Fortune

by Craig W. Turner

  A short while later, lying there and still staring at the ceiling in the dark, he realized that this approach wasn’t good enough either. He hopped out of bed, ripped open the shades to let the sunlight pour in, and quickly changed his clothes. After a quick brush of his teeth and tossing on a Yankees cap to manage his wild hair, he darted out of the bedroom and down the stairs, where he found Dexter sitting on the sofa with his feet up on the coffee table, working on his laptop.

  “What’s going on?” Dexter asked, looking up.

  “I’ve gotta go.”

  “Where?”

  “San Francisco. I’ve gotta tell her that I’m going to turn my work in.”

  “To who?” Dexter set the computer on the table and sat up. “The government?”

  “It’s what she wants me to do,” he said. “I love her.”

  Dexter laughed. “Okay, we all know that. But isn’t that a pretty big step?”

  “Which part?”

  “All of it. Don’t you want to take a minute to think about it before acting irrationally?”

  He thought about what Dexter said, and for the first time all night felt as though he wasn’t acting irrationally. He shook his head and smiled a boyish grin.

  To which Dexter shook his own head. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that I am unable to stop you from doing anything,” he said. “But I will say this. There are repercussions to everything you do. I’m an example of that. You go down this path, it might not end well.”

  “She’s worth it,” Jeff said simply, and hurried into the kitchen to get his keys. When he returned, he stopped for a moment. “Why are you still here? I figured you’d be well on your way back to Philly by now.”

  Dexter had returned to his screen. “I’m taking a little time to learn about myself here. I have to tell you, Jeff, what the other me saw in that woman I don’t know. I can’t abide being there.”

  “Wow.” His mind was already in California, and Dexter’s suffering was going to add a whole new level of guilt that he couldn’t handle right now.

  “Just so you know,” his friend continued, “I’m supporting you because I’m your friend. But if you end your time program to get this girl, and you get to California and it wasn’t what you imagined – and I’m stuck in this new life – I may kill you.”

  “Fair enough,” Jeff said, waiting a moment for a follow-up laugh that didn’t come, then he headed quickly out the door to his car. He had no intent on running out on his friend, but he had bigger priorities at the moment. Before driving away, he texted Erica to call him when she landed.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Erica deplaned in Sacramento, thanked the pilot and flight attendant for a wonderful flight, and headed across the runway to the terminal. Once inside, she made her way to four different rental car counters before she found a Mini Cooper, a car she’d always wanted to drive. She gave them the necessary paperwork and a few minutes later was headed East on I-80. It was a drive she’d taken many times before, but never with the freedom she was experiencing on this particular trip.

  On the way, she made a familiar turn off of the highway and into the parking lot of the Gold Rush Museum. She spent a quick fifteen minutes catching up with some friends she hadn’t seen in a while and carefully flipped through the Wilton diary one more time. She laughed to herself when she read the account of Wilton’s bravado, now knowing the truth of what had happened. Then she bid goodbye to the museum staff and was back on the road, headed for the site of the historic marker she’d lobbied so hard to establish.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  At the Newark Airport, Jeff had almost leapt for joy when he was told that there was a seat available on the 1:15 p.m. flight direct to San Francisco. He paid for the ticket by credit card and crawled through a security line before camping at the gate about 45 minutes before his flight was to take off. Too excited by the spontaneity of his newest mission, he realized he hadn’t eaten anything and would likely starve on a six-hour flight, so he grabbed a turkey wrap from one of the concession stands that he could take with him on the plane.

  He checked his phone. He was a little unnerved that Erica, who should’ve landed by then, hadn’t answered his text. The message had been nondescript, and being so, he had to imagine that her knowledge of his intentions when she left wouldn’t necessarily mean she’d jump at a chance to talk to him. But he needed her to know that he was a changed man. And in his mind what he was doing was pretty romantic – hopping on a flight across the country. Even for the unlikely couple of a lab rat and history geek.

  Again, he texted her, but ten minutes later he’d still received no response. Finally, as they began to announce the pre-board information for his flight, he walked away from the gate, looked up the number to the private jet service on his phone and called. They answered and he inquired about the flight he’d chartered leaving from Teterboro that morning - just wanting to make sure it had made it safely to San Francisco.

  He heard typing on the other end of the line, then the operator said, “Well, Dr. Jacobs, I see that the flight landed safely. However, it appears that it was diverted to Sacramento.”

  “Diverted?” he asked. “Any idea why?”

  “My notes say it was at the request of the passenger, but there are no details. I’m sorry, sir.”

  “At the request of-”

  Jeff dropped his phone to the ground, where it bounced along the carpet. He could barely hear the operator calling after him, “Sir? Dr. Jacobs? Are you there?”

  Jeff’s mind crashed the way an overloaded hard drive would – and like its computer counterpart, his body froze. Every memory advanced on him at once. Erica’s probing about Wilton. Her insistence on learning how to use the time device independently. Her willingness to get close to him, but never too close. Her overwhelming concern about Dexter and her promise to him that she would do what she could to fix things. It was too confusing and muddled an array of thoughts, and he put his head in his hands to cope with it.

  She was headed to Wilton Pass to go back to 1849 and put things back the way they were in the original history that he’d skewed with his selfish experiments. She’d played him like a fiddle to get everything she needed to make it happen and he’d gone right along with it. Everything that had happened mattered for nothing. She was 3,000 miles away and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  The airline rep at the desk called for seating for his flight to begin, but he didn’t budge. He couldn’t move. It was worthless. If she was successful, she would change history and most likely he would never be sitting in this airport waiting to board this flight. There was no way of telling what would happen, which left him in a vacuum of indecision. How do you sit and wait for history to change around you? What action can you take to prepare yourself?

  The strangest thing was that he wasn’t angry with her. He, for the first time since they’d met, could see her point-of-view. She’d been incensed with him for announcing that it was his experiment that had ensured her existence, and she’d been right to have felt that way. This was her retribution. And she deserved it.

  At the very least, though, he felt as though he wanted her to know that he was aware of what was happening. For whatever purpose.

  He picked his phone up off of the ground to see that the call to the booking agency had been cut off from the other end. He opened a text window to write her a message, then paused for a moment, looking at all of the activity taking place around him. None of these people had any idea the game that was being played around them, and none of them ever would.

  He hit “Send” on the phone, then picked up his bag, turned, and walked away from the gate down the long hallway of the terminal.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Erica pulled the Mini to the side of the road across the street from her sign – the one that she’d fought so long and hard to get. In a way, it was a perfect end to her story. Her very existence had everything to do with that sign. They went hand-in-hand,
and neither made any sense without the other. She pulled a quick U-turn and parked on the westbound side of the road next to the sign, then got out of the car and took a moment to reflect. She took a deep breath and read the sign top to bottom:

  “Wilton Pass - 1849: On this site, pioneer Joe Wilton and his party were ambushed by bandits in one of the largest heists in California history. Over $1 million in gold bricks was stolen.”

  Laughing to herself, she thought of the trial it was to get even that many words engraved in bronze letters on the sign. It really minimized the importance of the story – the historical version of it, at least, much less the family history that led from Jeff and his crew stealing Wilton’s gold to her standing here this very moment. How big would that sign had to have been, to tell the whole story?

  She wondered if Jeff was on to her scheme yet, and how he would react to it. In many ways, it really didn’t matter because the history she was attempting to create would in theory change the world around him. He would never know that she’d existed. She thought of the old saying, “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Which didn’t really fit. If, indeed, Jeff’s feelings for her were what he would call love, he would’ve loved and lost, but he would know nothing about it.

  It astonished her that that kind of thinking wasn’t causing her to waver, and that she really was strong enough to put practicality and pragmatism over emotion. Not that she felt that she loved Jeff – she knew that the connection between them was largely derived from their adventures together, and not some deeper magnetism. But a part of her did feel bad that he was having the carpet pulled out from underneath him.

  In the end, though, she hoped that what she was doing would not only put things back to right, but would force him to be more cautious about the dangers of manipulating history. At one point, she’d thought that with possession of the time device, she could simply destroy it. But a person as driven as Jeff was would simply re-do his work so that he could continue. It wasn’t an option with lasting effect. It was her intent to make their first job, the Wilton job, unattractive enough to halt their entire operation.

  Also, it did occur to her while driving that if there was indeed such a thing as fate, and fate had a different plan for her, it would manifest itself. She’d determined she was okay with whatever happened because her conscience would be settled.

  She reached into the Mini and pulled out her bag. She unzipped the top and took out the time device, as well as a bed sheet that she’d pilfered from the hotel in New Jersey, which she tucked under her arm. She closed the car door and took her position next to her sign. Meticulously, she punched in the coordinates she’d memorized that would take her back to 1849 – the ones Abby had shown her – thirty minutes before Jeff and his team would arrive. Once they were entered, she double-checked them for typos – with only one trip left in the battery, she couldn’t afford to end up a couple of decades off – and readied the device. She looked up into the trees, a soft breeze tugging on the leaves silhouetted on a crystal clear blue sky, and said a silent goodbye to the present time.

  Just as she started to depress the button on the time device, her cell phone vibrated in her pocket – a text message. It gave her a slight pause, but her thumb continued its downward pressure and suddenly the trees blurred before her eyes and disappeared for a moment. They reappeared a split second later, familiar, but smaller. The sun was just beginning to descend, an orange light brimming the tree tops lining this narrow, secluded, vulnerable path. She could see immediately why Wilton was nervous about passing through it, and how easy it would’ve been for Jeff and his team to overtake them.

  Then it struck her. She’d just jumped to 1849 with no way of getting back. Without enough juice in the device’s battery pack, it was now useless. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe, and it was only a cool gust of wind sending a shiver down her spine that brought her back to conscious thought.

  Her mind returned to her mission. First off, it was imperative that she got away from her landing site. If she wasn’t successful in exactly a half-hour, Jeff and his team would be appearing in that very spot. Potentially, it was a way out for her – she could always hitch a ride back to the present with them – though the Jeff that would be showing up would have no idea who she was, or why she was standing there holding the time travel device that he’d invented. The awkwardness of such an interaction was minimized by her assumption that if that happened it would probably destroy the entire universe. Or something equally as bad which she didn’t currently have time to deduce. In any case, it would also defeat the purpose of her even being here.

  With that thought in mind, she tucked the time device into her coat pocket and quickly unfurled the sheet, which she then draped around her neck like a long cape. She started east on the trail along Wilton Pass. Based upon everything she knew, she expected to intercept Wilton’s wagon within about fifteen minutes.

  After walking what she figured to be about a quarter of a mile, she noticed a small crevasse in the rocks to her right and decided it would be a perfect place to hide. Springing herself out on an already nervous Wilton would add to the effect she was going for. She ducked into the cleft and crouched, listening for the clip-clop of horses’ hooves.

  Waiting, she took in her surroundings. Had she not just seen these trees at full growth and pavement under her feet, there would be no way of knowing that she was in the past. As far as she could tell, she was in the Sierra Nevadas in the present time. It wouldn’t be until she saw Wilton and his team traveling by stage that there would be any sign of a different time.

  The correlation with her present time caused her to remember that her phone had buzzed just before she traveled. She pulled the phone from her pocket and saw that she’d received three text messages. Not that she could’ve done anything about them, she touched the screen to open the first one.

  It was from Jeff. A quick one. “Call me when you land.” He’d probably realized once the alcohol had worn off that he’d never collected the device from her. Too late now. She slid her finger across the screen to bring up the second. “Just checking to make sure you got home safely.” She had, yes. It had been a very nice flight.

  Then the third, also from Jeff: “I know what you’re doing and I understand. I hope to see you again in the future.”

  Her heart leapt, shaking in her chest. He understood? She leaned against a tree, letting questions jumble through her mind atop one another. What did he understand? That she was going back to fix things because he wouldn’t? That she was doing it for his own good? For Dexter’s good? For the good of everyone? She found it curious that he claimed to understand, but didn’t follow up with what he planned to do about it. If anything. Or was he saying in his own subtle way that she was right?

  Unfortunately, those were questions she could no longer answer. If she could’ve texted back, the first message that came to her mind for him to know was that what she was doing didn’t require his understanding. It seemed too cold as a response for the simplicity of his last text, but not knowing left it the only option.

  In fact, she decided that as a therapeutic exercise, she’d type it out anyway. While her phone searched for service in the satellite-free sky, she started running her fingers across the screen.

  She got two words in when she heard it – the slow gait of a horse with the grinding of wooden wheels on the rocky mountain floor. She peeked around the corner of the rock that secluded her and saw a wagon coming toward her, a hundred yards away, led by two horses and steered by her great-great-great-great grandfather, Lucius Fitzsimmons. Even at a distance, he looked exactly as she’d expected – thin frame, baggy blue denim trousers with a gray button-down shirt, and a cravat around his neck. With his straw hat, he exemplified the gold rusher.

  With a deep breath, she stood. They were getting closer and there was no opportunity for hesitation. She pulled the time device from her pocket, held it for a moment, then tossed it into the trees. She did the sam
e with her phone, then readied to meet Wilton. She smiled to herself when the thought occurred to her that she might not have had the courage to just walk out there and do this had she not the day before leapt onto an armored car in the middle of Times Square. Despite her expected outcome, this was cake compared to that.

  The wagon was nearly in sight, so she stepped out from the rocks and into the middle of the path. She could feel the sheet waving in the breeze behind her as she walked, and as ridiculous as she probably looked, from what she knew of Joe Wilton, it was exactly what he needed to see.

  Incidentally, it was exactly what Dexter needed to see, as well.

  Fitzsimmons pulled on the reins and the horses halted ten feet from her. She stood for a moment in silence, looking at Fitzsimmons’ face, trying to determine if there was any family resemblance she could cling to. Six generations and, maybe, she could see her eyes in his. But she could never have captured the innate wilderness wariness that he wore. Not in the halls of academia, at least.

  A head popped out of the covered portion of the wagon, and she immediately recognized it from the photo in the Gold Rush Museum: Joe Wilton. “Why’d we stop?” he asked. His voice was deeper than she imagined, though she’d nailed the Virginia accent.

  “Not sure, Mr. Wilton,” Fitzsimmons said. “Maybe you can ask this young lady.”