Jaclyn the Ripper (18 page)

Surprised, he smiled thinly. “That's between Amy and myself.”

“It's pristine sex, right?”

He reddened and looked down helplessly, was at a loss for words.

“Which is sad, 'cause she used to be the other woman, right? And other women are famous for great sex and good times, am I right?”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

“Don't you really want your wife to be a whore in bed and a Madonna in public . . . ?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That's why you do your passades, right?”

He left the room, but she followed, took his arm, turned him around.

“ 'Cause I can do both. I can be the perfect little Edwardian wife if you want.” She touched his face and added in a whisper, “Then come home and fuck your brains out.”

“ 'Dusa, please!”

“Well . . . ?” She smiled wickedly. Her heart pounded. “Think about it.”

He glared at her. “Would you still want me if I stopped everything for you and said to hell with Amy?”

She stepped back, her mouth forming an O. She shook her head no, like a schoolgirl. Then, deflated, she sat at the table and turned on the laptop. She blinked back tears. If she'd had someplace to go, she would have bolted, but she was home. Her own place was all around her, a cruel reminder, and she wondered if after this man and
The Utopia
, she belonged anywhere.

So she sat at the laptop like an automaton and shelved her bruised emotions.
Something silk
, she thought,
it's like I've just bought something silk and beautiful, but have to put it away until the right occasion
.

H.G. stared at his pocket watch, his face burning from 'Dusa's proposition. In his own time, despite socialism and the suffragettes, an emancipated woman proposing to a married man—and proud of it—would have been unheard of. So outrageous, in fact, that it would make a fabulous novel.
One that I wouldn't mind writing, though Macmillan might not want to publish it. I doubt I'd name my emancipated woman Amber, however. Maybe Ann . . . Ann Veronica
.

He stole a glance at Amber, and she gave him a blank look that masked her feelings. They exchanged uncomfortable smiles, then returned to their own spaces, the silence, the white noise from city traffic. He waited for a few minutes, for the heat of the moment to pass, and when he sensed that she had become respectable again, he joined her at the laptop.

They started in again, Googling “Kevin and Elizabeth Robbins, Los Angeles, California” and getting 461,000 responses, most of them Web pages for somebody else. A waste of keystrokes, H.G. told himself, but Amber had moved on to a program called “people lookup” which at first glance seemed promising. It listed addresses, phone numbers, previous cities lived in and relatives. There were one hundred and forty-some Robbinses in the Los Angeles area, none of them named Kevin or Elizabeth and none of them living in Beverly Hills. Regardless, Amber
began the tedious process of getting details on each one of them, H.G. distracting her because he was peering at the slots for DVDs, the intricate plugs on the back of her computer.

“What're you looking for?”

“I haven't a clue, 'Dusa. I'll know it when I see it.”

“Hey, you want something to drink . . . ? You hungry?” She paused. “There's Coke in the fridge and taquitos in the freezer. . . .”

“Taq-quitos . . . ?”

“If you didn't try them when you were here in '79, they're to die for.”

He looked at her, puzzled.

“You'll like them.” She went back to the laptop, then heard him banging in a cupboard and pulling out an iron skillet. “No, no, you don't have to go to all that trouble. Put them in the microwave.”

“The microwave. . . .”

Great Scott, is she referring to electromagnetic waves, originally discovered due to Maxwell's equations, and then effectively demonstrated by one Heinrich Hertz when I was at the Normal School? Or was it after I'd left? I can see how they might be useful for radio and television, but in the kitchen?

She laughed again. “You're helpless, aren't you?” She came in the kitchen and started to take the taquitos from his hand, but he resisted.

“I'm quite capable of heating food, 'Dusa.”

“Okay.” She pointed at the microwave oven on the counter, clicked open its door for him. “You put it in, set the time—you can do timers, can't you?—close the door and push Start.” She went back to the table and sat down. “Two minutes should be plenty.”

Frowning, H.G. set the timer, then dumped the taquitos in the skillet, closed it in the microwave, pressed Start, stepped back to watch.

The microwave arced and zapped in blue and yellow flashes, danced on the counter and then exploded. Smoke poured out from behind its door.

H.G. was flattened against the refrigerator, staring at the blackened appliance, now convinced that microwaves had no place in the kitchen.

Flabbergasted, Amber stood up, her hands on her hips.

“Don't tell me you put a frying pan in there?”

“A metal frying pan,” he said, mortified, “containing a molecular structure incompatible with microwaves. I'm so sorry.”

She howled with laughter. “Hey, wanna do takeout?”

 

While they waited for a sizzling chicken plate from the King of Siam, Amber clicked her way through two more Robbinses in the L.A. area, finally threw up her hands in frustration.

“Don't you know anything about her family?”

“She didn't get along with her father. Most girls don't, so the professionals tell us.”

“I never had a father.”

“She loved her mum. . . . And she absolutely adored her grandmother Sara.”

“Sara?” Amber straightened up, her eyes going wide and bright. “Her grandmother was named Sara?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“I was named after my grandmother. Maybe Amy's sister was named after their grandmother.”

They bent over the laptop like eager children before a magician as Amber went to the white pages and quickly found Sara Robbins, MFCC, a counselor in Sherman Oaks, and the eager became the amazed.

His fingers trembling, H.G. dialed the number and got Sara's voice mail. After the beep, he had the presence of mind to introduce himself as Herbert George Wells—no relation, of course—who had been trying to locate his wife, Amy Catherine Robbins, but had misplaced her phone number, and could she please call if she is indeed the right Ms. Sara Robbins? Satisfied, he hung up and smiled at Amber.

“You forgot to leave a number.”

Mortified, he called back and did.

And then they waited.

“What happened to your arm?” asked a concerned Sara Robbins.

“Oh, that,” said her sister, laughing nervously. She glanced at her arm, which an urgent-care nurse had bandaged with a flesh-colored patch after her clumsy dressing had come loose as she was buying some twenty-first-century clothes, none of which fit properly. “I was in a hurry at the . . . the airport and I cut myself on a door.”

“But it's okay now?”

“Yes, quite all right, thank you.”

Her chin in her hand, Sara smiled and gazed at her sister. “You look
great
, you know.”

“Thank you, so do you.”

“I mean . . . don't take this the wrong way, but you look so young.”

Amy smiled.

“Is there some place you go? Or, or something . . . ?”

“Facials are quite the thing in London,” Amy said blithely, never having had a facial in her life.

Sara continued gazing at her. “God, you sound so
British
.”

“Yes, well, I pretty much am now.” Amy fidgeted with the lunch menu in front of her, her eyes darting around at the other guests, the room,
resonating with their animated talk and laughter.
They all seem so happy, so full of themselves
. She glanced back at Sara—she had that same joie de vivre, yet looking at her was like looking in a mirror.
If not for the age difference, if she weren't so happy, we could've been twins. They must've had her after I went to 1893 with Bertie, though Daddy was never big on children. Was she a mistake or did Mom want to replace me? And then Daddy decided to do it right the second time around and raise a girl who was “capable” instead of all the other things he used to call me
. She smiled shyly and added, “It seems I've been there forever.”

“I hate to say this,” Sara said low, “but we all thought you were dead.” She leaned forward and gripped Amy's hand. “I . . . I thought I was going to go through life without ever having known you.”

“I'm so sorry,” Amy replied, her voice quavering. “I should've come sooner.”
Or maybe not at all
. She was having trouble accepting the hard reality that she might be stuck out of time and never see her home again.

“So you're married and have kids?”

Amy nodded, fought to hold back tears at the thought of little Gip and Frank without her, yet managed a proud smile.

“When do I get to meet them?”

Amy looked off and gathered herself. Probably never. She didn't have the special key. When she had climbed down from
The Utopia
, she'd been shocked to discover that she wasn't in H.G.'s lab in Mornington Crescent—she was over five thousand miles away. She had planned to reunite with her parents by flying from London to San Francisco, but that hadn't been necessary. Her portal to 2010 had been the Getty Museum—a museum so breathtakingly marvelous that she thought she had arrived in the wrong century. Yet to be in an unknown, an unexpected place—she had been petrified with fear. So panicked, in fact, that she'd forgotten about the special key—not to mention her purse. So panicked that she had forgotten her husband's notes about keeping the machine “when it was,” but knew she had only ninety seconds to do something and had pulled the first thing she saw—the declinometer ring below the cabin door. Then she ran and had just cleared the center gallery when she'd been staggered by a blinding flash meaning that she'd done something terribly wrong.

The time machine had physically left without her.

So, no, it wasn't likely that Sara Robbins would ever meet Bertie and the boys.

“Maybe when you come to London,” Amy fibbed. “You see, I left on such short notice . . . I was so worried about the earthquake and . . . and . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I'm not doing very well, am I?” she said candidly.

Sara sipped her white wine and smiled professionally. “Hey, it's okay. We all do things for crazy reasons.”

“Yes, but now it seems so silly to have come all this way just to warn someone of something that has already happened. You can't imagine how mortified I am, especially after Daddy—”

Sara laughed easily. “Look at the bright side, Amy. . . . If you hadn'tcome, we might never have met.”

“You girls ready to order?” said the waiter.

They both went back to their menus, Sara making up her mind quickly and asking for an Asian calamari salad with spicy ginger lime vinaigrette and a Pellegrino. Whereas for Amy, the menu might as well have been written in a foreign language. Yes, she loved fine cuisines and had eaten at her share of great restaurants in London and on the continent, but she had no clue what many of these dishes were and had no intention of asking the waiter, especially when she felt his eyes—and Sara's—on her, and knew she was blushing hard.

“Need more time?”

“No, no.” She looked up and forced a smile, was reduced to what she would've ordered as a teenager in the seventies. “I'll just have a hamburger and fries.”

Sara's puzzled expression came and went so quickly that Amy didn't catch it.

“I'm actually quite famished.” Amy handed her menu to the waiter, smiled and once again said the wrong thing. “I could eat a horse.”

 

In the wee hours of Sunday morning, Amy had walked from the Getty complex down to the 405, had followed the frontage road looking for
shelter and found the Hotel Angeleno, a curiously circular building lit up in garish purple. At first glance, she'd thought it was a twenty-first-century advertisement of some kind—or worse, the headquarters for a Southern California cult religion. Relieved that it was a hotel, she had checked in, grateful she had worn her 1979 dollars in a money belt, and once in her room, was grateful for the solitude.

After a hot bath, she went straight to bed, fell asleep missing Bertie and the boys, and slept through most of the day. She woke up asking herself how she could have been so insane, taking the time machine as if out for a mere Sunday drive. She hadn't been worried about the boys—not so much because Mrs. Vickers was an excellent nanny but because she had been convinced that she'd be back before she left. Thanks to Bertie and his theory, thanks to helping him pen
The Time Machine
, she had been seduced by the romance of time travel.
More like rape, it was
.

She had called her parents in San Francisco, was surprised their phone number had been disconnected, then placed a call to her namesake, Aunt Amy, who had lived in Short Hills, New Jersey, forever. They talked for two hours, Amy crying sometimes—wistful tears for a life that she hadn't lived, joyful tears for the life she had lived—then lapsing into a terrible silence at the notion of being caught somewhere in between. Aunt Amy had told her about Sara, her therapist sister, and her parents moving to Beverly Hills some twenty years ago.

Late Sunday afternoon, thoroughly bewildered, she'd taken a cab to a dismal big-box store where she shopped anonymously for toiletries and a few modern outfits. She had no intention of meeting her family, especially Daddy, looking like she'd stepped out of a costume drama.

They had finally all met this morning—a beautiful, sunny Monday—and Amy thought she was rather convincing as a twenty-first-century woman, but in that wonderful glow of a family reunited, she'd said some reckless, dumb things. “Coming home to warn them of the big one” had left her father amazed. He couldn't hold back soft, yet derisive laughter. “You're twenty years too late,” he had replied. He had already suffered enormous loss, had already moved home and insurance business out of San Francisco, and now she had flown back into their
lives like Mary Poppins or something.
“Why didn't you just pick up the phone?”
he'd said.
“Why didn't you call twenty-five years ago and tell us you were okay? Or would that have been too considerate? We understand people running off to see the world and live their own lives, but usually they say good-bye. Oh, no, not my little Amy. She was always at the back of the line, always a space cadet.”
He had shaken his head, disgusted, was about to go off on one of his diatribes when their mom tactfully reminded him that they had to go or he'd be late for a doctor's appointment.