Sand City Murders (18 page)

“What’s the other trick?”

“Hmm?”

“The third technique for returning to the present.”

“Ah yes, I masquerade as myself.”

“Come again?”

“I can only travel forward as a
new me
, since I am no longer there. You understand this?”

I nodded noncommittally.

“If I try to travel from the past to the present, such is impossible because I exist there no longer. I must pop into the present as a new me. I am an impostor of myself, so to speak. Of course, I have all my recent memories so it’s fairly easy to impersonate myself.”

“I think my brain is starting to hurt.”

Fynn laughed.

“Does this happen a lot?” I asked.

“More than you might imagine.”

“Doesn’t anyone notice?”

“Not usually… and it’s rather easy to explain. ‘Oh, I’ve been away on holiday,’ I might say to someone who asks.”

“Wow,” I commented but felt regret creeping in.
Why did I even ask about time travel?

The boardwalk changed again. The white shacks ended abruptly; now there was an iron railing, a good view of Serenity Bay, and wooden steps leading down to the wide, flat beach. A line of countless empty benches led us closer to the Californian. It loomed large as we approached. Built in the mid sixties, it was a typical concrete and glass box, like a hotel you might see in Hawaii. The Californian had been converted into a timeshare complex in the eighties, though it still functioned as a hotel. There was a lobby and a skeleton staff in the off season. Nobody did much sharing in the winter months and the whole place was very quiet for now.

“There is of course one exception,” Fynn said.

“What?”

“I don’t wish to complicate matters…” He seemed a bit evasive.

“Really, what is it?”

“On rare occasion, I can travel back in time, yet not re-occupy an old self. My present self physically travels there.”

“What, like a future jump, a
hard jump
... but to the past?”

“Exactly this.”

“How?”

“There are gaps in my concurrency, places in the past where I have never lived. If I manage to travel there, it is the same as traveling to the future.”

I thought about this for a second. “So you could bring something back to the past.”

“I suppose.”

“Like a passenger?”

“An object maybe.” Fynn paused. “As I say though, this is an exceptional form of travel. In practice, it’s very difficult to find these gaps in my past lives.”

The boardwalk ended abruptly. There was a virtual mountain of sand in our path and it blocked our way entirely. Fynn seemed quite curious about this and climbed to the top.

“Storm damage,” I explained. “The wind and the surf lifted all the sand from the beach and dumped it here on the boardwalk.”

“Extraordinary.”

“Happens all the time really, well, any big storm like last week’s, a nor’easter.”

“What’s to be done?”

“Hmm, the DPW will show up in the next couple of days with bulldozers… They’ll push all the sand back to its regular place.”

  To our north was Boxtop Beach and beyond that, Bayview. We agreed to walk a bit further and ambled down the newly formed dune to the bike path that ran parallel. We made good use of it for another mile or so before turning back.

“Is that the location you spoke of?” Fynn asked.

“What?”

“The place not on your map,” Fynn said and pointed up the bay. Far in the distance, Saint Alban’s was just visible, nestled against the bluffs, tucked away in a small cove just above the sea wall. It had a menacing outline, sort of neo-gothic with numerous turrets poking into the sky and tiny barred windows. The faded red bricks looked gray this afternoon, despite the ivy-covered walls. If ever there was a place for a mad scientist to carry out his diabolical experiments, this was it. Whose idea was it to build an asylum in a resort town? Whoever it was, he wasn’t doing Sand City any favors. Of course when it was built back in the day, Sand City didn’t even exist. It was just a quarry town with a bunch of fishing shacks, plagued by mosquitos and horse flies. No one in their right mind would ever spend a summer here.

***

The following week, our destination was the lighthouse at Rocky Point, though we only walked around the outside. Inspector Fynn absolutely refused to go up top. “I don’t like heights,” he said.

It was all in the guide book: The Lighthouse, The Sentinel, built in 1802… fully automated now. A very popular tourist attraction, access by foot or bicycle only. The closest parking lot was at least half a mile away. The lighthouse itself stood atop a two hundred foot cliff of granite, a windy bluff. There was no lee side, it’s where the two winds meet, from the bay and the ocean. And down below was downright treacherous, at high tide, impassable. You’d find yourself with no beach to walk on, smack up against the cliffs with a cold surf pounding in on you. Not a summer goes by when someone gets trapped there, and it’s not usually for the best. The Coast Guard knows this all too well. Don’t be fooled, at low tide, there’s a natural jetty and a sandy beach that looks inviting until the water comes rushing in from out of nowhere.

I gently confronted Inspector Fynn on the cold walk back to the parking lot.

“You never answered my question.”

“Which question is that, Patrick?”

“On the beach… how I’m supposed to help you… with um, the murder, or murders?”

“Yes, I’m very glad you asked. Are you quite sure you’re ready?”

“I guess.”

“Excellent.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Simply make use of your memory. Make note of any odd occurrences, changes in your timeline, so to speak. You have an intimate knowledge of this present which I do not possess.”

“How does that help?”

“There is someone in Sand City who is not who they say they are, and I believe they are manipulating events. You must help me find them.”

“A man or a woman?”

“A man.”

“His name?”

“His name is probably not relevant. I last knew him as Javelin Mortimer.”

“What does he look like, this Mortimer?”

“There’s little I can say, except that he is quite tall, a big man, and he may have only one eye.”

“One eye?”

“Yes.”

“Like an eye patch or a glass eye?” Evan James, the
Chronicle’s
stringer came immediately to mind.

“Either, I suppose.”

“How tall?”

“About two meters.”

“Six feet… that’s not that tall. What else? Young? Old? Middle-aged?”

“He could be.”

“What do you mean he could be?”

“Well, I’ve seen him as a very young man, and... as an old man.”

“Oh, that’s right, he’s a time traveler too…” I tried not to sound condescending, it just sort of slipped out. I could feel my frustration growing.
Why did I even go down this road?
Maybe Fynn was right.
Maybe I wasn’t ready.
“Can’t you go back in time and just fix things again?”

“I’d risk much going back. It is too soon.”

“Too soon for what?”

“There is still much to know. For example, perhaps this man is not acting alone.”

“What, like an accomplice?”

“It is a distinct possibility.”

“Someone I know?”

“Probably.”

I didn’t like where this conversation was going at all. Paranoia crept in. Was Fynn’s delusion starting to go south? Turning ugly? Was I sensing an agenda all of a sudden? I decided to steer the conversation elsewhere. “How did she die? Your wife, Lorraine… How did any of these women die?”

“Shock, as the corner report says.”

I had no response at first. “What killed them though?”

“Jumping from the past probably. Such would be quite disturbing to anyone.”

“Why is that?”

“Try to imagine for yourself. Perhaps one moment you are in your kitchen making morning coffee. Someone grabs you and a moment later it is late at night and you are somewhere else entirely… And there is the searing pain.”

“Searing pain?”

“Yes. It feels as if every part of your body has burst into flame and then has been frozen solid. A most unpleasant experience. This sort of travel wrecks havoc on the nervous system.”

“How do you survive this searing pain?”

“It lasts for the briefest of moments… if you expect this, you can cope with it. If you are unawares, well, I suppose your body goes into a kind of shock.”

“Why were they killed then?”

“Surely you’ve noticed that they are all the same. The same age, the same appearance…blond, pretty, fit…”

“Yes.”

“This man is hunting them, but he lacks knowledge about my past. He is fishing, if you’ll forgive the word… Getting closer to whom I hold dear… and eventually succeeding, I will add.”

“Does he know he’s succeeded?”

“It’s difficult to say with certainty.”

“Did you know these women?”

“Who?”

“Clara and Debra, the first two victims.”

“Not in the slightest.” Fynn turned to face me with a serious expression. “These were attempts to close in on the correct victim, I believe. This man, my adversary, tries to do me harm by killing the people I care for most: my wife and my daughter Anika— though his knowledge of my past is somewhat limited. He is forced to make suppositions. These women fit the profile for Lorraine: the correct age, the correct location, and their physical similarities…”

“So… Clara and Debra, they were just sort of hapless victims, caught in a crossfire?”

“Apparently.”

“You must have really pissed this guy off.”

Fynn flashed some anger. “This
guy
as you call him is a monster. He hasn’t a shred of humanity left in him. His brutality is something little experienced in your modern world.”

“And he’s after you.”

“It would seem so.”

“Okay, so how do I help?”

“I’m not entirely convinced you’re ready to help.”

Wait, did he just shut me down?

I tried to look at all this through the lens of mental health. No doubt Fynn was suffering from something, though it didn’t seem to be a straight-up psychosis or schizophrenia. He didn’t seem especially paranoid, or hear voices in his head. No hallucinations as far as I could tell… I took a long evening to do a bit of checking. Psychiatric stuff. I sifted through hundreds of acronyms, PPD, NPD, BD, SPD… most of them seemed to end in
Disorder
. In the infamous DSM-IV, I found DD or delusional disorder. It seemed to be the best fit for his symptoms:

Non-bizarre delusions (i.e., involving situations that occur in real life, such as being followed, poisoned, infected, loved at a distance, deceived by spouse or lover, or having a disease) of at least 1 month’s duration.

Well, maybe not non-bizarre. Time travel? Alternate realities? It hadn’t been a month yet either… maybe he’d come around in the next week or so. I read some more:

Apart from the impact of the delusion(s) or its ramifications, functioning is not markedly impaired and behavior is not obviously odd or bizarre.

This seemed true enough and was somehow comforting. I wasn’t quite ready to break the news to Durbin yet. Soon though, as soon as I was able to dismiss the very idea that I had experienced a different timeline. Two other murders? No one else, especially Durbin, ever gave an inkling that something like this had occurred. No, I had fallen into Fynn’s madness, temporarily. He had convinced me things had happened which hadn’t. But how? And why was he so damn convincing? Still, somebody cleaned out our morgue… including all the files for July 1977. Maybe his delusion isn’t so harmless after all? Not if Fynn is busy sabotaging files for Lorraine Luis… Whoa, who’s getting paranoid now? I caught myself.

***

On the other side of it all, Fynn was proving to be a very popular figure in town. He had a natural charm, an ease with people. He had a robust, hearty laugh and it came easily. People liked him. They liked to talk to him. He liked to listen. He was larger than life and something of a local celebrity now. I found it all pretty annoying. Maybe I was just plain old jealous. Even Durbin was completely enamored by Inspector Fynn: “This guy is awesome. Smartest guy I ever met, and a very laid back boss…” he told me over lunch at the Land Ho Bar and Grill last Tuesday. And then there was the Policeman’s Ball. Durbin thought it was a great idea. I had my doubts.

“Yes, a Policeman’s Ball!” Fynn said with great enthusiasm.

“A what?”

“It is a tradition in my country to hold an annual dance. There is nothing quite like it.”

“Do you mean the Secret Policeman’s Ball?” I asked.

“No, no, there is nothing secret about it. Everyone is invited.”

“Did Durbin say okay to this?”

“He has. In fact he seems quite enthused. He has offered his help in arranging it all. You will give me a mention then, in your newspaper?”

“Of course… when’s it scheduled for?”

“June, the last week, sadly, just before I depart.”

I couldn’t help but mention there was something tasteless about the idea. Fynn seemed slightly offended until I used the words
murder
,
wife
and
dancing
in the same sentence.

“Yes, you do make a valid point, Patrick. I’m sure everything will be fixed or solved well before then.”

Maybe this should be all about boundaries. I’d help Inspector Fynn with this murder, if I could. It seemed very real to me, whatever the cause, but no time travel nonsense, okay? Not that I actually said this out loud to Fynn. Call it cowardice, call it compassion. Still, I kept getting sucked in. Apparently, he still had lots to explain. Our friendship continued. We often went on long walks, Fridays or not. I was beginning to fear that my very spring would be ruined. I will admit that part of me was increasingly less interested in what he had to say, happy enough to go along with my regular, mundane existence. Our conversations always seemed a bit unsettling. And after a while, I actually tried to avoid him. I felt a growing unease. Something was not quite right and I couldn’t put my finger on it.