Fire, The (6 page)

When Kevin walked out of Roger Johnson's house in patent leather shoes at 1:10 p.m., he looked like a man on a mission. He
was
a man on a mission. He was about to experience Wallace in a way Walking Walt could only dream about. He imagined picking up a phone and calling Joel Smith and asking if he could get graduate credit for a paper on "How I Spent My Summer Vacation in the Edwardian Era."

Like he did the first time, he pulled two-dozen double eagles from his pockets and arranged them in the shape of two Ms, a C, and an X. Like he did the second time, he waited a moment, collected the coins and opened the door to the chamber of stones. He carried the suitcase into the tiny structure and dropped it on a cement floor.

The chamber was empty, as it had been on both occasions, and mostly dark. The only light streamed in from horizontal slits located about a foot below the top of each wall. Kevin assumed that the slits had been created for ventilation purposes, though he didn't know for whom. He couldn't imagine anyone voluntarily spending more than a minute or two in the bleak space.

He waited a moment, turned to face the door, and then reached for the brass knob. He then attempted to turn the knob, as he had done the previous times, but the knob wouldn't budge. It wouldn't turn in the other direction either.

Kevin tried again to open the door, this time with both hands, but succeeded only in chafing the skin on his palms. Something was wrong.

Before he had the chance to try again, he heard the wind pick up. Cool air flowed through the vents –
very
cool air, the kind one might find in a breezy tunnel. He stood on his toes and tried to peek through one of the slits but managed to do little more than strain his feet. He again went for the door and again failed to force it open. For the second time as a time traveler, Kevin felt genuine fear. This wasn't funny. This wasn't funny at all.

Kevin tried to turn the knob again, with similar results. He threw his weight against the door, kicked it several times, and pounded it with his fists. Nothing moved and no one answered. He repeated the process several times and several times managed only to raise his blood pressure. This was the price one paid, he thought, for messing with powers beyond his control.

When the air in the chamber turned from cool to cold, he collected himself in a corner and tried to stay warm. Summer, it seemed, had turned to winter. Kevin was never one to panic, but he felt like panicking now. He began to seriously wonder whether he had entered one of Dante's nine circles of hell. The thrill of time travel had long gone by the wayside.

Gathering his strength, he assaulted the door again. He attacked the knob, kicked the bottom, and knocked as hard as he could. He shouted for help at least three times. Then the door opened and Kevin saw something he welcomed: the outside world.

But the joy of liberation was short-lived. When Kevin looked out the door of the chamber of stones he saw more than Asa Johnson's backyard and Asa Johnson's house. He saw Asa Johnson himself, along with the business end of a pump-action shotgun.

CHAPTER 9: KEVIN

Kevin had to give his great-great-grandfather credit. Asa didn't shoot him on the spot or leave him in the backyard to freeze. He instead invited him into his warm house – at gunpoint, of course – for a friendly game of Twenty Questions.

Asa directed the trespasser through a door in the back of the house to an extension of the kitchen that the trespasser knew well. A woman in her late twenties held an infant in her arms. A boy of four or five stood at her side. Celia and Randolph Johnson seemed none too pleased to meet Kevin. Great-grandfather Lloyd, asleep in a blanket, didn't appear to care.

"Take a seat," Asa said as he pulled up a chair at one end of the table. The rest of the Johnson family quickly assembled behind him. He placed his shotgun in a secure position at his side.

Kevin did as instructed. He sat in a chair at the opposite end of the table and tried to keep calm as he processed a hundred thoughts swirling through his mind. He had found serious trouble and found it fast. Where once he had worried about whether he could return to the future in time to meet his family, he now worried about whether he could return to the future at all. He watched Asa cautiously as he blew on his cold hands.

"Would you like some coffee?" Asa asked.

Kevin nodded his head.

"Celia?"

The lady of the house placed Lloyd in a nearby crib, walked to a serving counter, and poured dark brown liquid from an enamel coffee pot into a porcelain cup. She returned to the table and placed the cup in front of the man her husband had found trapped in the stone shed. When she finished the simple courtesy, she returned to her frowning son and her smiling husband.

While he waited for Asa to make the next move, Kevin did an inventory of his immediate surroundings. He could see from the expensive furniture in the nearby living room that Asa Johnson's ship had not only come in but also stayed in port for a while. He recognized at least two chairs and a hutch that he had last seen in 2013.

Kevin also saw a monthly calendar hanging from a narrow strip of wall in the kitchen extension. The calendar had been flipped to February 1910. He concluded from the child-like marks that blotted out the first two weeks that Randolph was counting the days toward an important event. He concluded as well that it was Valentine's Day, a Monday.

Kevin didn't know what to make of Asa. He looked friendly enough. He didn't expect coffee when he had entered the house. Maybe the patriarch of the Johnson clan might cut him some slack and send him on his way. For a few seconds, Kevin began to think that he might be able to walk out of the place in one piece by offering little more than a few well-chosen words.

Then there was the other possibility. Asa might ask Kevin to open his suitcase and discover that the intruder had taken not only his diary of numbers and secrets but also a sizeable share of the gold and cash he had hidden under the guest-room floor. If that happened, then this surreally pleasant exchange could turn ugly quickly.

Asa folded his hands on the table and stared at his new acquaintance. He dropped the smile and spoke in the measured, deliberate cadence of a businessman.

"Make yourself comfortable, friend, but not too comfortable. The reason I offered you a cup of my wife's fine coffee and not a belly full of shot is that I'm a curious man. It's not every day I find someone inside my stone shed, particularly a well-dressed dandy like you."

"I understand."

"Let's start with your name."

"My name is Kevin Johnson, sir."

Asa laughed heartily and looked over his shoulder at his wife.

"Did you hear that, Celia? He says he's a Johnson!"

Kevin watched Celia smile nervously at her husband. He could see that the young wife and mother didn't like the idea of her husband bringing a trespasser into their home. Like Kevin, she appeared to be making the best of a difficult situation.

"That's quite a coincidence. My name is Johnson, Asa Lysander Johnson. Strange as it may seem, I have not met many Johnsons in this part of the country. Had you knocked on the door of my house instead of the door of my shed, I might think of you as a relative I had yet to meet."

Kevin flinched. He wondered what Asa – a short, slender man with a thick, neatly trimmed mustache – would think of Roger's reunion book.

"As it is, I must think of you as a stranger – a stranger who violated the sanctity of my home and has not yet explained his circumstances. I assume you have an explanation."

"I do," Kevin said.

"Then please explain, young man," Asa said. He folded his arms and stared hard at Kevin. "You have five minutes to persuade me not to contact the police."

Kevin sighed and glanced at a bare wall that would someday support his grandma's hideous cuckoo clock. He would gladly give up everything in his possession to see that stupid clock again, if doing so didn't place him in even more jeopardy. He turned to Asa.

"I entered your shed because I needed shelter from the weather."

Asa smiled.

"Wallace has several hotels and boarding houses, Mr. Johnson. No man chooses a hard floor in a cold room over a soft bed in a warm room."

"He does if he leaves his wallet on a train," Kevin said.

Celia covered her mouth with a hand.

"When my train stopped here yesterday, I got off. I'd intended to continue to Missoula, but I thought Wallace looked interesting and decided to stay for the night. So I got off the train, walked around a bit, and looked for a restaurant. When I saw one, I reached for my wallet and found an empty pocket. By the time I got back to the station, the train was gone."

"I see," Asa said. "So, naturally, when you discovered that you had no money, you walked nearly a mile across town to my rock shed, opened the door, and made yourself comfortable."

"Asa!"

Kevin looked at his great-great-grandmother and noticed that her eyes and expressions had softened considerably. Perhaps he had an unexpected ally in this unexpected trial.

"No, sir, I looked first for a telegraph office. I figured if I could find one, I could wire my family for money, pay for a room, and catch the next train out. When I saw that the office was closed, I wandered some more."

"What about the hotel lobbies?" Celia asked. "You could have warmed yourself there."

"I walked into a few," Kevin said, "but the proprietors sent me out when they realized that I wasn't a paying customer. I wandered into this neighborhood around midnight. I didn't want to enter a house and take a chance on getting shot, so I looked around some more and found your shed. When I saw that the door wasn't locked, I walked in."

Kevin felt a surge of satisfaction when he finished his impromptu narrative and then a surge of panic when he realized he had made claims that could be proved false. He didn't know for a fact that eastbound trains rolled through Wallace every day or that the town had a telegraph office that closed at night. He didn't know the
location
of the telegraph office. He had said too much and had left himself vulnerable to a withering cross-examination.

Asa didn't speak right away. He instead rubbed his hands together, hardened his expression, and stared at Kevin for what seemed like an eternity. When he finally spoke, he didn't cross-examine the defendant. He did something far worse: he asked about the suitcase.

"Would you mind if I took a look inside that case?"

"I would mind, sir. Some of the items are personal in nature –
very
personal. I would prefer to be spared the indignity of displaying them."

Kevin tried to put down the butterflies in his stomach as he watched Asa's expression change from a garden-variety frown to a sly grin. He suspected that the older man very much wanted to see the contents of the case but didn't want to embarrass his wife and impressionable son.

"You are fortunate, Mr. Johnson. I know for a fact the shed was empty when I opened it last, so I know for a fact you didn't remove anything of value," Asa said. "I don't think much of your story. I've heard more plausible tales in saloons. But I don't believe you mean harm to anyone, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt."

Celia smiled softly at Kevin and then walked to the marble-topped serving counter, which divided the cooking and dining areas. She then looked at the head of the table, raised her brows, and scolded her husband with a withering stare.

Asa chuckled.

"I assume you haven't had breakfast, Mr. Johnson."

"No. I haven't."

Not since 2013, anyway.

Asa extended an arm toward a counter. A large plate of pancakes and smaller plates of eggs, sweet rolls, and link sausages sat next to the coffee pot.

"My wife has prepared a feast. Please join us."

CHAPTER 10: KEVIN

Monday, February 14, 1910

Breakfast went well once Asa put his shotgun away. Kevin had coffee and pancakes at the same table in the same room for the second time in 103 years – or a few hours as the crow flies through time – and enjoyed every moment.

He learned more about his great-great-grandfather in an hour than he had learned in family albums, reunion books, and countless conversations with his father and grandfather. Asa Johnson, he discovered, was more than a shrewd businessman and a free thinker. He was also a standup husband and father.

In between eggs and sausages, Asa gave Kevin the condensed version of his transition from bachelor to family man. He had met Celia on a business trip to Spokane in 1902, when he was thirty-three and she was twenty, and had wooed her for more than a year with flowers and poems before she finally agreed to marry him. When she had insisted on a large home as her price for moving to the isolated mining town of Wallace, he bought his partner's second house on Garnet Street and filled it with the finest furnishings a successful speculator could buy.

Celia Blake Johnson was no less surprising and impressive. The oldest daughter of a district court judge and a Spokane socialite, she was an accomplished pianist who could speak fluent French and German and recite the poems of Byron and Blake as effortlessly as she could make and serve a four-star breakfast. With long, strawberry-blond hair, high cheekbones, and alabaster skin, she was also decidedly easy on the eyes.

Kevin asked the Johnsons many questions about their backgrounds and long-term plans. He shared very little about his own background and immediate plans. He didn't want to compound his predicament by adding new whoppers to his growing resume of lies, but he wasn't able to avoid the matter altogether.

In the new life he had constructed on the fly, Kevin Johnson was a college graduate from Seattle who was headed east in search of opportunity. He had knowledge of the sciences and a mastery of English but precious little teaching experience. He told his hosts that he intended to gain that experience in Montana, where he had heard the need for educators was great.

Kevin hoped that his story would close the door on additional scrutiny, but it succeeded only in opening it wider. Both Asa and Celia seized the opportunity to tout Wallace as a place to teach and perhaps settle. They told him that northern Idaho needed capable educators as well and offered to do what they could to make any transition to the area seamless and comfortable.