Fortune

by Craig W. Turner

Dexter sat back, laughing. “Time travel?” He looked at Jeff. “You brought me here for this?”

  Erica read the body language between them, the taste of the magnificent wine in her mouth forgotten. Until now, it hadn’t occurred to her this could really be happening, but the men’s reactions spoke volumes, even as they hid them. Dexter was clearly putting on a show, and Jeff didn’t seem to want to do so. They were just looking at one another, set at an impasse. She devised a couple of options in the conversation – either make her fellow historian uncomfortable enough to get him to tell his story, or turn her attention to Jeff, who definitely wanted to say something, but hadn’t yet. “Jeff?” she asked, prodding him to give some answer to what she was seeing, and what she’d already seen.

  “Erica,” Jeff said, setting his glass on the coffee table, “before we engage in this conversation, you need to ask yourself if it’s a conversation that you want to have.”

  “Why wouldn’t I want to have it?”

  “The fact that you’re asking that question suggests to us that you might not have thought this all the way through,” Dexter said. She’d been looking at Jeff, but as she turned back toward Dexter, she noticed his demeanor had changed. He was now gravely serious, no trace of the obviously false laughter he’d given her a moment ago.

  She found herself not knowing what to say. She couldn’t envision a scenario in which there would be bad news for her, and reasoned that perhaps they were creating this line of thought to discourage her from wanting to know more. They’d discussed and scripted it. Without question, they were up to something, having already miraculously come across a treasure that was deemed a century before to be unrecoverable. But for some reason, their warning struck a chord. Still, she was a scientist, and scientists didn’t shy away from the truth, despite any repercussions. “So, it is time travel, then?” she said, purposefully being assertive. “Why else would a historian and a physicist be working so closely together?”

  Jeff was nodding, but solemnly. She took another gulp of her wine, ignoring the fact that it was a priceless delicacy and not simply a remedy for worn nerves. Was it possible she was imagining this, after her sleepless schedule these last few days?

  Jeff sat forward. “It is time travel, Erica, yes.” He waited a moment to let it sink in, then continued. “We have been to the Gold Rush era and we did see your, what, great-great-great-great grandfather, Lucius. We did hold up Joe Wilton and take his 60 bars of gold. And those are the bars of gold that you saw yesterday. The beauty of gold is that it is difficult to date, but if there was a way you would probably see that those bars were minted within the last year. I don’t know how you put two-and-two together, though clearly Emeka’s scar has something to do with it, but I suppose if there’s anyone we should be letting in on the secret, it’s you.”

  “So they’re fakes?” she asked quietly, the words barely getting out.

  “No, they’re really Wilton’s bars from his mint. They just skipped about 160 years of history.”

  She was silent for a second, then took another sip of wine. “You’re right, maybe I didn’t want to know.” She reminded herself this couldn’t possibly be happening, so she might as well stay calm.

  “How did you know about Robert Miles?” Jeff asked.

  She didn’t expect to, but she let out an uncomfortable laugh. She’d lost control of a conversation that she’d wanted to steer. She could feel her heart beginning to beat more swiftly. “Ask Dexter. That’s our job. To research history and make connections. I take it you were the four mystery men standing in the road?”

  “Well, three men and one woman,” Jeff said. “How on earth did you put that together?”

  “You should know I’ve done an awful lot of reading about American history,” she said. “And I remember things. I call it ‘Jeopardy knowledge’ – those parts of your brain where you store information that’s only useful when you’re playing Jeopardy. Or, of course, if you’re trying to hunt down time traveling bandits. You’re right, it was your friend – Emeka. The scar on his face.” She interrupted herself, shaking her head. “I can’t believe I’m treating this like a rational conversation. Look, Wilton wrote in his diary about being accosted by a man with a large scar on his face. And Miles told the police that his money was stolen by a man with a ‘grotesque’ scar on his face. Then, who shows up to cash in on Wilton’s gold on the front cover of the Daily News?”

  Jeff looked at Dexter, shaking his head. “I told him to keep his mask on.”

  “Hold on,” Erica said, leaning forward herself. “You’re just going to let me walk in here and decipher the code? I say it’s time travel and you just up and agree? That seems a little too easy. Tell me what’s going on.” Either they somehow really were time travelers with guilty consciences, or they were putting on a charade for her. But why? Or, she told herself, perhaps she was simply dreaming the whole thing. She let out a chuckle of uncertainty and watched their confusion over why she might be laughing. Is that how people in a dream would react?

  Without a word, Jeff stood and walked across the room to the closet, opening the door. He reached in and pulled out a black bag, returning to the couch. He unzipped it and tossed it onto the sofa next to Erica. “Recognize that?”

  She reached inside the bag and pulled out a small stack of $100 bills, though they were older – the 1928 series, featuring a picture of Benjamin Franklin and the language “Redeemable in gold on demand...” that once defined U.S. currency. A nice historical find, sure, but they meant little to her. “Not particularly.”

  “That right there is Robert Miles’ money, the money he stole from the First Bank of Jackson in Learned, Mississippi in 1931.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. Cuss words rarely came out of her mouth.

  “Why?” Jeff said, defiantly. “We already showed you we have Wilton’s gold. Why would this be any different?”

  Erica took a deep breath. She pulled another handful of bills from the bag, inspecting them. Could this be real?

  “We also have Miles’ gun,” Dexter said.

  “His baseball bat gun?”

  He nodded. “Emeka’s got it at his house. We can always call him and demand that he come over as well.” She noticed Dexter scowl at Jeff.

  “This is all too much,” she said. “Where else have you been? Or, should I say, when else have you been?”

  “Nowhere of significance yet,” Jeff said.

  “What do you mean ‘yet’?” she asked. “You’re going somewhere else?”

  “Yes, Jeff,” Dexter said, looking at him with a silly grin of annoyance on his face. “Tell us about ‘yet.’” She continued to pick up that the two of them were not on the same page on multiple topics.

  Jeff held up his hands. “That’s for another conversation,” he said.

  “Okay,” said Erica. “Let’s say I’m going along with this – that I believe what you’re saying. Which I still can’t believe what I’m hearing. You’ve been to see Joe Wilton. You’ve been to see Robert Miles. What else are you not telling me the full story about? I’m not seeing the part that made you so foreboding, the part where I have to decide if I want to have this conversation. Is there some responsibility of me knowing this information that I should be concerned about? Does all of this fall under the clause of ‘I can tell you, but then I have to kill you?’“

  Jeff laughed at that one. “Not quite,” he said. “While I’d prefer that you didn’t say anything to anyone about this, and allow us to continue to study the phenomenon as scientists, you’re under no obligation to us. I do know that the scholarly world and the media tend to frown upon claims of time travel, so if you decide to go public with this, I’d craft your story carefully.”

  “No... I don’t think I’ll be telling anyone anything. Not when I don’t understand it myself, at least not yet.”

  He sighed deeply, then glanced at Dexter, who she thought she saw slightly shake his head in a negative at Jeff. “Alright, well here goes,” Jeff said. “When
we went back in time-”

  “Wait,” she said, “how is it that you do this?”

  “That’s also for another conversation,” he said, then continued. “When we went back to the Gold Rush and ambushed Joe Wilton and his team, something unexpected happened. See, where we came from originally, Wilton’s team was ultimately ambushed, and his gold was stolen – but not until the next morning, when their camp was ransacked by a gangster known as ‘Bad Dan’ Carmichael.”

  “No it wasn’t,” she said, correcting him.

  Jeff smiled at her, but it was a cautious smile. “Rest assured it was. When Carmichael attacked the camp, there was a shoot-out, and several members of Wilton’s team were murdered.” She looked over at Dexter, who was uncomfortably shifting in his seat. “Lucius Fitzsimmons was among them.”

  “That’s impossible,” she said, frustrated. “I would’ve read about it. Daniel Carmichael – I don’t know where you got ‘Bad Dan’ from – was known to be an inept petty thief, robbing miners of their food, but never really coming up with a big score. He died a pauper in Sacramento.”

  “You know that he crossed Wilton’s path, though, yes?”

  “Well, sure,” she said. “The day after Wilton was robbed, he hit the camp, but came away with nothing...” She watched Jeff’s face lighten up as it dawned on her. “... because there was nothing to steal. Because you’d stolen everything the night before. How’d you know?”

  “Wilton’s diary.”

  “Wilton’s diary doesn’t say anything about...” She stopped herself. “Man, I keep doing that. In Wilton’s diary, he writes about you. Then he writes about Carmichael. You’re saying that Wilton’s diary changed?”

  Now Dexter jumped in. “To you, no,” he said, with a tone that was almost defensive of her. “It was always the way it was. To us, we based everything we did on a completely different recounting.”

  Erica attempted to process that concept, but there was little chance of that happening. Instead, she took the last swig of her wine and held up the bottle to Jeff. “I might need to get drunk now – do you have anything cheaper than this?”

  He attempted a warm smile and nodded, heading into the kitchen. Great – after all that she would now get the kid gloves. A moment later, he returned with an open bottle and refilled her glass with red.

  “You changed history,” she said, after drinking half the glass down. “I’m not sure I’m okay with that.”

  “It is what it is now, though,” Jeff said.

  “It is what it is?” Despite the amazement she was feeling about the topic in general, this last piece brought with it a sadness, especially with how glib they were about it. “I need to recap this: You read a diary written by Wilton in which he writes that he’s carrying 60 bars of gold, and that his camp is ransacked by Carmichael, who in your world was called ‘Bad Dan,’ probably because of this heist. Was Wilton killed in the attack? No, of course not -- you wouldn’t have had the diary then. So, you and your friend with the scar on his cheek take advantage of the trickiness of the Henness Pass to ambush Wilton before Carmichael can. You come back to the present time with the gold, and Carmichael ends up with nothing.” She paused, taking a slow gulp of her wine as she looked between the two men. Suddenly she realized why they’d given their caveat. “Wait a second – you said that, where you came from, Lucius Fitzsimmons was killed in the ambush?”

  There was a long, palpable silence before Jeff slowly nodded his head.

  “But in this new reality that you created, the confrontation with Carmichael didn’t turn into a shootout because there was nothing to steal. So Lucius and the others who’d been killed that morning... lived on. They made it to California, they found a living, and-”

  “They started families,” Dexter said, finishing her thought for her.

  “Oh my God,” she said, shaking her head. She stood up and walked halfway across the floor, then turned back to Jeff. “The bathroom?” she said, barely getting the words from her mouth. He pointed down the hallway and she fled.

  Inside the bathroom, she looked into the mirror as she splashed water on her face. The time travel and the changing of history was one thing. Once she left Jeff’s house, she could honestly choose to believe it or not. But the notion that Jeff’s time travel was responsible for her very existence was overbearing. Would that mean that there was an alternate reality in which she did not exist? Where Wilton’s diary was completely different and where her great-great-great-great grandfather had been killed? Were there alternate realities for every decision she and all of her ancestors had made on a daily basis? It was too much. Her head ached, and she knew it wasn’t from the wine.

  Tears began to stream down her face. She didn’t want to believe it could be true, but at the same time she couldn’t come up with a good reason not to.

  She heard a knock on the door and opened it to see Jeff standing in the hallway.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “If I’d had it my way, you never would’ve had to have known anything about this, and you would go about your life knowing that everything had an intentional purpose. This was a contingency we didn’t plan for.”

  “A contingency? I’m a contingency? My family is a contingency?” She told herself to calm down, hearing hysteria in her own voice. He hadn’t meant it like that. She pulled the towel off the rack and wiped her eyes.

  “No,” he said, clearly trying to work his way through what he wanted to enunciate. “But having met you, to me, knowing you... seems to me to be far better than the alternative.”

  He made no sense, so she looked at him for a moment, determined to say something biting, but then softened. He was either trying to console her or, for some god-awful reason, flirt with her, but was failing at both. “Please just give me a minute. I’ll be right out.”

  Jeff nodded and she closed the door. She blotted her face with the towel until she looked somewhat presentable, then left the bathroom. In the living room, Jeff sat alone.

  “Dexter left,” he said. “He said he was too analytical to be of any help now. Which is probably true.”

  “I think I’m going to leave,” Erica said, trying to hold back more tears.

  “You don’t have to,” he said, standing. “We can talk about this. I don’t want you driving if you’re not up for it. You’re welcome to stay here as long as you need.”

  “No, I need to be away from this,” she said, picking up her coat from the couch and putting it on. She walked over by the door. “I’m not quite sure what to say. Thanks?” She shook her head and turned to leave.

  “Wait – can I call you? I really want to talk more with you.”

  She stopped just outside the door and turned back toward him. “I think the answer to that question has to be ‘no’. It was nice to meet you, Jeff.”

  With that, she turned and hopped down the stairs and into her rental car waiting by the curb in front of the house. Without a wave or even a look, she pulled out of the spot and took off down the street. Several blocks down, she found an elementary school, where she pulled into the empty parking lot, finding an isolated corner near the playground.

  Then she put her head in her hands and cried.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Erica’s car disappeared down the street. Though she was no longer in sight, Jeff stood watching after her for some time. Had he made the right decision in telling her? He thought so – but it wasn’t all about Erica and her feelings, which, of course, he was concerned about. More so than he thought he would be. A large part of what was spinning in his mind was the reaction that his team would have, and since they were in the midst of planning their next mission, he couldn’t afford to lose any of their trust. Especially Dexter, who was starting to take on the role of perpetual devil’s advocate. It also probably didn’t help that Jeff had sprung this on him without advance notice.

  His focused his thinking to conjure up a hook – some inner urge that had made him want, no, need to tell her about her confusing past. Stepping outs
ide himself, even he had to admit that it could easily be perceived that this was all a game to him. In his heart, he thought it was right to tell her. But that was going to be difficult to explain to them. And to get buy-in on. Even though there was little hope of her turning around and coming back down the road, he gave her sufficient time to do so before returning inside again. He closed the door behind him.

  “That was a mistake,” Dexter said, leaning against the doorway and into the dining room, holding a bottle of Yoo-Hoo. He’d been hiding in the kitchen, both of them certain that she would disappear upon leaving the bathroom.

  “That’s mine,” Jeff said without emotion.

  Dexter laughed. “I figured under the circumstances, what with opening seventy-year old bottles of wine in the middle of the afternoon, you could spare a Yoo-Hoo. But seriously... that was not a smart thing to do.”

  “It was the right thing to do, though.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” he said, walking slowly to the couch and sitting down. “There was no need to tell her anything. It’s like shopping for your wife and spending two hours looking at a diamond necklace, then opting to buy her a scarf instead – and then going home and telling her about the necklace. There’s no good can come of it.”

  “Diamond necklace? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Alright, that’s a stretch. Let me give you another. My parents were split-up and my dad signed me up for baseball. My mom signed me up for gymnastics. I loved baseball, and I hated gymnastics. One afternoon, my baseball coach scheduled practice for the same time as when gymnastics class was scheduled.”

  “I’m learning a lot about why you are how you are.” Jeff sat on the other couch, facing him. He refilled his glass with the cheap wine.

  “Nice. Anyway, I happened to be with my mom that day, so she takes me to gymnastics instead of baseball. I didn’t even know there was a practice scheduled – my parents must’ve decided among themselves. We’re driving home from gymnastics and my mom tells me that my team had a practice that night. I still remember the thoughts I had – I would’ve been perfectly happy never knowing that there was a practice, but something in her felt the need to tell me. Then, I was pissed.”