The Bellbottom Incident (13 page)

Nate was pacing back and forth in the lab. He was alone. We had been in 1976 from midday October 31 to the morning of the following day, but less than an hour had passed for him. He ground to a halt in response to the
whoosh
of warm air that signaled my arrival on STEWie’s platform. His face fell when he saw that I was alone, but I didn’t take it personally.
 

“You haven’t found her?” he asked, lending me a steadying hand as I descended from STEWie’s platform. Abigail and Dr. Little had stayed behind to inquire around the dorm, with Xave’s help, about where the book club had gone. We had decided it would be best if I jumped to the lab, since I might find myself shuttled back at any moment anyway.

“We have,” I explained. “She is with a campus book club.”

“That’s good news.”

Since it had only been an hour, he was obviously still in the nice shirt and slacks he’d pulled on for the dinner we were supposed to have at my house. I was sure I looked very grungy after spending the day aimlessly searching around campus and the night in a public restroom. Nate didn’t seem to care. He pulled me to him for a long kiss.

“There is a small glitch, however,” I said once my feet found steady ground again…and not because of the time traveling, either. “The book club, they’ve gone on a midterm break and we have no idea where. All we know is that they are headed to the East Coast, to the ocean.”

Since he, too, knew Sabina very well, he saw the problem at once. “And you don’t think she’ll want to leave the ocean.”

 
“Sally—I mean Sabina—spent last night in someone’s dorm room. Early this morning—November 1 in 1976—the book club members took off. We think they’re probably headed for Georgia or Florida. Two vehicles, the first a red Ford Mustang, the second a VW minibus.”
 

“Hmm…Sabina was able to hitch a ride with them?”
 

“I know, it’s a bit weird. I don’t like it. What if she just…disappears?”
 

“She’s got a good head on her shoulders. She’ll be fine.”

“She’s quite capable of sneaking onto a cruise ship going to Europe.”

“That’s true, she is,” he said in a tone that could only be described as proud. “Hold on—don’t the other students in the dorm know the book club destination?”

“It seems to be a bit of a mystery. Dr. Little and Abigail are asking around campus. All we know is that there’s a certain tree that interests Udo Leland, the driver of the Ford Mustang and the book club leader. We were hoping you could talk to him in the present and ask him where they went all those years ago, in 1976.”

“Will that work?”

“Dr. Little and Abigail seem to think so.”

He slid into one of the workstations. “You said this Udo Leland was interested in a tree? He was studying to be a biologist or a botanist, then?”

“No, a writer. The tree had to do with the setting for his Great American Novel or something.”

“I see. Udo Leland is an unusual name—tracking him down shouldn’t be a problem. Let’s see what we can come up with.”

A disconcerting thought occurred to me as he commenced a Google search, but I held off on saying anything.

“Hmm…there’s an Udo here and there, and many Lelands, but none are paired up.”
 

“He must be somewhere.”

“I’ll keep looking.”

“Okay.”

“What?”

“
What
what?”

“It seemed like you had more to say.”

I voiced the unsettling thought that had occurred to me. “If we don’t manage to locate Sabina in 1976, that would mean she’s here in 2012 as a middle-aged woman. What if we did a search on her name…and found her? It would mean that all of our efforts in 1976 are pointless.”

“Then we should do a search for her name, if only to be sure.”

“No…Wait. Yes, do it—I need to know. There was something odd about Dr. Mooney’s demeanor earlier—where is he anyway?” I looked around the lab. The unfinished Slingshot 3.0 was still in its place in the middle of the worktable, next to the disemboweled Version 1.0, but the professor was nowhere to be seen.

“Dr. Baumgartner is on her way to take over guard duty for STEWie. She should be here any minute. Dr. Mooney had some things to attend to off campus.”

“I bet he did. We just spent a day with him in the past.”

“Really? He was, what, a graduate student then?”

“With a mustache. But that’s not the only odd part. We talked to him and he figured out that we were from the future.”

Nate frowned at this. “How’s that even possible?”
 

“Well, he was a bit condescending and swollen-headed back then. I guess we merely proved that his high opinion of himself was correct.”
 

“He’s never said anything to you about having met you back when he was a student?”

“Never. We saw Dr. Rojas, too, but I’m not sure he took much note of us.” The mild-mannered professor was still on his sabbatical, but I figured calling him up and asking him whether he remembered meeting us in 1976 would be a waste of time. Dr. Mooney was the person I wanted to grab by the collar and talk to.

Nate had given his attention back to the Internet search. “Hmm…”

“What?” I leaned over his shoulder to look at the search results.

“You’ll be happy to know I’m not finding any hits on a Sabina Secunda Tanner.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Unless she’s gotten married and changed her last name, of course,” Nate added, ever the cautious police officer. “Or is still keeping a low profile and her personal information off the Internet, as we have taught her to.”
 

The lab doors opened and Dr. Baumgartner hurried in, looking a touch irritated that she had been summoned without explanation. “Xavier said you needed me urgently. He didn’t say why.”

“Sabina is lost in 1976,” I said simply.

Worry replaced the look of irritation on Dr. B’s face at once. She was as fond of Sabina as the rest of us. “What? How did that happen?”

“Nate can explain later, but right now I need you to send me back—time is flying by in 1976. I came back to update everyone and to get a couple of overnight kits.”
 

“Nineteen seventy-six?” I heard Dr. B ask as I exited the lab. “What on earth is going on?”

Overnight kits were always kept at the ready in the travel apparel closet. I chose two—Dr. Little had pretty much everything he needed in his duffel bag—and hurried back into the lab with a backpack on each shoulder, balancing the small stack of sandwiches I had grabbed from the vending machine in my hands. My few minutes in the lab would be hours back in 1976; I figured Dr. Little and Abigail would be hungry.

Nate steadied me by the elbow as I climbed onto STEWie’s platform with the armful of supplies. “I’ll get on the phone and get some official inquiries going. I’ve sent Officer Van Underberg to find Dr. Mooney. We need some answers.”

“Send us a note through STEWie if you find out anything.”
 

One of the larger mirrors blocked Dr. B’s view of us and I wondered if we might sneak a kiss, but Nate looked a touch uncomfortable, so I gave him a platonic peck on the cheek instead. “For luck.”

“Julia?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Be careful. I’m not sure I like the way this sounds, this book club outing with the mysterious Udo Leland at the helm.”

Dr. B had sent me again to 1976 as swiftly as possible, but it was already evening back in November 1, 1976. A blast of cold air and lightly falling snowflakes greeted me at the Open Book sculpture. I radioed Abigail and Dr. Little, who radioed back that they were in Xave’s room and that I should meet them there.
 

I slipped into St. Olaf’s dorm past the hall monitor, who was busy flirting with another student, and made my way up to Xave’s room on the fifth floor. All three of them were there. Xave was reclined on his bed, looking like his normal self again. (I remembered college, when all it took to bounce back from an all-night party or study session was a nap and a lot of coffee.) He waved a friendly greeting at me.

I learned that Abigail and Dr. Little had talked to Udo’s roommate while I was gone. The roommate, Sam, was an electrical engineer. “I got the impression that he and Udo don’t talk much.
Udo only likes people who do art
,” Abigail quoted the roommate. She was perched on the windowsill again.
 

This brought back college memories as well. Either you got on great with your roommate for the year, or you didn’t.

“No one seems to know where the book club has gone. No one,” Abigail continued. “It’s almost as if Udo didn’t want people to know.”

“Well, he appears to have succeeded if that was his goal,” Dr. Little commented from the desk chair.
 

“Too bad there’s no electronic trail for us to follow,” I said. “Tweets and such.”

I swear I could see Xave’s ears perk up. “What are
tweets
? Are tweeters trained birds—or perhaps programmable robotic ones?—and do they track people’s whereabouts and report their location to the authorities?”

“Yeah, no,” Abigail said.

“Which is it, yes or no?”

“People are all too eager to report their whereabouts themselves,” I explained. “Everyone likes to share details of their lives, it turns out.”

Dr. Little had mentioned that the seventies were considered
the
me
decade, but I rather thought we had them beat.
There really was no way to adequately explain the early years of the twenty-first century without living through them. And Xave Mooney would, of course, in due time. I hoped all the information we were letting slip wouldn’t corrupt him into buying early stock in smartphone and social media companies.
 

“Hey, are those sandwiches from the future? I’m famished.”
 

I had set the two backpacks I had brought with me on the bed next to him, and the sandwiches, too. “Help yourself. These two are ham, those two are peanut butter and jelly.”
 

Xave waited politely as Dr. Little sprayed his hands with hand sanitizer, a proceeding he watched with interest. Abigail and Dr. Little took a sandwich each. Xave carefully reached for a peanut butter one. The vending machine fare consisted of pre-sliced white bread with a thin film of jam and an even thinner film of peanut butter. My guess was that he was going to be mightily disappointed.
 

He carefully unwrapped the sandwich and took a test bite. “Hmm. It’s a little…bland, if you don’t mind my saying so. Is it prefabricated somehow, created from some common source of nourishment?”

“It might as well be.”

“Hey, where do I end up teaching?” he asked between bites. “MIT? Berkeley? Caltech? I know, you can’t tell me that either.”

“Julia, we’ve come up with a plan,” Abigail said, having already downed her sandwich. She reached for the leftover ham one. “Anybody want this?”

Dr. Little shook his head at her. Xave said, “No, thanks. I’m still, uh, enjoying this one.”
 

“What’s the plan?” I asked.

“Some spying is in order. We need to find out when the book club last met,” Abigail said. “You said on Friday evenings, Xave. Is it each Friday?”

Xave, having finished the peanut butter sandwich clearly more out of a desire not to offend us than anything else, wiped his hands on his pants. “There’s a flyer downstairs by the front door.”
 

In the present, he would have reached for his cell phone to check the book club webpage, blog, Facebook group, et cetera, but the norm was different in 1976. While we waited for him to return, I quickly explained that Nate was on the case in the present and that there were no search hits on Sabina’s name, which hopefully meant we would be successful in our mission to catch up with the book club.

Xave popped back into the room as if he had taken the four flights of stairs two steps at a time (making me miss my college years, with their seemingly endless store of energy, yet again) and waved a flyer at us. In large block letters, it informed the public that
SERIOUS STUDENTS OF LITERATURE
were invited to congregate every Friday evening at 8.30 p.m. in the rec room of St. Olaf’s Hall. Below that were two handwritten lists separated by a line down the middle. The one on the left chronicled the books the club had been reading month by month (a mix of modern authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Erica Jong, and classic ones like Tolstoy and Chekhov). The other list appeared to be a record of the book club regulars. First was Udo’s own name, written down with an almost illegible flourish, as if Udo had practiced his signature until it looked satisfactorily author-like. It was followed by eight other names, each in a different handwriting style, starting with Gilberte Dubois’s name. My eyes went further down and stopped: Missy Donovan, my mother, and Soren Olsen, my father.
 

“Julia, what is it?” Abigail asked, clearly noticing my surprise.

I tapped the list. “Small world. Missy is my mom and Soren my dad.” My parents are avid readers—our house had always been littered with books—so I guessed it wasn’t that much of a surprise when I thought about it.

“Interesting,” Dr. Little said in a tone that suggested the opposite, and proceeded to wash down his sandwich with a swig from his water bottle.
 

During her college years my mother had lived with her parents in town, I knew, while Dad had taken up residence in a dorm on campus—“one of the old dorms” was how he’d described it to me. St. Olaf’s? I had never heard anything about a book club. I turned to Xave. “Do you know them? Missy Donovan and Soren Olsen?”

“Nope, but it’s a big dorm. And not everybody in the book club is from this dorm—Udo tends to attract them.”
 

Hold on. If my parents were
in
the book club, and Sabina was
with
the book club, then why hadn’t they recognized her when they came over to my house over the summer? On the other hand, it was three and a half decades later, and she seemingly wouldn’t have aged a bit. Upon meeting Sabina, Mom had said, “I feel as if I’ve known you all my life,” which now took on a whole different meaning. At the time I had not given it a second thought. Now it seemed as though Mom and Dad
had
known Sabina, not for their whole lives exactly but for a long time—longer than any of us had realized. I’d have to ask them about it when I got back.