Jaclyn the Ripper (21 page)

 

“I stopped being your little Amy when I was ten because I'd rather read than play with dolls. Or help Mommy in the kitchen. I stopped being little Amy when I had trouble with algebra in high school. I stopped being Amy when I didn't want to go to Berkeley and study economics, and you said you couldn't afford to send me to Bennington to ‘dally in pots and poetry' yet you had money to burn. . . .” She took a huge breath and half-whispered, “I stopped being your little Amy when I left home, and you refused to ever talk to me again. You didn't love me, Daddy, you loved your perfect little image of me, yet I was never that person.”

A silence between them. Blessed by the sound of the waterfall, it was not tense, not a prelude to an ugly barrage of words and feelings that would scar them both beyond reason. Rather, the silence settled the moment, this tenuous bond long between them stretched thin and invisible. An unspoken wisdom hovered. And waited.

“Who are you, then?” he asked quietly.

She started with Mrs. Wells, that charming woman of many hats that kept the business, household and family on schedule, though she was careful not to give away her busy, lovely Edwardian world. Her tales of raising children—not to mention her husband—between phone calls to agents and publishers and shopping trips amused Kevin Robbins, and occasionally she caught him nodding or grinning sympathetically.

“Don't get me wrong, Daddy. I love my life and my family. I love them so much, but they're not me, either. . . .”

He sipped his whiskey, made a steeple of his fingers and nodded slowly for her to continue.

“Sandgate is cold much of the year, so I have a garden house. A garden house with a cherrywood desk and a fountain that sounds like yours and the wonderful perfume of flowers even in January.” She
smiled wistfully. “It sits on a bluff over the channel, and on a rare sunny day one can see the coast of France, but most of the time there's clouds or fog.” She paused. “I like fog, but I like flowers more, their profusion of colors, their quiet beauty, and the fact that when one shrivels and dies, it really doesn't because two more bloom beside it.”

Her father listened.

Had he ever done so before?

“So when Amy isn't ‘in recovery,' ” she said for his benefit, “when she gets tired and bored and fed up with the world, she goes out to the garden house, and the second she closes the door, she becomes Catherine. . . . Catherine is the little girl inside that has always made Amy different. Catherine makes sense of dreams and logic of intuition and sees love and beauty in all things untouched. Catherine sings to her flowers and vines and plants as she waters them. Catherine listens to Purcell and Bach. Catherine writes stories and poetry for the pure joy of writing them. She paints watercolors and draws ‘picshuas' that make Bertie and the boys laugh. . . . Ah, laughter. It heals all, no matter where we are. Laughter is our souls saying that they love life and will seek the magic within no matter where they happen to be in the cosmos. . . . Ah, Catherine. She laughs, she sings, she loves without pain, she forgives. . . . Catherine. . . . Not little Amy,” she added in a whisper.

Her father opened his arms, and they held each other tightly, Amy bent over his wheelchair, not feeling the awkwardness.

“So is Catherine the reason . . . ?”

“. . .they locked me up?”

He nodded.

“No. Not really, Daddy.” She saw no reason to tell him that she'd never been in an institution. Instead, she chose it as a metaphor. “Amy was the one who was locked up, on occasion. . . . When they let Amy out, Catherine took wings and flew.”

A long silence.

“I wish I'd known,” he growled softly.

A silence.

“Can I call you—?”

“No,” she said firmly. “Not Kate or Kathy or Katie. It's Catherine.”

“Okay.”

“I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you, too, Catherine.”

 

“So now,” said Amy, giggling ebulliently to herself, pedaling hard on the bike, “now that he's finally met the daughter he never knew, how in the world am I going to tell him—or Sara or Mom or Aunt Amy—that I'm a time-traveler?!”

She guffawed and almost swerved into oncoming traffic. Needing to unwind, she'd borrowed a road bike with upright handlebars from her mom, who had also loaned her a designer outfit and insisted that she take a cell phone in case something happened. She'd taken it, then mused:
Bertie would've thought that these little beauties were a curious example of technology making life more burdensome
.

Now she pedaled aimlessly through neighborhoods the way she used to do with him in Mornington Crescent when they'd go searching for slices of life that could be turned into popular articles—in the early days before Spade House and the boys, and the weight of success and responsibility. If she were ever home again, she would insist that they go riding on picnics and adventures together, and at last Bertie and the boys would see her gloriously happy, for the weight of a life unfinished was gone.
One life, that is
.

Going home—as Bertie might say—wasn't bloody likely. Yet as she came down Laurel Way and turned up Coldwater Canyon, she tried to remain steadfastly optimistic despite the fact that she was facing a future without a past.

Up ahead was Coldwater Canyon Park, and while it was no Regent's Park by any stretch of the imagination, it had broad grass meadows and trees, and flowers bordering a red-brick firehouse, and a late-afternoon golden light that made long, warm shadows. She thought of her times with Bertie at Regent's Inn in front of the great, old fireplace ablaze
with bayberry logs, sharing a pint and dreams of their life together. She stood on the bike and pedaled faster, turning on the lesser-traveled Beverly Drive for an open space, the glimpse of a lake in the hills, trying to out-distance her memories. She couldn't.

She burst out crying.

“Did you know that ‘system restore' is a form of time travel?”

Despite herself, Amber raised her eyebrows and smiled curiously. She had never been good at waiting, but right now she was content to watch him tinker with her laptop on the kitchen table, immersed in its motherboard and components. She was torn. On the one hand, she hoped Sara, the sister Amy had never mentioned, would call back soon so H.G. could “save” his wife. On other, she hoped that Sara
wouldn't
return their phone call, so that she would have “Bertie” all to herself. Alas, if the call did come, Amber guessed her chances were seriously diminished. How could she hope to compete with Amy, a comely, petite woman who had been raised in the twentieth century and now probably reeked of Edwardian sensibilities? How could she compete with requited love?
Try answering him.
“So you're saying that if we were small enough . . .”

“Precisely.” He grinned. “If we could somehow enter the environs of this portal, if we had a control within a control, we would be masters of our own existence. . . . You see, the software for these programs is written with the Aristotelian precision one would expect in that the world—the cosmos, if you will—of this clever little machine is orderly
and controlled. Hence, if you or I were a particle, we could hop an electron and instantaneously go to any date, time and year within the confines of the laptop's experience.”

“Wow.”

He had found a tiny wrench and screwdriver, had taken her laptop apart and was studying it with a magnifying glass. He looked up, grinning. “I do believe that the mechanics that make the ‘system tools' programs work are basically the same as those in
The Utopia
's engine, but I'll need another computer to test it.”

“I don't have one.”

“Pity.” He looked off thoughtfully. “You know, if I'm right, I could rewire my engine and make it much more efficient.” He pointed at the laptop. “In fact, the innards of this thing might solve my problem with the Destination Indicator.”

The phone rang.

The caller ID read: “Sara Robbins, MFCC.”

“She had lunch with her!” H.G. exclaimed as they rode the elevator down. “Her sister dropped her off at her parents'!”

“Okay, okay.”

“She's all right, 'Dusa! She's here and she's alive!”

The elevator doors opened. They sprinted across the underground parking lot to Amber's car, stopped short when they heard clanking and a winch whining hydraulically. A tow-truck driver was taking away a faded green Toyota Corolla that had been parked across two spaces, blocking in Amber's Milan and her neighbor's Prius.

Watching the scene, the neighbor heard Amber and H.G., turned and gestured at the Corolla. “What an idiot, huh?”

Deflated, H.G. glanced at his watch—5:25
P.M
.—tried to quell his sudden uneasiness and a grim little déjà vu from deep in his soul. Then the tow truck took off in a blast of exhaust. Amber pressed her key, the Milan's doors chirped, and they jumped in. H.G. pulled a map book from the door side pocket, riffled through and found Beverly Hills, left it folded open.

“That took all of two seconds,” she said of the tow truck.

She zoomed out of the parking lot and up the ramp, but paused at
the street. “Where are we going?” H.G. handed her the bright-green Post-it note he had copied the Robbinses' address on. She stuck it on the dash, started entering it into the Milan's GPS. Meanwhile, H.G. dialed the phone number, but nothing happened.

“You have to push the green button.”

“Details.” He did so and waited. He frowned. “The blasted thing stopped ringing.”

“I don't get good reception here.”

“You live here!” he said, astonished.

She shrugged and finished setting the GPS. “What are you doing?”

“This tells us how to get there.”

“What the devil's wrong with the map?”

“We don't need the map.” She pulled into the street and pressed her turn indicator.

“Turn right and proceed northeast on Ocean Park Boulevard,” said a disembodied voice from the GPS. “Turn left on Lincoln Boulevard. . . .”

H.G. stared openmouthed at the GPS, fascinated that their motor car was a blue dot on a small screen and that he could actually follow their progress.

“How marvelous,” he said, surprised. “The motor car talks.”

Amber stood on the gas and flew up Lincoln, weaving through traffic, then whip-turned on Olympic. She looked upset—helplessly so—and was biting her lip to stop from crying.

H.G. didn't notice. He was reaching for the arrow buttons on the GPS when it spoke again: “Merge on to Interstate 10 east toward Los Angeles. . . .”

“Leave it alone or you'll get us lost,” she said.

“I should think that this, this modern version of a sextant would be immune to stupidity. Perhaps it uses the same technology as microwave ovens.”

“You are exceeding the posted speed limit,” warned the GPS.

“Oh, really?” H.G. replied to the GPS. “Well, we have no intention of slowing down, old boy.”

“Merge on to Interstate 405 north. . . .”

Amber swerved up the sweeping on ramp, then had to brake hard. Traffic on the 405 was stacked up in both directions—a silent advertisement for walking to Beverly Hills.

They came to a dead stop.

H.G. craned his head out the window to see how far the slowdown went and blanched. It was endless. He shook his head, whispered in awe, “We're marooned . . . we're adrift on a bloody sea of motor cars.”

“We get off at Wilshire,” she said helpfully.

He glowered at the GPS as if betrayed, then waved the map book before the screen. “You didn't go the right way,” he said to the GPS.

“What d'you mean, I didn't go the right way?”

“I wasn't talking to you,” he replied, “I was talking to your robot!” He held the map book out for her to see. “But if you had taken this thoroughfare here,” he explained, pointing at Santa Monica Boulevard, you'd have gotten there much more quickly. These blasted freeways, as you call them, are nothing more than infinities of metal and exhaust from wasted energy.” He stabbed his finger at the GPS. “And
this
thing should know that.”

“All right, all right! So I pushed ‘direct route' instead of ‘shortest'! I fucked up, I'm sorry!”

“Maybe you don't want me to find her at all,” he said hollowly.

“That's not true!” she cried, turning off the 405 at Wilshire. “Why are you being so nasty?”

“You seemed to have forgotten that
we
are not the only ones looking for her!”

“Okay, okay!” She sped up on Wilshire. “Why don't you try the damned phone again?”

He looked at the cell, opened it, then as an afterthought turned back to Amber. “And just for the record, I didn't know Amy had a sister because
Amy
didn't know she had a sister! When we left in 1979, Sara Robbins wasn't born yet.”

He pushed the green button. This time when the cell rang, Elizabeth Robbins answered. After introducing himself and asking after her
health, H.G. learned that his Amy was out on a bike ride. He scribbled down the cell number and rang off. Wondering when mankind would transcend the inconvenience of numbers, he began dialing again.

 

“Amy . . . ? My God, Amy? Is that really you . . . ?”

He laughed with relief and turned to the door in an effort to make the phone call more private and didn't hear Amber's lovesick sobs.

“Are you all right . . . ? You're quite certain. . . ?” He sighed. “There was blood on the cabin floor, Amy. . . .” He nodded. “Blast. . . . I'm so sorry. . . . I'll fix the damned door as soon as I can.”