A Twist in Time

by Susan Squires

  “He’s got a protective streak.” Jake softened. “If you’re in trouble, Lucy, you came to the right place. But you’ve got to tell me what’s going on.” He folded his hands over his chest, waiting. When the only result was her chewing her lip, he said, “What you need is breakfast.”

  “I couldn’t eat.” Lucy pressed her palm against her forehead. She had an awful headache.

  “Well then, I’m going to make him breakfast, because I’ve got a feeling he doesn’t chew Vicodin real regular and on an empty stomach he’s likely to throw it up all over my rug.” Jake turned and went through to his kitchen.

  Lucy glanced to Galen and shrugged. “He will give us food.”

  Galen pushed himself up. “I will watch. He could use a knife as a weapon.”

  Galen didn’t recognize the many guns, antique and modern, mounted between the bookcases in the living room as weapons. Jake had a license for every one of them. He wasn’t really a whacko, just a guy with definite opinions, mostly involving the government.

  “You are wounded. You should rest. He’s a friend.”

  “I am Danir. I fight whole battles wounded. I will rest later.” He stood, a little shaky.

  Lucy was too tired to argue. She trailed into the kitchen, Galen stomping after her.

  Jake’s corner unit had views out to the bay on two sides. After he’d recovered from his hip replacement and could get around, he’d remodeled two units into one larger living space. Instead of bare walls and linoleum, his apartment was filled with things he loved. In his kitchen he’d put up open-fronted cabinets to display his handmade pottery collection. It was a cozy place of earth-tone tile and wood, except for the stainless-steel restaurant-grade appliances. Jake liked to cook. A big butcher-block dining table doubled as a cutting board. Lucy slung her bag over one of the spindle-back chairs at the table and sat. Galen took another. He was wavering. The fool. Trying to prove something. Food was probably a good idea.

  “So tell me the story, while I whip up a couple of omelets.”

  Lucy ran her hands through her hair. What did it mean that Brad and Casey had removed the contents of her apartment and her store? Could they think she’d stolen the machine by bringing it back to some other location? Like she could hide it in her apartment. Maybe he was looking for the book, or a clue to where she took the machine.

  Jake retrieved an armload of eggs, cheese, and vegetables from the Sub-Zero. Lucy followed his glance to Galen and saw a watchful furrow in the Viking’s brow. “Begin at the beginning.”

  “Well, it began with a gigantic coincidence,” she started.

  “No such thing as coincidence,” Jake growled as he cleaned scallions at the sink.

  “It sure seemed that way to me. I had a book, my most prized possession. It was by Leonardo da Vinci, and it showed diagrams of a machine he wanted to build.” She swallowed. Here was the tough part. “A machine that could travel through time.”

  Jake pushed his lower lip up and nodded his head. “Maybe that’s what they were looking for—book must be worth a pile.”

  That wasn’t the part that was hardest to believe. “Yeah. It’s worth a pile. I never told anyone about the book. It was too precious to me. Until one day we were out at the Palace of Fine Arts, and . . . and I had the strangest urge to show it to Brad.”

  “And the coincidence was . . .”

  “He was working at the lab on getting power to a medieval machine in partnership with the Italian government. None of them knew what the machine was supposed to do. I knew right away, in my gut, that it was the machine from my book. Leonardo had actually built it.”

  Jake grinned as he chopped scallions at the table with a huge knife. Galen tensed beside her. She put a hand surreptitiously on his good thigh under the table and gave it a pat. “Bet it frosted that ole spook’s ass that you knew what it was and he didn’t,” Jake said.

  “Maybe it did. Well, anyway, we went down to the Super Collider Lab and there it was, all gears and jewels. It’s a beautiful thing. Colonel Casey—”

  “Got to be CIA or NSA or some damn thing. I recognized him as special ops right off.” Jake straightened, hands on his hips. “So you tried it and it worked, right? That’s where you got your friend.” He looked like the cat who’d swallowed the canary. Leave it to Jake to accept the unbelievable. Galen never took his eyes off that big knife.

  “I thought I was going to have to show you the book.”

  “Hell, if you got the book, I’d love to see it. But let’s eat first. Wouldn’t want to get egg all over it.” He put down the knife, right within Galen’s reach, and cracked eggs into a bowl. He swung round and got out a small Calphalon pan and turned on a burner of his Viking range. Viking. That was rich. “So, was it you who went back?”

  “Yeah. Boy, was I stupid. But it felt . . . I don’t know. It felt like my destiny or something.”

  “Those two are real heroes. They get plausible deniability and you take the risk.” He swung back suddenly. Galen flinched and grabbed for the knife on the table.

  “Whoa!” Lucy held up her hands. “I told you. Jake is a friend,” she continued in Latin.

  Jake had gone still. “That’s right. A friend. Maybe you want to sharpen that for me?” he asked slowly, nodding to the knife.

  Galen narrowed his eyes in suspicion. But he said, “Freond?” It sounded like “friend.” Maybe that was a Norse word that had been absorbed into English. In graduate school she’d learned that English took on words from all England’s conquerors, first Vikings, then the Normans. The structure had grown simple and strong with the invasion of the Danes, able to collect words of all kinds. Maybe she was understanding the words they had in common.

  Jake turned carefully to a drawer and got out a sharpening stone. He held it up, and Lucy saw recognition in Galen’s eyes. Jake held out the stone. “A man needs to feel like he’s got a weapon when he’s in a bad place, and I expect that’s just what this seems to you.”

  Galen nodded once. “Wpn,” he said clearly, though with an accent.

  Jake set the stone on the table and slid it across. Galen began to sharpen the knife, holding it with his bad hand and smoothing the stone along the blade with long, slithery strokes. The muscles in his shoulders bunched and relaxed with the rhythm. He seemed to relax as well.

  “You’re a kind man, Jake. Let’s just hope he doesn’t use it.”

  Jake ignored her. “So, looks like you landed in some trouble.”

  “Right in the middle of a battle. I’m not sure who was fighting whom.”

  “That where you were aiming the machine?”

  “This is going to sound so crazy. Leonardo says you just think about the place and time you want to be in and the machine takes you there. I . . . I thought about going to a time when magic was still possible.”

  Jake was silent at that as he watched butter sizzle in the pan. Finally he turned to slap two slices of bread into the toaster. “You’re lucky you weren’t killed.”

  “Galen nearly was. A fourteen-foot machine made of bronze gears all whirring that appears right in the middle of a battle is . . . distracting, I guess.” She gave a helpless chuckle. “This sounds insane on so many levels. I think he was protecting me from a guy with really bad teeth. Anyway, Galen was wounded. He fell against me right as the machine took off and we came back together. But the teeth guy hit the control lever of the machine with an axe just at the last minute and damaged it. I guess that’s why I’m four months late.”

  “Where’d you get him patched up?” Eggs sizzled in the pan and he sprinkled some chopped Brie and avocado and scallions on top.

  “We landed in the bottom level of the parking structure at the General. Can you believe it? Right outside the only trauma center in the city. I guess I was thinking he needed medical help or he was a dead man.” She chuckled. “You’d be proud of the lies I told. Boy, Richard Nixon has nothing on me.”

  Jake’s eyes crinkled. “Let me guess . . . a reenactment.”


  “Yup. I said he was a cousin from Denmark, or sometimes I said Finland.” She grimaced. “Okay, maybe I’m not a great liar. Anyway, the police took his sword. If he hadn’t been restrained and groggy from surgery, he would have fought them for it right in the hospital room.” She chewed her lip. “I took him out AMA to get him back to his own time before someone found the machine. But it’s broken. Brad is the only one who can fix it—”

  “Don’t call him, Lucy.” Jake slid the omelet onto a plate and put it with . . . surprisingly, a big serving spoon in front of Galen. That seemed all right with Galen. He dug in with the spoon.

  “Gd.” He pronounced around a mouthful of eggs. “Thonc to thu.”

  “You’re welcome,” Jake said. He slapped another pat of butter into the pan and poured in another batch of eggs.

  “I’ve got to get him back before his absence changes something. I’m not sure man was meant to mess around with time.”

  “I guess we’re going to find out.”

  “What do you mean? If Brad can fix the machine—”

  “If Brad and the spook can fix that machine, you can bet they’ll use it. Whether or not they agree to send your friend home.”

  “They might want to keep Galen for a while. But we can send him back to the exact time he disappeared and not change anything.” She stared into the night at the lights of the bridge. “Would it be so bad if Brad used the machine in some controlled experiments? It’d be amazing if you could go back to another time, just as a visitor, without changing anything, and solve mysteries. Like who really killed Kennedy. You’d like that. . . .” She looked up.

  Jake stared at her, his eyes hard. “Don’t be naïve. You can’t just visit. You found that out. And that’s not what the spook wants with a time machine. You just think what he could do with it. He could go back and assassinate people he didn’t agree with. Maybe he doesn’t like the New Deal, so he goes back and assassinates Roosevelt. Or maybe he thinks he’s a ‘good guy’ and he wants to eliminate Hitler. Doesn’t matter. These guys are going to change history big-time.”

  Lucy felt like she was sliding down a rabbit hole into the twisted warren of conspiracy theories Jake inhabited. “They don’t have the machine.”

  Jake looked under his brows at her. She felt stupid. When someone found the machine in the parking structure they’d call the police. And the FBI or the CIA or whoever would have put out a call for information about it. Casey and Brad would have the machine back in no time. Though of course it didn’t work now. But they’d fix it and do what they wanted with it. And she’d made this possible. Would Brad let Casey use it for whatever he wanted? It was Brad’s project. But she knew in her heart that Brad was no match for Casey. Whatever Casey wanted, he’d do.

  Jake sat at the kitchen table. “Let’s get serious. You call anyone since you been back?”

  Lucy shook her head. “You’re the first person I’ve been in contact with. My phone doesn’t work.”

  “You give your real name at the hospital?”

  “Yeah. I listed myself as the responsible party, to be sure they’d give him surgery.”

  Jake just stared at her. “Tell me you didn’t give them a credit card.”

  Lucy’s blush answered the question.

  “Then we don’t have much time.” Jake looked grim. “But you came to the right place. You can use my setup.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You and your friend here have got to go off the map for a while. New identity, the whole nine yards.”

  Lucy blinked as she tried to follow his logic. Galen examined each of them in turn, alerted to the change in the tone.

  Jake set his lips. “I know it’s a lot to absorb, Lucy. But our friend Colonel Casey is going to want to eliminate anybody who knows about his little project.”

  “Eliminate, as in . . . kill?” She laughed. She had to remember it was Jake she was talking to here. “Jake, no one wants to kill me. I’m a bookseller, for God’s sake.”

  But Jake didn’t laugh.

  “They’ll want to find me, but not to kill me, just to get these,” she continued. “I’ve got the book.” She reached around to her bag and hauled out the book and set it carefully on the table. “And this.” She fished out the diamond slightly bigger than her fist.

  “Shit, howdy.” Jake stared at the diamond. Lucy realized that for him, it was this impossibly big diamond that made the whole thing resonate in his gut as real.

  “From the lever. Machine doesn’t work without it. They could get another one—”

  “Those don’t grow on trees.” He glanced out the windows. The sky was lightening. You could see the stream of headlights from early commuters coming over the Golden Gate. Lucy could just make out the rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts far off to the left. “They’ll find you, take what they want, and then they’ll kill you both. Or maybe they keep him, while they question him about his time. Captivity isn’t much better than death. Take it from me. Nothing for it, babe. You got to take your Viking and disappear.”

  “Brad would never let anyone hurt me.” Why didn’t her voice sound surer?

  “Look.” Jake reached across and took her two hands in his. “I know you think I’m the crank down the hall. But it takes an ex-spook to know a spook, and I worked on enough conspiracies in Southeast Asia to know conspiracies are real. The world is filled with bad people, Lucy. Humor me on this one. Drop out of sight for a little while longer. Better safe than sorry.”

  Lucy felt an actual pain in her stomach. If once you started seeing evil everywhere, pretty soon you’d be wearing huaraches and a serape and collecting guns. And yet she herself had already had doubts about turning Galen over to Casey. She started to shake her head.

  “Okay, let’s do it this way,” Jake interrupted. “You said you felt it was your destiny to use the machine. You wanted to go to a time where magic was possible. So you travel through time and some wounded guy leans up against you and comes back with you. Sounds like magic to me. Or maybe destiny. Then again maybe not. But you land in the one place that can save him, then you come to the one guy in fifty miles who knows how to go off the map, which, believe it or not, you need to do. If that isn’t destiny, it sure is something. Ask your gut. Your gut knows.”

  Lucy was about to protest or maybe just get up and go to the phone she saw hanging on the cupboard to call Brad. But she didn’t. Her gut, as Jake called it, was doing flip-flops. She looked around wildly for something to hang on to.

  Galen raised his head, sensing her distress. He stared at her, frowning. Oh, those blue eyes. Even she was not immune. She steadied, searching his face.

  Jake receded. The kitchen seemed far away. And she felt something . . . emanating from Galen, like he was his own vortex of true and right. Her stomach eased. A feeling of . . . she could only describe it as . . . as wholeness flashed through her and was gone. And its loss was the most devastating thing she’d ever experienced. Her eyes filled.

  The room came flashing back. She blinked at Galen as a breath shuddered through her. It felt like the first breath she’d ever taken, that screaming first breath of a newborn babe, howling at the loss of sanctuary, the harshness of a new reality dawning.

  Slowly she turned to Jake. She had no idea what she would say. But the words came anyway. “He needs to heal. Then things will be all right.”

  “You agreeing or not?” Jake demanded, examining her.

  “I’m agreeing.”

  “Good.” Jake rubbed his hands together and stood. “I’ve been preparing for this day for a lotta years. I’ve got a car registered under a false name and a forty-four-footer in a slip up north on the bay registered to another one. Not traceable. You can stay there. No phone calls, no letters, and for God’s sake no credit cards.”

  “Won’t they look for me here?”

  “You’ll be gone in ten minutes. If they come looking, everyone in the building will say the same thing I do. Ain’t seen you. Their part’ll be true.” />
  Ten minutes? He went to the pantry, scooped away some containers of flour and beans to reveal a safe, and twirled the knob. He pulled out a gym bag and tossed it on the table, zipped it open, and fished out a key ring. “Car’s in the basement. Blue Chevy, nothing special. Runs like a dream, though. Here’s fifty thousand in twenties and a nine-millimeter Glock with no registration number.”

  “I can’t take money from you, Jake. And I wouldn’t know what to do with a gun.”

  “The money’s a loan. I’ll charge you some usurious rate of return.” She didn’t believe that, and he could see it. “Look, girl. You saved my life once. You probably don’t even know that.” His smile was rueful. “No. You didn’t pull me out of a swamp, or get me out of a bamboo cage. You did it with casseroles. Even though I didn’t want to be saved. I was about ready to call it a day what with my daughter dying a day after that last surgery, knowing there would be other surgeries, that I’d never be the man I was again. You didn’t know that.”

  He’d never said a word about his daughter dying only two days before Lucy had barged in with her first casserole. “That’s what friends are for,” she said softly.

  “Exactly.” He cleared his throat and moved back to the table. He raised a tiny camera and held it up. “Smile.” He clicked a picture of her and one of Galen. “Two passports will be delivered to the Quik Stop up where the dirt road turns off Highway 37 day after tomorrow. That’s where the mail comes for the marina. Now give me your cell phone.”

  She dug in her bag. “Jake, this is the latest iPhone,” she pleaded.

  “Not anymore. You been gone four months. There’s a new version out. And from now on, cell phones are out, along with all Internet. The minute you hook into the Net to do a Google map, they’ve got you.” He took the phone, laid it on the table, and went to one of his kitchen drawers. He came back with the kind of wooden mallet you used to make paillards. Lucy sucked in a breath. She glanced to Galen. He seemed unfazed by the impending violence. He just looked gray. Jake brought the mallet down on the phone. Again and again, until little circuits shot out over the tile floor. “I’ll dispose of the pieces.”