The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  As he spoke, Xavier was looking over the Polaroids we’d taken since arriving in Pompeii, the ones of the harbor and Secundus’s street, faces, wares, graffiti, the theater-mask fountain with its trickle of water. It seemed like he was about to suggest something, but all he said was, “These are all right. They’ll make a fine addition to the History Alive exhibition, Helen.”

  “What?” Helen said.

  “I didn’t say anything. I was paying you a compliment.”

  “But?”

  “Well, since you ask, it seems to me that it might be a good idea to take a snapshot of Vesuvius itself for the Geology Department. After all, the mountain will look much different after the eruption.”

  Helen looked chagrined that she had not thought of it herself.

  “There are two Polaroid films left,” was all she said. “We can go take care of it right now.”

  “Let’s head over to the Amphitheater,” Xavier suggested. “It will be deserted. August is a dead month for gladiator games. Too hot. We should be able to get a good view of the mountain from there.”

  Nate stopped on the way out to take a look at the lock mechanism on the side gate. “Looks undisturbed. It would have been easy enough for someone to slip in and hide in a dark corner of the garden before Secundus went out for the night.”

  As we wound our way through the town in the direction of the large stadium with its oval shape and graceful arches, Xavier said, “I read up on Pliny the Younger’s account in order to have an idea of what to expect when the eruption came. It was something he wrote that led me to believe that coming here was the right thing to do. I’ll tell you more about that in a moment. I met him, you know.”

  “Who? Pliny?” Helen said.

  “Well, I saw him in the street. I visited Misenum one morning and someone pointed out the admiral to me. With him was a pimply, bookish-looking youth with curly hair combed forward. I attempted to make a sketch from memory later, but it didn’t turn out terribly well.” Xavier explained that he had not only studied Gaius Pliny’s account before traveling here, but had also perused modern volcanology textbooks. “A quiet period in Vesuvius’s life is about to come to an end,” he said. “It’s been seven hundred years since the volcano last erupted. When it comes, the eruption will make itself known with a sudden, mammoth explosion. Hot gas and ash will shoot high into the sky. Pumice and other debris will rain down on Pompeii and its countryside.”

  I wasn’t sure what exactly pumice was, but it sounded unpleasant.

  “Streets will become impassable, and roofs will collapse from the extra weight of pumice and ash by nightfall. Phase two,” he added, “will be worse. The gas and ash column will collapse under its own weight. Deadly surges, six of them, will travel down the mountain at devastating speeds, burying everything in their path. Pyroclastic flows. The first will bury Herculaneum completely. The last three will reach Pompeii. The sixth will be the biggest, bringing with it unsurvivable heat and debris. I expected to die in that one. It will sweep across the bay and reach Misenum and the island of Capri, both thirty kilometers away. Eighteen miles,” he added for my benefit, but I had long ago familiarized myself with the metric system so that I could follow cafeteria conversations and understand funding requests. “When it’s all over, Herculaneum will be under twenty-some meters of debris—seventy-five feet. Pompeii will fare a little better. Rooftops and temple gables might peek out above the ash when the sun reappears three days later. Land will push back sea perhaps by almost a kilometer.”

  Xavier shaded his eyes—the sunlight was strong in the clear blue sky—and faced the mountain. “How about we take the pictures from here?” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.

  Here was the grassy area by one of the outside staircases of the Amphitheater. The stadium was quiet in the summer heat, but at other times of year it would be humming with morning animal fights, lunchtime executions, and afternoon gladiatorial combat. Nearby a vineyard lay within the town walls, and there, framed between umbrella pines, was the mountain itself. Xavier continued to speak as Abigail turned the Polaroid on the mountain. “Gaius Pliny wrote this of the disaster he was caught in: ‘I believed the whole world was perishing as wretchedly as me and this was a great consolation to me in my mortality.’ He was only eighteen at the time.” Xavier paused. “And completely wrong, I’ve discovered. There is no consolation in everyone around you dying while you are. In fact, I had come to take a certain comfort in the fact that everyone I left back at St. Sunniva was alive and well.”

  Including whoever had sent us into this mess, I thought, taking a look around at our little group. Which one of us had someone wanted to do away with? And why not run that person down on a slippery winter night instead of subjecting others to the same fate? Perhaps it was merely a matter of opportunity—or a need for speed.

  Nate stood with his large, sandaled feet planted firmly on the ground, doing a visual sweep of the area, as he always tended to do, as if danger lurked behind every statue, pine tree, and lavender bush. Back home, he had just started his inquiry into what we thought was a murder, having sent Officer Van Underberg to go through Dr. Mooney’s effects. As he himself had pointed out, his officer knew just about everything he did, so getting rid of him didn’t make much sense. Unless something had been said just before we stepped into STEWie’s basket, when Officer Van Underberg wasn’t present—something that had doomed us all from that moment on. Which would narrow down the pool of suspects to two—Gabriel Rojas and Jacob Jacobson, mentor and student, the only ones from our list of suspects who’d been present at the time. I tried to remember everything that had been said as we prepared ourselves for the Beatles’ arrival at JFK airport. Abigail had wafted in after asking Dr. Rojas if she and Kamal could come along, Kamal had left a program running on his computer, Dr. Rojas had found a hat for Chief Kirkland, I had told Jacob not to tweet a play-by-play of the proceedings. Not much to go on, really.

  I turned to look at Helen, who was making a quick sketch of the Amphitheater. She was as much at home here in far time as she was at St. Sunniva. Now that her connection with Dr. Mooney no longer mattered, I couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone would have wanted to get rid of her. She didn’t demand a ton of spots on the STEWie roster; when she did ask for a trip, it was usually a for a good reason, like with Shakespeare’s plays, or more recently, when she had gone back to copy the letters destroyed by Jane Austen’s sister after the novelist’s death. (The letters had turned out to contain as much scheming, misunderstanding, and jealousy as one of Austen’s own novels, all of it regarding one clergyman and potential suitor to the sisters, Dr. Samuel Blackall.) Given Helen’s penchant for picking successful projects, perhaps professional jealousy had played a part.

  Then there were our two grad students, who were currently bickering over what spot and angle would yield the best photograph of the mountain. They settled on taking a photo each. It was preposterous to think that someone would have wanted either of them out of the way—Kamal wouldn’t hurt a fly, and Abigail’s successes were so hard-won. The chief had suggested that perhaps someone wanted to steal one of their ideas, but it wasn’t like anyone did their research in a vacuum—roster spots had to be justified months in advance, funding proposals put together, papers published, seminars given. It wasn’t easy to steal other people’s research.

  That left yours truly.

  I couldn’t think of anyone who’d want to do away with me. Really.

  Not that I thought everyone on campus necessarily liked me—I had ruffled a few feathers rearranging class schedules and STEWie roster spots, and delegating shared lab expenses. Erika Baumgartner had lost a STEWie spot early in the school year when, with Dean Sunder’s encouragement, I had made room for several last-minute runs for Dr. May to gather snapshots of British royal coronations for the opening of the History Alive exhibition. The truth of the matter was that bringing in funds sometimes took precedence over research goals. Erika had said she didn’t mind, but it was just
about then that she had started her early morning jogs.

  Steven Little had wanted early-morning time slots for his fall semester classes, but 8:00 a.m. wasn’t a popular time with students for obvious reasons, so I had overruled him and scheduled his classes for various times throughout the day. Dr. Little didn’t hide the fact that he disliked me and thought I was an interfering busybody who sent way too many committee requests his way. I had no doubt that he was happy to be rid of me, but probably considered me too unimportant to bother doing away with. Still, I couldn’t rule him out.

  As for Gabriel Rojas, I’d doubted him at one point, but I was sure he would not have used STEWie, his pride and joy, for something as boorish as this.

  And I couldn’t think of a single reason why Jacob Jacobson would have wanted me dead, other than the fact that I kept telling him to put away his cell phone.

  It struck me that sending a group of people into a ghost zone was certainly a clean way of getting rid of them. No bodies to be found by the police, no blood on the guilty party’s hands. Clean and quick.

  Abigail surrendered the Polaroid camera to Kamal like they were siblings who had been told they had to share. She joined me in the shade of an umbrella pine. “A penny—no, an as for your thoughts, Julia,” she said, carefully peeling the backing off the print in her hand.

  “Just mulling over who might have sent us here and why,” I said as we watched the photo come to life.

  Kamal nonchalantly went down on one knee by the Amphitheater staircase, as if he needed to relace his sandal. He framed the mountain in his hands, trying to find the perfect shot before taking his photo.

  Abigail said to me, “Twenty possibilities.”

  For a moment I thought she was counting everybody in the TTE building, whether they had the lab door code or not, but she went on, “Dr. Little is my top suspect. Maybe he wanted to get rid of Chief Kirkland, or you, or Dr. Presnik, or me, or Kamal… What’s he doing? That’s not a great angle, he’ll get a lot of glare. Anyway, that’s five possibilities right there. Or Dr. B wanted to kill Chief Kirkland, or you, or me, or Dr. Presnik, or Kamal for some reason. That’s five more possibilities right there. Or it could have been Jacob, or Dr. Rojas—”

  “That’s the problem,” I said. “Too many possibilities.”

  “It’s actually more than twenty. It could have been a combination of culprits and victims, like maybe Dr. Little and Dr. B conspired to get rid of the security chief and you for some reason, or maybe all four of them conspired to get rid of all five of us for some reason. I could total up all the possibilities—”

  “Let’s see if we can rule out some people,” I said. “I don’t think Dr. Rojas did it, for one.”

  “I don’t either. And I don’t think Jacob did it. Dr. B has been looking a little stressed out lately,” she said quietly. “She’s forgotten about our weekly meeting a couple of times. Sergei said that she was late grading midterms this semester. She is really hard to please, generally speaking,” Abigail added, as if easygoing people were never criminals. I knew that some of Dr. Baumgartner’s colleagues and students thought the professor could be best described as pushy and ambitious. Both were qualities that could be helpful in academia, in my opinion.

  “If Erika wanted something, she would go for it openly, not like this,” I said.

  “Which brings us back to Dr. Little,” Abigail said.

  “Who you both happen to dislike the most,” Nate said from behind us. I hadn’t noticed him standing there.

  “Doesn’t mean he didn’t do it,” I said. “Though I can’t think of a good reason why he would have sent us all here.”

  “I can. To get rid of me.”

  “Do you and Dr. Little know each other personally?” I asked. I couldn’t think of any reason why Dr. Little would want to kill Nate that was related to the case.

  “We’re next-door neighbors. There was an incident during the summer, just after I moved in. I had requested that Dr. Little and his wife cut down a red oak that was swaying during thunderstorms and was in danger of falling on my new house. Dr. Little wanted me to pay for it. But the law is the law. The tree was on his side of the property. He seemed to think I was abusing my police powers somehow.”

  “You think he sent us here, Chief Kirkland?” said Abigail. “Because of a personal grudge against you?”

  “You’d be surprised what behavior people will to stoop to with their neighbors. But there’s something more to this, something that’s eluding me,” Nate said. “Someone wasn’t just using STEWie as a weapon. There’s a significance to how our disappearance was staged. It’s bound to affect the program itself, isn’t it? Make it harder to get funding?”

  “Probably,” I agreed. “You think someone doesn’t approve of us knowing more about the past than we used to? Like Mrs. Butterworth?”

  “Who’s she?” Abigail asked.

  “A frequent and generous donor to the school. I wasn’t really suggesting her as a suspect, only giving an example. She wasn’t too happy that we ruled out Sir Francis Bacon as the penner of Shakespeare’s plays. I suppose there have been other things our researchers have confirmed or disproved that may have rubbed someone the wrong way. If it’s someone within the department, especially an untenured professor, he or she may not wish to rock the boat by saying something openly against the program. This way—well, like Xavier said, Dean Sunder will have his work cut out for him. He’ll need all the help he can get from donors like Mrs. Butterworth and Ewan Coffey to keep the lab going.”

  “Ewan Coffey? You mean our library donor?” Helen asked as she and Xavier came over to where the four of us were gathered in the shade of the pine. “I’ve never seen any of his movies, but he has done a lot for the school.”

  “He was the lead in Robin and Marion,” Abigail explained in a dreamy voice, “and in Antony and Cleopatra and Juliet’s Romeo—though the movies themselves,” she added more briskly, a touch of pink rising in her sunburned cheeks, “were silly history-wise, of course.”

  “They should consult us on these things,” Kamal, who had ambled over after taking his photo, concurred.

  “Whatever happened with the new STEWie generator, Julia?” Xavier asked as we watched Kamal’s photo appear on the print. “Was Lewis able to arrange for one?”

  “He was, through Ewan Coffey. Though everything was put on hold after you, uh—left.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’ve heard that Ewan Coffey is coming to campus for this year’s graduation, Julia, is that true?” Abigail demanded.

  “He might,” I admitted. “Don’t spread this around if we make it back, but there’s been talk of giving him an honorary degree from the Drama Department.” Technically, Ewan Coffey wasn’t an alum because he had never finished his studies, but that was a minor point when it came to generating good publicity for the school.

  “Do you think there’s a chance he might stop by the TTE lab?” Abigail breathed.

  I opted not to remind her that two-thousand-some years separated us from Mr. Ewan Coffey and his smoldering good looks. “Is anyone else keeping any secrets?” I asked, with a look at Nate. I felt a little irritated that he hadn’t told us about his trouble with Dr. Little. He seemed to think this was his investigation only. It was part of my job to help figure out what had happened and why. Dean Sunder had instructed me to do so.

  “Well…” Helen said.

  She glanced at Xavier.

  “What?” he said.

  “Well—Gabriel and I went out on a few dates. Before you and I met.”

  “I know. Rojas was the one who introduced me to you. He said it didn’t work out.”

  “I was the one who broke it off. He was a little—too polite, I suppose. I could never tell what he was thinking. He didn’t seem to mind when I broke things off. Then he met Lane and it didn’t seem to matter that you and I were getting married. But all these years, even after he married Lane, I’ve rather thought that he might still have feelings for me. At your mem
orial service, as Lane was putting a basket of flowers by the enlarged photo of you that Julia had ordered, Gabriel quietly asked me out for coffee.”

  “Dr. Rojas?” Abigail asked, incredulous.

  “Professors are human, too,” I said, impatient to hear more of the story.

  “Coffee, huh? And what did you say, Helen?” Xavier asked.

  “I said no, of course. I would have said no even if he had asked at a more appropriate time and place. Again, he didn’t seem to mind, and his behavior as we prepared for the New York City trip was as usual, but—”

  “—here we are,” Nate finished the sentence for her. “Well, crimes have certainly been committed for lesser reasons.”

  “Let’s hope Dean Sunder manages to keep the program going so Dr. May’s team comes to the Colosseum dedication as planned. And that it happens without delay at their end,” Helen said. “If things are put on hold for a year or two or ten, everyone we know will be older when we make it home—even your Ewan Coffey, Miss Tanner. That would certainly be strange.”

  “It would be very strange,” I said, thinking of a new dean’s assistant taking my place in the small office on the ground floor of the Hypatia of Alexandria House, of Dean Sunder retired, of Jacob Jacobson with a Dr. in front of his name, of Officer Van Underberg in charge of campus security. I felt melancholy, like all signs pointed to us having to stay in the past, never to set foot again on the sprawling St. Sunniva campus. I stared at the volcano, mesmerized by its hidden power. “Vesuvius is beautiful, isn’t it? The vineyards, the rich farmland, the orchards, the power and beauty of the mountain itself…”

  “As powerful and beautiful as a coiled snake,” Kamal said. He had obtained sweets earlier and he pulled out a handful from the satchel. Abigail accepted a piece. “You want some, Julia? Chief? Professors?”

  To my surprise, Nate took one of the sticky sweets.

  I shook my head at Kamal’s offering. “Got a bit of a headache. I think I just need some water.”