Jeff jumped in, thankfully. “No, we haven’t met him, but we read about the cancer in the paper. Victoria spoke with Mr. Kane this morning.”
“Hmm, that’s interesting,” she said, frowning. “We’ve kept Mr. Kane’s illness very private. Maybe something leaked. Anyway, let me show you to him.” She turned and walked out of the foyer and down a long hallway toward the back of the house. They passed an expansive living room with mile-high ceilings and walls covered with enormous paintings, then on the other side a library that rivaled the one back at Dexter’s home base at Columbia University. To the right were dual stairwells leading upwards, and the corridor opened into a kitchen that made the television cooking show kitchens look like EZ Bake Ovens. They then followed the nurse through the kitchen, Dexter realizing he’d never even seen a dining room off of what had to be the main hallway, and then they were out the patio doors and into Kane’s backyard.
The yard was no less lavish and spectacular, with a covered patio that had to be 20,000 square feet, featuring an array of wicker chairs and plush couches. Beyond that was a kidney-shaped pool the size of a baseball diamond, with sharp blue water reflecting the sun, and to the left and right immaculate carpets of green Florida grass. For those who could raise their eyes above the incredible scenery, the yard stopped immediately at the water of whatever inlet they were on, with the mouth to the Atlantic and beyond just one neighbor’s yard away.
There was too much to take in, but Dexter was able to finally focus and settle his eyes on a lounge chair sitting poolside. In the chair was Benjamin Kane.
Upon further inspection, the lounge chair wasn’t really that at all – instead, it was a hospital bed disguised as a lounge chair. He could see the wheels beneath it and the thick mattress supporting Kane’s body. Kane appeared to not really be himself, either. Even from a distance, Dexter could tell that he was half the person he’d been when last he’d seen him. Whatever changes had been made to history had not been good for Kane’s health.
The nurse motioned them to follow her, then she stopped and pulled a chair over to Kane’s bedside. Jeff realized what she was doing before Dexter did and pulled two more chairs over. Kane noticed their arrival and turned his head to see them. “Gloria, honey,” he said, reaching out to her with a toothpick of an arm, “can you bring some of that lemonade you make? It’s so wonderful.”
She set the chair she was carrying down and smiled. “Sure. Some for you, sir?”
“No, no, no,” he said, waving her off with a laugh. “I had a Nestle Crunch bar about an hour ago. I’ve had my sugar allotment for the day. I’ll be up all night.”
“Mr. Kane,” she said, scolding him.
He held up his fingers. “Don’t worry. It was one of those little bite-sized ones. The kind you give out to kids on Halloween.”
“Okay, then,” she said, and went back through the kitchen doors.
Kane looked at the three of them, now sitting in their chairs. He laughed. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ll be up all night anyway.”
Collectively, they didn’t know how to take the joke, so they sat in stunned silence for a moment. Finally, Dexter forced himself to laugh. Jeff and Victoria followed suit.
“Excuse my attempt at humor,” Kane said. “I know I’m not the most pleasant sight. Unfortunately, this is what death looks like, so I try to overcome it with bad jokes and poor puns. Dr. Graham, it’s a pleasure to meet you in person. You must be Dr. Jacobs and you must be Dr. Murphy.”
Dexter and Jeff both nodded at Kane. He was so frail and weak, though in his voice you could sense the business magnate that had once lived within the wrinkly skin now covering his body. He projected himself as a wise leader who people respected and heeded, even in this deteriorated state. Dexter almost had to close his eyes to see past his drawn-in face and life-supporting oxygen tank.
He also felt he needed to close his eyes to stop himself from feeling that the cancer eating Kane’s body was justice for what he’d done. He knew it was a different Kane, but was having a terrible time separating the two of them.
“Since we got off the phone, Dr. Graham,” Kane said, “I’ve been contemplating what possible need there would be for the United States Time Program to send three of their top chiefs down to Florida on a moment’s notice, just to meet with me. It seems a bit over-the-top.”
“Mr. Kane,” Victoria said, starting, “what do you know about the USTP?”
“Very little,” he said, shaking his head. “Only what I might’ve read in the papers. I’m afraid it’s a bit over my head. I commend you for the science, but what you’re trying to accomplish seems like a terrible idea. Please don’t take that personally. At my age and in my condition, I’m allowed to be a curmudgeon.”
Victoria laughed charmingly. “I can assure you, Mr. Kane, that everything we’re doing at the USTP is very safe. The public side of the program is only to support the research.”
He pointed a decrepit finger. “Keep telling yourself that, Doctor,” he said. His arm tired immediately, visibly shaking, and he laid it down at his side. “So you can really send people back through time? That’s pretty amazing. Have any of you done it?”
They hadn’t discussed how much they would share with Kane, so Dexter was surprised when Jeff said, “Yes, Dexter and I have.”
Kane nodded and looked at Dexter. “Really?”
“Well, my responsibility at the USTP is to be a guide for the travelers,” Dexter said. “I’m a historian.”
“Makes sense. And you?” He struggled to turn back toward Jeff.
“I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing different realities,” Jeff said. Dexter looked to Victoria, who was glaring at him, but Jeff wasn’t noticing. “I’m actually the creator of the time travel device that the USTP uses. I’ve been on several missions, the most recent to the Soviet Union in 1983.”
What was he doing?
Kane played along. “What would bring you to the Soviet Union in 1983?”
Dexter waited for Victoria to jump in, but she didn’t. Instead, Jeff was left to continue, “I was there for the assassination of a Russian general without whose death the Soviet Union would not have fallen in 1991.”
“Really?” Dexter could see the look of shock on Kane’s face. He was truly intrigued. “And you killed this man?”
Jeff was shaking his head. “No. Someone else did. I was just instrumental in getting them there.”
Kane laid his head back on his pillow for a moment, gazing at the clear blue sky and grinning like an idiot. After a moment, and without looking at them, he said, “Well, this is something. I mean, your story is completely unbelievable, but it sure is something.”
“I can assure you it’s tr-” Jeff said, but was cut off by Dexter.
“Mr. Kane, we came here to ask you some questions about your company’s history,” he said, not letting Jeff get any more into his story. He’d said enough already.
“What about it?” His expression quickly went from jubilant to confused.
The nurse, Gloria, returned with three glasses of lemonade. They each thanked her and took a glass. Dexter tasted his – it was distractingly good – and set the glass down on the ground at his feet.
The lemonade had actually been too much of a distraction, and Kane took advantage, not allowing Dexter to answer the question. “Actually,” he said, his tone switching to a firm, but not abrasive, confidence, “I’m not going to get into any of that until you answer my original question of why you’re here. Why is the US Time Program interested in me?”
“Fair enough,” Dexter said, choosing his words carefully. “Fair enough. Mr. Kane, you’ve been involved in a time travel mishap.”
“I have?” He coughed uncomfortably. They must have been blowing what was left of his mind.
“Yes, sir. In another reality, you were a participant in the Time Program. I personally took you back to 1930 New York City, where you hit me over the head with a bottle and fled.”
“Tha
t doesn’t sound like something I would do-”
Dexter felt himself getting into a groove, and his disgust for Kane was carrying him. “In the tussle, you took my gun, and a few moments later you shot a man on the street. A man named George Mellen.”
“George Mellen,” Kane said, contemplating. “I know that name.”
“I can tell you a little bit about him,” Dexter said. “He was president of your family’s biggest competition at the time.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. “I know that story. The guy was shot on Fifth Avenue. My family bought that company after World War Two.” He paused. “Wait, you’re saying that was me who killed him?”
Dexter nodded. “I was there.”
“How old was I?”
“Just about the age you are right now.”
“Impossible. I can hardly move.”
“It was a different reality, Mr. Kane,” he said. “Apparently, something in this reality must have sped up your cancer.”
His already sallow complexion paled further, and he swallowed heavily. “I had cancer there, too?” Dexter nodded. “I guess if fate’s got it out for you, then fate’s got it out for you.”
Kane sat for a long moment, again staring at the sky. Dexter picked up his lemonade and took a drink, thinking about the severity of the news he’d just delivered. As had been pointed out to him dozens of times, history had changed. Dredging up an old reality that was no longer reality was pointless, unless they intended to go back and fix it – something that Kane would quickly deduce. Otherwise, why would they have even brought it up?
Finally, Kane looked up at them, his eyes reflecting tears. “Why would you tell someone that? What good would it do? People have called me a lot of things over the years, but I’ve never been called a murderer.”
The hardness in Dexter’s stance melted away in a split second. Even though they were the same man, with the same DNA and family history, they were not the same person. From the earnest look on his face, Dexter truly believed that this man in front of him was incapable of murdering someone. Even though he’d been there when it happened, in some way, the circumstances of each of their different tracks in life had created completely different characters.
He looked at Jeff. His circumstances were no different than Kane’s. The USTP was holding him hostage, disallowing him to return to his life, because of actions taken by another version of himself with different experiences, a different mindset, and a different outlook on life. Immediately, rectifying that situation for his friend became a priority.
“Mr. Kane,” Victoria said, rescuing the conversation, “forgive us. I know this is a shock to you. Believe me, it’s news we wish we weren’t delivering, and we do of course know that you yourself aren’t the murderer.”
“Then why are you here? You want to fix what you’re saying happened, don’t you?”
She was shaking her head. “No, sir. We can’t fix what happened. Not without risking causing irreparable damage. We are here for research.”
“Research?”
“Yes, sir. The time travel program has created a burgeoning field of psychology to study the mental and emotional effects of time travel on a person.” Dexter looked over at her, surprised. What she was saying was not true. “There are many facets to multiple realities, one of which is a person learning about a reality which they have not experienced. The opposite is also relevant. Dr. Jacobs’ story is true. He experienced a reality – well, actually a set of realities – that none of us know. He is the only person on the planet who knows of a world where the USSR did not fall in 1991. We’re studying what that does to a person’s mind. It’s alienating. It spurs loneliness akin to the feeling one might get when they lose a spouse – the immediate grief of the question of ‘why does this happen only to me?’”
“So that would be you, in my case?” Kane asked. Dexter saw he was looking at him and nodded. “You’re the only person who experienced me murder George Mellen?”
“Well, me and the thousands of people on Fifth Avenue at that time.”
“But you’re the only person right now in this time who experienced it.”
“Yes.”
“Not much for me to go on, is it?”
“No, sir, it’s not.”
Kane rested his head on the pillow again. “As we’ve been talking, the George Mellen story has come back to me. Mellen was the president of Brooklyn Milling and Grain, Incorporated, which provided grain to all of the major cereal companies on the east coast. They were competitors, but they weren’t – in the ‘20s and ‘30s, Kane Industries wasn’t in that business. We were in shipping, and we serviced the grain business. Ship and rail. We actually didn’t enter the grain business until about ten or fifteen years later. After that – right after World War II – we purchased Brooklyn Milling, which was about to go under, and all of its grain mills. But that was some twenty years after Mellen’s death. That’s probably enough to indict me, though, right?”
“Well, there’s no indictment necessary,” Jeff said. “You didn’t murder anyone. You aren’t responsible for the actions of your other self.” Dexter caught the irony in Jeff being the one to deliver this observation to Kane.
“No, I did not,” Kane said. “What happened to me after I fled the scene? There must be some history of it somewhere. Yes?”
“You were killed in a shootout with police a few blocks from the murder scene.”
Kane laughed. “I must’ve had some master plan going.”
“Well, apparently it worked out for you.” The words left Dexter’s mouth before he could stop them.
Kane turned toward Victoria. “Can you grab Gloria for me?” he asked. Obligingly, Victoria stood and went through the kitchen doors. “How do you mean?” he asked Dexter.
“Well, I can assure you that in the reality I started in, provided Mellen’s company was still around, which I don’t know, you were competitors. Grain was your business. However you got into it.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“In the research we conducted prior to your trip, there was no connection between you, Mellen, and 1930 New York City.”
“What was I going to see in New York?”
“The Empire State Building.”
“Being built...” he said, smiling. “Good choice. Always loved that building. So there was no connection other than the fact that someone knew – and must have told me – that George Mellen got his newspaper every day at that newsstand on Fifth Avenue.”
“Oral history.”
Now Kane laboriously leaned on his right arm and faced them. He grinned. “You’ve got a hole in your system.” It was clear the old man liked a puzzle.
“Yes, we do,” Dexter said, nodding.
The kitchen doors opened and Victoria came out with Gloria in tow. Gloria outpaced her back to the group and stood beside Kane as he settled onto his back again. “Is everything okay, sir?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. Dexter realized he’d returned from what a moment ago was his shrewd business voice to his deathbed murmur. “Gloria, I’m tired. Can you please show my guests to the door?” He resumed staring out at the water.
Without a formal goodbye, Jeff and Dexter rose and followed Victoria and Gloria through the expansive house and back out onto the front porch. Not knowing the nature of the conversation, Gloria apologized kindly for his abruptness before retreating into the house.
“Well, that went well,” Jeff said, the three of them standing at the bottom of the stairs, not quite able to agree upon getting in the car and leaving.
Dexter looked at him, astonished. “Did you know you were going to start rolling off details of your time travel? Couldn’t you have let us know ahead of time?”
Jeff laughed. “Seriously? You called the guy a murderer! All I did was tell a guy who’s going to be dead in a month a fun story to get his mind going. You ruined his life.”
“Gentlemen,” Victoria said, interjecting.
“If we
weren’t going to tell him what had happened, why did we come?”
“To find out about Mellen.”
“We found out about Mellen.”
“No,” Jeff said. He wasn’t upset, which was helping Dexter realize that his anger which had started this argument was really about his own role in the conversation next to Kane’s pool. “I’ll tell you what happened... You went in there wanting to demonize this guy because he hit you over the head with a bottle. So you burst into the story. But then you realized that this guy isn’t a murderer, and now you have to deal with the idea of ‘fixing’ a history that would make a guy who’s not a murderer into a murderer. Yes?”
Those thoughts had crossed Dexter’s mind during the conversation – and, yes, in that order. “Well, I didn’t do anything just because he hit me in the head with a bottle,” he said, a defense that was as lame as it sounded coming out of his mouth.
“Well, thank goodness for Dr. Graham, here,” Jeff said, pointing at her with his thumb, “or USTP would be staring down a huge shitstorm right now.”
“Why’s that?” Victoria asked.
“That speech about the psychology of time travel. That was on the fly, wasn’t it?”
She smiled.
“Brilliant. It was believable, and it took the focus off of the idea that we’re going to go back and change this life that he’s built.” Jeff motioned with his head for them to get in the car.
“Well, more than that,” she said, climbing into the passenger door. “It makes sense as a discipline. It came to me in the middle of the conversation and I developed an entire platform sitting right there. I should spend more time poolside, it appears.”
Dexter’s heart was pounding. He wanted to get as far from Kane’s mansion as possible. “Let’s get some dinner,” he said.
They closed the doors and pulled away.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jeff sat on his hotel room’s patio and breathed the evening air deeply. It felt like the first time he’d had a real moment to himself since he’d gotten back, and he tried to clear his head. He thought there was nothing that could help him do that more so than the sound of the surf hitting the beach seven floors beneath him. The sun hadn’t quite set on the other side of the hotel, but in front of him stars started to pepper the night sky.
Fate (Wilton's Gold #3) Page 8