by David Walton
“Is that why the police called? To find Dad?”
“Yes, now please! Go get Claire and Sean.”
“Why do I have to come?” Alessandra asked.
“Because I’m not leaving you here when I don’t know what will happen, or how long I’ll be. We should stay together.”
“Why don’t you just call him?”
“I have been calling, but he hasn’t picked up. I called the NJSC, and they don’t know where he is either. I don’t want to sit here wondering. We’re going.”
“Are they going to arrest Dad?” Alessandra asked. “Did Dad kill the man?”
“Alessandra!”
“Well, did he?”
“Of course not,” Elena said. She grabbed her purse from the easy chair and rummaged through it. Now go get Claire and Sean and tell them to meet me in the car.” Elena took out her keys, swung the purse over her shoulder, and turned the handle to the front door. I wanted to shout, to warn her, but of course, she couldn’t hear me. I wasn’t really there. I watched mutely as she swung the door open. The varcolac was standing there.
Elena had never been one to scream. She stepped back and tried to shut the door again, but the varcolac walked through it as if it were air. It was followed by lighter, more shadowy versions of itself, like the interference pattern we had seen before, but these quickly merged into the one figure.
“Alessandra, call 911,” Elena said in a sharp voice, which she kept admirably under control. “Right now.”
The perspective changed as Alessandra jumped to her feet. An option scroll sprang into view in her vision. Much more rapidly than I could have done, she manipulated the options to control her phone and dialed the emergency number.
Elena took another step back. “Leave this house, or I’ll call my husband.”
The varcolac cocked its head, reached out, and put its hand through Elena’s chest. It didn’t break the skin; it just passed right through, like it had with the door. For a split second, she gasped, and her eyes flew wide, then her face crumpled and she collapsed. Alessandra screamed. I shouted and stood up, nearly stumbling over the chair. I felt Colin steadying me.
The varcolac leaned over Elena and peered at her, sniffing. Alessandra screamed again, and the varcolac looked at her, swiveling its head as quick as a bird. She ran, stumbling, into the kitchen, around the table, and out the back door. With one backward glance to make sure he wasn’t following her, she crossed the back yard and climbed over the neighbor’s fence. I kept expecting her to turn around, to go back to the house. I figured the varcolac must have gone upstairs to kill Claire and Sean, and then Alessandra went back and saw my car and went inside, and that’s when the varcolac got hold of her. But it didn’t happen. She kept running through the streets and crying until she saw Marek run along beside her, and then I pulled up in my car and they both climbed inside.
The dizziness was getting to me. I blinked the display off, pushed past Colin, and ran to the bathroom, just in time to throw up in the toilet. I’d barely eaten all day, so it wasn’t much, but it made my throat burn. I realized I was shaking.
Colin came up behind me and helped me to my feet. He found paper towels under the sink and let me wipe and wash out my mouth before leading me back into the basement room. Alessandra was lying on her back on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
“Now you know,” she said bitterly. “I ran away and left them all to die.”
“You couldn’t have saved them,” I said. “You were right to run. But I need to know something: did you go back to the house at all?”
She glanced at me, suspicious. “You know I didn’t. I saw Mom fall, and I ran. I didn’t know if she was dead or what; I just ran away.”
“I saw you, in the house. After Marek and I found Claire and Sean, we went back downstairs and saw you.” I looked to Marek for confirmation, and he nodded.
“That’s true,” he said. “You were there.”
She sat up. “Alive?”
I nodded. “Alive. The thing that killed Mom had a hold of you, and I distracted it, and you ran away.”
Colin looked more worried now than he had since we arrived. “And did you see that just now? When you watched the recording?”
I shook my head. “No. And that wasn’t the only strange thing. Alessandra, tell me—are you right-handed or left-handed?”
She looked at me like I’d gone mad, and I didn’t blame her. “I’m right-handed, as you well know.”
“Raise your right hand.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Please, Alessandra. Just do it. Raise your right hand.”
Slowly, skeptically, she raised her left hand.
“You’re not messing with me now, right? That’s your right hand?”
Colin intervened. “What are you doing, Jacob?”
“Everyone, raise your right hand,” I said. The four of us were in a circle now, the three men standing, and Alessandra sitting on the bed.
Marek and Colin and I raised our right hands. Alessandra raised her left.
We all looked at each other.
“What’s going on here?” Colin asked.
“The rest of the family,” I said, hardly able to keep my voice under control. “Elena and Claire and Sean. They might still be alive.”
We talked around the events of the day for hours, but came to no real resolution. Alessandra fell asleep on the bed with the old, blue-green blanket wrapped around her.
“One of you must be mistaken,” Colin said. “She couldn’t have both come back to the house and not come back to the house. Either the two of you didn’t see what you thought you saw, or she’s blocking the experience from her memory.”
“The recording backs up her story,” Marek pointed out.
“True,” I said. “But maybe you’re wrong. Maybe she could do both.”
Colin’s raised eyebrow showed what he thought about that suggestion. “Let’s keep our considerations to the physically possible, okay?”
I couldn’t resist the shot. “Funny to hear you say that, of all people.”
“Just because I believe in the miraculous doesn’t mean—”
I waved away his explanation. “This is physically possible. We’ve already seen that the man with no eyes exhibits quantum probability waves. What if Alessandra was caught up in that probability wave? What if she briefly experienced superposition, like a subatomic particle, and existed as a set of possibilities, rather than a single reality? She was terrified, but at the same time she wanted to protect her siblings. She both ran away and she stayed, both at once. Both of those possibilities were in evidence.”
Colin looked at me skeptically over his glasses. “In evidence. You’re telling me there were two Alessandras running around your house and neighborhood.”
“Not two girls, exactly,” I said. “Two possibilities, momentarily unresolved. We say an electron orbits an atomic nucleus, like the Earth around the sun, but it doesn’t really. It’s part of a waveform, a probabilistic cloud that exists at every point around the nucleus at the same time, with some probability. Similarly, a particle can have an up spin or a down spin, but until it resolves, it has both—it’s in quantum space, spinning both ways at once. For Alessandra, I think the wave resolved once I picked her up in the car, or maybe slightly before that. The two versions didn’t deviate all that much.”
“That’s the most ridiculous theory I ever heard,” Colin said.
“Wait,” I said. “This is the important part. If Alessandra could split, then why not Elena and the others? They were about to leave the house. What if one version of them did leave the house, before the varcolac arrived, and thus weren’t killed?”
“This is wishful thinking,” Colin said. “Don’t do this to yourself.”
“It makes sense,” I said. “The varcolac wouldn’t arrive at a single, discrete point in time and space, like we would. Its arrival would be smeared over a range of times and places, with some probability.”
“You’re losing me,” Colin said.
“Me, too,” Marek said.
I growled, angry at them. Why couldn’t they understand? “When you go somewhere, you arrive at one time,” I said. “At five o’clock, say. But a varcolac doesn’t. It arrives at 4:45 and 4:46 and 4:47, through to 5:15, and may eventually resolve to only one of those arrival times, though some have a higher probability than others. That means it arrived both before and after they left the house. They became entangled with its probability wave and split, one version of each of them heading off in the car to the NJSC, oblivious, while the other versions were caught and killed.”
Silence. “Well,” I said. “What do you think?”
“A lot of crazy things have happened today,” Marek said. “Sure. I believe you.”
Colin yawned. “It’s two-thirty in the morning,” he said. “Could we figure out what universe we’re living in tomorrow?”
I apologized and let him go. I didn’t know how I was going to sleep, though. I was buzzing. They were out there somewhere, alive. Tomorrow, I would find them.
Colin left us with a promise to bring us breakfast in the morning. I tried to convince Marek to take the other bed, but he insisted on the floor. The bed springs were old and creaked loudly, but as soon as I lay down, exhaustion took over, and I knew I was going to sleep after all. With a last nervous glance at the backward mirror, I closed my eyes. I dreamed of an endless hall of mirrors and of Elena, always just glimpsed in a reflection, but never there when I turned around.
I woke to Colin shaking me, his eyes wide. “Jacob. Jacob! Wake up. You have to see this.”
I groaned and sat up, slowly registering the unfamiliar surroundings and remembering the horror of the day before. “Why couldn’t you have let me sleep?”
“Look.” He thrust a piece of smartpaper into my hand. It was a news feed, and I read the headline.
SWARTHMORE PROFESSOR ARRESTED
FOR MURDER OF QUANTUM SCIENTIST
I scanned the article and saw my name and an old picture of me. According to the article, I had been arrested for the murder of Brian Vanderhall, who had been found shot to death in his office at the New Jersey Super Collider. There was nothing about the deaths of my family, just that I had been picked up at my home, and the police were making no further comment.
“Why would they lie about that?” I asked. “You’d think they’d want people to know they were looking for me.”
“Maybe they aren’t.”
“What do you mean, they aren’t? I’m a murder suspect; of course they’re looking for me.”
Colin smacked me on the side of the head. “Wake up. You were the one going on last night about being in two places at once. Why should you be any different?”
CHAPTER 16
DOWN-SPIN
“The People call Sheila Singer to the stand,” Haviland announced.
Terry cursed and started rummaging through his papers in a way that did not inspire confidence. “Your Honor,” he said, still rummaging. “I have no knowledge of this witness.”
Haviland’s smile grew brighter. “Her name was provided to the defense weeks ago, in the discovery process. She works at the New Jersey Super Collider.”
Probably twenty percent of the NJSC’s three thousand employees had been on the prosecution’s list of possible witnesses. Terry had made me go through them all and identify all those I knew, had ever worked with, or had seen during the events of last December third. It was a standard lawyer trick, apparently, to drown the opposition with irrelevant entries in order to hide the ones that really mattered.
“What is her relevance to this case?” Terry snapped.
“I hope her testimony will make that plain.” Haviland was positively beaming now.
“There’s nothing irregular here, Mr. Sheppard,” Judge Roswell said. “The name is on the list. You may proceed, Mr. Haviland.”
Terry glared at me, but I shrugged. I had no idea who Sheila Singer was, and when she took the stand, I was even more confused. She was twenty-something, slender, with a low-cut, turquoise blouse and a short, black skirt that revealed legs a half mile long. If I’d seen her before, I would have remembered. She flashed a brilliant smile at the jury.
“Ms. Singer, please state your name for the record.” She did so, and he asked her to tell the court what her job was with the NJSC.
“I’m a receptionist and tour guide,” she said. “I meet visitors who come to the center, and I sometimes take groups through the parts that are open for tourists.”
“Do you get a lot of tourists?”
“Of course. It’s the biggest scientific instrument ever created.” A sly smile at the jury. “Some people think the bigger the better.”
I coughed. Haviland looked a little annoyed. “Were you working on December third?”
“Yes,” Singer said. “I was stationed at the reception desk in the Feynman Center. That’s where I work when I don’t have a tour, so I can answer questions, give out maps, that kind of thing.”
“So, your desk is the first thing a visitor sees when they enter? The first place they would go to ask a question?”
“Yes.”
I could tell Terry was dying to object and ask what the point of this line of questioning was, but he held back. It was probably just what Haviland was waiting for.
“Do you know Jacob Kelley, the accused?” Haviland asked.
“No. I don’t think we ever met,” Singer said.
“But on December third, you heard his name, didn’t you?”
“Yes. There was a woman who asked for him. She seemed quite upset.”
“Did the woman say who she was?”
“No. She had three children with her, two girls and a boy, and she said she was looking for her husband and asked if I knew how to contact him,” Singer said.
I stood up slowly, staring at her.
“What time was this?” Haviland asked.
“Just before five o’clock.”
“How can you be sure of the time, Ms. Singer?”
“Visiting hours end at five o’clock. It was the end of my working day.”
Haviland pushed a button on a remote control, and a picture of my beloved Elena appeared on a large screen. “Is this the woman?”
I felt a lump in my throat, just seeing her picture. It had been so long since I’d seen her. It seemed like another life. I felt like I was choking, like I was going to cry right there in the courtroom. They had been there, right there at the NJSC. They had split when the varcolac came to the house, and here was the proof.
I realized everyone was looking at me, and Terry was frantically tugging at my sleeve. Judge Roswell glared at me. “Mr. Kelley, sit down.”
I sat. “I’m sorry, Your Honor.”
Haviland gave me a predatory smile and turned back to the witness. “Ms. Singer, let’s be clear. Mr. Kelley claims that he saw his wife and children dead in his house in Pennsylvania more than an hour before you claim to have seen them in New Jersey. Were they dead when you saw them?”
“No, sir.”
“Ms. Singer, how long have you been working at the NJSC?”
She blinked at the sudden change of direction. “A little more than a year.”
“And in that time, how many visitors have you seen?”
“Oh, hundreds. Gosh, I don’t know, maybe thousands.”
“And the woman who was looking for Mr. Kelley, had you ever seen her before December third?”
“No, just that once.”
“Can you be absolutely sure she was Jacob Kelley’s wife?”
Her mouth pouted prettily. “I’m very sure.”
“I remind you that you are under oath, Ms. Singer.”
“She didn’t tell me who she was, but she looked just like the picture,” Singer said. “If it wasn’t her, then she had a twin sister.”
With shaking hands, I snatched one of Terry’s legal pads and scribbled a note on it.
Terry read it, looked at me, and w
rote, “Why?”
I wrote, “Please, just ask.”
He shook his head, but he tucked the legal pad under his arm.
“And what did you tell Mrs. Kelley?” Haviland asked.
“Well, I felt sorry for her, you know?” Singer said. “She said he might be with Mr. Vanderhall, so I looked up the building and told her.” She put a hand to her cheek. “I had no idea that her husband had killed the man. The poor woman.”
“Objection,” Terry said, but the judge was already nodding.
“Ms. Singer,” she said. “Whether or not Mr. Kelley killed Mr. Vanderhall has not yet been established. Please limit your answers to the questions being asked.”
“Of course. I’m sorry,” Singer said.
“Your witness,” Haviland said, and sat down.
Terry stood and took the lectern. He flipped through his legal pad for a moment as if marshalling his thoughts. He obviously hadn’t planned to interview this woman, which meant he wasn’t prepared. The old adage that you shouldn’t ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer meant that he should just sit down again. He frowned and stared at his pad. I knew he was deciding whether to ask my questions or not.
“Mr. Sheppard?” the judge said.
He seemed to shake himself. “Just a few questions, Your Honor. Ms. Singer, did you happen to notice if the woman you saw was wearing a wedding ring?”
Singer brightened again. “Yes, she was. I always notice that sort of thing. It was a sweet ring, small, you know, but sometimes that means more than some enormous diamond. Maybe the guy doesn’t have a lot of money, but then it’s really for love, you know what I mean?”
“Did you happen to notice . . .” Terry paused. “Did you happen to notice which hand the ring was on?”
“Well, of course,” Singer said. “It was on her left hand. I told you it was a wedding ring; where else would it be?”
I knew the jury wouldn’t understand why I was smiling, but I couldn’t help it. At least an hour after I had seen them dead, my family had been alive. Singer had seen my Elena, not the backward version of her I had found in the house. It meant my theory about them splitting had been correct after all. It meant my family was really alive out there, or had been two months ago. But if that was the case, what had happened to them? Why had no one seen them since?