by Rodney Jones
I sighed. “Tess, believe me, it’s not a coincidence. I know my aunt. I know her handwriting, her way with words. You saw the date on the letter. October 24, 1875.”
She turned to me. “So what?”
She clearly wasn’t willing to consider the logic, no matter how convincingly laid out it was. I couldn’t blame her. “I don’t know what,” I said.
Tess frowned. “You had a brother?”
I nodded. “My big brother, James Wyatt.”
“Why haven’t you told me about him?”
“I thought I did.”
“I don’t know. Maybe you did.”
A nuthatch crept up the gnarled bark of an old maple at the edge of the parking lot. The low rumble of motor cars came and went like far-off thunder.
“Just one brother?”
“My little brother, Michael, died when I was seven. I had a sister, Sarah, and like most everyone else, a father and a mother. J.W. and his wife, Minnie, were minding our ma down in Chester. Pa was killed in Shepherdstown, Virginia.”
“Killed?”
“The war.”
Tess again slipped off into silence. A minute passed, then she said, “Crap.”
I didn’t know what to make of that. “I didn’t tell you everything. I figured I’d just be wasting my breath and look all the more foolish for it.”
“John.” She punched me in the arm.
“It’s true.”
“Yeah, well, I believe you. I do. I meant… crap, this is like totally nutzoid. But I believe you.”
“You do?”
She punched me again. “Yes. I do.”
I looked her square in the eye. “Why?”
She shrugged. “It’s not like it makes any more sense to me. It’s… not possible.” Her brow furrowed.
I recalled my first time there in 2009, that moment when I realized where I was and the confusion I felt. “Tess? You once told me that when you were little, your ma and pa took you horseback riding… some place north of Rutland. You told me you enjoyed it and that you used to dream of someday having a horse of your own.”
She gave me a puzzled look. “I told you that?”
“We were leaving Greendale, headed up the mountain toward Wallingford. I was on the brown, and you were riding the goose.”
“A goose?”
“One of my uncle’s horses. He had a mare and two geldings, the brown and the goose. We called him that ’cause of his coloring. But anyway—”
“In 1875?”
I nodded. A long moment stretched in which neither of us spoke—exchanging glances—her thinking and me wondering what was going through her mind.
She finally said, “I really time traveled?”
“Yeah.”
“Crazy. I can’t…” Tess brought a hand to her chin and placed a finger over her lips, slowly shaking her head. “I can’t see Mom sharing that with you,” she whispered as though talking to herself. “She probably wouldn’t remember it, anyway. I always felt like, no matter where we were, she was somewhere else.”
“I got that story from you,” I said.
She shrugged. “I must’ve liked you.” Her eyes met mine for an instant then shifted away.
I smiled. “We got along all right.”
“This is nuts. You know that?”
“No doubt.” I wagged a finger at Mr. Mansur’s old house. “All that business, though? It’s just a newspaper clipping from a long time ago.” I wished it could be that simple, but it wasn’t. “I’m sure McNeil is burning in hell for his part.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter. Not anymore.” Just minutes before, as I was reading Aunt Lil’s letter to J.W., it had mattered a lot. True, that letter was a hundred thirty-four years old, but to me, it had happened only yesterday. In my mind, my aunt was still mourning, while my uncle’s body was waiting to be laid in its grave.
Tess’s shoulders dropped. “Whoa. This isn’t going to be easy getting used to.”
“I’ve had a good while longer to think about it than you, and I’m still not used to it, Tess.”
She nodded then said, “1875. No cars, right?”
“Horses and trains,” I told her. “It’d just take a while longer getting wherever you were going.”
“So you’ve never been in a car before?”
“This ain’t my first time here.”
“Oh. That’s right.”
“I still find it hard to believe—the cars, paved roads, machines for just about everything.”
She glanced around the car. “Well, yeah. And TV. You didn’t have TV.”
“No.”
“No computers, no Internet,” she said.
“No.”
“And you’ve never been on a plane.”
“A plain what?”
She shook her head. “They didn’t have movies back then either, did they?”
“Movies?” I pictured a small machine with wheels and a button to make it go.
Tess took out her cell phone. “Okay. Let’s do something fun. Let’s go see a movie.” She called her ma and told her that she and Nicole were going to the four o’clock show in Rutland and that she would be home around seven.
I couldn’t help but wonder at how she had managed the lie without showing the slightest bit of shame. I guessed it was one of those moments that called for an adjustment in moral perception. I kept quiet about it.
When we arrived in Rutland, Tess parked in the same lot as before. The theater had six different movie shows to choose from, three of which were starting soon.
“Oh, cool. It’s back. I saw this last year, when it first came out.” Tess stood before a large poster. “The Dark Knight.”
The picture was kind of scary looking. A tall dark wall—flames spilling from it, smoke and debris everywhere—and below the fire and chaos stood a man wearing a black, shiny getup, beyond even my craziest imaginings.
I shrugged. “All right.”
We entered an almost empty lobby, stepped up to a window, and purchased a pair of tickets from a fellow I had the hardest time understanding. Inside, every surface was bathed in the glow of colored lights. The air was saturated with the smell of butter and caramel.
Tess pointed toward a glass counter. “You want anything?”
I could only stare at the confusion of lights and colors. She bought us each a Coke drink, then she led me down a corridor to a huge, dimly lit room. Rows of seats were divided by two aisles, and the floor sloped down toward a shallow stage backed by a featureless light-gray wall. We went about halfway down the aisle then shuffled sideways to a pair of seats near the middle of the theater. As I sank into the padded chair, I glanced around and saw that less than a quarter of the seats were occupied.
I stared up at the blank wall and took a sip of my drink. Just as I was about to lean over and ask Tess what we were waiting for, the wall vanished. The mountains east of Rutland appeared. I had thought we were facing west. Then the words “Green Mountain Realty — Homes for Sale in Vermont” appeared across the sky, and a string of numbers and other nonsense hung in the foreground toward the bottom of the mountains.
“Whoa! Whoa.” I turned to Tess, expecting she’d be enraptured as well. She was fiddling with her cell thing, not even looking at the stage. “Tess, you’re missing the show.”
She glanced up. The mountains were gone. They had been replaced by an old lady lying on a raised bench with a plump pillow beneath her head. A bulky gray and white square arm with glowing green and red buttons extended out over her belly. Another lady stood behind the table, looking at an internet machine. “Rutland Regional Medical Center – We’re committed to providing exceptional medical care” was spelled out in foot-high black letters that floated near the top of the stage.
“My Lord, Tess, look at that.”
Tess only grinned at me.
chapter nine
Tess
Going to the movies hadn’t been my best idea. The last preview was for a new movie called Zombieland, which I thought looked pretty cool. John flooded me with about a million questions. Using whispers and gestures, I struggled to explain the idea behind a preview being just glimpses of a movie—no, those weren’t real zombies, and no, they didn’t really drop a piano on that “sad fellow.”
“Well, Tess, I can barely hear myself think with all this hullabaloo,” he’d blurted loudly.
Someone behind us yelled, “Sit down and shut up!”
We barely made it through the first ten minutes of The Dark Knight. John seemed to feel that we should be doing something to help the Joker’s tormented victims. So we left and slipped into one of the other theaters. We walked in about a quarter of the way through a romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock. I thought he might like that. Still, I had to struggle to keep him in his seat and quiet. We left after another ten wild and crazy minutes.
“How do they do that, Tess?” he asked as we crossed the parking lot. “It looked just like a real dog.”
“It was a real dog,” I said.
“I thought you said it wasn’t.”
“You had plays in 1875, didn’t you?”
“Every year at Christmas time, kids dressin’ up as shepherds and angels, but no one jumped from mile-high rooftops, flying like bats. And birds didn’t go around carrying off dogs then dropping them smack dab into someone’s arms.”
“Where’s my car?” I stopped and scanned the next two rows of vehicles.
“How’d they do that, Tess?”
“Do what?” I pointed across the lot. “Wasn’t I parked by that light post?”
“Isn’t this it?” John pointed at the car immediately behind us.
“Oh.” I clicked the unlock button on my remote. “It’s film, John. They can do anything and make it look real. Special effects.”
“Film?”
We climbed into the car and put on our seatbelts.
“Film, like, like in… I don’t really know how they do it.” I tried to remember if they had anything even remotely like film in the nineteenth century. “It’s kind of like a magic trick, I guess. It looks real, but it’s not. Everyone just knows it’s not.”
“Well, it had me fooled.”
“You’re lucky. I think everyone goes to the movies hoping to be fooled. That’s the main reason we go, to escape reality.”
“But why would anyone want to escape to a reality with dead people chasing after you? And that wicked joker man with paint all over his face—ugly. He didn’t scare you?”
“Yeah, he was scary.”
“Well, if I was ever to bump into that fellow somewhere, I’d turn tail, no question about it, three wheels shy of a wagon.”
I laughed. “We need to pop a pizza in the oven and watch some Brady Bunch reruns on Nick at Nite.”
We stopped at Hannaford’s on our way out of town and bought a few groceries—things John could keep at his camp—then headed back to Wallingford, continuing our discussion about movies along the way. I did most of the talking, not even realizing it until we were nearly there. Something was eating John, and I was certain it was the letter in the museum. I didn’t question him because I was still creeped out by it all.
Just before we got to the house, I pulled off to the side of the road. John released his seatbelt, but then he just sat there.
“What a crazy day,” I said.
“Long.”
“I wore you out, huh?”
“No, you didn’t. I’m just not used to it, everything moving so quick. One minute we’re here, the next we’re in Weston, then Rutland, then back… like it’s nothing.” He peered down the road. “The day ain’t even done. Time plays tricks on you.” He pushed the door open and stepped out.
I said, “Come in for some waffles in the morning.”
He looked at me as if he were about to say something more but then just nodded and closed the door. I watched him walk off into the woods before I continued home.
A large silver pickup truck was parked in front of the garage, and the front door of the house was wide open. I climbed the porch steps and nearly bumped into a man carrying a power drill.
“Oopsy,” he said, stepping to the side.
I walked past him and into the living room. Mom was slouched on the couch, a bottle of beer in her hand.
She glanced at the clock on the DVD player. “That was a short movie.”
“It was lame. We left early.”
The man began tapping nails into the trim around the door frame.
“Well, good. You can help with dinner.” She turned her head. “Mick, would you like to stay for dinner?”
Mick looked up at me. “So you’re Ann’s daughter, Tess. I pictured someone a bit heftier. Wrecking-ball girl.” The guy was about five-ten, gaunt and pale, with dark messy hair streaked with white. He also had the epitome of square chins—the kind I’d never trusted.
“Uh huh,” I said, wondering what story my mom had given him.
“I’m Mick Pechmann. Work the same place Ann does, back in lumber.”
“Stay and have dinner, Mick,” Mom said. “Tess, throw some potato wedges in the oven. There’s a bag of salad greens in the fridge, and those T-bones. You and I can split one. Can you manage that, hon?”
I wanted to say, “Manage what? Everything?” but of course I didn’t.
“I prefer my steak a little pink in the middle,” Mick said. “But any way it comes, I’ll eat it.”
“And, hon? Bring Mick another beer, too.”
I headed for the kitchen before she could decide I needed to prop his feet up for him. As I popped the cap off a bottle of beer, I overheard Mick say, “You have one fine daughter there, Ann. I see she takes after you in looks.” I shoved the mouth of the bottle into my armpit and gave it a twist.
In the middle of dinner, my phone went off.
“I hate that,” Mom said, “a phone ringing while I’m trying to enjoy a meal.”
I dug the phone out of my pocket. The caller ID displayed a local number but no name. I got up and headed toward the patio doors.
“We have a guest here. Call them back,” Mom said.
I ignored her and slid the door open as I answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Tess? This is Richard Adams.”
I stepped out onto the deck and closed the door. “Yes, this is Tess.”
“I have a collector in Boston who’s offered twelve thousand for three of your silver dollars. He’s agreed to take the rest for six thousand more. I think we’d do better finding another buyer for the remaining coins, though.”
I did the math in my head. “Wait. Eighteen thousand dollars?”
“Yep.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s good, but if they were mine, I’d sell the three and then shop the rest around a bit more. They book for about fourteen. I might be able to get between eight and ten. Maybe.”
“Is it a lot of trouble to look for more buyers?” I glanced through the door, into the dining area. Mick was gesturing with his hands, and Mom was laughing.
“The hard part’s done—the photos and grading. All I have to do now is e-mail the potential buyers and wait. It’s just a question of how patient you’re willing to be.”
“I don’t know. Are you thinking like weeks or months?”
“A week or two. Around that.”
I wanted to do the right thing for John, but I didn’t really know what that was. I wasn’t even sure he knew. “Okay. Let’s sell the three coins then keep looking.”
I hung up and went back inside to finish my dinner. As I sat down, Mick cupped a hand to the side of his mouth a
nd whispered something to my mom.
She rolled her eyes. “She needs a boyfriend like she needs a hole in the head.”
That night, the incident at the museum crept back into my thoughts. I stepped through all the intricacies of John’s story, from the moment I had first noticed him standing on the lawn through his reaction to the letter. I couldn’t figure out how he could have pulled off a hoax without the collaboration of the staff. Also, he couldn’t possibly have known I would take him to that museum. It was completely my idea. And even once we were there, I could’ve bypassed the letter. I skipped over a lot of stuff. He made no effort to nudge me that way.
If the whole thing was a lie, it was too big and complex not to unravel pretty quickly. But if it wasn’t a hoax, then John was who he claimed to be, and the Tess described in the newspaper clipping was me. I had traveled through time and been murdered. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to believe that.
chapter ten
John
Gazing through the sheer mesh of the tent door, I watched a star framed by the dark canopy of maples and beeches. The branches shifted back and forth, hiding its light, off and on, on and off. A breeze moving down through the Champlain Valley whispered like ghosts in the treetops. I’d start to drift off, but then a word or a line from Aunt Lil’s letter would tug me back to awareness.
It wasn’t right that my uncle had suffered such an injustice. I wondered if the fire would have happened if Tess hadn’t shown up. Though she only meant to warn me, her mere presence seemed to have drawn calamity, like a house on a hilltop pulling lightning from the sky. But my own insatiable curiosity had occasioned our meeting in the first place. If I had to put the blame anywhere, it would be on me.
The ground dug into my bones, so I rolled over onto my side. Perhaps it would’ve worked out the same whether Tess had come or not. McNeil probably would’ve found some other way and reason to do what he did. Maybe the rub didn’t begin with Tess but with my aunt rejecting the sheriff’s advances at the Mosiers’ dance—long before I’d even met Tess. Uncle Ed had worked up quite a froth once he’d learned of it. I remembered his words precisely: “If I’d been within eye or ear of McNeil’s tomfooleries, he wouldn’t have walked out of there on his own like he did.” I couldn’t help but wonder if that was what the whole mess was really all about, a stupid dance.