The Bellbottom Incident (23 page)

Abigail bent down and picked up the note and rock. The note had been taped in place, and she pulled it off, letting the rock fall on the ground by her feet. I saw her visibly flinch and thought for a second it had landed on her toes.
 

Dr. Little and I moved to look over Abigail’s shoulder. The note was worded so that it wouldn’t mean much to anybody but the three of us. Presumably, Dr. B had sent it, but Nate had written it—I recognized his neat handwriting. It said:

FORD MUSTANG IN ACCIDENT
 

SANIBEL CSWY, FL, NOVEMBER 3, 1:15 P.M.
 

UDO L. KILLED

We stood still, all of us frozen by shock. November 3 was tomorrow.

Dr. Little was the first to speak. “So
that’s
why Sabina was able to hitch a ride so easily. Udo does not have long to live.”

“That explains matters. Udo does not have very long to live,” Dr. Little repeated.

I could have smacked him for saying it with such clinical detachment. Udo’s book would never be finished. He would never see it in print, never have the opportunity to grow wiser and more jaded…
So it goes
, as someone I had spoken to recently would have said. Udo was not leaving St. Sunniva; he was leaving life. That thought was immediately followed by another one:
Not if I can help it
. Followed by one that pointed out just as firmly,
But History cannot be changed
.
It can’t.

Over the past several minutes I’d been feeling somewhat pleased that I had managed to contribute to this mission, even though I was not an expert in time travel or seventies US history or famous literary figures. True, it was merely a coincidence that my parents happened to live in Fort Myers and that’s where Udo and his book club had gone, but so what? And now this…

“Well, this news about Udo is depressing. What’s CSWY?” Abigail asked of the note.

“The Sanibel Causeway. It’s a bridge that connects Sanibel Island to the mainland of Fort Myers,” I explained distractedly. As a TTE professor had once pointed out to me—I think it was Dr. Mooney—everyone you met while time traveling tended to be dead already. It was always the case when you jumped to far time. But being in near time made it feel so very different. All the fresh-faced students milling about campus without paying us much heed—and Udo, wherever he was at the moment—were
supposed
to make it to 2012.
 

“Hold on,” I said. There was more to the note. Figuring that Nate had reused a scrap of paper from the recycling bin in the lab, I had at first glance ignored the text printed upside down at the bottom of the page. Now I realized that someone had fed the paper into the printer the wrong way after Nate had written on it. There was a sequence of numbers and a very short note—
BEACH, 8 p.m.

“Beach, 8 p.m.,” I said. “That’s a bit cryptic.”
 

Dr. Little took a look. “Not at all. These are coordinates.”

Abigail clarified. “Dr. B made it easy for us—she gave us the coordinates to a beach we can jump to. Is Sanibel Causeway near a beach, Julia?”

“There are lots of beaches all around in the area.”

“Well, we’re heading to one of them.” Dr. Little took the note from me and turned to ready the Slingshot. I wasn’t surprised that he still found something to complain about. “I wish Dr. B had thought to send a grid map of the area, in case we need to make small adjustments. As things stand, we only have one data point in the timeline—Udo Leland’s car will be nearing Sanibel Causeway just after one o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

“Perhaps that’s all they had found out for the time being,” I said. My watch said five o’clock. A thought occurred to me. “Can you tell from the coordinates if Dr. B and Nate are sending us to Fort Myers at 8:00 p.m. tonight…or tomorrow, November 3?”

“Not at first glance.”

Tomorrow would be too late. Tonight there would still be time to do something. “I guess we’ll just have to trust them.” I bent down to pick up the rock that had accompanied the note. I turned it over several times in case there was some other hidden sign to be found on it, but the only significance I could glean was that I recognized where it had come from—
the decorative garden in the courtyard of the TTE building. I slid the rock into my coat pocket. It seemed bad form to leave twenty-first-century detritus strewn around 1976.
 

Whatever they were feeling underneath, Dr. Little and Abigail did what we were supposed to do under the circumstances: focus on practical matters.
However long Udo had left, our mission had to go on. “
I’ve never been to Florida,” Abigail said as Dr. Little started typing the coordinates from the note into the Slingshot in a furious staccato, much faster than I had done on the stairs of Vonnegut’s Manhattan brownstone. I wondered if he would double-check them or if his belief in his infallibility would prevail. Abigail added, “I’ve heard it’s very flat. Where exactly is Fort Myers?”

“On the gulf side of the state, roughly halfway between Tampa and Miami.” I was keeping my fingers crossed that we would arrive at eight o’clock tonight, which would give us seventeen hours, and not
after
Udo’s fatal accident had already happened.
 

Just as I’d thought, Dr. Little didn’t bother double-checking the coordinates. “Ready,” he said, getting to his feet.

Soft sand lay under my feet, and a warm, marine-scented breeze tickled my nose. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the new circumstances, helped by the light of the almost-full moon. I glanced around, trying to get my bearings. Dr. Little and Abigail were doing the same. Where had Dr. B sent us? And, more importantly, to what day? In one direction, silver sand met the pitch-black ocean; moonlight reflected off the waves crashing on the shore. In the other direction stood a line of beachfront motels and cottages with well-lit parking lots. Here and there, beachgoers sat intertwined on blankets or clustered around small bonfires, enjoying beer, cigarettes, and good company.
 

“Well, Julia?” Dr. Little demanded. “Where are we?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” I admitted.

“Nice beach,” Abigail said, “wherever it is.”

“Let’s check for another note,” Dr. Little suggested, ever practical.

We found one a few steps away by the expedient of me stubbing my toe on it. “Ow.”
 

I picked up the rock and we huddled around it as Dr. Little turned on a pencil flashlight. This time there was a rubber band around the rock instead of tape, presumably in anticipation of the wet conditions on the beach. I took off the rubber band and removed the Ziploc bag that it had been securing. Several sheets of paper had been stuffed inside to keep them dry. I unfolded them. There was a printout of a newspaper story and also a year-appropriate grid map of the Fort Myers area.

“Ah,” said Dr. Little, pouncing on the map. “That will simplify things. Pity we don’t know exactly where we are.”

“Is there an X on the map?” The rubber band, Ziploc bag, and
the new rock joined the one already in my coat pocket.
 

Dr. Little pored over the map with his flashlight. “Nothing.”

He turned his flashlight onto the news article next, and all of us gathered around to read it. It looked like it was from a small-town paper—I recognized the writing style, a mix of professionalism and gossip. Details jumped out at me: a freak accident…excessive speed or blown tire suspected…Ford Mustang flew over causeway guardrail…divers still searching for vehicle and its driver. There was a grainy stock picture of the bridge. The accident had happened near the mainland, on the first of the three segments that formed the bridge, with the vehicle headed toward Sanibel Island.
 

Body recovered two days later
, Nate had written in the margin. He had added underneath,
Nothing to report on the other matter
, which I took to mean that he had found nothing out of the ordinary in Dr. Little’s office.

The newspaper article included a short biographical bit about the missing driver. Udo’s family was local and owned property both in Florida and the Midwest, the article said. His parents, Judith and Robert Leland, resided on Sanibel Island. Fort Myers was his place of birth.

“Poor Udo,” Abigail said.
 

“At least he was alone in the Mustang,” Dr. Little said. “There’s no mention of any of the other students—or Sabina—being in the car. I’d say it was lucky for you, Julia, that neither of your parents was in the Mustang with Udo when he went over.”

“Yes, that’s true.” I didn’t even want to think about it.

“The article does give us one important fact,” Dr. Little added, as if further emotionally detaching himself from the details, unhappy as they were. Or perhaps he thought nothing could be gained from dwelling on what was going to happen. History could not be changed. But we had to try. I would have to make sure the others agreed with me on that.

“What fact?” I asked.
 

“Didn’t you see it, Julia? There, near the end.” Abigail pointed over my arm.
 

My eyes skipped to the last paragraph. Focused as I was on the specifics of the accident, I had skimmed over it quickly.
 

The reporter had, somewhat judgmentally, written:
 

One of the students admitted that the group had driven straight down from their school, St. Sunniva University of Thornberg, Minnesota, on what she called a midterm break. Rather than paying for a hotel here in Ft. Myers, the students spent the night at the beach, further adding to their sleep deficit. We will never know for sure if this contributed to the fatal accident, but can there be any doubt that it did?

The article writer finished with a call on the mayor to look into
the problem of seasonal incursions of students
as swiftly as possible.

They spent the night at the beach.
This one? The article had said that Udo’s parents owned a house on Sanibel Island, so perhaps that’s where we were. In any case, the book club had to be here—it was the only reason for Dr. B and Nate to have sent us to this particular beach. We just needed to find the students, even if it took all night. The sandy shore stretched north and south of us, seemingly endless. It was impossible to make out the shadowy faces around even the nearest of the bonfires.

“Let’s split up and head in opposite directions,” I proposed. “Abigail and I’ll go up the beach. Dr. Little, you go the other—”

He interrupted. “It might be faster to check the parking lots for the vehicles. There can’t be that many cars with Minnesota license plates. And the art bus should be easy to recognize.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” I said, irritated that I hadn’t thought of it myself. “All right, let’s walk over to the motel lot that’s nearest, that one. We can check there first, then split up and head from parking lot to parking—”

“I know where they are,” a husky voice said in the dark.

My first, wild reaction was that Xave had somehow followed us to Florida, but that wasn’t the case, of course. An old man, older even than Dr. Mooney was in the present, stepped into the thin cylinder of light that Dr. Little’s pencil flashlight projected onto the soft sand. Bare feet and bony knees stuck out from under ratty cutoff jeans; bony elbows jutted out of a tattered short-sleeve shirt that had been white once. There was a well-worn Havana hat on the man’s head. In 1976 (and perhaps today) he probably would have been called a beach bum, the effect completed by the pungent odor of whatever he was carrying wrapped in an old newspaper.
 

I saw Dr. Little take a step back and fought off the impulse myself. Whatever was in the newspaper didn’t mask the alcohol reeking from deep within an unruly beard.

“Can you tell us where we are, sir?” I asked.

“Of course I can. Don’t
you
know where you are?”

“To be honest, no.”

“Well, then. You’re on Estero Island.”

Not Sanibel Island, then, but nearby. It was good to have a point of reference. It had been disconcerting to land on a nameless dark beach. The Edison Estate was about twenty or thirty minutes by car over the bridge and inland; Sanibel Island was about the same, up the coast and across the causeway. Somewhere in between, the site that would one day house my parents’ retirement community was probably still wetland.