Regarding Ducks and Universes (26 page)

“W
ho gave you a book?” Bean demanded in a loud whisper that could barely be heard over the din of the buses and cars thundering by and occasionally rattling the sidewalk we were on.

“What book?” Arni demanded in an equally low tone from my other side.

Puzzled by their manner, I lowered my voice accordingly. “
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?”

“Evans who?” said Arni. “I don’t have an Evans in my database.”

“No,
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
is the title of the paper book. An Agatha Christie,” I explained. “You’ve seen me reading it, Bean. The innkeepers at the Queen Bee Inn sent it while I was quarantined at the Palo Alto Health Center. Franny and Trevor. This morning I tried to return the book, but Trevor said to keep it. I’ve never gotten a paper book as a present. I think—yes, I have it here—” I unzipped my jacket and pulled out the book from an inside pocket.

“Toss it,” Bean hissed.

“What? Into the water? But it’s a book!” I protested, keeping a firm grip on the item in question. “Besides, won’t that draw attention to us?”

“It might,” Arni agreed. “Did the innkeepers give you anything else?”

I shook my head. “Not really. They recommended the Bed & Breakfast where we stayed in Carmel—you don’t think—Franny said the Be Mine Inn was run by her cousin—”

“Cousin, hmm,” said Bean. “More like coworker. Well, we knew they were keeping tabs on us.”

“Wait,” I protested, “this doesn’t make sense. Even if the Department of Information Management was paying special attention to me because of my fake birth date, what are the chances that I would happen to stay at an inn run by DIM agents? Franny and Trevor seemed perfectly nice—”

“Humph,” said Bean, taking a disbelieving sip of her smoothie.

Arni shrugged. “Franny and Trevor probably send regular reports to the Department of Information Management on their inn guests, especially visiting A-dwellers. Maybe this time they were asked to perform a special service.”

Bean sent a mean look in the direction of the Agatha Christie, which I had wrapped in my jacket in an effort to render the presumed microphone embedded in it worthless. “We could fling it into the bay when no one’s looking,” she said, giving the railing another appraising glance.

“Never mind,” I said. “With my luck it would probably land on an unsuspecting surfer or a yacht—”

I stopped.

Bean sucked in her breath. “Land on an unsuspecting—
of course
.”

“Back then the tour boats made a U-turn under the bridge, in a wide arc around the first tower usually, before heading back into the bay,” Arni said slowly, like he was working something out in his head. “Tourists loved it. The ocean level was low, so they didn’t need to raise the drawbridge. It could have gone right over the bridge railing, or through it—the slats are certainly far enough apart.”

Bean finished his thought. “We’d assumed that your paths crossed at the Quake-n-Shake Restaurant, but you didn’t need to come in direct contact with Olivia May to—”

“To ruin her life?”

“—to make her part of your event chain. Duck pacifier lands on tour boat, passenger spills pomegranate juice, misses interview, and so the omni is never invented—and then advanced Universe B models arrive with a bang.” She gasped. “Felix, you’re responsible for paper books being gone from Universe A.

“So it
was
you,” she added, eyes wide. “I’m not sure I ever really believed it.”

“I
knew
a duck had something to do with it,” I said, feeling a sudden urge to make duck soup and twisting my jacket tighter around the Agatha Christie.

“We have to hurry back,” Arni took charge of the situation. “If there is a microphone in the spine of the book, then DIM agents overheard all our conversations. What if they know about Professor Maximilian’s,” he lowered his voice again, “Universe C experiment?”

“I don’t think that I had the book with me,” I said, “when we were in Professor Singh’s old lab—”

Unable to reach either Professor Maximilian or Pak on their omnis, we hurried back in the direction of the parking lot, with Bean hobbling along trying to keep up on a bridge now wholly shrouded in fog. We passed James and Gabriella arranging Murphina in the Photo 13A tableau at lamppost 30 on the way and made it to the Bihistory Institute just in time to see two uniformed DIM agents escorting Professor Maximilian out of the building and into a marked car.

It was a mean thing to do to a book, but I doused
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
with a melted orange-banana-raspberry smoothie and dropped it into the nearest trashcan.

A
lone in the Lilac Room of the Queen Bee Inn, I found myself at the tiny hotel desk staring at the floral wallpaper as the sun dropped below the horizon. The chair was uncomfortable, my hand unused to writing anything longer than a grocery list, and the hotel notepad awkwardly shaped, like a bee.

I threw caution to the wind, damned all alters, and began the story.

The ice storm had coated everything with a thin, slippery veneer. R. Smith took a step out the front door of his lodge and immediately grabbed at the wooden handrail to avoid falling. He carefully continued down the stairs, making a mental note that the decaying autumn leaves needed to be swept. At the bottom of the stairs he paused. The air was crisp and the sky had that feeling of being freshly washed, with a wispy cloud or two hanging around for effect. Bluer still was the lake, views of which were to be had through the Douglas firs fronting the lodge, their branches laden with icicles like early New Year’s decorations.

It was too early to be thinking of winter holidays, R. Smith reminded himself. Right now his job was to get the lodge ready for the annual Autumn Cookery Competition. Keeping to the grass rather than the slippery path, he continued down to the lodge parking lot. The grass crunched under his feet with every step and around him tree branches, heavy with ice, creaked and groaned. He thought of all the work that needed to be done: leaves swept into compost bins, gutters cleared of debris, lodge rooms cleaned after a long summer, the kitchen equipment needed for the competition cleaned and disinfected. He hoped the ice storm hadn’t damaged the gondola lift at the neighboring Gold Peak ski resort. Lodge visitors and the competition attendees liked to take the twenty-minute ride up the mountain to enjoy views of Lake Tahoe.

In the parking lot a lone car sat in the closest spot, right where he had left it last night after a harrowing drive up the mountain through the storm. He hadn’t bothered to carry in all of his luggage, only a small bag with toiletries. Now he needed a change of clothes.

He started to chip at the ice on the trunk lock with his keys, devising and rejecting possible themes for this year’s competition as he did so. As always, the theme would be a surprise for the attendees, revealed on the opening night. Last year’s
Flour Arrangements from Around the World (
the competitors had forgone the ubiquitous wheat flour for the less familiar rice, soy, and the South American quinoa) had been a success, a quinoa chocolate cake taking the top prize.

He managed to get the key into the trunk lock, then stopped. Something was different. At this time of the morning on most days, delivery trucks and cars would be rumbling past as they followed the curve of the lake toward competing motels and cabins of yearlong residents, all the way to where the road ended in a large circle at the ski rental place at the base of the mountain. Everyone must be getting a late start because of the storm, R. Smith thought.

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed sunlight gleaming off metal somewhere on the lake beach. Without knowing why, he abandoned the car trunk and crossed the road, twice slipping on the slick surface but managing to just avoid falling, to examine what lay on the sand.

R. Smith had never seen a dead body before. The first thought to enter his mind was, she must have been killed just before the ice storm hit.

There was no other explanation for the glistening layer of ice that coated the body as if it were a natural part of the landscape. It coated the woman’s face, on which shock registered, like she had just gotten some unexpected news, and glistened off her long hair, which was as white as the ice itself.

It coated the knife.

I put the pen down and looked up from the bee-shaped notepad—right at eye level, there was a small tear in one of the pale purple wallpaper lilacs. For a wild moment I wondered if Franny and Trevor had cameras installed in walls to spy on their guests and report on any regulation-breaking activities to DIM. Shaking my head at my increasing paranoia, I leaned back in the chair to read what I had written, adjusting a word here and there.

It wasn’t a bad start. I wrote down the first sentence of the next chapter:

R. Smith didn’t recognize her.

I scratched that out and instead wrote,

The woman seemed familiar, like R. Smith had seen her before.

I gathered the pages and put them away in my backpack, then went to bed.

W
aking up with a start, I opened my eyes and saw pale purple flowers all around. It was morning, I was still at Franny and Trevor’s inn, and it was Saturday, my last day in Universe B. I got up, showered, donned my last clean shirt and pair of shorts, then set upon the task of gathering my belongings. As I wrestled a plastic bag containing dirty laundry into the backpack, I was reminded of the call I’d received in the midst of packing for my trip to Universe B. My presence had been requested at the local DIM branch. The fake birth date arranged by my parents hadn’t been my fault or even my preference, but an unsmiling person had introduced himself as Agent Dune, led me to a windowless office, and asked an hour’s worth of questions. I was worried that I’d be charged with falsifying personal data, but in the end Agent Dune had issued a new identicard for me and told me that I was free to go after paying the data correction fine. I’ve never gotten out of a place so fast.

I scanned the hotel room for a missing sock (hoping it hadn’t been vortexed somewhere through a micro-link). So Franny and Trevor, innkeepers and welcoming hosts, had been spying on me. Via a book, no less. Rather obviously in retrospect, it was Franny who had taken Aunt Hen’s photo while repacking my bag and sending it on to the quarantine wing of the Palo Alto Health Center. According to Bean, the photo was gone from the Y-day photoboard as well, as if it had never existed.

Yesterday, after watching the marked car take the professor away, we had checked the subbasement lab and found it locked. Pak was nowhere to be seen, his bicycle gone. As there didn’t seem to be anything else to be done, the three of us had parted to go our separate ways, Bean looking so gloomy that I felt it would be bad form to invite her to a romantic dinner. I returned to the Queen Bee Inn instead—with a glass jar in my pocket.

I bent down to look under the desk for the wayward sock. Professor Maximilian had been arrested, presumably for breaking Regulation 19 and perhaps also for additional crimes. Regulation 4, for one, governed the exchange of people and objects between universes A and B, but no doubt could be applied to unexpected transgressions if necessary—like the creation a new Universe C by watering (or not) a lace hedgehog cactus and then transferring bookmarks back and forth.

The sock was under the bed. I rolled it up with its partner, found a place for the pair in my backpack, then glanced around the room to make sure I had everything. Last night, on a writing high, I’d been sure that my Chapter One was the best beginning to a novel anyone had penned since the Sumerians invented writing and would blow out of the water any mystery series cobbled together by Felix B.

This morning I had folded five thin pages of scribbled bee-shaped hotel stationary into my backpack. It wasn’t much.

For one thing, I had absolutely no idea who had killed the mysterious woman found lifeless on the beach by R. Smith, lodge owner.

On a smaller note, there was the commonplace name I’d given him (the R to be revealed to me and the reader at some future point in the novel). I had chosen Smith because I’d read somewhere that Agatha Christie, though she had an interesting character in her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, had become irritated after a book or two with all the “foreign” mannerisms and French phrases that had to be inserted into the dialogue. But what if Felix B had chosen the name Smith for
his
detective? Jones, Wang, Garcia, Brown, they all carried the same problem. Maybe Wojciechowski or Lindroos-Rangarajan was the way to go.

I’d think about it later, I decided, zipping up my backpack. For now, R. Smith owned a ski lodge and hosted an annual cooking competition during which odd things, like murders, occurred; a new case for him to solve each year meant a potential mystery series of my own. Given that he drove a car, Smith lived in Universe B and was also, I had a feeling, recently divorced. His wife—Maria? Jane? Sally?—same problem as with Smith—had in previous years helped get the lodge ready each fall and had even suggested last year’s theme of International Flours, but a dislike of winter boots and slushy roads had taken her on a different life path. After filing for divorce, she had moved off the mountain to work in Las Vegas as a—what? Well, I’d think of something; maybe a dentist. It didn’t matter. I liked it. It provided a nice, handy reason why R. Smith was alone at the lodge, as well as opening the door for a potential love interest later in the book.

And perhaps R. Smith’s alter could make an appearance too. Maybe he could be the sidekick, like Holmes and Watson, or Poirot and Hastings. Smith and Smith.

I was oddly pleased that I had managed to write the whole of Chapter One in words only. There had not been any other choice with pen and paper, of course, but I had not once gotten stuck and needed a stock image of a lakefront lodge or a quick shot of light reflecting off a bloody knife.

Before leaving the room, I carefully lifted the glass jar out of the side pocket of the backpack and checked it. The yellowish, frothy mixture looked the same as it had last night when I’d procured it at the back door of the Salt & Pepper Bakery. I unscrewed the lid and took a whiff; I thought I detected a hint of the aroma of bread and beer, but it might have just been my smell-impaired nose playing tricks on me. (It wasn’t unusual for me to detect phantom smells, only to hear from other people that there was nothing actually there.) I gently tilted the jar left and right, watching the pancake-batter-like dough slide and stick against the glass. For 170-some years this little yeast-bacteria civilization had been propagated from one generation to the next—use half for today’s bread, save half for tomorrow’s batch. Bakeries going out of business, changing weather patterns affecting the local environment, the earthquake demolishing storage areas—no one was quite sure what had contributed most to the sourdough starter being lost in Universe A. I put the lid back on and tightened it. Until I could safely get the jar to a refrigerator at Wagner’s Kitchen, the centuries-old method called for a daily stirring and a flour-and-water feeding of the dough, something I’d have to take care of as soon as I got home.

At the Nautical Nook breakfast buffet I ran into Franny. Head held high, she said, “We all must do our part to help protect society. Trying to prove the Passivists right. Not very nice.”

I checked out, thanked Franny and Trevor for their (somewhat strange) hospitality, and took a cable car through the morning fog to Presidio University. Except for a crew of energetic and scantily dressed sand-volleyball players engaged in a morning game, the campus was mostly deserted, the bulk of the summer students still asleep at the Saturday nine a.m. hour. The bihistory building itself was unlocked, though most doors leading to offices and labs were closed and I passed not a soul in the hallway. I took the waiting elevator one floor down to the basement.

The hallway in front of the students’ office was dark, but the light inside the office was on and visible as a thin strip under the door. As I approached to knock in the morning silence, something stayed my hand. A silhouette had disturbed the thin line of light under the door. For no explicable reason, I put my ear to the door. At first nothing could be heard; then there was a sharp, silence-piercing moan and a hissing sound, followed by a crash. Somebody swore. The silhouette by the door moved—and a dark stain, visible even in the poor light, spread under the door and onto the hallway linoleum.