The Time Collector

by Gwendolyn Womack

  “Did you tell her we were coming?” It was almost evening and her stomach was grumbling. She didn’t know what time zone her body was in anymore.

  “Not exactly. I did leave a message.”

  So they were just showing up to his mother’s without an invitation? That didn’t sound good.

  “All these homes were built in 1850 and have been beautifully restored,” Roan said out of the blue. He motioned to the charming street like a polite realtor.

  She couldn’t help but wonder if he was getting nervous.

  When they arrived at the Victorian townhome she watched him fish out his own keys from his pocket and unlock the door. He flipped on the lights and stepped aside to let her in. “She’s probably tied up with a lecture. I’ll see what I can cook us up for dinner.”

  Melicent’s eyebrows shot up. He was going to cook for her?

  He hung up their coats and beat a hasty retreat into the kitchen. Seconds later he called out, “Wine?”

  “Yes, please.” Never had a glass sounded more inviting. Here she was crashing his mom’s house without an invitation. Was Roan going to tell his mother everything that was going on? Were they all going to powwow together over Stuart’s laptop?

  She rubbed her nose, knowing it was surely red from the cold. And she was still standing in the entry hall like an idiot. So much for Roan’s abilities as a host. He’d vanished on her as if he was embarrassed to have brought her there.

  She hung her muffler on the peg next to her coat and left her boots by the door. When she wandered into the room off the hall, the first things that struck her were the number of books and the musty smell from the dust.

  The room held a dizzying array of wall-to-wall bookshelves that were filled to capacity with thick volumes and intimidating-looking tomes. Melicent skimmed the titles closest to her: The Complete Works of Plato, The Histories of Herodotus, The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein, and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Merely reading the titles fatigued her. Along with the immense number of books, artifacts in glass cases were scattered about and a cluttered desk sat in the corner.

  She’d just wandered into Dr. Jocelyn Matthis’s study. If an historian could be compared to a mad scientist with a laboratory, this room would definitely fit the bill. Instead of beakers and vials it was words and relics. There was also something incredibly intimate about the space. There were no pin lights for the glass displays and the books all looked well worn and used—like they’d been read too many times.

  Melicent turned toward the desk, and a lone photograph on the shelf caught her eye. At first she thought it was a picture of Roan, but it was his father. He had glasses on, his black hair was blowing in the wind, and his head was thrown back in laughter. The shot was a close-up, taken on a mountaintop with a ledge of rock and clouds visible on each side of the frame.

  Melicent studied his profile. The jawline, the aquiline nose—everything about him was Roan. She reached out and picked up the metal frame to study the photo more closely.

  The moment she held the picture in her hand she heard the music.

  The song sounded far-off, playing in the distance. Then it began to gain resonance, like a radio in the room, and she recognized it as “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers.

  Oh, my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch

  A long, lonely time …

  Images and thoughts cascaded over the music. They’d been woven into the melody. Roan’s parents had gotten married in New Orleans. It had been a boisterous celebration with a wedding parade down Bourbon Street and a second line brass band. The next day they’d flown to Mexico City for their honeymoon. Jocelyn had taken the photo of Robert right as the sun was rising on top of Popocatépetl, the most active volcano in Mexico and one of the highest mountains in North America. They’d camped overnight to catch the sunrise. Within the silence at the summit, they could feel the rumbling energy of the earth. There had not been an eruption since 1947, but they thought there might be another in their lifetime. They both agreed Roan was conceived that night.

  The imprints within the frame poured into her. Melicent didn’t know how long she stood there until she turned to find Roan standing in the doorway with two wineglasses in hand. Embarrassment flooded her cheeks and she put the picture frame back down.

  “Your father’s picture,” she said, stating the obvious and realizing she’d just witnessed some very personal memories.

  “Yes.” He came toward her to offer her the wine.

  She murmured her thanks and turned back toward the picture, still unbalanced from the deluge of information it had imparted. “Have you touched this?”

  Roan stared at the picture of his father and shook his head. “I don’t touch my parents’ things. It’d be infringing.”

  He hadn’t meant to say it as a reprimand, but still she could feel a fresh flush on her face—she had infringed. It hadn’t been intentional, but she’d seen private moments. Every anniversary Jocelyn would play “Unchained Melody” to hear her wedding song. It’s why the photo was so full of the music.

  Melicent could feel the lingering emotions from the imprints squeezing her throat, taking away any words she might have said. Instead she took a sip of the wine. After reading the imprints, it felt like the lines of Jocelyn’s life and her own had momentarily blurred, and the wedding song was an echo in the room that would never fade.

  Roan had a closed look on his face. “They were complicated. They divorced when I was thirteen.” It was obvious he didn’t like talking about it. “Some people aren’t meant to be together even if they want to be. Life gets in the way.”

  Melicent looked up at him and realized he wasn’t just talking about his parents. She set her wine down and took a step toward him. “I disagree.”

  His eyes darkened. “Melicent,” he said in warning.

  Ignoring the caution in his voice, she took the final step and kissed him, their mouths twisting in the dance that had begun on the plane and never stopped. His gloved fingers slipped around her waist and traveled up her back.

  It was the sound of the front door opening that broke them apart.

  Jocelyn Matthis stood in the foyer looking exactly as Melicent had imagined her, only now her hair was silver and her glasses were bigger. In her college years Jocelyn had been a philosophy major, a cutting-edge feminist, a wild child of the sixties and seventies, and then a wife in the eighties. When she’d gotten married she’d had cat-eye glasses and black hair, cut spiky short like Annie Lennox.

  Jocelyn’s sharp gaze took in the two of them, the wineglasses, the picture frame of her late ex-husband set ever so slightly off from where she had placed it last, and the stamp of the kiss on their faces.

  “Why, hello.” She raised both eyebrows and set down her briefcase. She shrugged off her coat. “When I asked you to come to dinner, Roan, I had hoped for advance notice.” Jocelyn said it so cordially, Melicent couldn’t tell if she was upset or not.

  “I left you a message,” Roan said.

  “Well, I lost my phone. So I didn’t get it.” Jocelyn came forward, her hand already extended to shake Melicent’s. “And you are?”

  Roan spoke up first. “This is Melicent Tilpin, from Los Angeles.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Melicent. And I bet you two were at Paddington station.” Jocelyn didn’t wait for confirmation and marched straight into the den and turned on the TV. “I’m sure they’re airing it on a loop. It’s the feel-good story of the day. Lord knows we all need one.”

  Roan and Melicent followed her into the den to catch the news story already under way. A female reporter stood beside the Paddington Bear statue.

  “Is Sirius Black alive and well? A little girl from York seems to believe. Today, five-year-old Anna Montgomery was lost in Paddington station, where she said a man in all black from Hogwarts cast a spell to find out her mother’s phone number and wrote it down on a piece of paper, allowing Anna to be reunited w
ith her family. Anna’s parents could not be more grateful to the mysterious stranger. Perhaps there is magic somewhere in the world.”

  Melicent watched the TV in fascination. They’d made the news. She looked at Roan and he gave her a little smile.

  “So I take it that was you?” Jocelyn asked in exasperation, although she already knew the answer. “Roan, you shouldn’t take risks like that. What if you had been identified? How could you have explained it?”

  “No one saw me.” Roan brushed off her concern. He took out his cell phone and opened up a tracking app. “And it says your phone is somewhere here in the house.”

  “Of course it is.” She rolled her eyes. Roan tried calling it. She shook her head. “I’m sure the battery’s dead. I’ll never find it.”

  Roan smiled. “Always the pessimist.”

  “Realist. Now, tell me exactly what’s going on. You can explain everything while you’re cooking. And please put on some house slippers. The floors are chilly.” Jocelyn sounded like a general, ordering them about. She brought two pairs of guest slippers from the entry hall closet and returned to her study to reset the photograph where it had been before. “Welcome to my home, Melicent. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you personally.”

  Melicent watched Jocelyn through the doorway and couldn’t help but detect the censure in Jocelyn’s voice that silently conveyed, Don’t touch my things. Roan’s mother knew he wouldn’t dare touch the photograph. A blush rose in Melicent’s cheeks.

  If Melicent hadn’t held the photo beforehand she would have been intimidated by the woman, but all she could think about was how incredibly lonely Jocelyn was underneath her brisk demeanor.

  “So tell me what on earth is going on—start at the beginning.” Jocelyn turned off the lights in her study, leaving Robert West’s portrait to sit in the shadows with eyes that seemed to continue to see.

  24. THE MAP

  ROAN ATE WITHOUT TASTING A THING. At this point he barely remembered cooking the pasta. He tried to focus on the conversation at the dinner table as he brought his mother up to speed about Stuart, their failed meeting in El Paso, and the mysterious oopart delivery.

  He underplayed everything, not revealing Stuart’s abduction or Melicent’s involvement. That would take all evening and require another bottle of wine between them. He could tell his mother had questions for him, too, about Melicent, the first person he’d brought to her doorstep. When they were out of this mess he could figure out what to do about his growing feelings for her. He didn’t have to touch Melicent’s wineglass to know that she was equally affected.

  When they were done eating, Jocelyn turned on the TV to catch the evening news and Roan turned to Stuart’s laptop, booting it up. Fortunately, he didn’t need a password to log on. Stuart had been careless, but then he’d also thought his computer would stay locked up in his safe.

  The three of them sitting at the dinner table with the TV on and Roan at the computer looked strangely domestic. Roan couldn’t begin to guess what Melicent was thinking. The trip must have taken a surreal turn for her—here they were in Oxford having a spaghetti dinner with his mother in a dusty, cluttered Victorian house, while a stiff-upper-lip British news anchor went on about world events. Melicent probably thought Jocelyn rude for preferring the BBC over visiting with her. Then again, maybe after reading the imprints from the picture frame, Melicent understood that his mother didn’t do small talk. He also should have warned her that Jocelyn was addicted to the news—specifically the BBC or CNN. The TV was always on.

  One of the top stories tonight was about three dozen whales that had been stranded on Tysfjord’s beaches in northern Norway. A female reporter was commenting, “Whale-watching season may have ended for the rest of Europe, but orcas abound in Tysfjord every winter through December, when the whales follow schools of herring into the fjords. However, this year something has gone amiss. The whales are ending up on the shores, scientists say, due to geomagnetic disruptions from solar storms.”

  Roan and Melicent both watched the report, and Roan couldn’t help but think the ooparts could be categorized as a geomagnetic disruption too. They were just harder to find than a whale on a beach.

  Roan turned back to the laptop and scrolled through Stuart’s files. It would take time to go through them all.

  Jocelyn was eyeing him. “So what exactly was Stuart working on with these out-of-place artifacts?”

  Roan looked up from skimming the most recent project file. “From what I can tell, he’s been tracking every oopart ever discovered … recording the time and place they originally existed in and when and where the objects were rediscovered. It’s as if they’re jumping through time.”

  Jocelyn gave Roan a stern look. “How is that possible? Jumping through time?” She peered at him over the rim of her glasses, looking every bit the discerning professor. “What are they? What are ooparts?” She even lowered the TV volume to hear the answer.

  Roan hesitated. He’d been studying the mechanics of time all his life, but when it came to ooparts, he didn’t have a clear picture of the phenomenon yet. The subject was the Bermuda Triangle of the archaeological world. Like crop circles, ooparts were either brushed off as a hoax, explained away, or ignored. But Stuart had dedicated the past several years to solving the riddle, and it had begun for him with Descartes’s ring.

  So how was a ring from a man born in France in the late 1500s found in Jordan buried in Cretaceous rock?

  He glanced between the two women—Melicent was waiting for his answer too, and he attempted to explain. “Our physical reality is made up of 99.9 percent space. Our bodies and everything around us are, in essence, the leftover .1 percent, organized within a vast sea of energy. These out-of-place artifacts are jumping in and out of the electromagnetic boundary between our .1 percent and that space. If the ooparts on Stuart’s list are legitimate anomalies, then the question becomes, have they been jumping into new locations and timelines with intention? Or is it random?”

  Jocelyn nodded, pensive. Through Roan’s ability she and her son had learned a long time ago that the impossible was possible.

  He went on. “These ooparts could even be the result of a time-traveling experiment in the future. Right now we don’t know. Which seems to be the question Stuart is trying to answer.” Roan glanced back to the computer, toggling between files. Stuart had been unable to correlate all the ooparts’ timelines together to find any pattern.

  “And you say he’s unreachable now?” Jocelyn asked.

  Roan nodded, a knot in his stomach. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her Stuart had been captured by the men who wanted his research. Jocelyn was the one who’d introduced Stuart to Roan in the first place; he was a family friend. Jocelyn had met the unorthodox archaeologist, a pioneer who paired psychometry with archaeology, and invited him to do several guest lectures for her students at Oxford. After Stuart’s first lecture, she’d called Roan, insisting he had to meet him.

  Roan had been surprised by the suggestion, knowing her and his father’s opinion of allowing anyone to know about his abilities. It was the one thing the estranged couple had always agreed upon. Only Holly knew about his gift. His parents had kept Roan sheltered for most of his life.

  Roan flew out to Oxford and sat in on a lecture to hear what Stuart Alby had to say. The outspoken Brit used his psychometric ability to survey archaeological sites, attempting to assess what had existed in the past at a location and what may be buried there. His success rate was good enough that he had earned a name in the field and worked with clients across the globe. He called what he did “intuitive archaeology.”

  Roan watched him explain with glee to a hall of rapt Oxford history students how reading bones was his specialty. He held up a femur to the class with a dramatic pause. “I can pick up a bone and gather the general facts of a person’s life. I may not always get it right, but I get it right enough times to count. Because bones,” Stuart said, “can tell you anything.”

  Ro
an listened, amazed that he had not only found another psychometrist, but a psychometrist who enjoyed the notoriety of being one.

  “Using intuitives at digs,” Stuart said, pointing to himself, “is a fringe idea and usually scoffed at by academia—the word psychic is even more taboo—and yet here I am at Oxford talking to you chaps, so I can’t be too batty.” The lecture hall broke into laughter. “Only one renowned archaeologist in Canada, Dr. Norman Emerson, from the University of Toronto, has ever officially shared his findings while working with a psychometrist on his digs. That was with George McMullen. Emerson and McMullen worked closely together for decades until Dr. Emerson passed away in the late seventies, but they had many successes.”

  He gave them an engaging smile. “I have found Byzantine ruins, lost mosaics, buried columns, hidden statues, and even a stone labyrinth all with the power of my hands and my mind.” He held up his hands to make his point. “Now, I love all the gadgets and technology just as much as the next archaeologist. I work with magnetometers, aerial thermal imaging. I rely on light detection, geophysics, and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. But there’s something I can do that ground-penetrating radar simply can’t, and that is to sense the ghost ship of the past that is sailing all around us.” He opened his arms wide. “So don’t be afraid to hop aboard.”

  The lecture ended to roaring applause. Roan introduced himself after the last student left. The instant camaraderie and connection between them was the start of a friendship that cemented quickly.

  “My God. I hope he’s all right.” Jocelyn’s eyes were bright. She got up to clear away the dishes. Melicent jumped up to help, but Jocelyn brushed aside her attempt.

  Melicent abandoned her place at the table to study the laptop too and pulled up a chair right next to Roan, making a loud noise in the process. She pointedly ignored Roan’s questioning look and leaned in to study the screen.

  Roan could feel his mother’s eyes on them. Jocelyn was wondering how in the world Melicent factored into all of this—a question he didn’t want to answer.