Fate (Wilton's Gold #3) (8 page)

Dexter nodded. “I was there.”

“How old was I?”

“Just about the age you are right now.”

“Impossible. I can hardly move.”

“It was a different reality, Mr. Kane,” he said. “Apparently, something in this reality must have sped up your cancer.”

His already sallow complexion paled further, and he swallowed heavily. “I had cancer there, too?” Dexter nodded. “I guess if fate’s got it out for you, then fate’s got it out for you.”

Kane sat for a long moment, again staring at the sky. Dexter picked up his lemonade and took a drink, thinking about the severity of the news he’d just delivered. As had been pointed out to him dozens of times, history had changed. Dredging up an old reality that was no longer reality was pointless, unless they intended to go back and fix it – something that Kane would quickly deduce. Otherwise, why would they have even brought it up?

Finally, Kane looked up at them, his eyes reflecting tears. “Why would you tell someone that? What good would it do? People have called me a lot of things over the years, but I’ve never been called a murderer.”

The hardness in Dexter’s stance melted away in a split second. Even though they were the same man, with the same DNA and family history, they were not the same person. From the earnest look on his face, Dexter truly believed that this man in front of him was incapable of murdering someone. Even though he’d been there when it happened, in some way, the circumstances of each of their different tracks in life had created completely different characters.

He looked at Jeff. His circumstances were no different than Kane’s. The USTP was holding him hostage, disallowing him to return to his life, because of actions taken by another version of himself with different experiences, a different mindset, and a different outlook on life. Immediately, rectifying that situation for his friend became a priority.

“Mr. Kane,” Victoria said, rescuing the conversation, “forgive us. I know this is a shock to you. Believe me, it’s news we wish we weren’t delivering, and we do of course know that you yourself aren’t the murderer.”

“Then why are you here? You want to fix what you’re saying happened, don’t you?”

She was shaking her head. “No, sir. We can’t fix what happened. Not without risking causing irreparable damage. We are here for research.”

“Research?”

“Yes, sir. The time travel program has created a burgeoning field of psychology to study the mental and emotional effects of time travel on a person.” Dexter looked over at her, surprised. What she was saying was not true. “There are many facets to multiple realities, one of which is a person learning about a reality which they have not experienced. The opposite is also relevant. Dr. Jacobs’ story is true. He experienced a reality – well, actually a set of realities – that none of us know. He is the only person on the planet who knows of a world where the USSR did not fall in 1991. We’re studying what that does to a person’s mind. It’s alienating. It spurs loneliness akin to the feeling one might get when they lose a spouse – the immediate grief of the question of ‘why does this happen only to me?’”

“So that would be you, in my case?” Kane asked. Dexter saw he was looking at him and nodded. “You’re the only person who experienced me murder George Mellen?”

“Well, me and the thousands of people on Fifth Avenue at that time.”

“But you’re the only person right now in this time who experienced it.”

“Yes.”

“Not much for me to go on, is it?”

“No, sir, it’s not.”

Kane rested his head on the pillow again. “As we’ve been talking, the George Mellen story has come back to me. Mellen was the president of Brooklyn Milling and Grain, Incorporated, which provided grain to all of the major cereal companies on the east coast. They were competitors, but they weren’t – in the ‘20s and ‘30s, Kane Industries wasn’t in that business. We were in shipping, and we serviced the grain business. Ship and rail. We actually didn’t enter the grain business until about ten or fifteen years later. After that – right after World War II – we purchased Brooklyn Milling, which was about to go under, and all of its grain mills. But that was some twenty years after Mellen’s death. That’s probably enough to indict me, though, right?”

“Well, there’s no indictment necessary,” Jeff said. “You didn’t murder anyone. You aren’t responsible for the actions of your other self.” Dexter caught the irony in Jeff being the one to deliver this observation to Kane.

“No, I did not,” Kane said. “What happened to me after I fled the scene? There must be some history of it somewhere. Yes?”

“You were killed in a shootout with police a few blocks from the murder scene.”

Kane laughed. “I must’ve had some master plan going.”

“Well, apparently it worked out for you.” The words left Dexter’s mouth before he could stop them.

Kane turned toward Victoria. “Can you grab Gloria for me?” he asked. Obligingly, Victoria stood and went through the kitchen doors. “How do you mean?” he asked Dexter.

“Well, I can assure you that in the reality I started in, provided Mellen’s company was still around, which I don’t know, you were competitors. Grain was your business. However you got into it.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“In the research we conducted prior to your trip, there was no connection between you, Mellen, and 1930 New York City.”

“What was I going to see in New York?”

“The Empire State Building.”

“Being built...” he said, smiling. “Good choice. Always loved that building. So there was no connection other than the fact that someone knew – and must have told me – that George Mellen got his newspaper every day at that newsstand on Fifth Avenue.”

“Oral history.”

Now Kane laboriously leaned on his right arm and faced them. He grinned. “You’ve got a hole in your system.” It was clear the old man liked a puzzle.

“Yes, we do,” Dexter said, nodding.

The kitchen doors opened and Victoria came out with Gloria in tow. Gloria outpaced her back to the group and stood beside Kane as he settled onto his back again. “Is everything okay, sir?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. Dexter realized he’d returned from what a moment ago was his shrewd business voice to his deathbed murmur. “Gloria, I’m tired. Can you please show my guests to the door?” He resumed staring out at the water.

Without a formal goodbye, Jeff and Dexter rose and followed Victoria and Gloria through the expansive house and back out onto the front porch. Not knowing the nature of the conversation, Gloria apologized kindly for his abruptness before retreating into the house.

“Well, that went well,” Jeff said, the three of them standing at the bottom of the stairs, not quite able to agree upon getting in the car and leaving.

Dexter looked at him, astonished. “Did you know you were going to start rolling off details of your time travel? Couldn’t you have let us know ahead of time?”

Jeff laughed. “Seriously? You called the guy a murderer! All I did was tell a guy who’s going to be dead in a month a fun story to get his mind going. You ruined his life.”

“Gentlemen,” Victoria said, interjecting.

“If we weren’t going to tell him what had happened, why did we come?”

“To find out about Mellen.”

“We found out about Mellen.”

“No,” Jeff said. He wasn’t upset, which was helping Dexter realize that his anger which had started this argument was really about his own role in the conversation next to Kane’s pool. “I’ll tell you what happened... You went in there wanting to demonize this guy because he hit you over the head with a bottle. So you burst into the story. But then you realized that this guy isn’t a murderer, and now you have to deal with the idea of ‘fixing’ a history that would make a guy who’s not a murderer into a murderer. Yes?”

Those thoughts had crossed Dexter’s mind during the conversation – and, yes, in that order. “Well, I didn’t do anything just because he hit me in the head with a bottle,” he said, a defense that was as lame as it sounded coming out of his mouth.

“Well, thank goodness for Dr. Graham, here,” Jeff said, pointing at her with his thumb, “or USTP would be staring down a huge shitstorm right now.”

“Why’s that?” Victoria asked.

“That speech about the psychology of time travel. That was on the fly, wasn’t it?”

She smiled.

“Brilliant. It was believable, and it took the focus off of the idea that we’re going to go back and change this life that he’s built.” Jeff motioned with his head for them to get in the car.

“Well, more than that,” she said, climbing into the passenger door. “It makes sense as a discipline. It came to me in the middle of the conversation and I developed an entire platform sitting right there. I should spend more time poolside, it appears.”

Dexter’s heart was pounding. He wanted to get as far from Kane’s mansion as possible. “Let’s get some dinner,” he said.

They closed the doors and pulled away.

Jeff sat on his hotel room’s patio and breathed the evening air deeply. It felt like the first time he’d had a real moment to himself since he’d gotten back, and he tried to clear his head. He thought there was nothing that could help him do that more so than the sound of the surf hitting the beach seven floors beneath him. The sun hadn’t quite set on the other side of the hotel, but in front of him stars started to pepper the night sky.

There was plenty for him to be contemplating given the opportunity, but he tried to suppress that urge to work, to plan. He’d been given a difficult hand to play, and really needed to understand his current situation before he could begin to figure a way out of it. That was going to take some degree of peacefulness that the haste of the past two days had not afforded him. Sitting here on the patio with the cool ocean breeze blowing through the loose cotton shirt he’d bought when they’d arrived in Florida, now hanging open off of his shoulders, he was bound and determined to grab that little bit of peace.

Dinner with Dexter and Victoria at a seafood place about a mile from the hotel, which had excellent coconut shrimp, had been spent mostly talking about Kane, and his place in the time travel soap opera taking place around them. They hadn’t learned much that they didn’t know already, but there was a consensus among the three of them that something had to be done to fix the situation. The probable solution raised far more questions than they knew how to answer, though. The most difficult, perhaps, was the notion that they might not be the only ones able to travel through time. That occurrences in the history they knew could have been affected by time travel just the same as George Mellen’s history was, just the same as Jeff’s previous travel had. The fact that they knew what happened to Mellen was of little consequence. The timeline they were now on was history to them and everyone else. If they went back and changed Mellen’s fate because they felt it was the right thing to do, what would stop them from going back in time to change history in any way they wanted? Nothing.

In truth, a lot of the impetus for doing something was at Dexter’s urging. He felt guilty for letting Kane slip away from him, and he felt responsible. Jeff and Victoria were not as decisive, but they shared the view that the Time Program was responsible for Mellen’s death, so if the Time Program could do something about it, it should.

Jeff shook his head roughly. He didn’t want to think about the dinner conversation. He wanted to mellow.

Which was probably impossible – there was too much rattling around in his brain. He tried shutting his eyes and focusing on the sound of the surf. It helped, to some degree.

Behind him, he heard a knock on the door, and dropped his head in frustration. The last thing he wanted to do was have Dexter come into his room and try to sell him on a plan. As much as he loved the guy, now wasn’t the time.

Still, he stood slowly and took his time walking over to the door, even stopping to turn on the lamp on the table beside the bed. When he reached the door, he leaned his face up to it, saying, “Dexter, I really need to rest. Can it wait until tomorrow?”

“It’s not Dexter,” Victoria said from the other side of the door. “It’s me.”

Jeff nodded to himself and unlatched the door. She was standing in the hallway in a sheepish sort of pose, one leg crossed over the other, her hands behind her back. Like Jeff, she’d changed her clothes and wore a colorful sundress with a thin sweater over the top of it. He realized his shirt was open, and immediately hoped it didn’t conjure any old feelings within her. Though admittedly, he didn’t know the tenacity of their prior relationship – all he had to work off of was a stunted kiss in the airport. “What’s up?” he asked.

“I was hoping we could talk a little.”

“About what?”

She laughed. “About what? I think you know.”

He glanced back into his room, toward the open glass doors that led to the patio. He really had been enjoying his quiet time and the beach atmosphere. He knew he didn’t want to be cooped up in this room being interrogated by a woman who said she’d dated him. “Go for a walk?” he said half-heartedly. She nodded, so he retreated into the room and put his sandals on – another good purchase. He’d bought a $140 pair, and didn’t feel guilty about it. He figured that if the U.S. government was going to pull him away from his life and force him to do their bidding three years into the future of his actual life, he was going to be compensated for it. These sandals hugged his feet like a swaddled infant. He walked past Victoria and checked to make sure the room door was locked once it closed behind him.

A few minutes later, their feet hit the cold, soft sand. Jeff ended up taking off his pricey sandals and carrying them, Victoria walking a foot away by his side in stride. The sun had now fully set and the beach was dark except for shadows cast by the hotel lights and silhouettes of couples walking the same way they were. They didn’t speak from the time they were standing in Jeff’s doorway until they were two hotels down from their own.

“This is a lot to handle,” Victoria finally said, the wheels in her head obviously spinning. “There’s the time travel piece of it, of course, but there’s also the personal part for me.”

“I would think, given your field and your education, you’d be prepared for this.” He tried to be empathetic, but at this point, this really had to be all business for him. He wanted – needed – his own life, free of collateral damage from the other Jeff’s entanglements.

She was shaking her head. “Yes, they tell you on the first day of psychology school not ever to allow a professional relationship to turn into a personal one. Why is it you never believe that things can go wrong when they feel so right at the time?”

“Well, it sounds to me that your relationship was ripe for disaster. Way too much at stake.”

“When you’re in it, you hope that’s not the case.”

“I’m not sure what it is you’re wanting from me here,” Jeff said, purposefully pushing his toes into the sand as he walked, simply because it was relaxing – a tactile sensation effectively distracting him from the emotion he could hear in this woman’s voice.

“I don’t know either. I appreciate your agreeing to spend some time talking with me. I know you don’t owe me anything.”

A couple passed them, hand-in-hand. Jeff nodded to the man, who nodded back. “Why don’t you tell me about you and the other Jeff,” he said. “The other me. How’d you meet? You said I recruited you?”

“Yes. It must have been pretty soon after you – or he – returned from your mission to Russia, because it was about that time. I was working for Stanford University on a grant studying hysterical, or fugue, amnesia, as it relates to singular traumatic moments such as terrorist attacks, earthquake or tornado destruction, et cetera.”

“And what is hysterical amnesia – wait, did you say Stanford?”

“Yes. Why?”

It was either an incredible coincidence, or the other Jeff had sought out another scientist from Stanford for a specific reason. The woman, Erica, who he and Dexter had seen in 1849, had been a scientist at Stanford, as well. He’d have to spend some time on that one. But he wasn’t going to mention her to Victoria. “Nothing,” he said, “just trying to paint a picture in my head.”

“Ok,” she said reluctantly. “Hysterical amnesia is the type of amnesia they use for comedic effect in movies – remember the one when Kermit the Frog gets hit by a car? It’s where you experience a traumatic event and wake up remembering nothing about yourself. No recollection of anything, including the event.”

“Does this happen a lot?”

“It happens enough for the government to put some money into it,” she said. “Though it was never confirmed, I believe there were soldiers in Afghanistan that were experiencing the phenomenon, but it happens occasionally in other scenarios, as well.”

“You were looking for a cure?”

“Yes, but I left the project when you came calling.”

They walked for a moment in silence. Jeff could easily see the connection between the burgeoning science of time travel psychology and Victoria’s studies. Both involved specific effects on a singular person’s memory – one remembering and one forgetting. Quite possibly, they were related enough that treatment for one could identify treatment for the other. If, that is, there was a desire to “treat” time travelers so they wouldn’t have to carry around the burden of being alone in their memory of a different reality. It seemed far-fetched, but he could understand the logic of it. It’d probably make things a lot easier for the USTP if they had a way to make Jeff forget about Russia and Dexter forget about Kane. But why would the other Jeff make that a priority?

Of course, until then, Victoria’s only job – that he knew of – had been prepping candidates for the time travel program. Perhaps her understanding of how the brain worked was keen enough to proactively address that issue, rather than waiting for it to happen. After all, it was up to her to determine whose mind could handle it.

“You haven’t told me about how we met,” he said, as warmly as possible. He risked leading her on to learn as much about the previous Jeff as he could from her.

“Well, the other you attended a presentation I was making in Philadelphia at an APA conference. After my talk, you approached me and asked to take me to dinner – that you had a proposal for me. I think you said, ‘the opportunity to work on science that has never before even been considered.’” She laughed. “I thought you were a stalker. Especially with your not giving me any details.”

He sighed. “That’s the first thing anyone’s told me about the other Jeff that actually sounds like me.”

“It does,” she said. “It does. After some convincing, though, I let you take me to dinner. You laid out for me what was going on with the Time Program, which was not yet up-and-running. It blew my mind. But I didn’t understand why you needed a psychologist – and I don’t think you really did either at that point. But as we talked, it became clear. Once you laid out for me what had happened in Russia, and your trip back to the Gold Rush era and how screwed up that had been, it was easy to see why you needed me.”

“I told you all that?” Jeff was surprised at himself.

“It was a hard sell,” she said. “I don’t respond well to missing details. I know about the woman with the cell phone. He told me all about her.”

“Well, he couldn’t have told you
all
about her. There’s not a lot to tell.”

They reached a breakwall of stones, which was a natural barrier forcing them to turn around and head back toward their hotel. Another couple sat on one of the big stones smooching.

They walked for a moment in silence again. The moon had risen over the horizon and was casting its light on the rippling water. It was actually quite breathtaking. Jeff hoped it would distract Victoria from the Erica conversation. He really didn’t want to be discussing that with anyone at the USTP, much less this woman who had such a strange connection to him.

No such luck. “Do you think that’s where he went?”

“Where who went?”

“The other you. Do you think he went to the Gold Rush to find her?”

Jeff knew his own intentions, so it was reasonable to believe that the other version of himself might have the same ones. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible.”

“And then never come back? That would be painful.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” he said, holding up his hands even though she couldn’t see them in the dark. “There’s an infinite amount of other possibilities as to where he could have gone.”

“Yes, but Jeff, that’s the safe bet. I’ve tried to pretend for a long time that it wasn’t, but there’s no avoiding it.”

“Don’t dwell on that,” he said, hoping to change the topic. “So you come to work for the Time Program... When did you start seeing each other?”

“Not too long after that. Working so closely together just turned into a relationship.”

“A close one, I’m gathering?”

“I thought so.” Way too much emotion in that short statement for Jeff’s comfort.

“Look, Victoria,” he said, “Like I said at the beginning of this walk. I don’t know what you’re looking for from me. What I did – what the other version of me did – it sucks. If I could find a way to fix it, and not put you through it, I would. You seem like a great person and a talented scientist. But I don’t know you. If you’re envisioning a relationship because you feel there’s some connection, you’re really starting at square one – up to and including our introduction, which happened today at the airport. I don’t want to put you through that because in absolutely no way am I even considering looking for a relationship. When I was in Russia, I wasn’t looking for a relationship, so the fact that I came back and dove into this one tells me you must be a pretty special girl. But it’s not in the cards.” He couldn’t see her face, so he wasn’t sure how that was going to go over. But he couldn’t afford to let her emoting go on for too long.

“Like I said at the beginning of this walk: I don’t know what I want from you, either,” she said. Pretty grounded. “You’ll have to allow me a little leeway, though. You showing up here after I’ve been heartbroken for a year-and-a-half is all-consuming. Yes, I’d like to think that my education and knowledge in psychology could mitigate that, but it isn’t doing the trick. A part of me wants to punch you, a part of me wants to put my arms around you and not let go. But wait – there’s this wonderful twist. You have no idea who I am. How is a person supposed to deal with something like that?”