The Bellbottom Incident (2 page)

“I didn’t know that. All right, will do.” As he snapped in a dog safety restraint and received an outraged look from Celer in return, I added, “When you bring Wanda’s things later, do you want to stay for dinner—and, er, breakfast? Abigail and Sabina are planning on pizza and a movie. I could pick up a bottle of wine and some Swedish meatballs from Ingrid’s for us.”

“It’s a date. I’ll bring dessert.”

“Can you make it something good and not, you know, fruit?”

“What’s wrong with fruit?” We always teased each other about our opposite predilections for food—Nate opted for healthy choices, and I preferred taste to nutrition. Shaking his head at me in mock disapproval, he said, “I have a pecan pie in the freezer. Will that do?”

“And vanilla ice cream?”

“And vanilla ice cream.”

 
Holding Wanda’s collar as a precaution against her running after the Jeep, I watched Nate back out of the driveway. It felt good to have outwitted Quinn. I didn’t think he was a real threat anyway. He was just needling us a bit, making sure he didn’t get into any trouble over the fallout of his miserably failed attempt at blackmail. It would all pass in a day or two, and we’d swap the dogs back. Everything would return to normal, or what passed for it. We were three adults—four, counting Quinn—who were playing games, making decisions as if Sabina’s opinion mattered not at all.

Sabina rolled out of bed at around nine thirty, embarrassed to have slept so late. She didn’t complain when we explained that Celer had been sent to Mary Kirkland’s house for a few days, but she was quiet all day, even when dutifully helping me walk Wanda.
 

The call came later, when I was sipping a refreshing cup of tea at the kitchen table, having just spent a good twenty minutes rolling a ball along the living room carpet for Wanda to chase after. Sabina was next door doing homework, and Abigail was on her way back from campus with pizza for the two of them. As for my part of the house, a plateful of Ingrid’s Swedish meatballs was warming in the oven, and I was expecting Nate’s footsteps outside the front door any minute. I thought the phone might be Nate calling to say that he was running late.

It wasn’t Nate. It was Professor Mooney.

“Julia, we have a problem.”
 

I set the cup down. Xavier was not calling at dinnertime on a Saturday evening to tell me that we needed to order more staplers for the lab or that STEWie’s generator required a new part. What had gone wrong in the TTE lab this time? Another case of attempted murder? Had someone—again—used STEWie for a joyride into the past? I was ready for anything.
 

“Sabina—she came here tonight. She’s gone, Julia.”

“What? Where?”

“Back in time.”

I hadn’t been ready for this.

“That’s impossible,” I said, almost knocking over the teacup as I scrambled to my feet. “She’s next door, doing her homework. I can hear the TV—the Weather Channel is on. Abigail went to get some work done on her thesis and is picking up a pizza for the two of them on her way back from campus. They’re thinking of catching a movie later,” I added, as if that settled matters.

Wanda had jumped up from under the table when I did, anticipating more playtime, and was hovering around my feet with her tongue hanging out.

“Hold on, Dr. Mooney, I’m going next door to check.”

“Julia—”
 

But I was already out the back door, cell phone in hand, with Wanda at my heels. The mother-in-law suite shared by Sabina and Abigail had a separate entrance from the back deck. I knocked, as I always do—it was my house, yes, but it was their living space—then, when there was no answer, I peeked in through the window. The curtains were drawn, but a crack in their middle allowed me to see inside. The TV was on louder than usual and was showing some kind of blizzard disaster story. There was no one on the couch watching it.

“Julia?” Professor Mooney’s voice crackled faintly through the phone in my hand.
 

The door was not locked. Wanda and I went in and I turned off the TV, then called out, “Sabina? Abigail?” and received no answer. The suite consisted of a small living room, where Abigail slept on the sofa, a half kitchen, Sabina’s bedroom, and a bathroom. All were easily checked and all were empty.
 

An odd impulse led me to slide open the closet in Sabina’s bedroom. She wasn’t inside, of course, but I glanced around, as if the neatly organized shelves might hold a clue to where she was. Her Pompeii clothes, a simple dress and sandals, were not on the top shelf where she usually kept them.
 

Almost tripping over Wanda, who had quieted down a bit, as if picking up that something was wrong, I turned and took a good second look around the room. The walls, covered with photos we had taken in Pompeii and lists and notes Abigail and I had crafted to help Sabina acclimate to modern life, told me nothing. Her bed had been made—she excelled at keeping up with her chores, which had always made me uneasy rather than pleased. Like I said, she had toiled away much of her young life as an indentured servant, then as helper in her father’s shop, so it would have been refreshing to see her bedroom messy once in a while.

“Huh,” I said.
 

“Julia?”

I picked up the square wooden frame from the bedside table. What was usually in it was a snapshot, the same one that was on my desk at work, of Sabina with her twenty-first-century family: Abigail and me, Nate, Xavier, Helen, Kamal, and Jacob, all of us at our Fourth of July picnic two months ago by Sunniva Lake.

The frame was empty.

I sat down on the bed, wrinkling its crisp sheets. Wanda jumped up next to me, and I didn’t even have the heart to tell her to get down.
 

She was gone. Sabina really was gone.

Pedal to the floor, I drove my aged Honda down Thornberg’s quiet streets to campus. Abigail, who had shown up at the house balancing a pizza box on her bike handlebars, was next to me in the passenger seat. She had left the bike and the pizza in the garage, both of us still not quite believing that Sabina wasn’t on some impromptu stroll around the neighborhood. I had texted Nate to meet us at the lab.

“Wait a second,” Abigail said as a red traffic light temporarily halted us. “Tell me again what Dr. Mooney said.”

“Just that she has jumped back in time.”

“To where? How?”

I had no answers. “Did you know she came to campus today?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I wonder how she got into the lab without anyone noticing…And, more importantly, how did she know how to work STEWie?”
 

“Well, the thing is, Dr. Mooney has been letting her help with his Slingshot experiments.”

I hadn’t known that. Sabina often spent her after-school hours in the grad student office where Abigail had her desk, doing her homework, or just wandered the campus people-watching—and, apparently, hanging out in the time-travel research lab. As the light turned green and I slammed the pedal to the floor again, Abigail added, “Damn. Do you think she figured out that the real reason we swapped Celer and Wanda was to protect her?”

“And decided to jump back to Pompeii, no longer wanting to be used as ammunition for Quinn to blackmail us with?…I don’t know. But it couldn’t be pre-eruption Pompeii she jumped to, could it? She was already there then.”

“Oh, no.”

“What?”

“What if she jumped back straight into the eruption, or its aftermath?”

Well, that was an awful thought. I shoved it aside as we pulled into the parking lot. “Whatever happened, we’re going to get her back. That’s all there is to it. Even if we have to check every nook and cranny of History to find her.”

We hurried into the TTE building. Oscar, the security guard, gave us a friendly wave. Used to the various comings and goings in the TTE lab, he didn’t seem surprised to see us there on a Saturday night. Time travel does not fit neatly into a nine-to-five schedule, but then again neither does Oscar, who hardly needs any sleep and spends most of his day at his post.
 

“Julia—Abigail—hold up.”

It was Nate, who must have pulled into the parking lot right behind us. I guessed that my text had reached him en route to my house—he was in slacks and a nice shirt, his hair still a bit wet from a shower. As he joined us in the hallway, the police radio on his hip crackled (he was always on call) with a bit of mundane campus business. It was Officer Lars Van Underberg checking in to say he’d put a stop to a student prank involving a dozen dorm mattresses and some fun-loving seniors. Nate instructed the officer to stand by in case we needed him. Our eyes met over Abigail’s head as she typed the security code into the small panel to the right of the lab doors, but he said nothing. What was there to say?

The three of us filed into the TTE lab. This was where STEWie researchers worked on turning legend and myth into textbook material. A typical week in the lab could yield anything from video footage of the construction of the Mayan pyramids to details about Winston Churchill’s boyhood.
 

Xavier Mooney was at one of the workstations, his shoulders stooped in his lab coat as he pondered something on the computer screen. He was alone. STEWie’s basket, the one that had taken Sabina away, must have been gone for a while—send-offs into the past generated so much heat that cryogenic equipment under the floor was necessary, and the lab was already back to its usual chilly state. But it wasn’t the cold that sent a sudden shiver down my spine; it was a feeling of foreboding, one the fleece jacket I’d grabbed on my way out into the crisp late-September evening could do nothing to ease.
 

“She left a note.” Dr. Mooney nodded toward a piece of paper taped to one of the blackboards, above a collage of photos taken on previous STEWie runs. “The basket took off an hour and thirteen minutes ago…No, fourteen minutes,” he amended, checking the timer he had set running on his computer screen.

Nate pulled down the note in one sharp movement, read it, and passed it to Abigail and me. Writing English by hand was a skill Sabina was still working on, so she had typed up the note on one of the lab computers, where the spell-checker was her friend, and printed it out. Abigail read it aloud:

BEST THING TO GO. IF STAY, ONLY MORE TROUBLE WILL BE. THANK YOU FOR FRIENDSHIP AND HOME.
 

Sabina had added an additional line below:
 

SEND CELER TO ME, YES?

I felt tears well up in my eyes and didn’t bother blinking them away.
 

“It doesn’t say where she jumped to,” Nate pointed out.

The professor spun around in the barstool-like lab chair to face us. “Seventy-six. That’s where she went.”
 

“You mean Pompeii of 76 AD?” I asked, confused by this new bit of information. “A couple of years before the eruption? How can that be? She’s already there.”

The professor tugged at the strands of his graying hair. He was that rare breed of academic—beloved by students and colleagues alike. He took the note back and explained in the affable manner that was the hallmark of his lectures but felt a bit strained, given the circumstances, “Helen is away at a conference, so I thought I might as well get some work done. It took me a while to notice something was wrong. The lab felt a little warm, but I didn’t think much of it—I was already sweaty from biking—and my attention was elsewhere.” He gestured toward the workbench. Whereas STEWie was what you might call old-generation time-travel equipment—large and clunky were the best descriptors for the nested array of mirrors and lasers that filled the oversized lab—the Slingshot was portable and the next thing in time-travel technology. Since our time in Pompeii, Dr. Mooney had focused his energies on perfecting the device, which at first glance looked like the junkyard edition of a laptop. He was tinkering with a new version, 3.0, and had taken apart the prototype, Version 1.0, which had been damaged by a direct hit from a bullet. Its parts lay strewn all around the worktable.

He went on. “Then I saw the last entry in STEWie’s log. Sabina may have thought she was going back to the ancient Roman world, but no, it was not
that
seventy-six, and it wasn’t Pompeii either. She’s still on campus. Only in near time. The year 1976.”

I breathed a small sigh of relief—1976 wasn’t that bad as these things went. She’d find the campus somewhat different, but she would be safe. There would be buildings for her to take shelter in, water fountains to quench her thirst, people she could turn to for help.

“Hold on,” Nate said. “Are you saying she arranged this alone? How is that possible, Professor?”

“The system was ready for Steven’s run tomorrow. For his ongoing series of experiments in 1976,” Dr. Mooney explained. “She must have misinterpreted the date.”

Steven Little was one of the two junior professors in the TTE department. I knew all about his research, and none of it had anything to do with Sabina.

“All right, so the system was set for 1976,” Nate said, then followed up with the same questions I had asked Abigail: “But how did she know how to work STEWie? It’s not just a matter of simply stepping into the basket, is it? There are generators and things that must be turned on. And how did she get into the lab in the first place if no one was here?”

“It’s my fault.” Dr. Mooney got up to tape the note back on the blackboard, as if it belonged there with the other historical documents and photos. “I’ve been giving her free rein in the lab. She’s so bright and has a real aptitude for math and physics—but, more to the point, I reasoned that she has a
right
to know how time travel works. It saved her life and brought her here, after all. And so I’ve let her help me with a test run on occasion. No, nothing like that,” he said, noticing our shock. “I don’t mean I’ve let her step into the basket. Of course not. She’s only assisted me in sending the mobile robot on quick STEWie runs and in testing the Slingshot around campus.”
 

He didn’t need to explain why he himself could not step into STEWie’s basket again, not for the adventurous, uncharted kind of time travel in any case. Dr. Mooney had been grounded in the present by an immune system illness that put him at risk when traveling to places and times before the advent of antibiotics. He was one of the original minds behind STEWie, the other two being Gabriel Rojas, who was on a well-earned sabbatical after having been wrongfully accused of murdering a handful of people, myself included, and Lewis Sunder, who was now behind bars for his attempt to commit the crime of which he’d accused his colleague.