A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO TIME TRAVEL
Chapter 3
3
“How would I know why she was there?” I said, sitting at a table in the hospital cafeteria, nursing a tall cup of coffee. The sun was struggling behind a heavy layer of clouds hanging in the East, preventing any light from coming through. Everything was a dull grey, making the windows in the cafeteria like mirrors. I could see my reflection, and Helen beside me, while Sheriff Thompson and Taylor looked more like dark silhouettes from behind.
“We broke up,” I said. “People do that.”
“I’m not asking you about that. I’m asking you why she’d be at your brother’s house in the first place?”
“I don’t know. I can’t figure that out. The last time I was there was last weekend, and Jen said Mandy called her and wanted to talk about something. She didn’t say what, and Jen kind of brushed her off because she was pissed at what went down between the two of us.”
“You mean you and Mandy?” Taylor asked, taking down notes.
“Yes, I mean me and Mandy,” I said, sounding testy.
“Do you think it’s possible your sister-in-law went out before your ex-wife showed up?” Sheriff Thompson asked.
“It’s starting to look that way, isn’t it?”
“Do you think she might have driven out to see your brother?”
“Nah,” I said, shaking my head. “Jimmy doesn’t care too much for Jen.”
“Why?”
“Family dynamics and all that shit,” I said.
“Did you?”
“Care for her? I put up with her, but she wasn’t someone who inspired a lot of familial bonding, if you know what I mean? She’s a sloppy housekeeper and a lazy cook.”
“And that’s an excuse to not like her?” Helen asked.
“Obviously there’s more to it than just that. She got herself pregnant right after high school, purposely, and we never knew if it was Bobby’s kid, or someone else’s. She claimed it was his.”
“That would be…Johnathon?” Taylor said, referring to his notes.
“Johnny, yes.”
“He was the oldest? Seventeen?”
“Yes,” I said. “Seventeen, next month.”
“What did you think about her?”Sheriff Thompson asked.
“Me? I didn’t think anything. Bobby was six years older than me. So I would’ve been twelve when she got herself knocked up. I always liked her when we were younger. She was pretty. Had a smoking hot body, if you know what I mean.”
“Typical,” Helen said.
“What? She used to wear bikini tops and Daisy Dukes; had her shirt tied up in front the way Donna Fargo used to. But then, after she had Johnny, she kinda let herself go.”
“Let herself go?”
“Please, Helen,” Sheriff Thompson said.
“Are you listening to this? I mean, sorry Boss, but I thought, well, I guess it doesn’t matter what I thought, does it?”
“That’s right,” Sheriff Thompson said. “Now can we go on?”
“I’m sorry, Boss,” she said again.
“Now, I’m kinda curious about your brother, Jimmy. You haven’t heard from him, and we can’t find him. And now your sister-in-law’s missing, and your ex-wife is dead. Like Alice said: ‘Curiouser, and curiouser.’ Can you think of where your brother might have gone, and if he has gone anywhere, why now?”
“Well, you’re right about Alice,” I said. “This whole thing is fuckin’ beyond me. I mean, what did you find in the house?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? I mean evidence? There was a family murdered in what you’re saying was a home invasion in the middle of nowhere. So what kind of evidence did you find?”
“We didn’t find nothing,” Taylor said, and I saw the Sheriff look at him and slowly shake his head as if he couldn’t believe the man would say something that stupid.
“Nothing? I can’t believe you’re going to lie to me about that. At least tell me something that’s even possible. Nobody’s going to believe you didn’t find anything.”
“You’d think we wouldn’t, but there you have it. Evidence doesn’t lie, Mr. Baxter, even when there isn’t any,” Sheriff Thompson said at last.
“Blood splatter?” I asked.
“What about ‘em? What’re you asking?” Sheriff Thompson asked.
“I don’t know. I see it on TV all the time. Doesn’t it tell you where they were standing, or how tall they were? That sort of thing?”
“It does, and it would, if there was any.”
“I thought there were shot?”
“Who told you that?”
“No one. I’d just assumed, you know, you hear someone’s been murdered in a suspected home invasion, they’ve either been stabbed, shot, or bludgeoned to death. You hear a lot about that sort of stuff. So which is it?”
“I wish I knew,” Sheriff Thompson said slowly, taking a drink of his coffee and looking at the door. Dr. Drusano was walking down the hall. He was wearing his scrubs, but I could see splatters of blood on his shoes.
Sheriff Thompson picked up his coffee cup and walked out to meet the doctor at the door, guiding him to a table on the other side of the room. It was just a little past five in the morning and the cafeteria was empty, except for us, so there was plenty of privacy.
“So what’s that about?” I asked. “If this is an investigation, why not share it? It’s not as if anyone’s going to overhear us. He was my brother, for fuck’s sake. What’s he being so secretive about? I gotta right to know that much, don’t I? What if whatever it is runs in the family, and I get it?”
“Why would you think that?” Helen asked.
“What if?”
“And what if the sky falls tomorrow?”
“It pretty much has fucking fallen,” I said.
Drusano left, looking at me the whole time he spent crossing the cafeteria floor. I didn’t know if he felt sorry for me, or somehow thought that I’d had something to do with it. Was it pity for me, or guilt on his part for not sharing it with me? It was hard to tell. I didn’t wait long until after Sheriff Thompson came back, before I peppered him with questions.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Are you going to tell us what that was all about?”
“It’s part of an ongoing investigation—”
“A what? You haven’t even started a file. What did he sat was the cause of death? Look, you saw what I saw.”
“And what did you see? I’m curious. Because you’re right, I did see what you saw. We all saw the same thing. My question to you is this—all of you—what did you see?”
He looked at us all, one at a time.
Taylor spoke up first.
“They all looked pale, except the last one—the ex-wife, sorry. She had a bullet hole in the forehead—”
“Not a bullet hole,” Sheriff Thompson said.
“Then what was it?” Helen asked. “Because I saw it, too.”
“That’s what he came to tell me. Your brother, and the boys, they didn’t die by any means he’s ever seen before. It’s like they were dehydrated. All the liquid was drained from their bodies.”
“How’s that even possible?” I said.
“I don’t know!” Sheriff Thompson said, losing his patience. He forced himself to settle down, looked around the cafeteria and noticed no one else had come in since we sat down, and then looked at me.
“What?”
“That ex-wife of yours? That mark we all assumed was a gun shot? It wasn’t a gunshot. By that, I mean there was no GSR around the wound—”
“GSR?”
“Gun Shot Residue,” Helen said.
“He said that whatever it was, it looked like it bored clean through her head. He said it was like when you were a kid, and you were playing in the backyard with a magnifying glass. Away from your mother and sisters. You ever do that? Just so you could burn holes in shit? Paper? Leaves? Wood? Bugs?”
“Bugs?” Helen said. “Who does that?”
“Okay, I had a different childhood,” he said.
“And that was the only mark he found?” Taylor said.
“That’s it. He said he was running tests on the skin surrounding the wound, but wasn’t expecting to find anything.”
“How does that explain the dehydration?” I asked.
“It doesn’t,” Sheriff Thompson said.
“No forcible signs of entry?” Taylor asked, and I saw Helen look over at me.
“He says it was space-age shit. That’s what he said. Those are his very words. Space-age shit.”
“What do you think to is, Chief?” Taylor asked, and we all turned to look at him.
“Well, I’m certainly not going to say that if I have to face the media.,” he said.
“Why would you have to face the media?” I asked.
“Charlotte,” Helen said, and both Sheriff Thompson and Taylor nodded their heads.
“Who’s Charlotte?” I asked.
“Her nephew owns the Densmore Crier, it’s the County rag. To hear her talk about it, her nephew’s just one good story away from winning the Pulitzer. In the meantime, it’s just one of those Farm report sheets you find in every local feed and tack shop.”
“Well, I’ve never been in a feed and tack store before,” I said.
“You’re not missing much,” Taylor was quick to say.
“Well, this man is young, and she keeps him hungry by telling hum he’s just a leap away from a Nobel,” Sheriff Thompson said. “She’ll be sure to tell him everything she knows.”
“And what does she know?” I asked.
“Enough to get him that Pulitzer,” Sheriff Thompson smiled.
“I have to tell my father,” I said, looking at Helen. She nodded, drank the last sip of her coffee and said she was going to go to the bathroom first. “It’s a long drive.”
*
It was a long drive, but I couldn’t sleep. There were too many thoughts going through my mind. At first, I was just so overwhelmed by everything, that I sat with my head turned away from Helen and let silent tears slip down my cheeks. I was wiping my nose on my sleeve so often, Helen passed me a tissue she’d pulled out of one of those plastic baggies she had in the centre console. I tried to thank her, but the words wouldn’t come out and that just upset me more.
Finally, with the sun breaking through the clouds and spilling across the hills and valleys, I told myself I had to pull it all together. There was too much for me to do to just think this was all going to go away. I had to make arrangements for my brother and his family. I had to contact Mandy’s parents and offer them my condolences. We were never close, but I thought it was something they’d want to hear coming from me. Not that they wouldn’t know about her death, but the fact that my family was somehow involved needed to be explained.
And how do I explain that?
“The thing about telling my dad is that he’s not going to remember it five minutes after I tell him,” I said. I said it more for myself than I did as an explanation for her, and it felt good saying it, but it was also true.
“It’ll be good for you just getting it out there,” she said.
“I suppose. I don’t know.”
“You’ll be fine. Do you want me to come in with you? Or do you want me to drop you off at your place? I really don’t think you should be driving. Not in this frame of mind. I mean, talk about your distracted driving,” she said with a smile.
“Is that supposed to be your idea of humour?” I said with a half-laugh. “Because it’s pretty lame if it is. But I’ll take it,” I offered a moment later.
We drove over a rise and a sign telling us the town of Ames was only ten miles away slipped by with a beat of my heart and I looked at the next exit on the left.
“I was supposed to pick up a trunk at the storage locker today. Do you think we have room in the back seat? I was supposed to bring it up for my Dad. He wanted to get something out of it.”
“A trunk? You mean one of those trunks for shipping things in?”
“Yeah. You know the kind? A steamer trunk. It’s old.”
“And by that you mean heavy?”
“A little.”
“What’s easier, picking the trunk up and bringing it out to the home he’s in, or picking him up and taking him to the storage locker? If I understand what you’re saying about your father is that he has dementia, why even bother bringing him the trunk in the first place?”
“Yes, you understand that perfectly. He has dementia. He doesn’t know my name at the best of times. All he knows is that I’m his son—one of them. He’s now saying that he has another family in this fantasy world he used to tell us about when we were kids.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He used to tell us bedtime stories. Instead of reading them to us, he’d sit in a chair in the corner and tell us adventure stories he made up, about a land in the future where the world was all broken up by a massive earthquake that destroyed three quarters of the population. Cities were destroyed; knowledge was lost for the most part. It was like living in the Dark Ages. People ran around with swords, and there was magic.”
“Magic?”
“Well, of course. What kind of adventure story like that doesn’t have magic?”
“I guess it’s better than The Cat In The Hat,” she smiled.
“Nothing’s better than The Cat In The Hat,” I laughed.
“Well, okay, maybe,” she smiled again. “So what is it? Pick up the trunk, or pick up your dad?”
“I guess we should do it the easy way,” I said, trying to smile.
Is anything ever going to be easy again?
The drive to the Home took us ten minutes out of the way. I told her I’d just go in and bring him out. That sounded like the easiest way to do it, and she agreed. She nodded slowly, looked at her watch and then looked back at me.
“I’ve got three hours left on my shift.”
“And then what? Pumpkin time?”
“Something like that.”
“I’ll be ten minutes. Max,” I added, closing the passenger door and entering the code into the pad at the main door.
It buzzed, and I went inside.
I was back out within three minutes.
Alone.
“What’s wrong?”
“He’s gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean? Like he wandered off, kind of gone? Or, the other kind?”
“The other kind?” I said, and then realized what she’d meant. “No. Someone picked him up.”
“Who?”
“My brother. And Jen.”