The Far Time Incident (18 page)

Chief Kirkland looked unconvinced. “Mystery novels and crime shows aside, the person who’s most likely to be guilty usually does turn out to be guilty,” he said in what I’m sure he thought was a sensible statement. “The spouse. The company partner. The beneficiary of the will—”

“But Dr. Rojas is a theoreticist!” I objected.

“Meaning?”

“It’s the experimentalists in our departments who tend to take matters into their own hands and hammer diplomas onto their office walls or put together office furniture, causing Maintenance to complain that their territory is being encroached upon. I can see Dr. Rojas mulling over murder as a theoretical problem, perhaps even deciding on it as an optimal solution, but to actually do it, to get his hands dirty—once for Dr. Mooney, and then again for us—very messy, to send five people into a ghost zone…”

“It’s not a particularly elegant solution, is it?” said Abigail.

“Poor Erika Baumgartner,” I said. “She won’t get to go on her run. After what happened to us, Dean Sunder will probably cancel all runs for a while, maybe permanently. She might never get to snap color photos of eighteenth-century French fashions and publish them on the
Les Styles
blog.”

The security chief did not seem to think it was the right time to worry about Dr. B. “She’ll find something else to do.”

I decided to add the main point in Dr. Rojas’s favor. “We didn’t actually see Gabriel operate STEWie, did we? The phone call. The one that got him to step out of the lab. Maybe someone sent him on a fool’s errand while they snuck in and changed our destination.”

“Or,” the chief said, “Dr. Rojas set it all up and pretended to step out for Jacob Jacobson’s benefit.”

There was no way to counter that. I remembered Jacob’s fingers moving speedily as he tweeted a play-by-play of the proceedings just before I sent him out of the room. It was certainly some kind of alibi.

For a while we sat in silence. Sounds of activity drifted up from the harbor, the shouts and banter of fisherman, sailors, and merchants, the
thwack
of cargo being loaded and unloaded. Closer by, the rhythm and pulse of building work in a nearby villa rung out in the still air; occasionally, we caught sight of a young, muscular local in a loincloth (he reminded me of the movers in Xavier’s office) pushing a loaded wheelbarrow down the road, a pair of mangy dogs running around his feet. Helen jotted down some of the louder banter of the workmen, who were oblivious to our presence. It felt like an unseen hourglass hovered above us and the town, one only we knew about. And the sands were about to run out.

“Look, only a handful of motives cause people to turn to crime,” the chief finally said. “We are all, every one of us, at the mercy of our emotions. The usual suspects, I find, are few: Greed. Jealousy. Desire. Fear. Desperation.”

He listed them evenly, as if he’d never experienced any of them himself, which was ridiculous, of course. Everyone has. I had experienced at least four of them myself since we’d
arrived—fear that I was going to die, a desperate desire to get home, jealousy of all the people at St. Sunniva who were safely snug in their offices and labs. Well, if he could keep it under control, so could I. “Five possible motives,” I said as matter-of-factly as I could muster, “and five intended victims? Or was only one of us the target and the rest of us happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? On the surface of things, it would seem that the most likely target was myself,” the security chief said without a trace of vanity. “I am in charge of solving Dr. Mooney’s murder.” His voice deepened in thought. “Except that I don’t know why anyone would feel the need to get rid of me. Everything I learned during my investigation of Dr. Mooney’s murder was duly recorded by Officer Van Underberg and will be available to whoever replaces me on the job.

“If I wasn’t the target, then our next possibility is you, Dr. Presnik,” he added. “You have a particular connection to Dr. Mooney.”

“My dear Chief Kirkland—perhaps we better dispense with the formalities if we are to be soon engulfed in a rain of rock and ash. I don’t think I know your first name?”

“Nate.”

“Nate, you mentioned a Wanda earlier. Is she a pet you have at home?”

The chief nodded. “A spaniel. Cavalier King Charles.”

I hadn’t expected him to have such a pedigreed dog. “I’m sure Officer Van Underberg will see to her,” I reassured him. “The basket returned without us, so Dr. Rojas will sound the alarm immediately.” He would do so whether or not he was the source of our current predicament.

“About your connection to Dr. Mooney—”

“What, that I used to be married to him? Other than work matters, I haven’t said more than a passing hello to the man in years,” Helen said.

I could not recollect Helen ever saying a passing hello to Xavier Mooney in the seven years I had been the dean’s assistant.

The chief clarified. “I meant someone might have assumed Dr. Mooney had told you something in confidence.”

“Like I said, we did not speak much.”

The chief turned to Kamal and Abigail. “Moving on, then. I don’t suppose you two saw anything around the lab that would have connected Dr. Rojas or anyone else to Dr. Mooney’s murder? No? Did one of you come up with a brilliant scientific idea in tandem with the professor that someone might have wanted to steal?”

“I wish,” said Kamal, watching a lizard dart across a boulder.

“Which brings me to you.” The chief turned his square jaw toward me.

“What about me?”

“You’ve been nosing around, asking questions, isn’t that true?” He sounded annoyed, like I had overstepped some boundary between civilian and soldier.

I wasn’t going to deny it. “Dean Sunder asked me to see what I could find out. I talked to Oscar and also the cleaning staff in the TTE building, though I didn’t learn anything of interest from them. I didn’t mean to step on your toes, uh—Nate.” Why shouldn’t I call him by his first name? Besides, it wasn’t my idea, it was Helen’s.

“Did you—hold on a minute.”

The offshore breeze had picked up and stirred the orchard foliage, briefly parting two of the fruited branches to reveal a small, circular stone wall overgrown with ivy. It supported a wooden shaft on which a rope and a bucket hung.

The chief sprung nimbly to his feet. (
He
hadn’t had to do all that running in high-heeled boots and a tight skirt.) He picked up a pebble and tossed it through the invisible wall of History and into the well. I thought I heard a small splash.

“All right, then,” he said. “I’m just going to get some water. I have no intention of leaving this sunny orchard…” He continued his commentary as he slowly and purposely headed for the well. “Quite happy to stay here, just need some water…”

Kamal pursed his parched lips and looked away. We were all desperately thirsty by now.

“I’m not sure History can hear you, Chief,” Helen began. But the security chief had already been brought to a full stop by the invisible wall.

He came back, sat down without a word, and picked up where he had left off. “Dean Sunder asked you to see what you could find out.”

“He relies on me to solve problems, small or large, that make their way into the dean’s office.”

“Well, did you find out anything that you haven’t told us?”

I shook my head, uneasily recalling how I had stood looking over Dr. Rojas’s shoulder at his workstation’s screen, the window into STEWie’s innards, which had revealed the fact that Dr. Mooney had been scattered across time on purpose. I hadn’t understood any of the information on the screen, but if Dr. Rojas had something to hide, he might have forgotten that not everyone who spent time around the TTE lab had savvy computer skills. I shook the thought off. No, I was sure he wasn’t responsible. Besides, why would he tell us that Dr. Mooney’s run had been sabotaged if he had been the one to do it? “If I had found something out, I would have said so.”

The chief studied me for a moment, but instead of pushing me further, he moved the conversation along. “Well, one of us
must have seen
something
. Kamal, you were probably the last person to talk to Dr. Mooney, other than the murderer.”

Kamal looked pained, like he should have noticed whatever it was that he was supposed to have seen. “We exchanged a few words about the scheduled calibration, then I said good night and headed home in the snow. I miss snow.” He licked his dry lips. “I ended up pulling an all-nighter for Dr. Little’s exam.”

“And you, Abigail?” the security chief asked.

“I had exams all day Monday and spent the evening in the library, finishing a project. I didn’t come into the lab until Tuesday morning.”

“But you did go into Dr. Mooney’s office this week,” I said.

“What’s this?” the chief asked, sitting up under the pomegranate tree and bumping his head on one of the lower branches.

Abigail, sounding embarrassed, explained how she had gone into Dr. Mooney’s office after his memorial and spent some time looking at the books, photos, and musical instruments the professor had collected on his time travels. She pulled apart another pomegranate to expose its honeycomb interior of bright red seeds and white pith and offered Kamal a segment. He looked a little green at the prospect of sucking on more of the tart pomegranate seeds. “The didgeridoo was missing. That was odd, I suppose,” Abigail went on. “But I did tell you about it, Julia.”

“And I told Chief Kirkland.”

“What’s this about the didgeridoo being missing?” Helen asked, puzzled.

“It wasn’t in his office,” I explained.

“The instrument’s absence was duly noted in Officer Van Underberg’s notes. That can’t be why we were targeted. But I wonder if someone watched you go into Dr. Mooney’s office, Abigail, and perhaps thought you were on to something—but
what?” Chief Kirkland swore under his breath. “None of this makes sense.”

Helen shook her head. “Not in the least, my dear Chief.”

A warm, breezy evening approached. Occasionally we’d hear the rattle of a cart returning from town and the drivers’ banter; then the cart would pass and there would be another period of silence. Activity in the harbor had mostly ceased. The repetitive
swoosh
of the sea as it gently washed against the rocky shore drifted up to the ridge. Stars had started to come into view, a whole lot of them, like coarse salt crystals shaken onto a dark tablecloth.

Kamal tossed a picked-over pomegranate shell through the invisible barrier History had placed around us and said, “Pretty.”

The entire Astronomy Department would have given an arm and a leg for this view. The moon had not risen yet. Faint pinpoints of light on Vesuvius’s slopes revealed the locations of villas and farmhouses. The mountain carved a tipless triangle into a sky alive with stars, unspoiled by light pollution from headlights, streetlamps, and overilluminated car dealerships. I thought about home. Quinn wouldn’t have to bother with the divorce paperwork, a temp would take over my work duties until a permanent replacement could be found, Wanda the spaniel would need a new home.

I was about to say something befitting the moment when Helen turned on the light on her wristwatch and said, “I’d like to set it to local time—nine o’clock, perhaps? I’ve been trying to remember what time the eruption started, as described in Gaius Pliny’s account.”

“Too bad I didn’t choose Mount Vesuvius as my project for Dr. Mooney’s Ghost Zones in Time: How to Find Them and
Avoid Them,” Abigail said. “We might have a better idea what time of day the eruption occurred, right? No, I had to go and choose Tunguska.”

Helen sounded as if Abigail had just leveled an accusation of incompetence at her. “When you read as much history as I do, Abigail, the details sometimes get put aside, but I assure you—”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that, Dr. Presnik—”

We were all tired, snippy, and in need of food, water, and a safe haven far from the danger of the volcano.

“Perhaps you better put the watch away, Dr. Presnik. For blending-in purposes,” Kamal said, coming to Abigail’s rescue. He had been periodically getting to his feet to check if the invisible wall was still there and he got up to do so again.

“I usually do not permit students to address me by my given name, but given our situation you can call me Helen, Kamal. You, too, Abigail.”

“Okay, Helen,” Abigail obliged.

“Everyone—most everyone—calls me Julia already,” I said.

The security chief cleared his throat and said, “How’s it looking, Kamal?”

Kamal was at the edge of the orchard, on the side where the builders were working, trying to poke his foot through. We heard him give a small cheer.

“They’re gone,” he called out. “The guys working on the addition to the villa.”

Chief Kirkland scrambled to his feet. “Is that why we’ve been stuck here? Until the workers finished up for the day?”

“Who knows what kept us from leaving this place?” Helen said, joining him. “Quite often it happens that one simply does not know.”

The first thing we did was to lower the bucket into the blackness of the well and, after some effort, as there only seemed to
be a shallow pool of water at the bottom, gratefully drink. The water was lukewarm, not cool like I had expected, and tasted vaguely of earth.