by Alex Myers
Without thinking, Jack ran along the shore and dove headfirst into the lagoon. He swam toward the two men. One was the big foreman Quentin Drake and the other was an older black man. The black man’s struggling slowed and he went under. Jack reached below the surface, grabbed the man by the back of the neck, and hauled him up to the surface. Then he kicked toward shore, dragging the man behind him.
Jack handed the man off to a couple of men on shore and dove back to get Quentin. The man was nowhere in sight. The men milling on the shore watched Jack and he yelled to them. “Where is he?”
They gestured down in the water.
Jack swam to where he thought he’d last seen him and dove straight down. He tried to open his eyes but the water was impenetrable. He hit the bottom and felt his way around until his lungs ached. He surfaced, gulped some air, and went down again. Jack tried ten times and found nothing. Finally, he swam to where they had hauled the black man to shore. Ten men were watching as Jack climbed up onto dry land.
“Did you ever see him come back up again?” Jack asked.
“Nope,” a skinny, muddy man in the group said.
“How’s the guy doing that I brought over here first?”
“You mean the nigger?”
“The black guy, yeah,” Jack said.
“Dead.”
“Dead?” Jack was stunned.
“Drowned. Can’t believe you chose to save a nigger over a white man,” the skinny man said.
“Screw you,” Jack said as he plowed through the men, wanting to see what had happened to the black man himself.
The woman who had been looking at him earlier was bringing down a large flatbed cart pulled by two horses. She drove to where three injured men sat. People picked up the three men and the body of the black man and loaded them onto the wagon. She was off in less than three minutes.
She gave Jack a look which seemed to ask how he could have let this happen, then announced that she was going to the doctor’s and that anyone else who was hurt would have to get there another way.
After all was said and speculated upon, Jack was the last to leave the scene of the accident. He sat on the jagged wall almost at the point of where it had exploded near the center of the inlet. The tide had reversed and Jack was totally amazed at the volume of water that flowed past his feet.
You could definitely put a tidal generator on this thing. Didn’t that Murphy McCord guy say he had one hooked up?
He must have been there an hour after the last person left when he heard a voice from the shore behind him.
“People say that you warned everyone, that you saved quite a few lives. People would have been trapped down in that hole had it not been for you.”
It was the woman he’d seen earlier, the one who drove the wagon. Jack stood on the wall of rock and walked over to her. He was close enough to speak but remained silent.
She watched him approach and openly studied him. She didn’t say a word either.
“How are the people you took to the . . . hospital?”
“Doctor’s office. They’re doing OK. Except for the colored man you tried to save. The doctor said he probably died of a heart attack; whatever it was, he didn’t drown.”
“Last I saw of him he was alive.”
“Three people died today so far—the colored man, a teenaged boy, and Quentin Drake, our project foreman.”
“Our? Is this your place?”
“It’s my father’s. And all anyone knows about you is that your name is Riggs. So Riggs, is that a first or last name?”
“Jack Riggs, and it’s a pleasure to meet you.” Jack extended his hand to shake business style, but she put her hand in his and left it there without shaking. He wondered if she wanted him to kiss it. “And your name is?”
“Frances Sanger.”
“Frances Sanger,” he repeated. It was making sense.
Looking him directly in the eye, she finally gave his hand a slight shake and withdrew it. “You seem like a very peculiar specimen.”
“I know I probably look peculiar, “ he said, “but I’m from New York.”
“Are you talking about your clothes? I’m a buyer. I just returned from a buying trip to New York, and I didn’t see anything like what you’re wearing.”
Jack realized he wasn’t going to get out of this quite so easily. “Ah, my best friend is a designer, and I guess I was his guinea pig.”
“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m not familiar with that kind of pig.”
“What I meant to say is that he used me to test his new fashions.”
She looked at him skeptically and let the subject drop. “Sounds to me as if you’re somewhat educated. Or am I giving you too much credit?”
Without thinking, Jack blurted out, “I have a degree from William and Mary.” This was true and Jack didn’t hesitate, knowing that the College had been founded in the late 1600s.
“What did you study?
“My major was Health Sciences.” Jack would usually laugh off this question by saying his minor in college was Unrealized Goals.
“My husband—I mean my ex-husband—went to William and Mary. He’s a lawyer named Abner Adkins. You two must know each other.”
“Name doesn’t ring a bell,” Jack said. How could he tell her he’d been in the graduating class of 2000?
“Is it just me, or do you think it’s strange that a man with a college degree is covered in black clay and digging a ditch?”
“A man’s got to do whatever he can to get by. But yes, this is not quite the kind of work I’m accustomed to.”
“And just what kind of work would that be?”
“I’m a teacher.”
“Teacher, huh? Let me see your hands.”
“Pardon me?”
“Let me see your hands.”
Jack held them up, palms facing her.
“Come closer, I’m not going to bite.” As Jack approached, she reached out and grabbed his hands, pulling him to within inches. He was close enough to smell her perfume and what he figured to be the fresh scent of her long blonde hair. As she examined his hands, he examined her. Her strong grip contrasted to the softness of her hands in his.
“No calluses,” she said releasing her grip. Jack let his hands stay in her open fingers, relishing her touch. She stood straight and moved away from him. “Well, wherever you’ve been working, it hasn’t been with these hands.”
She turned and addressed him directly, as if she, and not her ex-husband, was the lawyer. “I’m curious about something,” she said. “When I said you were peculiar earlier, I wasn’t talking about the way you were dressed. How do I put this so it doesn’t sound judgmental? Why did you try to save the Negro instead of the white man?”
It was the last thing he expected from her. “I didn’t set out to save a person of one particular race and not another. The old guy looked like he needed the help more.”
“You didn’t know he was already dead?”
“Of course not.”
“Why didn’t you try to save the foreman?”
“He looked fine when I first swam by. I did go back for him, but by that time he had disappeared.”
“You couldn’t tell he didn’t know how to swim?”
“No.” Jack was getting angry.
“Did you have an argument with him right before the accident?”
“Wow, I feel like I’m being interrogated. I was trying to clear the people out and he wanted them to continue working.”
“You knew the accident was going to happen before it did?”
“Yes, that wall was made of glass, and it was buckling the wrong way.”
“I’m just worried you’re going to have problems with Quentin’s brother Miles. He’s a bigger reprobate than Quentin was. He works security for the same company as my ex-husband does in Williamsburg. The SAC.”
“Am I supposed to ask what this ‘sack’ is?”
“It’s the Southerners Against Compromise, but I only know that because I us
ed to be married to their lawyer. They’re a big manufacturing concern that steals patents from Northern companies and makes cheap imitations.”
“They sound like bad people.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Frances looked around as if seeing things for the first time. “I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this.” She stopped and stood there blank, amazed, and shaken.
“I’m sorry about going off on you like that earlier,” Jack said. “I’ve suffered a string of….” He thought about what to call it. “Adverse circumstances, you could say. Misfortune, plain bad luck to put it mildly.”
“Maybe I can speak to Daddy and he could put something a little better than a shovel in your hands.” She turned and walked away without once looking back, and all Jack could do was watch her go.
As she walked away, Jack had an eerie feeling that this had happened before. He had a sense of some preordained, mystical junction. He certainly knew he wanted her, but for the first time in his life he wondered if he’d found a woman who was more than he could handle.
CHAPTER 8
February 1856
Worth a Try
It was Saturday and there was a break in the work at the estate. Miss Nancy Hart Douglas, the widow who owned the boarding house, had received Jack into her home with a certain exuberance. She was a robust woman, tall and stocky, not to the point of being stout, but a hundred and fifty years later, she would have thrown the shot put. Despite her size, she carried herself daintily like a woman half her bulk and half her age. Except for the grayness of her severely-bunned hair, she had a pleasant face, and you could tell she had actually been pretty at one time.
In Norfolk’s relative smallness, hers was one of three places that took in boarders. All three were run by women of various ages, appearances and characteristics—dubious and dingy, severe and suspicious, and in Miss Nancy’s case, calm and confiding. Miss Nancy’s was also the only one that allowed both male and female residents.
It was a large, openhearted contraption of a house, located on Fenchurch and Union Streets, one street off Main and two blocks from the docks, a giant rambling wooden structure that would have been lost among similar buildings except that it was pink. Under Miss Nancy’s direction, a former boarder with more time than money had painted the house for her. In a town where there was very little paint on anything, a pink thing had a tendency to get noticed.
Eight men and two women were boarding when Jack arrived. A young married couple and three of the men had been given the four bedrooms; the other four men shared an oversized partitioned parlor, and the other woman had a small room in the back with its own entrance. The married couple were teachers; six of the men worked on the docks or on a boat; and the other man was the clerk, Pete Snider, who Jack had first met at the Dry Goods Store. The single woman, a lady named Lottie Moon, was most likely a prostitute.
Miss Nancy’s relationship with Jack had a jaunty, flirty, borderline bawdy feel to it right from the start. The deputy who told the sheriff and the mayor what a hero Jack was had told the same story to the landlady. She said she’d be proud to house a real life bandit fighter, and even changed the bedsheets on Jack’s bed to a freshly laundered set.
After he’d been paid for his first days of work, Jack paid Miss Nancy for his two-night stay on credit and for a week in advance. Then he talked her into letting him borrow her horse. He declined her offer to ride with him in her buggy, saying that he was going to go through some rough country to try to find some of his lost supplies. Miss Nancy’s horse was more accustomed to pulling a cart than being ridden, but she had an old saddle and he made do.
Beginning at eight o’clock in the morning, Jack retraced his steps to Murphy’s place, but the old man was nowhere to be found. A winter rainstorm was beginning to fall, and by the time Jack reached the spot where he thought he’d awakened to the nineteenth century, it had turned into a full-fledged thunderstorm. He was strangely excited. He tied the horse to a tree and got on his back in the mud, hoping against hope that something extraordinary would happen and he’d be struck again and return to his life in the twenty-first century. But as he lay there, he wondered what his hurry was; any return would put him smack back into a bunch of unpleasant situations—Ashley, Shalah, the Norfolk police, the FBI, and Homeland Security. Besides, he hadn’t done his lesson plans.
After an hour during which nothing happened except that he got thoroughly soaked and filthy, he gave up and headed back to town. If I’m ever going to get back to my own time, it’ll have to be some other way than this. Besides, I’m not sure I believe in time travel. What makes me think I could figure out a way to flash ahead to 2013? Anyway, this place doesn’t seem so bad, he thought as he kicked the horse to a trot.
CHAPTER 9
February 1856
He Doesn’t Tell Murphy
On his way back, Jack stopped by Murphy’s house again and this time he was at home. Jack had discovered that Murphy really had been a Texas Senator and his family had indeed been killed by Indians. He found him sitting on a crate, smoking a corncob pipe under the overhang of his front porch.
“Jack Riggs, come in out of the weather! It’s coming down like a cow pissing on a flat rock.”
“Hello, Mr. McCord.” Jack hitched his horse to a tree, hopped over the electric fence, and stepped onto the dry porch.
“I won’t have any of that. I told you the name was Murphy.”
“You’re right, you did. I stopped by earlier and you weren’t home.”
“All this rain, I was getting back flow on my hydro-generator.”
“So you do generate your own electricity. I’m prepared to be a lot more impressed with your inventions this time.”
“I was washing my clothes when the electricity went out.”
Jack looked at Murphy’s pants—pure mud from the knees down and the shirt wasn’t much better.
“Not these clothes,” Murphy said. “My good stuff.”
“How are you doing, Murphy?”
“I'm so tired, the seat of my pants is dragging my tracks out.”
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“Haven’t been sleeping well. I’ve been thinking about things . . ..”
The jovial senior that Jack had met the first time through had grown more serious; even his eyes didn’t seem as wild. “Is it anything you want to talk about?”
“It’s probably something I should have talked about ten years ago but didn’t.”
“Are you talking about your family?”
“Yes, I am. I ran away from my work, the memory of them, everything, including myself and who I really am.”
Just knowing that there really were Indians that were still killing and being killed and that Murphy had really lost a wife and daughter made Jack look at him in a different light. “Why are you thinking about it now?”
“You.” Murphy said looking Jack in the eye.
“Me?”
“Nothing I showed up the other day phased you; it felt as if you’d seen it all before.”
“I have.”
“Well, tell me where, so we can go look at it. It would make it a hell of a lot easier.”
“Up here.” Jack pointed to his head.
Murphy nodded. “You seem like a man with a purpose.”
Jack thought he was anything but. The last few days he would have said his purpose was to get back to his own time—now…not so much. “I’m surprised to hear you say that about me.”
“Well, I’m about as crazy as a fundamentalist on firewater.”
If Jack had been drinking milk, it would have come out his nose. “Sorry,” Jack said, trying to stifle a laugh, but it just made things worse and soon he and Murphy were crying with laughter.
Gaining composure, Jack asked, “Why do you invent all this stuff? I thought you were a lawyer.”
“One thing about being a lawyer, you’ve got to deal with people. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I’m a bit of a recluse.”
&n
bsp; “I have.”
“I’ve always been a tinkerer, would have rather done that than lawyering, but my parents wouldn’t have any of it. I just don’t think it’s fair to have a head full of inventions and not share it with the world.”
“You want to sell this stuff you’re making?”
“I guess so. I mean, I suppose. I’m rich, so the money part doesn’t really matter. This is my family’s homestead, and there’s close to seven hundred acres here. Most of this side of Broad Creek. Plus I did fairly well as a lawyer.”
Finally, Murphy said, “I know how strange this all is . . .” Murphy gestured all around him. “It was easier this way.” The old man pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped the tears from his eyes.
Jack walked to the end of the porch and respectfully looked away. “Good gosh man, that’s a big barn you have there.” The structure was completely hidden from the rest of the house by trees.
“That’s a warehouse and a deep water dock. We were two generations of traders. My father finally gave up on it after my mother died.”
“What do you keep in it?”
“Ghosts mostly. That’s where my workshop is.”
Murphy eyed Jack’s horse more closely. “That’d be Miss Nancy’s nag you got there?”
“She let me borrow it; I’m boarding at her place.”
“She bed you down yet?”
“I may have gotten a little discount on my room and board.” Jack smiled and noticed a big smile on Murphy’s face too. “Wait a minute, have you and she . . .?”
“I might have partaken in her pleasures a time or two.” They both almost started laughing but stopped just short. “Ever time I see her, she’s batting her eyes at me like a frog in a hail storm!” He slapped his knee and roared. “But at my age, ‘bout half the time it’s like shooting pool with a rope, if you get my drift. So what’s on your mind or did you stop by just to chew the fat?”