

  For a superb time

  You bring a bag of popcorn;

  I’ll bring the wine.

  Beth probably didn’t remember that that was Tony’s original line; his haiku, he’d joked. Annie gulped to force back the tears, and then, suddenly, remembered something Tony wrote in the one and only letter she ever received from him. “I never got a chance to thank you for coming. It was a wonderful surprise. . . Next time, though, don’t forget the popcorn. I’ll have the wine chilled and standing by.” It wasn’t exactly his haiku, but close enough. And the thank you for coming? Coming where?

  She looked up at the professor, who was busy storing his notes and books, and then said without looking at her friend, “I’ll try. That’s the best I can do right now. Okay?”

  Beth sat back down and grabbed her hand again. “I really would like some company, someone to talk to.” After a pause Beth added, “I need someone to talk to, Annie. You’re my best friend.”

  Annie turned to face Beth. “What’s going on? You and Mikhail fighting? Why’s he going to his parents in the middle of the week?”

  Beth glanced briefly up at Professor Grae. “I’ll tell you tonight, and,” she dropped her voice to a whisper, “you tell me what old Grae wants to talk to you about. You don’t think he’s a dirty old man, do you, wanting to sooth the grieving widow?”