CHAPTER THREE
By the time they reached the hotel outside Bakersfield, California, near the site where principal photography on Angel Street would begin the next day, they had driven over two thousand miles, carried the attaché case with the diamonds and their modest supply of gold in and out of seven motels and nearly twenty restaurants, taught Lizzie how to drive quite well and eliminated a little over nine pages from the screenplay. Regardless of whether or not those pages stayed out of the script, their obligation to the production company was officially fulfilled.
Jack Naile had always considered himself somewhat anal retentive (convincing himself that attention to detail was prudent thoroughness, therefore a virtue rather than a psychological quirk). Consequently, he felt perfectly justified getting up a few times each evening, going to the window of whatever hostelry happened to be their abode of the moment and checking that the Suburban was as it should be.
The contents of the Suburban were vital to their success in the past. Certainly, it would be possible to survive without these items, but impossible to maintain any semblance of a normal late twentieth century lifestyle.
“Come to bed, Jack. The Suburban’s just fine.”
“Coming, kiddo.”
“What’s bugging you, Jack?”
“I’m just hoping that we didn’t forget something. And I don’t mean movies on videotape. It’s like that kit we thought of that we can install so we can run the Suburban on grain alcohol.”
“That was a good idea, seeing as we didn’t have enough money or time to get a diesel engine put in.”
“Yeah. With the right filter, we could have run the car off the equivalent of home heating oil.”
From the semidarkness of the bed, Ellen said reassuringly, “There will obviously be some things that we forgot or couldn’t anticipate needing, Jack. That’s just the way that life is.”
“What do you think the kids are talking about?” They were in the next room, an unlocked adjoining door connecting to it.
“David’s probably sleeping. If he doesn’t get his eight hours, he’s a grouch. Liz is probably watching a talk show or a movie and keeping the sound low so she won’t awaken David.”
Jack Naile nodded, glanced once more at the Suburban and then walked back to the bed. The attaché case with their stash of gold and diamonds was beside the bed, between it and the nightstand. In front of the nightstand, abutting the leading edge of the attaché case was an aircraft aluminum case, larger and heavier. Inside it were all but one of the personal sidearms he had brought for their anticipated travel into the objective past.
All but one. The long-barreled Colt Single Action Army, five chambers loaded, rested on the nightstand.
Jack got into bed, his right arm curling around Ellen’s bare shoulders. “Wanna make love? Might be our last chance in this century.”
“What a come-on line, Jack! You ought to save that one for a book!”
“Well, it might be.”
Ellen rolled into his arms and brushed her lips against his. “But just think how romantic it will be making love in the past, before we were even born. Do you want the little guy to be all tired out? Don’t you want to save up until—”
“He’s getting bigger by the second. He won’t get tired out, and I don’t need to save up. I make more all the time. Even when I’m sleeping, I’m always working, making more just for us. I’ll get pimples. You wouldn’t want me to show up in the past with a zit or something. Have you considered that? I think not” Jack Naile’s left hand cradled his wife’s face and he kissed her hard on the mouth. The zit thing almost always worked . . . .
The movie set looked just like something out of a movie, with several cameras—one of them on what looked like railroad tracks—and lights and canvas-backed folding chairs with names or titles stenciled on them and bunches of people. Half of them just milled around and seemed to be doing absolutely nothing, while the other half walked or occasionally ran. The frontier “town” consisted of a wide street lined on either side with clapboard commercial buildings, flat-roofed adobe huts of varying size, corrals and a big red barn at one end of the street, smallish houses with white picket fences at the other. What Elizabeth could see from standing near the catering truck and something her father had called a “generator truck” indicated that about half of the commercial buildings were not buildings at all, but merely facades, with nothing behind them.
The purplish gray mountains off in the distance—to the east?—were wholly real, she assumed.
Her father and David—David reluctantly—were off somewhere with the armorer, the property man in charge of the guns, while Elizabeth and her mother stood beside a long table stacked with stainless steel coffee urns, white Styrofoam cups and every imaginable kind of donut or breakfast pastry. There were bottles of water, too, representing several different brands. Bottled water, Liz had always thought, tasted pretty much like bottled water, regardless of what label it carried.
Holly Kinsey was someone Elizabeth had been reading about almost since picking up her first pop-culture magazine, watched as a presenter or recipient on innumerable awards shows, seen in every movie the woman had made. Attired in an ankle length, velvet-looking robin’s egg-blue dress with a high lace collar, her usual shoulder-length brown hair hidden beneath a wig of cascading curls reaching to her waist, she walked straight toward them and stuck out her right hand. Her pansy eyes sparkled as she spoke. “I’m Holly! You must be Elizabeth. Hi! And you’re Mrs. Naile?”
“Ellen, please.”
“Ellen, then.”
Elizabeth shook Holly Kinsey’s offered hand. “I never thought I’d ever get to meet you, even when Mom and Daddy said you were one of the stars of the movie. I’ve seen every one of your movies. My favorite was Sweetheart’s Revenge.”
Holly Kinsey flashed brilliantly white teeth as she smiled and said, “That was my favorite, too. But I think your mom and dad’s movie is going to be just terrific. The raspberry danish are really good, and there’s orange juice and soft drinks, if you don’t like coffee, or I can send out and get you something.”
Elizabeth was aware, on one level, that the thread of conversation continued for a moment, then passed her and resumed, but between Holly Kinsey and her mother. Holly Kinsey was gabbing with her mother! Her mother! And, if this time travel thing really happened, she’d never be able to tell Keisha or Amelia or any of her other girlfriends about it! Life sucked . . .
Elizabeth would look beautiful, albeit a little nervous, Ellen guessed. Ellen, on the other hand, felt perfectly stupid. She’d never liked dressing up when she was a little girl, even for Halloween. And looking at herself in the mirror, dressed this way, considering what lay ahead of them, was extremely creepy. Her own hair was pulled back in a tight bun, some tendrils drawn out on either side of her face and made into curls by one of the makeup technicians. Holly had personally accompanied them to wardrobe after making the suggestion, “Would you guys like to be extras in the street scene? One of the AD’s—assistant directors—can fix it up so the Guild doesn’t throw a fit. Come on! It’ll be fun! Especially for you, Liz!”
After that, Ellen Naile sank into what-can-you-do mode and agreed, figuring that Lizzie would have a wonderful time.
Wardrobe was full of enormous, uncomfortable-looking dresses and inane hats and clunky-looking shoes. Holly Kinsey shepherding them—almost smotheringly—every step of the way, outfits were selected and trailers were found and Ellen and Elizabeth went their separate ways. Damned if she’d wear a waist cincher, Ellen had squeezed herself into the dress and practiced her contortionist skills to get it closed up her back.
Hats were something Ellen Naile positively detested, and especially the one she wore. It had a broad brim, with lace trim banded around the crown matching the tight and itchy collar that felt like it was closing more tightly around her throat by the second. Remembering to catch up the enormous skirt and billowing petticoats under it, Ellen Naile opened the trailer door and warily navigated the trailer steps, her feet buttoned inside what had to be the ugliest cross between orthopedic shoes and combat boots ever conceived.
Settling her borrowed clothing, Ellen began looking for Elizabeth, after a few seconds and even fewer hesitant steps encountering her so suddenly that they almost bumped into one another, Elizabeth climbing down from the trailer next door.
“Oh, you look beautiful, Lizzie!”
“You look beautiful, Mom. You really do.”
“I feel like an idiot.” As if on cue, a wind blew up along the alley-width walkway between the rows of trailers and Ellen Naile felt her hat starting to go. She put her right hand, open palm, on top of it to keep it in place. “Having to dress like this every day is going to suck big time,” Ellen declared.
Lizzie started to cry, and Ellen thought, “To hell with the hat,” and put both arms around her daughter and just hugged her close while the wind kept blowing. But the wind from the mountains beyond the fake Western town wasn’t the source of the chill that Ellen felt. The reason for the icy tingle that spread upward along Ellen’s spine and stopped so abruptly at the crown of her head under the damned hat that her body shook with a paroxysm was something different. Both she and her daughter had glimpsed the reality that stalked their destiny, haunted their souls. They would be in a time when women were cared for and protected and sheltered and never, ever consulted, a time when everyday tasks consumed enormous amounts of time and a woman’s intellect and desires weren’t given a second thought.
“Kirk Douglas always believed—said so in print in his autobiography—that if he rode real erect-like in the saddle, he’d look like more of a horseman than he was. And he did.”
Jack glanced down from the saddle into the weathered brown face of Elvis Wilson. “Are you saying I should sit up straighter in the saddle, Elvis?”
“Since you and your family got here ten days ago, and you connived me into teaching you and them some ridin’, you’ve gotten a damn sight better, Jack. But until you get better still, sit erect. Remember Kirk’s words, and you’ll look good, at least.”
The advice of Elvis Wilson was to be taken seriously. Some of the stuntmen on the set claimed Wilson was almost in the Ben Johnson class when it came to horsemanship. Once Jack Naile and his family had arrived on location, Jack had set out to find somewhere in the area where basic horsemanship could be learned.
It was Holly Kinsey who had said, “Elvis Wilson taught me and half the actors I know. He’s good, and he doesn’t expect miracles. And he likes kids, so he’d be great with Liz. Your daughter is just the sweetest and smartest girl in the world. And is your son David terrific-looking! He’s so awfully mature.” After thanking the actress for the compliments to his daughter and son, Jack had looked up Elvis Wilson, who was doing some stunt riding and a little acting in Angel Street when he wasn’t supervising the horse wrangling. Despite Jack’s insistence, Elvis Wilson refused to take money for his services, saying instead, “Everybody who’s a decent person should learn himself to ride. Folks who aren’t—decent, I mean—well, the horses are better off. Buy me a steak dinner or a bottle of scotch sometime, and we’ll call it even.”
David did not like horses. A natural athlete in every sport he’d ever tried, riding interested him not at all and chiefly because he openly ridiculed everything and anything which had to do with the Old West. This was, of course, because his father liked westerns, was a dedicated student of Earpiana and owned a cowboy hat and a Colt .45. Yet David agreed to the riding lessons without protest. That only heightened Jack’s already eerie feelings concerning their future in the past. Ellen, who loved horses but had ridden almost not at all, made steady progress, as did Liz, who admitted that she was afraid a horse would bite her. Of the Naile family’s four students of equitation, it was David, of course, who was learning to ride so well that, with proper wardrobe, he could have served as a Mongol warrior under Genghis Khan.
Jack glanced down again into Elvis’ weathered face. Wilson wasn’t made-up; the scene in which Wilson was about to perform was one in which his face would never be seen. Wilson would be riding across a great barren expanse as one of fifty desperadoes on their way to wreak death and destruction. At Wilson’s prompting of the second-unit director, Jack and David would swell that number to fifty-two.
“Nobody will see my face wearing some damn cowboy hat, right?” David had insisted when the idea was suggested a day earlier.
“Nobody will see you wearing a cowboy hat, son.”
“Fine. I’ll do it.”
David, hat stuffed under his arm and leading his already saddled horse, walked out of the holding corral. “We ready?”
Elvis looked up at Jack Naile and winked, then went to get his horse.
It was hot despite the wind, or maybe because of it. The wind rustled the manes of the horses, tore at the hats of the men and necessitated squinting against driven dust. But it was the perfect special effect for the shot, and cost nothing. If Jack had learned one thing about moviemaking since they’d arrived on set, it was that free stuff was good.
“What did you say one of those camera trucks was called, Dad?”
“An insert car, I think.”
There were two of them, whatever they were called, trucks with special suspension, each mounted with a movie camera, the cameras rolling. The second-unit director had just called “Action” and was getting the long shot of the head desperado turning around in the saddle and giving his cohort of nasties a pep talk about all the fun death and destruction that they could perpetrate upon the town. In another few seconds, he’d wave his sombrero and it would be the signal for everyone to start forward on their mounts, at little more than a canter at first, then breaking into a gallop.
“You up for this, Dad?” David inquired.
“Yeah. I’m not going to do anything dangerous. And you remember that, too. If the other riders start going a little too fast for us, we can rein back a little. Nobody’ll notice. I mean, we’re supposed to be bad guys, not cavalry in a John Ford western.”
“Whatever.”
The sombrero was waved, and, more to the point, the second-unit director signaled. Trucks rolled and mounted men started forward. “Kind of exciting,” Jack Naile enthused to his son over the clopping of hoofbeats and the creaking of saddles and gun leather.
“Kind of dusty.”
“That Holly Kinsey really seemed to like you, David.” Jack remembered to sit up straighter in the saddle, pulling his costume-department cowboy hat lower over his eyes against the rising clouds of dust.
“If I tell you something, promise you won’t tell Mom?”
This was David’s way of insulating himself from Ellen’s direct criticism. David knew perfectly well that Jack would hold a confidence sacred from anyone except his wife. But prefacing the revelation as he was, David knew that his mother would never mention it, no matter what.
“Tell me.” That was Jack’s usual sort of response, noncommittal.
“Tell me first. What did she say? Holly, I mean.”
“That you were good-looking and seemed—yeah, mature. Holly said mature. Why?”
“I had sex with her the first time a little over a week ago.”
“We’ve only been here a little over a week, David! The first time?! For God’s sake! She’s almost old enough—”
“I never dated anyone younger than I am. And don’t worry—Holly’s on the pill.”
“Aww shit, son! Your mother and I never had sex with anybody but each other. Ever.”
“It’s the nineties, Dad, huh. You wouldn’t buy one of these horses without taking it for a test ride, right?”
“I don’t believe you!”
“We’re lagging behind. One of the ADs is waving at us.” And David leaned into the whipping mane of the bay mare he rode, the animal’s pace quickening.
“I’m not through talking to you, Davey!” Jack Naile urged his buckskin ahead, the blunted rowels of his spurs raking the animal gently, as Elvis had instructed him.
“Put yourself in the horse’s position, Jack,” Elvis said. That stud or whatever you’re ridin’ wants direction, control. No creature wants pain and meanness.”
Jack cut the distance, pulled alongside David. “You’re shittin’ me, right?”
“I’m sorry I brought it up.”
That was David’s way. He sincerely wanted to be open and truth-telling, but he also had the uncanny ability to make anyone feel guilty about questioning his conduct or disagreeing with him in any way. “You’re not shitting me.”
“Let it go, Dad. I was just trying to be honest with you, and this is what I get for it.”
“No, listen, son. I appreciate you telling me, sharing stuff with me.” Jack Naile thought, My God, he’s doing it to me, making me feel guilty. The insert cars were breaking off in opposite directions. In a moment or two, the second unit director would signal “Cut” and everyone would start reining in.
Movies were good. When the scene ended, that was it and life went on just as before.
“Our son did what, Jack?”
The suite of rooms the production company paid for was clean, comfortable and semiluxurious: huge bedroom with a king-size bed, couch and television; slightly smaller sitting room with another couch, several overstuffed chairs and an even larger television; bathroom with a large tub and great water pressure; a balcony overlooking the parking lot to the west and the mountains to the east. It adjoined a two-bedroom suite with a smaller sitting room and a bath, just as nice and with a better view of the parking lot, for Liz and David.
“You heard me, Ellen.”
“I just don’t understand him sometimes.”
“Maybe it’s good we’re getting away for a couple of days.” Jack was inspecting the contents of the attaché case, just retrieved from the production company’s safe. The contents—the diamonds, the small amount of gold, the Seecamp .32, the only modern firearm he hadn’t disposed of—seemed just as he’d left them. “Get David’s mind off the girl. We can look around the old store, if the current owner doesn’t mind, and check out what’s left of the house, too,” Jack told his wife. “It seems like we would have written something, left behind something. And if we could find out what we’d written, we might have an edge on what’s going to happen.” The mere contemplation of already having lived and died before they were born, having left notes or letters behind for their future selves in a past they had already lived but were to live again, was enough to induce insanity. Were they insane? All of them? How could this happen? Jack shook his head in momentary disbelief.
“Clarence called while you were getting the attaché case. He spoke with Liz for a while, and then got on the phone with me.”
“You tell him we’re all okay, kid?”
“Yeah, both physically and chronologically.”
“Clarence doing all right?”
“He sounded . . . You know, I’ve never used this word to say it, but it fits. He sounded distraught and kind of depressed.”
“Normal, huh?” Jack laughed. “I’m just kidding. I’m gonna miss him.”
“The kids’ll miss him. Speaking of the kids, where’s David?” Ellen asked.
“Liz sleeping?”
“Yeah. I’m supposed to wake her up in about an hour. Where’s David?”
“Riding.”
“Oh.”
“Not that kind. He’s out with Elvis Wilson. David’s conned Elvis into teaching him a Pony Express mount, and he wanted to polish it up before we left. I think he’s thinking this might be it, or at least we’re getting close.”
“Or is it just that a Pony Express mount is a good bet for quick getaways?” Ellen suggested.
“Ellen.”
“I’m sorry. No, I’m not. Are you going to talk to him about this thing with Holly Kinsey, since I’m not supposed to know about it?”
“He knows you’ll know about it. And,” Jack sighed audibly, “I really don’t know what to say that I haven’t said already. With one of the picture’s stars out of—out of the picture,” Jack said lamely, “for a few days with a dislocated shoulder, and the company shooting around him, we’ve got the time to get away and that may be just what David needs. It could be pretty overwhelming to a guy of seventeen to have a movie star tumble to him.”
“Would you have done it, Jack?”
“No, but I’m not him, and we don’t know the circumstances. Would a lot of guys do it if some hot babe who’s an international household word came on to them? Probably would.”
“That household word isn’t hard to guess. It’s got four letters and the third one’s a u,” Ellen supplied. “And if you change that third letter to an i, that’s what I’d just as soon do to Holly Kinsey’s throat.”
“Look at it this way, princess. Once this time shift happens, Holly Kinsey won’t have been born yet and David will be living in a much less permissive era.”
“And you just remember, Jack, that in those days the only way a girl could practice birth control was by keeping her knees together,” Ellen added soberingly.
Driving across the Sierra Nevada Mountains was something that Jack Naile was certain he would never forget. There was the agricultural inspection station at the border; then, once out of California—Ellen was driving by then—they turned north toward Carson City, stopping there to stretch their legs, the Suburban cramped because of the load it carried. They grabbed fast food, tanked up the Suburban and drove on toward Atlas, reaching the little town in early evening.
“You were right, Jack. It doesn’t look at all like it did in the photo, like it will for us,” Ellen almost whispered as Jack helped her from the Suburban’s front passenger seat.
“This can’t be right, Dad,” David declared, climbing out of the car and holding the middle seat door for his sister. “There’s almost nothing left from the photo. Did the whole town burn down or something?”
“That’s where the store was, wasn’t it, Daddy?”
“Yeah, Lizzie, where that law office is now. The foundation is pretty much the only thing left of it, though, but maybe there was a cellar or something. It’s too late to check it out today.” It was after six, well after anyone who didn’t have to kept office hours. But there was still plenty of daylight remaining, time enough for a quick drive to the ranch and an even quicker look at the remains of the house.
As there had been when Clarence and he had first stood on that street, alongside Arthur Beach, there was a strong breeze blowing in from the desert, dust devils appearing and disappearing.
They’d called for reservations at the town’s only motel, eschewing the two bed and breakfasts because the rates seemed scarily low.
Jack looked down the main street to his right, back toward where the highway did its right angle and continued on, almost as if Atlas were merely an inconvenience to the highway department engineers as they pressed their road onward across the high desert and into the purpling mountains.
“Anybody need to make a pit stop?” Jack gestured toward the highway. “The restaurant’s probably got decent johns.”
No one volunteered.
The ranch was just as Jack had described it. Ellen stepped out of the Suburban and turned a full three hundred sixty degrees. Yes, just as he had described it.
Jack holding her by the hand, the kids fanning out at their flanks, Ellen walked across the surprisingly level ground that would have comprised a front yard for the ruined house. She wondered, fleetingly, what irreplaceable memorabilia might have been lost when the house burned. What memories were gone forever?
The bones of the house laid upon a terrace. More open land—about the same size as a suburban backyard—separated the house from a roaring stream that emerged from a higher, wooded area beyond. There were a great many pines, but other types of trees as well. When the season was right, there would be flowers in the meadow that lay like an apron beneath the tree line. She’d have to learn the names of the wildflowers and plants.
The farthest boundary of the backyard seemed some several feet above the stream, a good feature during times of heavy rains or snow melt-off; the ground sloped radically downward to the water. “You were right, Jack; this is a perfect place for using hydro-electric power—if we can rig it up.”
“We can do it—we did it.” and he squeezed her hand.
A line of trees, almost perfectly paired, reached downward from the woods toward the terraced lot, as if grasping for the dirt ranch road leading up to the house. The track was precious little wider than the Suburban.
“How far is it from the highway, Jack?”
“Just a hair under nine miles. But remember, on horseback we’d knock about six miles off between here and the highway. The highway follows a natural ridgeline and then dips into the valley, which is kind of a usual thing for roads dating from horse backing days. So that was probably the highway a hundred years ago, too.”
The ride from the highway had been gradually uphill. Jack had said something earlier about the lot’s elevation accounting for the swiftness of the stream as it coursed downward.
The kids closing in at their sides, Ellen stepped across what was once the threshold, Jack beside her. Thankfully, he hadn’t offered to carry her over it. Considering the fact that the house, in its current state, was like a dead thing, to do so would have been spooky in the extreme.
From the layout of the house, as best Ellen could discern, they stood within what had once been a combination of sitting room, living room and dining room, planned out in the shape of an L resting on its side, the long vertical leg forming the sitting room and living room, the short horizontal leg the dining room. There were indications that another room had been off to her right as she faced the rear of the house where there was evidence of still more rooms. “This is the layout of the first floor of the house in Oak Park, Jack. We always liked that arrangement of rooms. We built this place.” And Ellen Naile shivered.
On closer viewing of the house, a fire might not have been the immediate cause of its destruction, but there had been a fire—afterward, perhaps.
All that remained essentially undamaged was an extremely nicely fitted stone-and-mortar chimney, the chimney thrusting upward into the deep blue of early evening from a hearth of inordinate size. “It’s like the fireplace they had at that little restaurant in the Chicago Loop that we used to eat at.”
“I thought that, too,” Jack affirmed.
“Still no word on who owns the property in the present?”
“God knows. Maybe our great-grandchildren own it.” Jack laughed softly. He might have been right. Ellen freed herself of Jack’s hand and approached the chimney. “Whatchya doing?”
“If we were going to leave anything special in this house, considering there would have been no fire department or anything like that, and we knew that someday we might come back looking for it in the future, where would we stash it?”
“In the fireplace,” Lizzie answered.
Ellen said, “That’s my girl. David, start checking that side.”
“But let’s all be careful,” Jack admonished. “With the mortar in its current state, we could get the whole thing tumbling down on us in a heartbeat.”
Slowly, carefully, they began to inspect the hearth, Jack producing a Mini Maglite from his bomber-jacket pocket, the pale light from its beam helping considerably. If needed, there were more flashlights in the Suburban. Lizzie said, “I just remembered something,” and produced a small light in the shape of a ladybug from within the bowels of her purse.
Thunder rumbled from up in the mountains and a flash of lightning freeze framed everything for an instant. “We’ve gotta hit the trail pretty soon. That road up here might be the kind that washes out during a heavy rain, guys,” Jack cautioned.
“Just another couple of minutes,” Ellen insisted.
“We can come back tomorrow and—” Lizzie began.
David interrupted her. “This stone almost wanted to come out by itself. Give me your knife, Dad.” Jack took a folding knife from his pocket. David opened it one-handed. “I may hurt the edge doing this.”
“I’ve got sharpening sticks in the Suburban. What have you found?”
“Just wait a minute, huh!”
“Take it easy, son,” Jack responded. Ellen didn’t say a word.
“Okay! Got it!”
David held a small metal box in his hands. Jack identified it. “Cast iron.”
“Can we open it?” Lizzie asked.
Ellen tried raising the lid.
“Probably rusted shut,” David announced.
“Let me have it, Davey.” Jack took the box, set it on the ground at their feet and looked about. “There we go.”
He stepped out of the light of the flashlights and back in the blink of an eye, holding a large rock of the type from which the hearth itself was constructed, probably the rock’s origin.
“Here. Let me do that,” David volunteered.
David took the rock and smacked it hard against the exposed single piano hinge at the rear of the box, then hammered against the front of the box, but knocking upward with the rock, trying to free the lid.
There was another flash of lightning. “If some Arab guys start chanting and we find the Ark of the Covenant, I’m leaving before we get to the part with the snakes,” Jack informed them. Ellen realized that her husband was trying to break the tension; it didn’t work.
When the rock hit the box lid, the sound was somehow different this time, and David got up from his crouch. “Got it!” Oddly, he handed the box to Ellen.
Ellen looked at Jack, and Jack nodded. Ellen lifted the box lid. Both flashlights bathed its interior in light. “A Ziploc sandwich bag, guys.”
That was all. She took it out of the box, breathing a sigh of relief as she realized that inside the bag was a piece of paper. Carefully, uncertain whether or not the paper inside the bag might crumble, she tore open the plastic bag’s seal. There were boxes of bags identical to these packed away in the Suburban. Could it be possible that the same bag somehow existed in two places at the same time? Ellen shivered and shook her head. Time-travel stuff was crazy, or enough to make one crazy just considering it.
The paper inside the bag seemed relatively undamaged by time. “Can I read it?” Elizabeth asked.
Ellen handed it to her daughter, who slowly, carefully, unfolded it, then read aloud.
“Dear Jack,
“Writing to oneself is probably like talking to oneself, an early sign of insanity.
“Anyway, here goes.
“Ellen and I pondered whether or not it would be wise to leave behind a record of this new life, and a record, too, of the future that we knew. If you were to read a record of this new life, would that change things? Were someone from your objective past, now the future, to read of the intervening years of which Ellen and I know, would such knowledge be for good or bad? Would such a record fall into the hands of some unscrupulous person who saw opportunity for wealth and power in changing the past to alter the future or the present?
“I don’t think history is locked in bronze; or, perhaps, graven in stone would be putting it better. Not now, not anymore.
“Ellen and I discussed this a lot, and she’s less of a buttinsky than I am, as you well know. We finally agreed to let people know—before it was too late—what your today and my yesterday/tomorrow were/will be like. Ellen and I wrote. I became afraid. In frustration, I nearly burned all that we wrote, the videos which we taped, the still photographs. But I didn’t.
“I don’t know how to tell you to determine whether there’s something odd about the world of your present, whether time seems out of order or something like that. When you enter the past, you’ll have to make that determination for yourself, whether or not to leave a record.
“As I was about to burn our work, the records of everything, I came across where Ellen and I had noted that more than eight million Jews, not to mention the Poles and the Gypsies who also died, were killed by the Nazis during World War Two. If our writing could save only one of those innocent women and children, by alerting the future to Hitler’s evil intentions, I couldn’t pass up that opportunity and, instead, have even one of those deaths on my conscience.
“Once you’ve entered the loop, you and Ellen and David and Lizzie will have to determine such matters for yourselves.
“I am running out of time. If you are careful, you may have more of it than I.
“On the plus side, at least Ellen and I figured out why this happened/will happen. Maybe.
“There were/are/will be a lot of things wrong with the last half of the twentieth century. By changing events just a little—without trying—people who knew what was going to go wrong might be able, a little at a time, to make things go right.
“Maybe.
“Why is it us, the Naile family? Ellen and I don’t have a clue.
“Our advice?
“We have no advice to give you, really.
“It would be wrong to tell you specifically what happens; or, at least, we think it is/was/will be. Anyway, just reading this will change your future in the past.
“I think.
“Suffice it to say, we can note three things which will hopefully ease your mind:
“1. Love does endure beyond the confines of time.
“2. Keep your faith in your family.
“3. Cheat time; you’re good, but not as good as the knight of the sorrowful countenance. Bring the Seecamp.
“Point three is included because I believe that I am dying and wish for you to avoid that fate; there is still too much to do.”
Lizzie looked up and there were tears at the corners of her eyes. “It’s signed ‘Sincerely, who else but me/you?’ He was—you—dying?!”
Ellen folded her daughter into her arms.
Jack cleared his throat.
The reference to the knight was, obviously, to Jack’s fascination with Richard Boone’s character in the television series Have Gun—Will Travel.
Jack, his voice little more than a whisper, said, “Shine the flashlight on my hand.” David and Lizzie turned the two flashlights on the palm of their father’s right hand. In it was the little pistol he had carried for so long and had thought about leaving behind: the Seecamp .32.
David moved the flashlight to shine on the palm of his hand. He held part of a wall outlet. “Just like the ones in the Suburban.”
Lizzie was into full-scale tears. David—almost tentatively—touched at his sister’s shoulder. Ellen felt Jack’s head come to rest against her own.