He dared consider, for just a moment, what the world might be like had Henri Laroche not leapt from his balcony, or if he’d survived the fall. No doubt he would have uncovered more secrets, though none more surprising than the mysterious equation that closed his time travel paper.
Burnett snatched the memory stick and held it in front of his face. A tear welled in his eye, then trickled down his cheek. All Henri’s lost potential felt unimportant at that moment. Even the significance of the equation dimmed in his mind. What mattered most was how much he missed his friend.
CHAPTER 51
The next morning Burnett awoke early. Curious to learn how his three visitors from yesterday would respond to the dream, he chose not to erase the equation.
Within an hour all three had returned to his hospital room. Both Emma and his father pleaded with him to delete the paper. They could find no rational explanation for the nightmare, and were stunned by how real it had felt and how much it had upset them.
Dr. Stone had the opposite reaction. He became obsessed with deciphering the dream and grasping its relationship, if any, to the equation. With an aggressive, almost belligerent tone, the calculus professor insisted on reading the entire paper again.
With great reluctance Burnett granted his request. After Stone finished, Burnett deleted the equation despite his protests.
Much to Burnett’s relief, the recurring nightmare at last stopped. The mundane dreams, and even the nightmares that replaced it, provided a welcome change.
After his discharge, he and Emma had the opportunity to get to know each other. They had the chance to do the things ordinary people do and talk about the things ordinary people talk about, without the fate of mankind or a lengthy prison stay dangling over their heads. The engagement ring he’d carried in his pocket the past week bore testament to their compatibility with no external pressure on them.
Burnett found himself intrigued by the challenges of developing solar power into a practical form of energy. It wouldn’t happen overnight, he accepted that; but he made the decision to see it through.
Even without the mystery equation, the peer reviews of Henri’s time travel paper were glowing. Word had apparently spread, and several prestigious journals had already expressed interest in publishing it.
On a humid summer evening six weeks and a day after Desmond had been killed, Burnett sat on the edge of his bed and kicked off his shoes. He placed the box containing the three-quarter-carat diamond engagement ring on the night stand. Tomorrow, he promised himself; tomorrow he’d present it to her. Tomorrow they had plans to meet for dinner at Emma’s favorite restaurant in Manhattan.
He leaned against his pillow. The weight of his eyelids closed them in seconds.
CHAPTER 52
A sickening rush of destruction billowed out from the center of downtown Chicago. Burnett heard voices: “Why have you done this to us?”
“I haven’t done anything,” he protested. His reply only infuriated his accusers. Their number and intensity grew.
Just when the voices reached a volume he could no longer tolerate, he sprung up in bed. Orienting himself in his dark bedroom, he wrung his sweat-drenched hands together.
Dr. Stone. Stone had re-created Henri’s equation. Burnett had suspected he might attempt it, but hoped he was wrong.
* * *
At six-fifteen a.m. Burnett banged on the front door of Stone’s ivory colonial. Mrs. Stone opened the door and beckoned him in.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“What makes you think something’s wrong?”
“That look on your face, for one thing.”
“What else?” he asked. He knew there was more to her answer.
“He’s been locking himself in his study for weeks. As soon as he gets up, he disappears in there. Sometimes he doesn’t even come out for dinner. What’s going on?”
“Wait here,” Burnett said, and raced up the stairs.
He found the door to Stone’s office locked. He rapped on it twice.
“It’s Michael. Open up.”
No response. For thirty seconds he pounded, but still got no answer.
“You have a key?” he called to Stone’s wife at the bottom of the stairs.
She shook her head.
Burnett kicked the door over and over, harder each time. By the sixth kick the top hinge started to break loose. By the eighth it broke free. He shoved the top of the door and it crashed into the room.
Stone lay on the floor in the corner of the room, balled up in the fetal position. Burnett ran over and knelt beside him. He checked for a pulse, and found it.
He faced the empty doorway, and shouted, “Call an ambulance.”
Stone’s laptop sat on a desk in the corner of the room. On the screen glowed Henri’s mysterious equation.
When his eyes met the screen, electricity charged the room. The hair on his arms rose. His heart raced, and his sweat and salivary glands pumped wildly.
He stood, shaky, and stared at the screen. He wobbled two steps toward the desk, then stopped. The equation seized his attention, as it had at Desmond’s house. Somehow the thing plucked a memory, a potent memory, from his unconscious.
In his mind’s eye, he sat beside Emma on the spare mattress in Stone’s garage. He felt her lips against his, relished her strawberry lip gloss, licked his lips to savor it a second time. He gazed into her eyes, aglow in the dim light. This was no mere memory. He was there again, reliving the experience.
Then he was at his father’s hospital bed the evening of his car accident. Medical equipment beeped and hummed and clicked behind him. The ubiquitous antiseptic odor sought to gag his sinuses. He extended his arm and grasped the cold metal bed railing after a doctor informed him his father might never walk again.
Without warning he found himself in the kitchen of his parent’s house, a young man fresh from college, ready to take on the world. When the phone rang, he knew who it was and tried not to answer. But he’d answered before, and had no choice but to answer again. His father informed him of his mother’s death. The pain, so real, it sent tears streaming down his cheeks.
A girl’s shriek wrenched him from his hypnosis.
“Daddy!” Stone’s daughter cried. She ran over to her father.
Shielding his eyes from the screen, Burnett sprang toward the computer, lifted it, and heaved it against the wall. The device split in two, the screen separating from the keyboard. When it struck the floor the screen shattered.
Burnett, fighting to maintain his balance, staggered over to Stone. His heartrate and glands slowly retreated to normal.
Stone awoke. His daughter tried to help him up, but Burnett waved his hand, indicating he should stay down.
Stone propped himself up on his elbow.
“You alright?” Burnett asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What happened?”
“My God. I thought I was dying and having a life review. It went all the way back to …”
Burnett leaned forward, waiting for him to finish the sentence.
“You were right,” Stone said. He grew agitated. “Delete the equation. Now. Delete it.”
“It’s okay,” Burnett said, casting a glance at the broken laptop. “It’s gone.”
Stone sighed deeply.
“How far back did you go?”
Stone shook his head.
“I need to know.”
Stone refused to even look at his student.
Through the window Burnett noticed a woman watching them from the street. He recognized her as the woman whose station wagon he’d car-jacked six weeks ago, the woman who’d walked by with the German shepherd as he and Emma had approached Desmond’s home. Different hairstyle and different clothes, but he had no doubt it was the same woman.
“I have to run,” Burnett said. “I’ll be right back. An ambulance is on the way.”
Stone lifted his head. “We do have much to discuss.”
Burnett nodded and
backed out of the room. As he descended the staircase, he wondered who the hell she could be.
After he exited the house, he stopped at the sidewalk. Looking left, then right, he spotted the woman several hundred feet away. He took off after her at a fast jog.
She cut down a side street. Burnett turned down the same road, and narrowed the gap between them.
From a hundred feet behind he yelled, “Hey!”
She didn’t respond. When he finally pulled up alongside her, she stopped. She briefly hid her face.
“Who are you?” Burnett asked. “That was you with the German shepherd, right?”
“And in the park. I had to get you out of there a little early. So you could ‘borrow’ my car.”
“You put up a good fight.”
“One of my better performances.”
“I know I said I’d return it. I just couldn’t.” He immediately realized how stupid his statement sounded.
“Don’t worry.” A broad, motherly smile spread across her face. “You were supposed to take the next car. But I didn’t want the guy to knock any teeth out. Not after the night you’d had.”
“I can’t for the life of me figure out what you’re talking about or why you’re here. How you knew I was here.”
She glanced at her watch. “I have to go soon.”
“Go where? I don’t understand. Who are you?”
“I’ve waited a long time for a chance to be here.”
“If you really have to leave, please tell me what you’re talking about.”
“I’ve come to watch you. I’ve come to watch you do what few people could have done.”
“Come from where? To watch me do what?”
“You’re too modest. Think about it for a moment.”
As with Audrey, every answer that popped into his head seemed more implausible than the previous one.
“You’re not …?” Burnett asked, unable to finish the question.
“Think of me as an old—I mean pre-elderly—woman who wandered out of Bellevue.”
It was the first thing she’d said that made any sense. “So I can ask you anything?”
“Of course.”
“What is that goddamn equation?”
“How hard would you laugh if I said it was the solution—or key, if you prefer—to the greatest mystery of the universe.”
“Is that all?”
She smiled and nodded.
“Time travel?”
She smiled again, minus the nod. “Mr. Laroche’s paper is brilliant. You and I wouldn’t be having this chat without it. But the equation has nothing to do with the subject of his paper.”
Stunned, Burnett could not speak. After a moment he composed himself, but stammered unintelligibly. Then he said, “What about the dream? Is that the future if the equation is published?”
“One possible future.”
“How? Why?”
“There are countless possible futures. Dreams aren’t meant to be taken literally.”
“What? Jesus, I was ready to kill Desmond because of that dream.”
“And good thing, too. Mr. Laroche wasn’t supposed to figure out the whole equation. Just the first part. If your professor had published it …” but she didn’t finish.
“Then he did discover something before its time.”
She glanced at her watch. “I only have a minute left.”
He didn’t know what would happen in the next sixty seconds, but he needed to get at least one of his ten million questions answered. He faced her, determined not to let her out of his sight. “Tell me, how did Desmond know we were at Stone’s house?”
She gazed at him with her warmest grin yet. “Ah, we think we know so much. Truth is, we’re still waiting to get into kindergarten.”
He returned her smile. “Sounds like a thought I had at the hospital.”
She took a single step back. “I still don’t know how, but Henri Laroche tried to sneak you into graduate school.”
Behind him a low grumble intensified. He was determined not to take his eyes off her. “Can you tell me one more thing?”
A powerful rush of wind blasted his back. He hadn’t intended to look, but his head twisted reflexively. He saw nothing. When he faced forward, the sound had stopped, the wind had died, and she was gone.
He rubbed his eyes and glanced around. With nothing for fifteen feet in any direction, there was no chance she could have hidden anywhere.
What the hell’s going on? It was a question he had become all too familiar with.
Perhaps he was dreaming and would wake up soon. Since the recurring nightmare, all his dreams had become more vivid.
Perhaps she had escaped from Bellevue. She’d probably read the news and knew about him and all that had happened six weeks ago.
Or perhaps …
A warm, gentle breeze kicked up from the southwest. Burnett spun on his heel, hesitated for just an instant, then strode toward Dr. Stone’s house. He picked up his pace. If he wasn’t dreaming, they indeed had much to discuss.
You can contact the author at: [email protected]
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
Innocent Bystander Page 28