“A nickel, then. Perhaps even a dime.” She smiled, the same flirty smile she’d given him that first day at the restaurant.
He pushed his lustful thoughts aside. Can’t go there. Not when he’d be gone within a week, never to see her again.
It was time to get the answers she’d promised him. He placed his bowl on the ground. “What do I have to do to warp within my own lifetime?”
Her cheer vanished. She set her dishes beside his, her movements sluggish, as if he were watching on a slow motion video. “Why do you want to?” she asked in a quiet voice.
His jaw tightened. This time he wouldn’t let her distract him. “You told me you’d answer my questions.” She’d promised him answers, he was going to get them.
She looked at the smoldering campfire. The flames had died down, and a thin plume of smoke rose from the glowing red core of a big log. “You said you’d done it once before.”
“Unintentionally.”
“Where were you when you... warped?” The big log popped, and she flinched.
“You’re not answering my question.”
“I’m trying to explain—”
“I was sitting in the family room with my wife, watching TV. Tele—”
“Your wife? I thought you were divorced.” Her eyes darted to his bare left hand.
“I am. But I wasn’t then. Not until after I went back.”
“You changed something.” She clutched her skirt.
Tony snorted. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“Wh- what happened? If you don’t mind my asking.”
Lisa had pressed him to talk about it many times, but he’d steered her away. Didn’t want her analysis or advice, and he sure as hell didn’t want to hear about the ass-kissing Charlie’d done to save their marriage.
But he wanted to tell Charlotte. She’d listen without telling him he needed to get a life. “I was supposed to go out of town that day,” he said. “For business. Only I didn’t know what was going on, so I missed my flight. And when I got home...”
A big smudge on the right side of his glasses marred his view of the fire’s embers. He snatched the glasses off, whipped out his shirttail and rubbed them, then slowly slid them back on. Much better. “I walked inside, and there my wife was with my sister’s husband, on the living room couch.”
A vertical crease formed between Charlotte’s eyebrows. “You caught them in the act?”
“Just about.”
“Mercy, how awful!” She lay her hand on his arm. “I can’t imagine.” She turned to him, her voice flat. “And now you want to go back and make it not happen—”
“No.”
Charlotte drew back and tilted her head.
“Dora and I were already too far gone. We never were right for each other.” Time for some answers before she got off the subject, distracted him again. “How did I do it? How did I go back like that? I’ve gone back a century, no problem. But two or three years...”
She rose and grabbed a long stick, then poked at the logs with it until the fire blazed anew. Smoothing her skirt, she returned to the stoop. “After your jump, when you went back two years. After the dizzy spell and such, where were you?”
“I was in the family room...” His jaw went slack. In the same room. The same chair. He’d been in the same place—before, and after the jump. Could it be that simple?
“You ended up in the exact physical location as before you jumped, correct?”
“Yes.”
“There is your answer.” She retrieved their dishes as she stood. He started to ask her to elaborate—how close did he have to be to the physical space he’d occupied at the time he wanted to warp? Within several inches? A few feet? Millimeters?—but she’d already walked away.
At the hand pump he filled the big wash tub, then put it on the fire to heat. In silence, they washed the dishes.
He sneaked glances at her while they worked. Twice he caught her doing the same.
What had he done wrong? Was his question so horrible?
Her face held a firm, don’t-mess-with-me resolve. He’d never find out if he waited for her to speak first.
“Why are you—” He started to say “upset” but caught himself. He knew her well enough to know she’d deny it.
“What?” she said.
“Quiet. Why are you so quiet?” Finished stacking the dishes, he took his place on the step again.
“Nothing to say.”
“I find that hard to believe. In the whole week I’ve known you—”
“I’m worried.” With a sigh she sat next to him. The little vertical crease again marred her forehead. “What are you going to do with this knowledge?”
He studied her face. She knew about Bethany. What was she like, she’d asked him that day in the attic, with a child’s blunt innocence that stemmed from not knowing some subjects were supposed to be tiptoed around. “My daughter,” he finally said.
Her eyes scanned the sky as she worked to remember. For her, the conversation had happened twenty years ago. “She was killed. In a car accident, if I recall...” Her chin snapped down, and her eyes grew round enough he could see almost the entire circle of brown. “Tony! You mustn’t! It’s—”
“It should have never happened! If there’s any way I can make it not happen, by God I’m going to do it.”
“Tony, some things are simply fated to be. We have no idea... it’s like playing God.”
“That’s the same bullshit Everly gave me.”
“Everly?”
“The Saturn Society guy from my time.” She opened her mouth to ask something else, but Tony cut her off. “She didn’t die in a car accident. She was murdered. And I’m sorry, but murder is not meant to be.”
“You can’t know that. And it’s not just... bull.” She spat the syllables, as if the words themselves were distasteful. “There are other dangers.”
Tony wrinkled his nose. “Like what?”
She smoothed her skirt. “When we manipulate the past for our own purposes, tiny holes form. Rifts in the fabric of time. When they’re small it may seem inconsequential, but—”
Tony waved her off. “Yeah, yeah, Everly told me about that, too. Supposedly things like insects can slip through. I’m not buying it.”
“Tony, the danger...” Her voice grew firmer. “Your contemporary mentioned insects, but it’s far more serious than that. People have disappeared because of these rifts—”
Tony snorted. “Undoubtedly people who wanted to disappear.”
“No! Theodore—” He shot her a glare and she stopped short. “Please, Tony... This is the sort of thing that gets people in the Black Book... and rightfully so, I might add.” She spoke softly, laying her hand on his arm again. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Tony stared straight ahead, unseeing. “You have no idea what it’s like, to answer the door, and it’s a State Trooper standing there—” His throat swelled and cut off the rest of his words. Why had he thought she’d understand? She’d never felt the dread he had when he’d opened the door and known what the Trooper was about to tell him. Dread that burrowed beyond the bottom of his stomach, down to his toenails. Only it was worse than that.
He’d had to go to the morgue and identify her body, only to find she’d been beaten almost beyond recognition, her face swollen, bruised, bloody—they’d probably pistol whipped her—her fingernails, broken and bloodstained from her trying to fight. Cuts and bruises elsewhere, too, but mostly below the waist—
“I’m so sorry.” Charlotte’s soft voice yanked him out of the horrible memory. “But if you do this, you could make things worse.”
Worse than his daughter being beaten and raped multiple times, then killed? “I don’t see how,” Tony said. “You have no idea...”
“You’re right. I don’t. And I never will.”
“I hope you never do.”
“It’s not even a possibility.” Her fingers curled on his arm. “I’ll never have children.”
The fire had again burnt down to a few glowing embers. “Sure you will,” Tony said. “You’ll find the right man. Get married. Have kids, if that’s what you want.” Stone coated the inside of his stomach. That man couldn’t be him. She deserved someone to cherish her for the rest of her life, not a guy who could stay with her no more than two weeks at a time before the pull snatched him away. “You don’t strike me as someone who gives up—”
“It’s not that.” She slid her hand away.
“What do you mean?”
She didn’t answer right away, and when she did, she spoke in a monotone. “I’m not able have children.”
Charlotte declined with a shudder when Tony asked her if she’d like to take a walk to the dam construction site down the river. “I don’t like to get so close to the water.” She’d had an aversion to water, anything larger than her bathtub, ever since that horrible day.
“You don’t— oh.” He shifted on his feet, then told her he’d be back in a while.
Tony understood. He didn’t think it was silly, like Elmer did. The river’s completely under control, Elmer had said when she didn’t want to walk along the bank of the Great Miami with him a few weeks earlier.
Charlotte knew the Conservancy dams could hold back far more water than the flood had dumped on them. But it didn’t matter.
By the time Tony returned, she’d washed and rewashed the dishes, and run out of things to tidy around the cabin. “How was your walk?” Her voice sounded falsely cheerful, even to herself.
“It was okay.”
“I hope you took some time to think about—”
“I did.”
Hope shot through her. “Then you’ve decided not to change the past—”
“Yeah.” He disappeared around the cabin toward the privy.
Her grip tightened on the broom. He was lying. The odd twist of his features rendered him as transparent as the plate glass window at Irving’s.
How had she let him talk her into telling him how to change his own past, to violate Society Code?
She never gave up so easily. Ever.
Yet this time, she’d completely given in. And in doing so, told him all he needed to know to do something that would condemn him in the Society’s eyes for eternity.
They didn’t speak of Tony’s intentions after that. By nightfall, conversation became comfortable again. It was stuffy in the cabin, so they slept under the stars.
Charlotte had never seen so many, sparkling so bright. She glanced at Tony, who lay motionless in his bedroll on the other side of the fire. She didn’t say anything. Too much romance inherent in stargazing with a man, and Tony had made it clear that was the last thing he wanted.
Once again, he’d become her hero. Though she was now the would-be savior and he the condemned, he’d saved her life again in a figurative sense. He’d awakened her to see she’d been letting her dreams die a slow death, a demise she would have hastened by accepting Elmer’s hand. Tony had saved her from a life without joy. Yet what would be left after the pull took him?
Sleep eluded her. The seven points of the Big Dipper winked at her, mocked her. A cigarette. That’s what she needed. It would help her relax. She pulled a blanket around her, then rose and tiptoed to the cabin.
There were only nine cigarettes in her box. She had to make them last. She’d smoke just one a day until it was time to go home. Sadness slipped over her in a thick, cottony mantle. She tried to ignore it as she lit her smoke, then stepped outside.
A brilliant light slashed the heavens. A shooting star! She gripped her cigarette. Wish I may, wish I might...
Silly. Nothing more than a superstition, her intellectual side scoffed. But she wished anyway. Her heart’s desire, to be with Tony. Forever. Somehow, some way.
DECADES LATER, VIOLET SINCLAIR LAY BACK in a lounge chair and pulled her blanket more tightly around her as Timmy tossed another log into the wrought iron fire pit. “That should do it for now, huh ladies?” he asked Violet and his sister Stephanie in his slow, deliberate speech.
“It’ll probably burn all night, as hot as you’ve stoked it.” Violet pointed at the bottom of the fire pit that glowed red. In the morning, there would be a charred, black ring on Stephanie’s concrete patio.
“Why didn’t’cha say something?” Timmy slapped his forehead. “I know, I’ll make myself useful. You girls want another beer?”
Stephanie handed him her empty bottle in response. “No thank you,” Violet said. “But if you could grab my cigarettes and bring me one, I’d appreciate it.” There were nine left in the pack. When they were gone, she’d quit. For good this time.
“Sure thing, Violet.” He spun on one foot and loped across the patio, then disappeared into the house. The screen door slammed shut with a deafening bang behind him.
Thankfully, Stephanie wasn’t in a talkative mood, leaving Violet to stare aimlessly at the sparks drifting up from the fire like miniature souls breaking free from the bonds of earth. The stars were unusually bright that night, and the Big Dipper twinkled above the cookie-cutter ranch house behind Stephanie’s. A sense of déjà vu pervaded Violet.
Of course you’ve seen it before, silly goose!
Tony’s image filled her mind. It always did when she looked at the stars, as if sometime in her obscured past, they’d shared a moment like this—
“Violet?”
Her head snapped around, the reproachful look on Stephanie’s face clear in the firelight. “You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?”
Violet wound a lock of hair around her finger, a bad habit she’d acquired immediately after she’d sold her necklace with the Ohio quarter on it. “I can’t help it.” Her unfulfilled longing for Tony had been a frequent topic of conversation, especially in the days after she’d first seen his picture in the paper five years ago when he’d been promoted to vice president at LCT. It had taken her a year to land the cafeteria job, but it had been worth it, just to be near him.
Sympathy laced Stephanie’s voice. “Violet... you need to move on. It’s been what, three years?”
“I still say I knew him before....” Her friend would know what she meant. Before June ninth, five years ago. The first day Violet could remember.
“I still think you should give hypnosis another try. Especially since your therapist said it might help.”
“I’ll think about it,” Violet said, more to get Stephanie to drop the subject than anything else. Hypnosis hadn’t brought forth any memories the first two times. Why would it a third?
“You agreed that it was time to move on,” Stephanie reminded her. “You’ve come so far—picking up on computers, going to school while you waitressed and worked in the cafeteria, then moving up to I.T...”
Technical work. Something Violet suspected she’d done before, too. “I know.”
“You even saved up the money to get your teeth fixed. The last thing that should hold you back is a man.”
“I know.” Violet pressed her tongue against the back of her front teeth, where the gap used to be. Stephanie was one of the few who knew Violet hadn’t done it for vanity, but because she feared whoever she’d wronged in her forgotten past might be looking for her. Between that, her lightened hair, and her weight gain—she suspected she’d been more active in her old life—they’d never find her. She hoped.
Stephanie twisted around in her chair, peering at the door. “What the fuck’s taking so long to get a beer? Did he—”
“Oh dear.” Violet put two fingers to her lips. “I put my cigarettes on top of the refrigerator. Timmy probably didn’t see them, and went to the carryout for more. Thank heavens it’s only a ten minute walk.”
Stephanie snorted. “No doubt. But then, he’d go get your cigarettes even if he had to walk ten miles in a blizzard.”
The front door slammed, and seconds later, Timmy bounded out the back and handed Violet a pack of cigarettes. “I had to go to the carryout down the road, but here they are.”
“Yo
u shouldn’t have. But thank you.” She took the pack and shook out a cigarette.
“You know I’d do anything for you, Violet. If you hadn’t showed up in the garage that day and helped me fix the plumbing, Vince would’ve beat the crap out of me. And prob’ly would’ve killed Steph, sooner or later.”
Stephanie grimaced at the mention of her abusive ex, then flashed Timmy a smile. “Beer?”
“D’oh!” Timmy slapped himself on the forehead, then dashed inside.
Violet grabbed a stick and held it in the fire until the end caught, then lit her smoke off of that. Because of course, Timmy hadn’t thought to grab her lighter, and she didn’t feel like jumping up to get it herself, nor did she have the heart to ask him to.
Timmy returned with Stephanie’s beer. “I saw Vince’s old friend Big Bert at the carryout.”
Stephanie made a face like she smelled something foul. Violet shivered.
Big Bert was the man who’d obtained Violet’s birth certificate and Social Security number, in exchange for the antique gold and diamond chip necklace she’d been wearing when she woke in Stephanie’s garage. She didn’t want to know where he’d gotten the perfect-looking documents, or how.
“I don’t think he saw me,” Timmy said.
“Thank God,” Stephanie muttered.
Violet’s gaze drifted skyward while Timmy told his sister about a drunk guy who was hassling the clerk at the convenience store. She didn’t realize their conversation had turned to her until Stephanie loudly repeated herself. “I told her she should give hypnosis another shot.”
“I think she oughta ask him out,” Timmy said.
Violet brought her hand to the base of her throat. “Oh mercy, I couldn’t.”
“Why not?” Timmy scooted closer to the fire and grabbed the stick Violet had used. “Girls ask guys out all the time.”
“I know, but...” They’d had that conversation before, many times.
A shooting star streaked across the sky, its sparkling path lingering but a second.
Wish I may, wish I might... Nothing more than a meteor burning in the atmosphere as it fell to earth, but she wished anyway. To be with Tony.
Time's Enemy: A Romantic Time Travel Adventure (Saturn Society Book 1) Page 24