A Traveler in Time
Page 3
ofit was. Well, anyway, here she was--and very unhappy, too. Wanted to goback to old New Amsterdam, but bad.
"It was a beautiful act, even if she was nuts. The strange thing was,though, that there were some things even a gal going whacky couldn'texplain. For instance, the house was filled with what the experts saidwere priceless antiques from Dutch New Amsterdam, of the period justprior to the British siege. You'd think those things would make poorJulie feel more at home, seeing as she claimed to belong in that period,but apparently they just made her homesick. And, curiously enough, allthe modern gadgets were gone. All those handy little items that make thetwentieth century so livable had been taken away--including thewashing-machine and dryer, by the way. Julie--or Anna, as she calledherself--claimed that Vanderkamp had taken it back with him, whereverhe'd gone to, after he'd brought her there."
"Poor woman," I said sympathetically. "They toted her off to the boobyhatch, I suppose."
"No...." Harrigan said slowly. "They didn't, as a matter of fact. Sinceshe was harmless, they let her stay in the house a while. Which was amistake, it seems. Of course, she _wasn't_ from the seventeenth century.That's impossible. All the same--." He broke off abruptly and staredmoodily into his glass.
"What happened to her?" I asked.
"She was found one morning about two weeks after she got there," hesaid. "Dead. Electrocuted. It seems she'd stuck her finger into a lightsocket while standing in a bathtub full of water. An accident,obviously. As the Medical Examiner said, it was an accident anysix-year-old child would have known enough about electricity to avoid.
"That is," Harrigan added, "a _twentieth-century_ child...."