“If you can help me figure this all out, please do.”
James stepped into the hall, closing the door behind him. He looked at his notes. A Master’s from MIT?
At age 20?
Chapter 13
Sunday ~ July 18, 1943
“What in tarnations is this?”
“A cat with big ears. What does it look like, Ma?”
“We have no use for a rabbit, James, unless you want me to cook it.” Mrs. Lamric stood in her living room with a big white, fluffy rabbit in her arms.
“As far as I know, it belongs to Mrs. Waring, the lady I told you about this morning. I talked to the Navy Chief who discovered her. The rabbit was with her when she was found. He was at the hospital trying to get rid of it. On a hunch I decided to take possession of it.”
“Well then, you clean up after it,” she said as she disappeared into the kitchen, the rabbit tucked in the crook of her arm like a newborn baby.
“Anything you say, Ma,” he said, smiling at the kitchen door. Then his thoughts went back to the woman, Mrs. Waring. He opened his notebook, scanned through her story and then followed his mother into the kitchen.
Mrs. Lamric was looking down at the rabbit that was sniffing around a piece of lettuce. “Up in the attic is that old cage. You ought to bring that down, James.”
“Sure, Ma.” He went up the two flights of stairs, the last being a narrow climb into the old dusty attic. Several things had to be moved before he could free the cage. He saw that the door would have to be repaired, and then wrestled it down the two flights of stairs.
“On the back porch,” his mother said without looking at it. “Clean it up and fix the door. Then get some of those clean rags out of the shed.” The rabbit had consumed half the lettuce and Mrs. Lamric was busy chopping up radishes and carrots.
By the time the cage was repaired and the rabbit was comfortable in his new home, Mrs. Lamric had lunch ready. Except for the soup and a splash of oil and vinegar on the salad, it wasn’t much different from what she gave to the rabbit. She set herself a small plate of salad on the table and then sat and watched James eat. “So! What did you find out?”
James looked at her across a spoonful of soup. “About what?”
“The big city mystery lady! You tell me about her, go off to see her, come back with a rabbit, and don’t say another word. You’re just like your father. You’d both lose a talking contest with the rabbit. Tell me what you found out.”
“Well,” he said and then sipped the soup off his spoon. “The more I find out, the more mysterious she becomes.”
“How so?”
“In my professional opinion she is either a very good liar or on her way to the looney bin.”
“Your professional opinion, James?”
“As a police officer I need to be wondering why she showed up on an American military installation in a time of war. Nobody, including herself, can tell me who she is and where she came from.”
Mrs. Lamric took a bite of carrot and then squinted at him. “You say that as though you have another opinion which is not professional.”
“Personally, Ma, I think she’s telling the truth.”
He forked up some of his salad and chewed on that for a bit. When he took another fork full, his mother said, “All right, James. You’re keeping your mother in suspense and I think you’re doing it on purpose. What truth is she telling? Where is she from?”
James grinned at her and then opened his notebook.
“Oh, and did she have her baby?”
“Yes. A girl.”
“What’s her name?”
“Elizabeth Anne.”
“That’s nice. Go ahead.”
“Well, like I told you this morning, she claims to be from the town called Goose Creek. I checked into the area where she says Goose Creek is. All I can come up with is the Casey Community. I’m told there’s not much more there than a schoolhouse, a store, and a church. They’re just poor farmers out there and she doesn’t look like a farmer.” He took a sip of the soup. “She says she’s lived there with her husband for four years, having come from Boston.”
“Boston! Well, there you go, James. She is a big city woman. What’s her husband’s name?”
“Steven Waring. He works as a civilian at the shipyard.”
Mrs. Waring considered that for a time. “That would be a long way to come to work. If she is as rich as you make her out to be, why would they be living out with a bunch of poor farmers?”
“I wondered that too, Ma. Listen to this, though. She is 24 years old. Four years ago when she and her husband left Boston, they had both just graduated from college. He received his doctorate in...” He searched his notes for the words,... “nuclear engineering. She received her master’s in nuclear physics. She also holds a bachelor of science degree in history, which she received when she was eighteen.”
Mrs. Lamric sat with her mouth open.
“And get this, Ma. She says they both graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
Mrs. Lamric closed her mouth, and then pushed herself away from the table. “I think, James, your professional opinion is a bit more accurate here. I’m not sure a crazy person could think of making that up, so why is she lying?”
“I don’t think she’s lying.”
“First of all, James, I don’t believe Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts women. Second, I don’t think anyone could get their master’s degree by the age of twenty. You’ve established that there’s no Goose Creek. What more proof do you want that she is lying?”
“I don’t think she is lying, knowingly. I think she believes everything she says.”
“Then that means she is crazy, doesn’t it?”
James looked at his mother who had stood and moved her empty dish to the sink.
“And what the heck is nuclear engineering or physics, anyway? Never heard of such a thing.”
“One other strange thing, Ma. She showed me a photograph of her baby.”
“A photograph! That’s odd,” Mrs. Lamric said. “She gave birth last night and already has a photograph of her baby. Can they do that, that fast?”
“Ma, she told me that the photograph was taken yesterday, before the baby was born. She said it was a photograph of the baby inside her.”
“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, James.”
“She called it an ultra sound photo.”
“Well, she may as well have called it a leg-of-lamb for as much sense as it makes.”
James laughed. “Yes, Ma’am.”
“So, she showed this photograph to you, you said?”
“Yes. Didn’t look like a baby to me.”
“What did it look like?”
James shook his head and raised his shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe a mistake. Like when a photographer tries to make a photograph but does it all wrong and ends up with a blurry mess. That’s what it looked like to me.”
“And she thinks it’s her baby. Sounds to me like she’s hallucinating.”
“Hallucinating?”
“That means when you see something that isn’t really there.”
“I know what it means, Ma.”
“Well then. That’s probably what she’s doing. If you believe she thinks she’s telling the truth, then that may be it. She’s hallucinating everything. By the time she leaves the hospital, things will come back to her, and she’ll go home. Probably forget all this nonsense she keeps hallucinating. Sometimes having a baby can be very stressful on a woman.”
“What if she leaves the hospital and still thinks she lives in Goose Creek?”
“Well, I guess she may have a problem. If she’s as smart as you make her out to be, she’ll figure something out.”
“I guess you’re right, Ma. But what if she doesn’t stop hallucinating and winds up living on the street? All you have to do is look at her to know that’s not the place for her. And that sure isn’t the place for her baby.”
Mrs. Lamric looked at her son, opened her mouth to ask him if he had feelings for the married woman, to tell him that if he did, he should suppress them and step away like a good police officer, to stay detached, to not get emotionally involved. And then her mouth closed and an idea flew into her head. She shook her head at it and said, “I don’t know, James. Are you through with that?” She swept away his dishes without waiting for an answer and dropped them into the sink. “Now, I’ve got some things to do,” she said and left the kitchen.
James sat at the table and tried to figure out what just happened. In a flash his mother cut off the conversation. Not at all like her. He stood and walked over to the sink. His plate lay there with a quarter of the salad left. “I wasn’t finished,” he said to it. “And since when does she leave dirty dishes, full of food, sitting in the sink?”
Chapter 14
Sunday ~ July 19, 1987
The heat was oppressive to most. Steven paid it little attention. Saturday night, after nearly 40 hours without sleep, he went home; however, sleep didn’t come easily. He tossed and turned until early morning, fighting short, unpleasant, quickly forgotten dreams. Finally, he fell into an undisturbed slumber. He awoke with a jerk at 10:00 a.m., feeling surprisingly refreshed. He didn’t shower but dressed quickly, finding himself, by 10:30, sitting on the front step with a large glass of orange juice, Anne’s favorite beverage. The hot morning sun bore down on him. In this weather, people in South Carolina rarely sat outside in the direct sun, but Steven felt energized by it. He also found it punishing. He felt a need to be punished and whatever discomfort he might feel, he surely deserved. His mind was clear and all his senses enhanced. He looked around the cul-de-sac at the neat homes and trimmed bushes. A tricycle sat out front of one. Other than that, there was no clutter. He noticed a white limousine parked opposite the entrance to the cul-de-sac. He only considered the oddity of it briefly before shifting his mind to the problem at hand.
A bead of sweat rolled off his temple, down to his jaw. He swiped at it with the back of his hand, feeling the two-day beard he had accumulated. He remembered how Anne giggled when he would run his stubble beard along her neck and chest and down to her swollen belly. He shook off thoughts of her and shifted his mind to the lab and the work needing to be done.
He knew the race track, the sub window of the main window dedicated to tracking the time envelope, had to be expanded. In his mind he began clicking off the numerous links that would be affected and would have to be reconfigured. An entirely new magnetron would need to be located or worse yet, designed and built. Wave tubes would have to be replaced with ones of higher power ratings. But the tri-generator would not need to be touched. Thank God for that. It took three years to build the tri-generator and would probably take at least two to do again. How Jerry managed to procure the materials, he didn’t know and was afraid to ask. As far as he knew, only the Commanding Officer of the shipyard had knowledge of the type of material they were working with just a quarter mile from his office.
As he was thinking, Steven noticed a large, blue truck pull into the cul-de-sac and park several houses away. No one got out. He studied the truck for a short time; however, the dark window tint made it impossible to see more than the dark shape of a huge man. After several minutes, he paid it no further mind and drifted back into thoughts about the past day’s events and future plans. It was a good ten minutes later that the truck moved on around the cul-de-sac. It stopped in front of Steven’s townhouse, but he didn’t notice the movement until he heard a door close. His head jerked up and his eyes focused on an old man, a large man with half a head of thin gray hair. He had moved partway to the front of the truck, and then stopped. He said nothing. For some time they looked at each other across the hood, as if trying to read each other’s mind. A deep, cold shiver ran through Steven’s body, raising goose bumps on his bare arms. He set down the orange juice and stood. The man walked around the truck and started across the lawn toward Steven, while Steven, slowly, hesitantly walked toward him. They stopped in the deep, unmowed grass several feet from each other.
“Good morning, Steven,” the old man said in a voice as deep as he was huge.
Steven had to look up at the man, shading his eyes from the sun with his hand. He stepped a foot to his left to place the hot glare behind the man’s head, enabling him to see his face better and to relax his own. Steven studied a face that showed evidence of years spent in the outdoors. The old man pulled a hand across his wet forehead, showing large, fat knobby fingers with nearly no fingernails. “Good morning,” Steven replied. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m here to talk to you about Anne?”
“How do you know my wife?”
“Let’s just say I know her from a very long time ago.” The old man looked around the neighborhood as if checking to see if anyone was observing, then stepped forward again. “May I come in so we can talk further?”
Steven hesitated again, then stepped back and turned toward the house. “Certainly.” He hurried to the door, opened it, and let the stranger pass through first. Then he entered and closed the door behind them.
The man took several steps inside and then stopped as though entranced by what he saw. The home of Steven and Anne Waring was upper-middle class modest. There were framed paintings of New England countryside and violent ocean waves crashing against New England beaches and rock cliffs. The decorations took on the flavor of New England, from wall decorations to furniture, china to silver, even the magazines neatly organized on one small coffee table in the living room. But New England wasn’t what the old man noted upon his entrance. He stood for some time with his eyes closed, taking deep breaths, inhaling a long forgotten scent, a memory that brought him much pleasure.
Steven walked around him, then turned to face him, watching him going through a facial transformation, a smoothing of age almost right before his eyes. “Would you like something to drink?” Steven asked, breaking whatever spells the man was under.
“Yes, please. Orange juice would be just fine.”
Steven quickly fetched several glasses and selected one of three unopened cartons of orange juice. He dropped in ice, added the juice and returned to the living room, finding that the old man had removed Anne’s framed bridal photo from the wall and was studying it closely. “I wanted very badly to be at the wedding.” He walked over to the front picture window to see better by a ray of morning sun. He studied it for some time. “I nearly did.”
“Nearly did what?” Steven asked, not catching the train of the old man’s words.
“Nearly went to the wedding, of course,” he replied, looking at Steven with a sad smile. “Only my good sense kept me away, fortunately.”
“What do you mean, fortunately?”
He accepted the orange juice, laid the picture on the sofa and sat down beside it. He appeared to ignore his question, drank half the orange juice quickly, and then continued. “Fortunately, I had the sense to stay away. I didn’t and still don’t know how I would have changed things. I still worry how my showing up now will change things. For four years I’ve waited, much longer actually, but the worst has been since the wedding. Four long years, waiting for this day.” He picked up the picture again. “I’m not sure why I didn’t come two days ago. Maybe because it wouldn’t have made any difference. Maybe it would have made too much difference. I’ve thought a lot about that over the last four decades. If I arrived two days ago, she would likely be here now, but if she were here now, I wouldn’t be here. Very perplexing. Very perplexing indeed. I hope I have not done the wrong thing by coming at all.” He finished off the juice, and then stood up with the empty glass. “Is that the kitchen?” He asked as he headed for a doorway.
Steven absentmindedly acknowledged that it was, as he tried to unravel the riddle in the old man’s words. The old man disappeared through the door. Steven stood for a moment not knowing quite what to do, and then followed behind him. He found him in the kitchen, at the open refrigerato
r, pouring himself another glass of orange juice. “It’s very hot. You’d think after nearly seventy years in the south I could get used to the heat.” He drank down another complete glass full and filled it again. “No, some people never get used to the heat. I guess that’s part of the reason I moved out of Charleston, to get away from the heat. Of course it gets quite hot up in Charlotte too, but it’s not the same. The humidity is considerably less there.” He removed a cloth from a pocket somewhere and wiped the sweat off his forehead and neck then returned the cloth to its place. He spotted a small desk in a corner off the kitchen eating area and walked over to it. A book of baby names laid open and the name Elizabeth was highlighted in pink. He picked up the book and studied it closely, a broad smile playing across his face.
“Listen, Mr. ah...”
“Lamric. James Lamric. Please call me James.” The old man spoke slowly.
“All right, James. Exactly what is it or how is it you know my wife and why are you here?” Steven demanded. “And what do you mean if you were here two days ago she would be here now?”
James Lamric laid the book down on the desk exactly as he had found it. He looked straight into Steven’s eyes. “First, I want you to know, I’m here to help you. I do believe I’m the only one who can.”
Some time passed before Steven realized he was holding his breath. As he let it out and resumed normal respiration, he turned and set his still full glass on the table. “I don’t need any help with anything, at least nothing that you could possibly understand. Listen, Mr. Lamric. I’m very busy so I ask that you quickly conclude your business. Please get to the point.”
“Very well, Steven. As I said, I know her from a very long time ago. As I walk through your home, I have great feelings of nostalgia from the impression of her recent presence everywhere.”
Steven shook his head. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“You’re being very patient with me Mr. Waring, but once I divulge to you why I’m here you’ll understand me completely and you will in no way want me to leave.”
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