We took the stairs into the sub-basement. Eddie kneeled over the trap door, punched numbers into the keypad, then lifted the door open.
Once we were down in the tunnels and on the move, I thought of another reason to tell him what had happened at the end in Cumberland.
Shouldn’t he know that he might’ve been shot before traveling anywhere? Who knew what kind of effect that would have on this trip?
We passed other carrels, all with their doors closed, except for one, where a woman was hunched over her computer, lost in her private world. Then we came to the darker stretches of the tunnels. We were approaching Alex’s carrel, and it was time to tell Eddie the biggest flaw in my plan to fix things.
“I don’t know where it’s going to take us,” I said.
“It always goes to Weldon’s estate, right?”
“No—that’s not what I mean. I’m sure that part is right. That’s why Weldon built his mansion there. What I mean is that I don’t know what time it’ll take us to.”
“You probably punch in a date.”
“I didn’t see anything like that in the carrel, and Alex called it a portal, not a machine. And on the Cumberland side, I just ran into it, without activating anything.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do. Run back into that wall.”
I let out a laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“I can’t think of a better metaphor for this whole damn thing than running into a solid wall.”
We made it to Alex’s carrel, and I unlocked the door. Inside, the room was just as I’d left it. As Eddie moved up to the far wall and pressed his hands against it, I locked the door behind us.
“It’s solid,” he said.
“You still want to run into it?”
He didn’t answer. He was busy examining each stone, pushing on them one by one.
I went over and did the same. Again, I weighed whether to tell him that he might’ve been shot. In my head, I tried to remember exactly what I’d seen before going through the portal. And that reminded me of something critical. Remembering was important. The very act of remembering.
I had to get that across to Eddie.
“Time travel, or time, or whatever you want to call it, counts on us forgetting,” I said. “It counts on our doubts and reconstructed memories. When I told you that I knew you’d seen something change, but you couldn’t be sure if you remembered it correctly in the first place—that’s exactly how it works. You have to remember the way things are. The way they should be.”
“Okay…” he said. He looked at me like I was a babbling lunatic.
And that’s what time travel and the new history were counting on—
I heard the sound of a lock clicking, whipped around to the door, realized that someone was unlocking it, and immediately lunged forward and re-locked it.
“Time to run into a solid wall,” I announced.
Eddie positioned himself as far from the wall as possible.
“Einstein’s secret,” I said. “Remember that. That’s how this all started, and that’s the only way to fix this.”
Eddie hesitated for a fraction of a second, hopefully to focus on that, then ran toward the wall. His body moved right through it.
As I took off, full speed ahead, telling myself Einstein’s secret is the key, I heard the lock click open behind me, right before I was engulfed in a sea of white.
It glowed and undulated like it had the first time.
I kept running, and I felt that overwhelming heat, but I wasn’t as panicked this time. Sweat formed on my brow as the temperature rose. I was having a hard time breathing, but went with it, taking smaller breaths rather than trying to gulp the thin air.
I kept running, and suddenly the ocean was gone.
Eddie was right in front of me, collapsed on the floor. I should’ve told him about the heat and lack of oxygen. Too late now. He was sweating and sucking in air, but he hadn’t lost consciousness.
“Just relax. You’ll be okay,” I said. I glanced at our surroundings, a dark room with a hint of light from somewhere above. We had definitely left the Caves. But had we moved through time?
Chapter Twelve
My eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw light above us, seeping in from under a door. There was no doubt that the light was from Weldon’s kitchen, and that I was in his basement.
My next move was to scan the basement floor, a cracked concrete slab, hoping to spot the original Eddie, and also hoping he was alive. But the only Eddie here was the new one, now standing up and checking out his new surroundings.
“Did we make it?” he said.
“Yes.” I looked back to the wall, fearing the person who’d entered the carrel behind us was on his way. “And we need to get out.”
I hurried to the stairs, and Eddie followed. He pulled out his cell phone. “Are we back to where you started? Nine months in the future?”
“I have no idea.” We hurried up the stairs.
“No reception,” he said.
I opened the door, just a crack, to see if anyone was in the kitchen…
The change was obvious. The linoleum floor was bright white, sparkling with freshness, and the cupboards gleamed, shining with pride.
Even though I wasn’t sure the coast was clear, I decided to take my chances rather than wait and see if whoever it was who’d entered Alex’s carrel had chased us through the portal.
I stepped out into the kitchen with Eddie in tow. “Follow me.”
As I headed into the back hallway, a plan, simple though it was, took shape. We’d get out through the French doors, hike through the woods, get off the property, and regroup. I ignored that I was a long way from figuring out how to fix things. My main thought amounted to this:
Don’t forget what I know. Einstein is the key.
The back hallway also appeared revived. The paint was fresh and the throw rugs were vibrant with color. We turned down the next hallway, the one leading to the sitting room, and as I moved past the study, an elegant, gold sculpture of a tiger caught my attention. That slowed me down enough to notice that it was sitting on a desk littered with books and papers.
Then my eyes fell on a blackboard near the desk. Equations were scrawled all over it, and it didn’t take a genius to recognize that they were physics equations. Maybe I’d been in denial when it came to the rest of the house, but seeing this made it abundantly clear that the Weldon mansion was no longer abandoned.
I was tempted to abort our getaway from the house and head right into the study. Those physics equations, for me, rightly or wrongly, signified only one person.
Einstein.
But I moved on, and Eddie was right behind me.
As we were about to pass the sitting room, I heard voices emanating from inside. I stopped short. We couldn’t pass the room without being seen. We’d have to find another way out.
I motioned to Eddie and we headed back down the hallway, then down another hallway, until we hit the dining room, where the floor, cabinets, and dining room table—which must have been long enough to seat thirty people—were covered in paint tarps. Paint cans and paint trays were stacked up in one corner of the room.
We hurried through the dining room into the living room, which was decked out with opulent furniture. Every grain of wood in this room, whether it belonged to the floor, the trim, or the furniture, was polished to a high sheen. Every inch of the upholstery and every cushion was immaculate.
We’d traveled to a time when the estate was in full use. The only question was: When? The possibility that we’d traveled into the future seemed remote. It just didn’t seem possible that Weldon or his descendants had come back to Cumberland and revitalized the estate.
We were somewhere in the past.
I opened the front door, stepped outside, and was greeted by three bloated, boat-like cars, polished to a shine, all curves and fins. Iconic symbols of an era, they left no doubt as to what decade we’d landed in.
“A Buick
Roadmaster, a Lincoln Premier and a Chrysler Imperial,” Eddie said, staring wide-eyed at the three cars parked in the driveway. “Welcome to the fifties.”
I was stunned, though I shouldn’t have been. This was my second journey into the great unknown. But the fifties? Come on, that seemed outlandish. Well, at least I wasn’t panicking. Not yet, anyway.
Eddie had a tiny smile on his face, as if he were amused, as if he were experiencing a Disney ride, rather than a mind-bending scientific anomaly. Maybe he didn’t quite believe that this was real, or maybe he saw this as a chance to explore the fifties, his area of commercial expertise.
I looked past the cars, down the long driveway, and was disappointed to find that the iron fence still surrounded the property. I supposed it was possible that we could have opened it from this side, but still thought it’d be safer to head around back and exit the property from there.
We made it to the back of the estate, and I was greeted by another surprise. One that I should’ve expected. The patio’s marble surface was no longer weather-beaten, but glinted nobly in the sunlight; and the expansive lawn was no longer wild and weedy, but was green and manicured and decorated with flowerbeds bursting with blue periwinkles and yellow petunias. Rows of large pink azalea bushes in full bloom bordered the sides.
I’m not sure if this scene of overwhelming life was the tipping point or not, but it suddenly hit me that I was headed in the wrong direction. I had spent more than a decade of my life hunting down Einstein’s secret, and now here I was at the heart of it all, perhaps at the very spot where everything happened: in the nineteen fifties, in this strange house in Cumberland, Maryland, where I’d just seen a blackboard full of physics equations.
Running was the wrong move. “I’d like to find out what was in that study,” I said.
“Thought you’d never ask.” There was no hesitation in Eddie’s voice.
I broke into a smile. “If we’re going to fix anything, we need to find out how the portal works, and that study is the place to start.”
“One of us has to draw whoever is in there out here, and one of has to go back in there and search the study.” Eddie’s treasure hunter side had kicked into gear.
“So who does what?”
“I’ll go in if you want—I’m used to this kind of work.”
“You mean breaking and entering?”
“And the most important part: searching.”
He was right. But my bet was that he wanted to go back inside to peruse the bonanza of fifties memorabilia. It was probably worth a fortune.
“But I’ll be able to tell if something in there has to do with Einstein’s secret,” I said.
“I thought we were looking for the portal instructions.”
“It’s connected.”
He looked back at the house again, and I came at him with another argument, his own argument from the future. “Eddie, the reason you took me to see Clavin in the first place and didn’t go it alone was because I was the expert when it came to this remote part of history.”
“And that didn’t work out too well, did it?”
It had worked out even worse than he’d thought. He’d been shot. And I need to fix that, too. “I’ve been working on this for twelve years,” I said.
He looked over the mansion. And when he took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, I knew he was going to acquiesce.
“I want you to remember two things when you get in there,” he said. “Be patient. Once you’ve taken the risk, you might as well let things play out.”
“And the second thing?”
“I know the fifties, and my take—and this is one of the many things McKenzie and I disagreed on—is that this was an era of less suspicion and more neighborly trust. Even with the systemic discrimination and the Communist cold war paranoia, this really is a more innocent time. Whoever’s in there, once I draw them onto the patio, they’re never going to suspect that you’re inside, right under their noses.”
*
The first thing we did was scout out the woods on the far side of the lawn for a place to meet up afterward. Because the property was now well groomed, that place turned out to be fairly far away.
With that done, we overturned some chaise lounges on the back patio and moved others to the middle of the lawn.
Then, though both our cell phones (mine being Alex’s) had no reception, we used them as old-fashioned watches and coordinated our moves. In seven minutes, I’d be in the house, at the end of the hallway, ready to go into the study, and Eddie would start rapping on the French doors, drawing whoever was inside, outside.
Then I’d go into the study.
Seven minutes later, I was standing in the dining room, on one of the paint tarps that covered the floor, ready to head down the hallway.
I heard the rapping. Eddie wasn’t fooling around. It was loud and continuous, demanding a response.
Voices rose from the sitting room, and seconds later footsteps rattled down the hallway, heading toward the back of the house.
So far, so good.
When the footsteps had completely receded, I hurried down the hallway, and was just about to step into the study, when I heard someone clearing his throat. One man had stayed behind, and he was in the study.
I quickly headed back down the hallway, through the dining room and the foyer, and out of the house. This time, instead of circling around the side of the house, I circled around the garage, not wanting to end up anywhere near the patio when I got to the back.
That worked out well. I found myself on the other side of the azalea bushes. I skirted along them, moving toward the back of the property. Through the pink blooms, I caught glimpses of the patio, so I slowed a bit to see if Van Doran or Weldon were out there.
Two men were on the patio: one standing, looking over the lawn, and one righting the chaise lounge. And though I was thirty yards away, there was no doubt about who the man looking over the lawn was.
Albert Einstein.
The shock of seeing him stopped me dead in my tracks. I didn’t dare breathe for fear of ruining this preposterous moment. After a minute or so of gawking, I checked out the other man, expecting to see Weldon or Van Doran.
It was Henry Clavin. A young and healthy Henry Clavin.
Had Einstein been discussing the physics of time travel with Clavin? Was Clavin some kind of savant after all?
Just then, a third man stepped out onto the patio. Weldon.
He walked up to Einstein and they exchanged a few words. Then he looked out over the lawn, into the woods, fixating on something. After a few seconds he turned to Clavin, who’d just finished righting the chairs, said something to him, and pointed to a spot in the forest.
The spot where Eddie was hiding.
Clavin headed across the patio, onto the lawn, and toward the forest. Apparently, although people may have been innocent in the past, they weren’t stupid.
I stood stock-still, hoping to avoid discovery, and hoping that Eddie was fleeing. Weldon scanned the woods for another minute or so, then he and Einstein retreated back into the house.
I had no idea how long Clavin would search the forest, but I wanted to catch up with Eddie as soon as possible. Plenty could go wrong with us on the run together, but if we got separated, that would spell disaster.
Heading toward the back of the property would present the risk of running right into Clavin, so I raced east instead. The forest eventually thickened, and as I dodged tree trunks, one question ran through my mind. How was I going to fix anything when things seemed to be getting worse?
I made it to the iron fence that ran along the side of the property and headed toward the back. I kept a lookout for Clavin, in case he’d taken his scouting mission out this far, and for Eddie, and made it to where the fence ended without seeing either.
There was no wooden fence across the back of the property, so it must’ve been a later addition. As I was wondering if that could’ve affected where Eddie had retreated to, I heard a �
�hey” and spun around.
It was Eddie’s voice, but I didn’t see him.
“Up here,” he said.
He was standing on the branches of the tree above me, clutching the trunk. “Treasure-hunting experience. No one ever looks up.”
“Where’s Clavin?”
“Was that the guy who came looking for me? The guy you said I resurrected?”
“Yeah.”
Eddie started shimmying down the tree trunk. “He turned back.”
I walked over to the other side of the fence. “Let’s get out of here.”
Eddie caught up to me and we headed toward the road. “What did you find in the study?” he said.
“I wasn’t able to get in. Weldon hung back.”
“But wasn’t that him who came out on the patio at the end there?”
I didn’t respond because I knew what he was getting at and didn’t like it.
“Why didn’t you wait?” he said, getting to his point. Be patient.
“How was I supposed to know he’d head out?”
“Because that was the plan.”
“The plan didn’t work.”
“It looked like it worked to me.”
“Okay—so you should’ve gone in. You would’ve waited. Now we’re going to have to try again.”
“It’s going be tough to break in a second time. Our diversion put them on notice.”
“We’ve got no choice.”
Chapter Thirteen
I may have been mad at Eddie for calling me out, but he was right. If I’d waited a minute or so more, Weldon would’ve left the study. Next time I’d have to think more like a commercial archeologist and less like a scholar. Research was one facet of this journey, but so was action.
Proper action.
Besides, what was the point of being mad at Eddie when it was looking more and more like Alex was the one to blame for this mess? He was the one who’d used the portal in the first place. He was the one who’d recommended me for the UVA job, not because he was doing me a favor, but because he’d wanted to find out if Einstein’s secret was about the portal.
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