Time of Departure (28 page)

He looked unnerved.

“It's just three nights a week to start. Marc, I'm grateful that you've taken me in even though you think I'm a bit crazy, but I need to do something to contribute.”

“Okay, but what about ID? You don't have any.”

“I said I'd work for tips.”

“You
told
her you have no ID?”

“No. I just said I wanted to stay off the grid.”

“Which means?”

“Below the radar. Invisible.”

“Do you know how that sounds? I'm a cop, remember?”

“Are you planning to turn me in?”

“No. It's not a crime to have no ID. I'm just wondering why you don't apply for replacements.”

“Marc, I'd need to start with a birth certificate, and I can't get one!”

“Because you aren't born yet. Claire, really…” He sipped from his drink and stared out over the lake.

Then, unaccountably, he switched subjects.

“What do you know about Cross Creek?”

“I've been here a few times.”

The last time I was here, I was following you.

“Have you noticed that white house with the screened porch across from where we turn in?”

“Yes.”

“Know who lives there?

“
Lived
. Marjorie Rawlings died in 1953.”

“Read any of her books?”

“
The Yearling.
A long time ago. I think, in high school.”

“Did you go to college?”

“Boston U, then Harvard Law.” I gave him a laser look. He was trying to steer the conversation, and I could see where it was going, so I laid a marker down. “What's with the twenty questions, Marc? Yes, my past is bigger than a bread box, and no, you won't find any record of me at either of those schools.”

He drew a long breath. “I know I won't. That young couple in Archer … Gregory and Margaret Talbot?”

“Yes.”

“They have no children.”

“Not yet.”

“C'mon, Claire! Who are you, really? Is Claire even your name?”

“Claire Alexandra Talbot. That's my name, Marc. It's not some secret identity.”

“I've been doing some checking.”

“You're not ready for this, Marc.”

“The labels in your clothes—the ones you were wearing when I picked you up. I made some calls. No one's heard of those brand names.”

“That would be right.”

He reached into a pocket and brought out my watch. He handed it to me. “I took that to be fixed.”

“Thanks!” I was surprised. But then I saw the watch face. The hands were frozen in the same place.

“I took it to a guy I know. Really good … trained at a special school in Switzerland. He didn't know how to fix it. He'd never seen one like it.”

“Okay,” I mused, “for one thing, it isn't a Swiss watch. It's Japanese.” Then it dawned on me. “And it's an Eco-Drive. It runs off solar power.”

“I've never heard of that.”

“I'm not surprised.”

“I don't get any of this, Claire! Should I be talking to the feds about you? I'm working with a few of them, you know!”

“The feds? Why?”

Abruptly, he switched to a foreign language. The intonations sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn't identify the specific language until he said, “Brezhnev.”

“‘Brezhnev'?” He flushed when I started laughing. “So now I'm … what? A Russian spy?”

“You're living ‘off the grid,' as you call it. You've got some kind of high-tech watch. You're too young and too smart to be a seasoned criminal, so what does that leave? You're either working for the Russians … or you're one of ours. Which is it? KGB or CIA?”

“Neither. And if you really believed that, you'd never have trusted me enough to leave me alone out here. You wouldn't have bought me new clothes.”

“You talk like a lawyer.”

“I am a lawyer.” I changed the subject. “I didn't know you spoke Russian.”

“Picked up a bit in the navy.”

“You never told me.”

“That's another thing! Why do you keep saying you know me?”

“Because I do.”

He shook his head in frustration.

“As I said, you're not ready for this.” I drained my drink, stood up, and set the empty glass on the porch railing. “But rest assured, Marc Hastings, I know you much better than you think.”

He remained seated. I could see the conflict on his face. He'd been thinking and brooding while he was away from me, and his brain and his heart were pulling in different directions. At least I had the advantage of knowing which one would win in the end. I glided toward the door. “For example,” I tossed back at him, “I know you're hiding me out here so your bosses won't find out.”

“There'd be a hell of a lot of questions if they did!”

“I suppose. I also know that you paid my hospital bill.” I had seen the receipt on his dresser when I was hunting for an extra towel.

“I had to! Otherwise, there'd have been more questions!”

I opened the screen door and dropped the bomb I'd been planning all day. “I also know you're aching to make love to me, but you're too scared to try.”

I heard him twist in his chair a second before the door banged shut behind me. “Scared?” I watched through the screen as he jumped to his feet. He crossed the veranda in three strides. “Cat! Listen to me, girl! I'm not scared!” I stepped closer to the door. He saw me.

“‘Cat,'” I said evenly. “Only my mother calls me that.”

“Your initials…” He tugged the screen door open. “It just came into my head.” We were inches apart. I stood perfectly still, looking into his fathomless blue eyes. He bent toward me. “You're right,” he whispered. “You scare the hell out of me.” He tried to say something else, but his voice caught. I slid my arms around him, and suddenly he was kissing me … my lips, my cheeks, my neck.

All my studied restraint evaporated and something deep inside me let go. Tears burned my eyes. “All those years! Oh, Marc, I'm sorry! I'm so, so sorry!”

He lifted me into his arms and carried me to his bedroom. He laid me on the bed. I saw the swirling confusion on his face as he lay down beside me. I pressed my fingers to his lips.

“Don't say anything. Don't ask anything. Just … make love to me.”

Twenty minutes later, we melded into one.

 

40

A baneful fate was slouching toward me like William Butler Yeats's rough beast. The clock was ticking; I knew it, but Marc didn't. I was clinging to the idea that at least one of us should be allowed to remain innocent for a while longer. Old Marc had protected me from my truth, but I wasn't sure how long I could protect Young Marc from his.

Wednesday was Marc's first day off in a scheduled rotation. We spent most of that day in bed. The sex was spectacular, and the tender hours between were ineffable, but the loom of crisis was never far from my consciousness.

By some unspoken understanding, Marc avoided cross-examining me any further about my enigmatic provenance. But the reprieve didn't prevent the occasional collision between us as I attempted to adjust to a less well-informed decade than the one I had left behind.

The first incident began with my lame attempt at comedy. It ended on a more somber note. On Thursday morning, Marc made breakfast while I showered. When I heard his voice call, “Cat! Breakfast is ready!”—the exact words he would use on a different morning, thirty years from now—I swallowed the lump in my throat and forced myself to focus on a mini-mission of cross-generational education. I wrapped myself in my bathrobe and marched into the kitchen.

The kitchen banquette was neatly set, and Marc was in the process of deploying plates loaded with bacon and eggs and toast.

“You know,” I began, “a few things around here will have to change.”

“Yeah? What?”

I dipped my hand into the pocket of my robe and retrieved the red plastic bottle I'd found in the shower. I held it under his nose. The multihued label shouted: “
GEE, YOUR HAIR SMELLS TERRIFIC.
”

“My shampoo? What about it?”

“Forgive me for pointing out that your hair does
not
smell terrific! It smells like you spent the night in a Turkish bordello!”

He assessed me carefully. “You don't look Turkish.” His eyebrows danced. “But I have to admit, you do have certain bordello skills.”

“You ain't seen nothing yet.”

“You promise?”

I kissed him. “Promise.” I dropped the shampoo bottle into the trash bin and slid into my seat. “Another thing…”

“What?”

“I checked some of the junk food packages you've been hoarding.” I pointed toward one of the kitchen cupboards behind him. “Bad news!”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning chemical additives! Are you in the habit of eating plastic bags?”

“Of course not!”

“Same ingredients! After breakfast, we're going shopping.” I surveyed the food arrayed on my plate—eggs sunny-side up, wheat toast, fried tomatoes, and … “Well, what do we have here?” I exclaimed. “Pancetta bacon!”

“Not many people would know that.”

“Learned it from you.”

“When was that?” Mark was standing over me.

Oh hell …

“Just now,” I answered, deflecting. I tasted the bacon. “Perfect!” I looked up. “Aren't you joining me?”

He sat.

“There's another thing.…”

“What?” Now he was on the defensive.

“I threw away your leisure suit. You'll thank me one day.”

He blinked, but said nothing.

I cut my toast into strips, and then dipped a piece into a yolk. I popped it in my mouth.

Marc ate slowly, watching me.

“Watch closely. This is part of your education,” I said, mopping up more yolk. I was trying to keep the mood light … trying to make the best of the disorienting surrealism of living in a prequel to my own life.

“You're talking in riddles.”

“Now you understand how I felt.”

He laid down his fork. One look at his face, and my brief foray into chatty superficiality cratered. I reached over and took his hand. “I'm in love with you, Marc. That's all you need to understand right now. More will come, I promise, but right now, I just need your trust.”

“I love you, too, Claire. I do. But it's like being under a spell. I know there's something much bigger going on here, but I don't understand it. The strange thing is … it's making me afraid for both of us.”

I flashed on a memory: the ornate living room … the clear-eyed old lady … the quiet warning.

“A lovely old lady once warned me to prepare myself. ‘Ready yourself for the sorrows to come,' she said. I think she meant both of us.”

Two more girls were going to die.

Very soon.

We would have to decide if we could save them.

Decide if we could change their history, and ours … and survive.

I didn't know how to tell him.

*   *   *

The Yearling's interior décor hadn't changed much. The dining room I'd seen on the evening I followed Old Marc was a screened-in porch, but otherwise, the place looked pretty much the same in 1978 as I knew it would three decades later.

It didn't take me long to adapt. I had worked tables in restaurants and bars all through my high school and undergrad years, so mixing drinks and slinging beer were no mystery to me. Nonie Friedrichsen, the bar manager, was the same woman who had been tending bar on the night of the brawl. This earlier version of her wasn't much older than me, but already her hair was flecked with gray and her face was showing the miles she'd traveled. She definitely had her rough edges, but I liked her, and I admired the cool way she handled men twice her size when they became insulting or raucous.

Marc had written his schedule on a calendar for me, and I had planned to coordinate my part-time duties with his shifts. But it didn't work out that way. While we were ravishing each other after I seduced him, the news blackout on the missing
Herald
reporter was lifted. On Friday morning, he was called back to work. He spent the next few nights at his apartment in town, leaving me to fend for myself at the cabin. To keep myself sane—perhaps an unusual concept for someone claiming to be a time traveler—I offered to work extra shifts at The Yearling. Marc and I tried to stay in touch, but the cabin's old rotary-dial phone had no answering machine, and voice mail was a marvel yet to be invented, so our contacts were pretty much hit-and-miss while he was in Gainesville.

When I next saw him, late on Sunday, he told me he had to go back in on Tuesday. A string of severe thunderstorms had blown through—“old cacklers,” Nonie called them—and it was a cold night, so I had the fireplace going when he arrived. We sat on the couch in the lounge. He started talking about the frustrating dead ends the task force was encountering. Of course, having read all the reports, I could have predicted their next disappointment. But I stayed quiet. I waited for Marc to bring up our conversation on the first day, at the side of the road near Hawthorne, when I had spooked him with my knowledge of Pia Ostergaard's unannounced disappearance.

He didn't, so I decided to give him a nudge.

“Collect dental records.”

“What?”

“Track down the missing girls' dentists and get copies of their charts.”

He hesitated. “I think someone's doing that.”

He didn't sound certain.

“Make sure, Marc. It's important.”

“Good point. I will.” He leaned back and regarded me with interest. “Lawyer, huh?”

I didn't reply. I could see that he still wasn't ready for the truth. We were almost there, but if this slow waltz was ever to end, I needed to hand him irrefutable evidence.