Time's Enemy: A Romantic Time Travel Adventure (Saturn Society Book 1) (45 page)

His nephew Mark approached. “Yeah, Uncle Tony, how was the cruise?”

“It was nice.” The lie ate into him like drops of acid on his skin. It had been worse with Bernie, especially when he’d had to concoct an even wilder story about how he’d ended up downtown stark naked.
This woman I was sitting next to on the plane must’ve slipped me a mickey or something. Last thing I remember was getting on in Miami...

Bernie’s left eye had narrowed, and he’d looked at Tony sidewise but didn’t press. Luckily, Tony’s parents didn’t read the police reports in the paper.

“Where’d your cruise go? See anything cool?” Mark asked.

Tony tried to think of something to say as his other nephew entered, with a girl in tow. “Hey, Uncle Tony, I want you to meet my girlfriend, Taylor—”

Tony’s mouth slid open as he took in the black, ruffled dress, pointy shoes, and red and white striped socks. Something rolled to the bottom of his stomach. Taylor Gressman? “Nice to meet you.” She held out a hand, smirking behind a smile that obviously snowed the rest of the family.

He shook her hand and mumbled a response. What was his nephew doing dating
her?
“Taylor’s in my history class at Sinclair,” Danny answered Tony’s unspoken question. “I’d have flunked the final for sure if we hadn’t studied together.”

I can imagine.
Tony fought the urge to wipe his suddenly clammy hands on his pants. Did the Society know what he’d done? Was Taylor there to catch him with his guard down and bring him in the way Charlotte nearly had? Before he could worry any more, his mother announced dinner. He’d have to watch the girl, be ready to jump up and run if she looked like she was going to pull something. The family filed into the kitchen and took their regular seats at the table.

Tony’s mom went on about his non-communication while on the cruise. “I still can’t believe you couldn’t at least make one little phone call to your mother.”

“I never had a chance,” he said. That, at least, was the truth.

His mother frowned. Acid churned in his stomach. He couldn’t lie again, not to his mom. He tried a diversionary tactic. “I, uh, met someone. A woman.”

Bethany whirled around. “You never told me—”

“You did?” His mother slapped her hands on the table. “What’s her name?”

“Charlotte.” He wanted to shrivel up and die, remembering the ease with which the scheming woman had almost ensnared him.

The questions flew fast, from all directions. “When do we get to meet her? What’s she—”

Tony held up a hand. Everyone fell silent. “It’s not going to happen. Sorry, Mom.”

“But why? Does she live too far away? Or—”

Bethany leaned forward. “You can have a long-distance relationship. One of my friends’ parents does it, it’s not like—”

“That’s not it,” Tony said. Best to stop this now. “On the last day of the cruise, I found out... she’s married.”

Well, she was, in a sense. To the Saturn Society.

A hush fell over the group. Tony’s dad grunted, but no one spoke. Across the table, Taylor had taken a sudden interest in the tablecloth. Did she know? “I’m sorry, dear,” his mom said. Mark and Danny mumbled agreements, and then his mom started passing the food bowls around. Gradually, conversations started about school, Mark’s football team, Charlie’s thoughts on the stock market that week. Safe subjects.

Taylor paid no more attention to Tony than any other guest of his nephews’ would have. Still, he kept an eye on her throughout the meal, torn between wanting to get her alone so he could chew her ass for locking him in that room, yet afraid to, should his fears prove true.

As he waited to serve himself, he scanned each of their faces, everyone in their accustomed places. The same places the Solomon family and their significant others had occupied for twenty years’ of Sunday dinners. His dad sat at the head of the table, and at the other end, Tony’s mom. Tony sat in the middle of the three chairs with their backs to the window, Bethany on his left and Lisa’s older son Mark on his right, and across from them, Charlie, Taylor and Danny—

Taylor. That’s what was... off. Not that she was present, but that she sat in his sister’s chair. “Where’s Lisa?” he asked.

Everyone froze. Bethany dropped a spoon on the floor. All their eyes, huge, round. Horrified.

Tony flung his hands out, palms up. “What?”

His dad coughed. Charlie excused himself, shoved back his chair and left the room.

“Uh,” Mark said.

No one else spoke, so Tony asked again. “Where’s Lisa? Is it some secret I’m not in—”

“Daddy!” Bethany whispered, her nose wrinkled.

“What?”

“Daddy... Lisa’s dead.”

“What?” His voice squeaked. A high-pitched, pulsating roar in his ears drowned out her response. His breath was gone. This was not happening. He wasn’t hearing this. Good thing he was sitting down, or his knees would have given out.

The rest of the meal passed in somber quiet. There was an uncharacteristic amount of leftovers, and everyone made excuses to leave soon after dinner.

“You sure you’re okay?” Bethany asked as they got into the car.

“Yeah.” As okay as he could be. During the ten-minute ride home, Tony cleaned his glasses three times. Lisa, dead. It couldn’t be. He tried to dredge up memories, ones he didn’t know he had. Had he somehow traded her life for Bethany’s? It didn’t make sense, yet...

Bethany’s face twisted in concern. “I think we should go back to Grandma’s and call the doctor—”

“No!” His head snapped around. “I’m fine. Just... this is kind of upsetting, even now.”

“You’ve been acting weird ever since your heart attack. Then you disappear for three weeks. And now... Mom thought that cruise would be good for you, but I don’t know...”

He didn’t want to dredge up his own painful memories of that horrible day in July, five years ago. He wanted to hear it from her. It would make it more real, something he had no choice but to accept. “I’m... a little confused,” he admitted. “How- how did she...”

She lowered her head, turned her eyes up at him. “S
pa
S
tar
?”

“What is it? I mean, I know it’s a solar power plant satellite, but—”

Her eyes widened, brows raised. She jerked her head at him as she spoke. “It fell and killed thousands of people?”

T
HE SKY WAS BURNING.
T
HAT WAS
the main thing Tony remembered from that day, seeing chunks of the satellite array falling, the smaller ones burning up in the atmosphere. Everyone at the office had run outside or braved the stairs and gone out on the roof. Tony had stood in the streets, watching the flaming pieces fall to the earth, unaware until the following day that one of them had killed his sister. She was the reason he’d never visited the Solar Energy Museum that was built a couple of years later.

But Tony could avoid it no longer. He got out of the car before he pulled into the museum’s parking lot, and gazed at the pewter-plated, memorial plaque at the street entrance. “Dedicated to those who died after the fall of S
pa
S
tar
- July 3, 1998,” he read. Eight granite arches bore over a thousand names inscribed on their polished sides.

The memorial and museum graced a flat plain north of Dayton, where the U.S. Solar Energy and Power Commission headquarters had once stood. The glass dome in the center of the museum’s roof sparkled in the afternoon sun, barely noticeable amidst acres of solar collection panels.

Tony scanned the lines of names in alphabetical order. He found Lisa’s on the second pillar on the east side of the drive. As if to convince himself of the horrible truth, he crouched and ran his fingers over the recessed letters.
Elisabeth Solomon Vogel.

His research had revealed that Charlotte Henderson’s innovations had helped the Dayton area become a center for solar energy research. Like in the other timestream, Dayton was also a center for aerospace development, which in this reality included solar energy-collecting satellites and power plants that hovered in geosynchronous orbits thousands of miles above the earth. S
pa
S
tar
had been positioned above the SEPC headquarters. Other parts of the Array orbited over several other U.S. cities.

Lisa had been at work at the SEPC headquarters the morning the array broke apart and fell to earth. HQ and the nearby suburb of Sunborough were the hardest hit, struck by a flaming power transmission satellite the size of a football stadium. Rescuers had combed the debris for a week. They found only three people alive.

Years later, the cause of S
pa
S
tar
’s sudden decay of orbit and subsequent fall remained a mystery. The Solar Energy and Power Commission and museum was Tony’s account at the agency, but he’d never toured it. Now he knew why.

In the timeline of LCT and Keith Lynch, of coal-fired power plants and steering wheels, there had been no Solar Energy and Power Commission, and Lisa had worked at the Air Force base. Tony wished he could wake up and find it was just a nightmare.

Another horrible thought occurred to him. What if his warp back to save Bethany had brought about all these changes? He gulped for air, his chest unable to expand. His legs went rubbery, then logic returned to him with a whoosh of breath.

Bethany’s death had occurred nearly two years after the fall of S
pa
S
tar
. He couldn’t have changed time at that point. Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that everything came back to him, was all his fault for messing with the flow of time. Maybe Everly was right, maybe Tony was playing God.

He would never warp again. Not even if Bethany died another preventable death. If something happened to her, it would be a lesson to him. A reminder that no matter how unfair, some things were meant to be.

Bethany hadn’t deserved to die. But neither had Lisa. Or sixteen thousand others.

He climbed back into the car. “Continue.”

Time crawled to a stop as he stood in front of the museum entrance, the wind whistling in the field of solar collectors as he read the name over the door. The Dorothy Charlotte Henderson Museum of Solar Energy. “No. Fucking. Way.”

Even though he’d known Charlotte had been a key contributor to early solar energy development, the sight of her name up there sent a shock through him.

He forced himself to open the door. Woodenly, he walked in.

He wandered down the main corridor, his mind in a fog, the entire experience dreamlike. He felt disconnected, as if his body walked through the museum without his brain directing it. Like he was watching TV, and another man who looked like him gazed at the first solar cells she’d developed. It wasn’t Tony, but someone else who peered at watches, heating appliances, and home heating systems from the fifties. It wasn’t Tony, but a mindless robot who skimmed the placards over early solar-powered computers.

He viewed the satellite power plant exhibit with detached interest. A pictorial display outlined the development of solar energy electricity generation in the 1940s. The display continued with pictures of the first solar power generation satellites, a miniature model of the first satellites to contain power plants that beamed electricity to the earth using radio signals, then a model of S
pa
S
tar
and its fall on Ohio, Florida, southern California and myriad other, smaller U.S. sites.

The hall emerged into a round room capped with a glass rotunda. A tour group clustered around a pedestal display in the center while a guide spoke. School-age kids, probably from a summer camp. Tony peered at the photos around the room’s perimeter. He immediately recognized Charlotte as a little girl in the second one. His heart clenched. The little girl he’d pulled from the floodwaters, saved from drowning. He wrenched his gaze away and strolled around the room, aghast at the wall of homage to the “Mother of Modern Solar Energy.” The woman who’d betrayed him. The woman whose work had indirectly caused the death of his sister and thousands of others.

Take it away, she’d said in the interview. S
pa
S
tar
had to be the reason. But what did she want him to take from her, and when?

Most of the photos showed Charlotte working on various projects. In one, she held up an early solar cell she’d developed. Ice formed over Tony’s ribcage.

In the photo, she wore the violet-print dress he’d bought for her. Like the few other photos in which she looked at the camera, sadness pervaded her thin, close-mouthed smile, reminiscent of Mona Lisa’s.

Tony skimmed over the other pictures, trying not to see Charlotte’s sparkling eyes, or her face aglow with desire and happiness as she clung to him in the river, as she lay beside him in the little box bed at the Fishin’ Shack, as she trembled beneath him in the living room of her home. He tried to forget her whispered professions of love—lies, all lies—and the press of her lush body against his...

The last photo was the only one in color. In it, Charlotte again wore the violet-print dress, by then faded. Gray streaked her hair and lines etched her forehead, a vertical one above her nose the most pronounced. The caption placed it in the year he was born. Even as a seventy-year-old woman, she was beautiful.