Incursion: Book Three of The Recursion Event Saga

by Brian J. Walton

  “Doing what?” I demand.

  Ellis steps toward me and reaches out his hands, placing them on my shoulders. “It’s late, Jim. The sun’s nearly up. But if I were you—and again, I am fully aware that I am not—then I would spend every moment I had looking for her, chasing her to the ends of the earth. It’s what I’d always wanted to do instead of hiding here in this bunker behind a microphone. Would you do that, Jim? If not for yourself, for me?”

  “How?” I ask.

  Ellis moves to a desk, pulling a large box from a lower cabinet. He lifts it with a grunt, carrying it slowly to me. Inside I see more VHS tapes, old notebooks, and stacks of folders. “There’s a lot more to tell you. Why don’t we start with the ISD?”

  May 21, 2008

  The rocking of the ferry as it departs from Madeline Island for the town of Bayfield, Wisconsin brings me back from my daydreaming. The island is a green oasis amidst the choppy grey surface of Lake Superior. In our early days of dating, before my capture and before things went so bad, Molly had talked once about visiting the Apostle Islands on Lake Superior when she was a young girl. She had told me she never felt so far from civilization as when she was standing on an island without a single structure built on it. Looking out the window of the ferry, at my receding view of the Inn perched along the shore, I had just been imagining the twelve-year-old Molly, her curly hair pulled back, looking across the choppy waves toward me, and waving.

  I let out a breath, the image of Molly receding along with the island, and return to the present. My bags sit on the seat across from me. Inside of it is toiletries, clothes for a week, and a binder filled with every piece of information that Ellis Francis Claymore had ever gathered about Molly’s life, from his notes on the last surviving tapes of the interviews that Molly had given at Camton University (still in his possession) to all the clues, theories, and guesses he had ever made about the ISD. I had spent the better part of two years reading over Ellis’s notes, collecting my own research, and piecing the information together. As far as Mary Rowell knew, I was working on my next book. But this was research that could never be published.

  In the last six months, I had taken a break from the research and had begun my road trip, visiting all the major landmarks of our relationship, from New York to Los Angeles and everything in between. At the moment, I was working on the “in between” stretch of the trip, with only a single destination left: the home of Arthur and Ada Vandermeer.

  Once back in Bayfield, I’ll be renting a car and beginning the two-hour drive to the Vandermeer’s home just outside of Duluth, Minnesota. It had taken me some time to find them. Arthur Vandermeer hadn’t left me any way to contact him after leaving that restaurant back in 1998. I tried searching for old news reports of Molly’s kidnapping, but fifty-year-old records of a missing person case in small-town Minnesota were not as easy to find as certain television series would have it seen. I called every Arthur Vandermeer that lived in Minnesota, but none were him. It was impossible to know if the Vandermeers had moved or had their number unlisted.

  The Internet turned out to give me my first real lead. I had set up a Google alert for Arthur Vandermeer’s name, and earlier this year I had gotten a result that showed promise. An anonymous blogger posted a review of my book, claiming he knew an even stranger story behind my story. He had somehow discovered the Vandermeer’s story by digging through microfilm copies of his local newspaper as part of his job. This man was a fan of the radio show Night Terrors and had a habit of engaging in conspiracy theories. He had speculated that the girl who disappeared in Duluth, Minnesota in 1974 may be the same woman that disappeared after her car crashed into the East River in 1998. His theory was based entirely on similarities between the photographs (despite a thirty year age-disparity), the coincidence that both women shared the first name of Molly, and that my book had been a fixture amongst 10/18 conspiracy theorists for the last few years. Had I been turned by the JAS? Was Molly also turned? Had the JAS been recruiting thirteen-year-old women from the United States as early as 1974? It was all ludicrous. But the article gave me what I needed—the name of the city where the Vandermeers lived. I called around, and it didn’t take me long to get the address.

  My iPhone pings as the ferry approaches the Bayfield Harbor. I take it out. It’s a text from Samantha. Normally a text from her brings all sorts of mixed feelings, but this message makes me smile.

  Ella wants to go see the dinosaurs

  An image comes to mind of Ellis’s trip back in time, and I shudder to think what I would have done if that had been me. But Samantha is talking about the Field Museum.

  Of course. tell her I’ll see her next week

  I gather my bags and stand, making my way across the boat and toward the last destination in this long journey.

  The home of Arthur Vandermeer is set back from the road, down a winding driveway, and nestled amidst a protective shroud of white aspens. It’s a two-story brick house with an attached garage and a latticework of green vines. There’s a basketball hoop next to the garage set to regulation height and a well-manicured garden extending back around the side of the house. I picture a family, scattered about the property on a Saturday afternoon, both working and playing outside. I try to picture a young Molly in this place and realize that the only pictures I’ve ever seen of her young are the pictures that Arthur Vandermeer showed me three years earlier.

  I park the car and climb out. The air is hot and sticky with humidity. A buzz of cicadas fills the air. Behind the house, through a gap in the tree, I glimpse the blue-green of a lake and a narrow dock extending out over its depths. I remember the picture of Molly at the end of the dock and superimpose the memory of that picture onto the dock now visible in front of me. It’s the same dock, but the Molly in that picture feels foreign.

  I turn back toward the house and make my way up the driveway, climbing the steps to the front porch, and press the doorbell. As I wait, I finger the horse-shaped flash drive in my pocket—an old habit. To this day, I’ve never been able to crack the file saved on the drive, nor had anyone else I’d given it to. But as a memento of Molly’s death, it stays in my pocket wherever I go.

  The woman that opens the front door is wrinkled and bent with long white hair tied in a thick braid behind her back. She doesn’t look a thing like Molly, but why would she? Molly had always said she was adopted, and the Vandermeer’s story verifies that detail. Ada Vandermeer stands in the open doorway, regarding me quietly and saying nothing.

  “Good morning, ma’am,” I say. “Sorry to bother you. My name is James—”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Gardner,” she says. “I’ve seen you on the news many times. You sent my husband home when he came to visit you. Sent him back with nothing. So, what are you doing here now?”

  Her strength takes me by surprise. It’s a shadow of Molly and startling in its vividness. “Forgive me, Mrs. Vandermeer.” The tears come at once, without warning. “I wasn’t in a place to hear him. If it’s any consolation, part of me always knew he was telling the truth. I—I didn’t want to admit it.”

  She pushes open the screen door. “Arthur’s out back. You’ll want a glass of ice tea.”

  Ada was right about the tea. Its refreshing coolness spreads through me like a tonic. I follow Ada onto the back porch, glass in hand. The house is built near a lake. There’s an old gazebo in the backyard built around an old tree stump, and behind it a rickety dock stretches out onto the water. Arthur Vandermeer is sitting on the porch in a rocking chair. His own glass of ice tea sits next to him, untouched.

  “Arthur, we have a visitor,” Ada says.

  It takes him a moment to recognize me, and when he does his eyes widen in surprise. “Mr. Gardner?”

  “Please,” I say, turning back and forth between them. “Call me James. I’ve come here only to say I’m sorry. That I owed you this visit a long time ago. And that I’d like to stay for a while and talk about Molly. I’ve got a room in town booked for the week, but t
he moment you ask me to go, I’ll go.”

  “Where are you staying?” Arthur asks.

  “The Best Western," I say.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Ada responds. “That place is a dump. We have a guest room. You’ll bring your things over this afternoon.”

  Once again, I find Ada Vandermeer giving a command I feel compelled to accept.

  “Actually, I haven’t checked in yet,” I say. “I’ve got my bags with me.”

  Ada Vandermeer smiles, a wide and toothy smile. “It’s settled then. I’ll make up the bed”

  Ada turns back inside. Arthur stands, moving carefully down the steps of the back porch, gesturing for me to follow. “You’ll want to see the lake while we still have the good, afternoon light.”

  I follow Arthur down the path toward the dock. “You have a beautiful home.”

  “We’ve been here over fifty years,” Arthur says. “I built it myself. Molly lived her whole life here. That is, until… well, you know.”

  I stop looking back at the house. “You did this all yourself? I couldn’t even build one of those bird houses in high school shop class.”

  “Sure did,” Arthur points to the gazebo. “I built the gazebo just a few years ago. There used to be a big ole oak tree over there. It had a tire swing that Molly loved swinging in. But that old tree started dying a few years after Molly disappeared. I had to cut her down, but I kept the good wood, and I turned it into this gazebo. Built it right around the stump. Something poetic about that, I think.”

  We turn from the gazebo and continue across the lawn toward the dock. “Neither of you seem surprised that I’m here,” I say.

  “We both knew you’d come, someday.” Arthur says.

  “If you don’t mind me asking… how?”

  “Because your Molly was the same as our Molly. There was never a question about it. And after you saw the pictures, we knew you would believe it as well. Of course, we knew it would take you some time to first work through the emotions before realizing we were telling you the truth. It was only a question of how much time.”

  We step onto the dock. The water laps at the wooden frame. A cool breeze blows across the water, ruffling its surface and sending a swarm of gnats along with it.

  “But it’s been ten years.” I say. “You never doubted I would come?”

  “Not even once,” Arthur says, stopping as we reach the end of the dock. “Now how about this view? Is there anything like it? The light is like gold on the water, isn’t it?”

  I nod, because it is. And words would only cheapen it.

  “Tell me what she was like,” I say. “I want to hear everything. What her hobbies were. The foods she loved, the foods she hated. The things you argued about. Everything.”

  Arthur smiles. “Come on. Let’s go back inside. There are a lot more pictures than the three I showed you back in New York that you will want to see.”

  I follow Arthur inside and up an old, creaking staircase. The third step gives a loud groan as I step on it, and I imagine how a young Molly might have skipped that third step from the bottom as she snuck out at night to meet a boyfriend. Of course, she had been kidnapped from her home by a cadre of time travelers from the future at the age of thirteen. There probably wasn’t too much sneaking out yet at that age.

  But what was Molly like before that kidnapping? Was she a happy child? Did she like sports? Did she have crushes on boys? I suppose learning something about that other Molly was the reason I’d come here.

  Arthur stops at a door at the end of the hallway, right next to the bathroom. A prime location for a young girl, I think. He opens it, and we step inside and into a time capsule.

  The room is frozen in 1973, at that fragile intersection of childhood and puberty. One shelf carries old, classic children’s books and a row of Kaylee’s Collectible Dolls. There’s a poster of the Beatles on the wall, as well as a poster of Jim Morrison—the classic, shirtless poster. I have a hard time imagining Mr. and Mrs. Vandermeer consenting to these posters for a thirteen-year-old. Molly must have been quite a strong-willed little girl. The bed is covered in an ancient looking quilt and stacked with more pillows than one could possibly need at night. Next to the bed is a small desk, more for an elementary school child than a teenager. Yearbooks, journals, and photo albums are neatly stacked on the desk.

  Despite the fact that the room has been untouched for over thirty years, it’s clear that the Vandermeer’s have been inside of it. The smell isn’t overly musty and the dust on the shelves isn’t so thick as to imply complete negligence.

  “We come in here often,” Arthur says, answering my unspoken question. “Just to sit and look out the window, but sometimes to look through her things and to remember her.”

  I go to the desk and pick up an old black-and-white photo of Molly. It’s one of the three pictures that Arthur had brought with him to New York to show me—the one of her on the dock, wet and grinning after a swim. I look closer at the picture, something catching my attention. A necklace with something small hanging from the end of it. A charm of some kind.

  “What’s this she’s wearing?” I ask.

  “Hm?”

  “Around her neck there. Is that a ring?”

  Arthur steps next to me, squinting at the picture. “I don’t know.” He frowns. “I recognize it. Yes, it’s a ring. Just some trinket she came home with one day. She said it was her promise ring. I didn’t care about those things nearly as much as she did, but she latched onto the idea.”

  I look closer at the picture. “Do you still have it?” I ask. “Could you show it to me?”

  “Oh no.” Arthur shakes his head. “She wore it all the time. She would have been wearing it on the day… well, I haven’t seen it since.”

  “That’s a shame,” I say. “I would have liked to see it.”

  Arthur takes the photograph from me. “It was just a trinket. A silly, childish thing. She said she would give it to her future husband. I tried to get her to stop wearing it, but—well, you know. She was strong-willed, our Molly.”

  I let Arthur set the picture back on the desk.

  “You said, ‘was.’”

  “I did?” Arthur asks.

  “When you came to visit me in New York, you were convinced that Molly was still alive. But tonight you’ve been talking about her in the past tense this whole time. Molly was this, Molly was that. I thought at first you were just doing that for your wife’s benefit—I don’t assume she would share the same hope that you do—but you just now said the same thing to me, and your wife isn’t here. Do you no longer believe she is still alive?”

  Arthur makes a small, gasping sound. He sinks into the under-sized wicker chair next to the desk. “It’s been so long.”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” I say. “You’ve already been through this once. Losing her for so long. Did you ever give up hope before?”

  “Over time it… fades.”

  “And then to both find her and lose her again in the same instant. I wouldn’t blame you to hold onto hope. But nobody would blame you to lose it again, either.”

  “What about you?” Arthur asks, looking up at me. “I read your book. I know that you believed she’d never really died. Do you still believe that?”

  I purse my lips, feeling a lump rise in my throat. How much to tell him? How much hope do I give to an old and grieving man? But would he even believe me if I told him the truth, even with all the evidence sitting in the trunk of my car? I run my hand through hair—what’s left of it—and turn back toward the window. I could give the Vandermeers one of two things: hope without resolution, or resolution without hope. But looking at Arthur, sunken into that chair, I can see he’s already made that choice for himself.

  I take a step toward him. “Even the strongest hope can sometimes fade, and that’s okay.”

  There’s a noise in the hallway and I glance back just as Ada steps into the room. She looks at us, hesitating. I’m sure she must feel the emotion in the
room.

  “Dinner’s finished,” Ada says. “It’s goulash. All the best flavors of home, nothing more and nothing less. I hope you’ll at least stay for dinner?”

  “Sounds wonderful,” I say.

  She exits without another word, quietly shutting the door behind her.

  Ada Vandermeer’s goulash is everything she had promised it would be. All the best flavors of home. Nothing more and nothing less. I ask for my third helping and let Arthur fill my plate for me. I heave a sigh of relief after I’ve finished, pushing my chair back from the table.

  “You’re going to have to watch your figure after this,” Arthur says. “You’re not a young man anymore.”

  “I’m hanging onto my fifties by a thread,” I say. “Don’t start calling me old just yet.”

  “That’s the difference from when we were young,” Ada says. “Being fifty made you a town elder. Now they’re saying that fifty is the new forties, or some other nonsense. I say, embrace your age. Whatever it is.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I say, raising my glass of water.

  When I set my glass down, Ada is staring at me with a steady, hopeful gaze. “What did she tell you? About us?”

  “As I told your husband when he visited me, I didn’t know much about Molly’s parents. She did say that she grew up in Minnesota, and that she had been adopted, but she told me that her last name was Smith, and that her parents names were Dean and Janet, and they died when she was young.”

  Ada draws in a sharp breath. “What else did she say happened to her, after that?”

  “After that she said she went to California to find herself. She wasn’t ever very clear about that period of life. But I always assumed she had been in the foster system and then… she ran away.”