Using penlights, they began an inspection. A half dozen rooms were designated for patients. Dave followed her from offic e to offic e, not really knowing what they were looking for. But Helen did one quick turn down the passageway, stopped in a room at the far end, and pointed at a machine tucked away in a corner. “This is it,” she said. The manufacturer’s label said it was an orthopantomograph. “It’s designed to provide a panoramic X-ray.”
“Panoramic? What’s that?”
“Full mouth. It should be all we’ll need.” The records were maintained in manila folders in an interior office. Helen found Shel’s, thumbed through it, and took out a disk. “Okay,” she said, “we caught a break.”
“What’s that?”
“The results are on individual disks.”
She explained how it worked: The person being X-rayed placed his forehead against this plastic rest and his chin in the cup-shaped support. The camera was located inside the cone over here, which was mounted on a rotating arm. The arm and cone traversed the head, like this, and produced a panoramic image of the teeth. The only problem was that the patient normally stood during the procedure.
“We’ll need six to eight minutes to do it,” said Helen. “During that time we have to keep him absolutely still. Think you can manage it?”
Dave nodded. “I can do it.”
“Okay.” She checked to make sure there was a disk in the machine. “Let’s get him.”
They carried Victor to the X-ray machine. At Helen’s suggestion, they’d brought along some cloth strips, which they now used to secure the body to the device. It was a clumsy business, and the corpse kept sliding away from them. Working in the dark complicated things, but after about ten minutes, they had him in place.
“Something just occurred to me,” Dave said. “Victor Randall already has the head wound.”
Her eyes closed momentarily. “You’re suggesting the arsonist didn’t hit Shel in the head after all. You know, I’m beginning to think it’s going to turn out to be the lightning strike at that.”
A mirror was mounted on the machine directly in front of where the patient’s face would be. Helen pressed a button, and a light went on in the center of the mirror. “They would tell the patient to watch the light,” she said. “That’s how they’re sure they’ve got it lined up.”
“How are we sure?”
“What’s the term? ‘Dead reckoning’?” She punched another button. A motor started, and the cone began to move.
Ten minutes later, they took the disk out, leaving Victor in place until Helen could be sure they had good pictures. She inserted the disk into the laptop, brought up the picture, and handed it to Dave without looking at it. “What do you think?”
The entire mouth, uppers and lowers, was clear. “Looks good to me.”
She took a deep breath. “Plenty of fillings on both sides. Let’s see how it compares.”
They went back to Shel’s folder. “He goes to the dentist every three months,” she said. (Dave couldn’t help noticing she still talked about him in the present tense.) She checked the dates on the disks and removed one. “These are the results of his most recent checkup.” She put it in the computer and brought up a panoramic picture, like the one they had just taken, and several smaller photos of individual sections. “I think they call these ‘wings,’ ” she said. “But when they bring a dentist in to identify a body, they do it with these.” She indicated the panoramic and compared Shel’s with the one they’d just made. “Well—”
“What?”
“They don’t look much alike in detail. If they ever get around to comparing Mr. Randall’s panoramic with Shel’s wings, they’ll notice something’s wrong. But it should be good enough to get by.” She transferred the data, everything except the panoramic, from Shel’s disk to Randall’s.
A car pulled up outside.
Helen put Shel’s panoramic disk in her pocket, marked his name on the Randall disk, and placed it in the folder.
Dave heard a siren. Getting louder. “Helen, I think we may have tripped an internal alarm.”
“Probably.”
“We have to go.”
“All set.” She replaced the folder and closed the file drawer just as the siren arrived and shut off. Blinds covered the windows, but rotating lights leaked through.
More car doors and voices. Out front and in the parking lot.
They retreated to the back and began taking Victor down from the X-ray machine. Meantime, they heard keys in the front door. “It’s taking too long,” Helen whispered.
The door opened. A flashlight shone in. A voice said, “Police.” Then the door swung wide, and more beams appeared. The plan had been that David would take the corpse directly to the town house, remove the converter, and return with it for Helen. But time was becoming a problem.
The body came free and fell into his arms as the police started down the corridor. Dave began to attach Helen’s converter while she wiped off the headrest and checked the floor to be sure no blood had been spilled. Then she and Dave turned off their penlights.
The passageway lights came on.
“We don’t have time,” she whispered. “We’re going to have to leave the body.” She inserted a fresh disk into the X-ray machine.
“We can’t do that.”
“Have to. No choice.”
Maybe there was.
The cops ordered them to come out into the passageway. “Where we can see you. And get your hands up.”
“Helen.” A new voice, in the dark.
Dave’s voice. A second Dave’s voice.
Damn. It had worked. The second David held a converter out for an astonished Helen. “Take it. Quick.”
Dumbfounded, she looked from one to the other, then grabbed the laptop.
The voices were right outside the door.
David activated Victor’s converter, watched him fade, and followed. The darkened dental office went away, and he was back in the den at the town house, standing beside the desk. Victor’s body lay on the floor.
Helen, still in a state of near shock, appeared, followed instantly by the second David. She stared at one. Then the other. Leaned on a side table. “Are you twins?”
“No.”
“What’s happening?” she asked. “Where’d he come from?” But she wasn’t sure which he she was referring to.
The two Davids laughed. Then the one who’d come in with the body removed the converter and set it to return to the point of departure.
“Where are you going?” asked Helen.
“Back to rescue you.” He grinned. “I’ll arrive a couple of minutes ago.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Take care,” he said.
“Wait.”
“Got to go.” He hit the button.
And he was back, watching himself bend over poor dead Victor, trying to decide what to do.
“. . . Have to leave the body,” said Helen, while inserting a disk into the orthopantomograph.
The David who was about to attach the converter to the body shook his head no. “We can’t do that.”
“Have to,” said Helen. “No choice.”
“Helen.” He couldn’t see her well in the dark. But he heard her gasp. He pressed the converter into her hands, the one he’d removed from Victor back in the town house. “Take it,” he said. “Quick.”
She got it into her hands. Almost dropped it.
Dave and the body went away as lights went on and two police officers burst into the room, guns drawn. Helen started to fade, and Dave pressed the black button.
THEY were all back in the living room.
Helen gawked at him. At both of them. “Are you twins?”
The David who’d been with Helen was in the process of removing the converter from Victor Randall. “No,” he said. He lifted the unit and reset it. Looked briefly at his other self, and smiled. “Got to go.”
And he went away.
“Is he coming back?” aske
d Helen.
Dave smiled. “He already did.” She looked pale. “You okay?” he asked.
“I think I have a headache.”
CHAPTER 41
O, call back yesterday, bid time return.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, RICHARD II
LIGHTNING glimmered in the curtains. Shel’s heating system came on.
Helen looked at the body and at the staircase. “We should have brought him in on the second floor.”
“I didn’t have the coordinates.”
“It’s only fifteen feet up.”
She was right, of course. Dave made the adjustment for the converter, attached it to the body, and punched the button. It faded, and when they went upstairs they found him on the landing. “Which bedroom is Shel’s?” she asked.
He almost told her that he thought she’d know. But he decided she wouldn’t think it was funny.
There were three bedrooms, but it wasn’t hard to pick out his. Pictures of their old high-school baseball team, plaques acknowledging his outstanding work for Carbolite, a pile of books on the side table.
Dave turned back the sheets, hauled the corpse onto the bed, and dressed it in Shel’s pajamas. When he’d finished, they put his clothes into a plastic bag.
They also had a brick in the bag. They went downstairs and got the keys for Shel’s car out of the Phillies cup. They’d debated just leaving the clothes to burn, but neither wanted to leave anything to chance. Despite what one might think about time travel, David understood that what they were doing was forever. They couldn’t come back and undo it, because they were here, and they knew what the sequence of events was, and you couldn’t change that without confronting the cardiac principle.
They borrowed Shel’s Toyota. It had a vanity plate reading SHEL, and a lot of mileage. But he had taken good care of it. They drove down to the river. At the two-l ane bridge that crossed the Narrows, they pulled off and waited until there was no traffic. Then they went out to the middle of the bridge, where they assumed the water was deepest, and threw the bag over the side. Dave still had Victor Randall’s wallet and ID, which he intended to burn.
They returned Shel’s car. By then it was 3:45 A.M., thirty-eight minutes before a Mrs. Wilma Anderson would call to report a fire at the town house. Dave worried whether they’d cut their time too close, that the intruder might already be inside. But it was still quiet when they returned to the house and put the car keys back in the cup.
They locked the place, front and back, which was how they’d found it, and retired across the street behind a hedge. It was a good night’s work, and they waited now to see who the criminal was. The neighborhood was tree-l ined, well lighted, quiet. The houses were upper-m iddle-class, fronted by small fenced yards. Cars were parked in garages or on drive-ways. Somewhere in the next block, a cat yowled.
Four o’clock.
“Getting late,” Helen said.
Nothing moved. “He’s going to have to hurry up.”
She frowned. “What happens if he doesn’t come?”
“He has to come.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the way it happened. We know that for an absolute fact.”
She looked at her watch. 4:01.
“I just had a thought,” David said.
“We could use one.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe there is no firebug. Or rather, maybe we are the firebugs. After all, we already know where the fractured skull came from.” And he knew who had broken into the desk.
She thought about it. “I think you’re right,” she said.
“Wait here,” he told her. “In case someone does show up.”
“Where are you going?”
“To get some gas.”
David left the shelter of the hedge and walked quickly across the street, entered Shel’s driveway, and went back into the garage. There were three gas cans. All empty.
He needed the car keys again. He used the converter to get back inside and retrieved the keys. He threw the empty cans into the trunk of the Toyota.
There was an all-n ight station on River Road, only a few blocks away. It was one of those places where they concentrate on keeping the cashier alive after about eleven o’clock. He was a middle-aged, worn-out guy sitting in a cage full of cigarette smoke. A toothpick rolled relentlessly from one side of his mouth to the other. Dave paid in cash, filled the cans, and drove back.
Helen helped. It was 4:17 when they began sloshing gas around the basement. They emptied a can on the stairway and another upstairs, taking care to drench the bedroom where Victor Randall lay. They poured the rest of it on the first floor, and so thoroughly soaked the entry that David was reluctant to go near it with a lighted match. But at 4:25, they touched it off.
They retreated across the street and watched for a time. The flames cast a pale glow in the sky, and sparks floated upward. They didn’t know much about Victor Randall, but what they did know was maybe enough. He’d been a husband and father. In their photos, his wife and kids had looked happy. And he got a Viking’s funeral.
“What do you think?” asked Helen. “Will it be all right now?”
“Yeah,” Dave said. “I hope so.”
DAVE’S first act on returning to the base time, Saturday, September 21, eight days after the fire at the town house, was to destroy Victor Randall’s wallet and driver’s license.
Then he used the converter to travel to Randall’s house. He left ten thousand dollars in the mailbox.
He and Helen spent some time planning how to get the news to Shel. The Socrates event seemed like their best bet. “Do it tomorrow,” she said. “I’m going home to crash for a while. This has been too much excitement in one day for me.”
They were at his place, and she had just started for the door when they heard a car pull up. “It’s a woman,” she said archly, looking out the window. “Friend of yours?”
It was Lieutenant Lake. She was alone this time.
The doorbell rang.
“This won’t look so good,” Helen said.
“I know. You want to duck upstairs?”
She thought about it. “My car’s out there. There’d be no point.”
The bell rang again. David opened up.
“Good morning, Dr. Dryden,” said the detective. “I wonder if you can spare me a few minutes?”
“Sure. Come in, Lieutenant. Where’s your partner?”
She smiled. “We’ve been busy.” She took a deep breath. “I have a few questions for you.”
“Of course.”
Helen came into the living room, but the lieutenant did not look surprised. “Hello, Dr. Suchenko. It’s good to see you again.”
Helen nodded. “And you, Lieutenant. How are you?”
“Fine, thanks.” Lake cleared her throat and addressed Helen. “I wonder, Doctor, whether I might have a minute alone with Dr. Dryden.”
“Sure.” Helen got her jacket from the closet. “I should be on my way anyhow.” She patted Dave’s shoulder in a comradely way and let herself out.
“Doctor,” said Lake, “you’ve said you were home in bed at the time Dr. Shelborne’s home burned. Is that correct?”
“Yes. That’s right.” When she’d asked her questions before, Dave had been annoyed. Now he felt queasy. Now he was, in a sense, the perp.
“Are you sure?”
The question hung in the sunlit air. “Of course. Why do you ask?” He could read nothing in her expression.
“Someone answering your description was seen near the town house at the time of the fire.”
“It wasn’t me.” Dave immediately thought of the man at the gas station. And he’d been driving Shel’s car. With his vanity plate in front just in case anybody wasn’t paying attention.
“Okay. I wonder if you’d mind coming down to the station with me, so we can clear the matter up? Get it settled?”
“Sure. Be glad to.” They stood. “Give me a minute, okay? I need to use the washroom.”
He called Helen. “Don’t panic,” she said. “All you need is a good alibi.”
“I don’t have an alibi.”
“For God’s sake, Dave. You’ve got something better. You have a time machine.”
“Okay. Sure. But if I go back and set up an alibi, why didn’t I tell them the truth in the beginning?”
“Because you were protecting a woman’s reputation,” she said. “What else would you be doing at four o’clock in the morning? Get out your little black book.” The problem was that Dave didn’t have a little black book.
CHAPTER 42
That old bald cheater, Time.
—BEN JONSON, THE POETASTER
DAVE had been reasonably successful with women, but not so much that he needed to organize a data center. Not to the extent, certainly, that he could call one with a reasonable hope of finishing the night in her bed. Except maybe Katie, who would do it as a favor, but he didn’t want to involve her in this. What other option was there? He could try to pick somebody up in a bar, but you didn’t really lie to the police in a murder case over a pickup.
Well, he’d have to come up with something. Meantime, he would need his car keys. He came out of the washroom, apologized to Lieutenant Lake for the delay, got his keys, and started out with her. “Oops,” he said. And stopped, patting his rear pocket.
“What’s wrong?”
“Let me get my wallet.”
He went upstairs, into his bedroom, and used the converter to return to the night of the fire, to Thursday evening, when he’d been out with Katie. It was about seven hours before the town house burned.
He came back down into the den and let himself out. The garage, of course, was empty. He used the converter again to move forward to 12:30. He was home by then, and the lights were out in his bedroom.
He held his breath while the garage door rolled up. But everything stayed quiet. He opened the car door as quietly as he could, slid behind the wheel, started the engine, and backed out into the street.
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