Time Games

by Rex Bolt

  Wow.

  The hope obviously was Andrea was not some half-incarnation of Audrey, that the real Audrey was alive and thriving and whole, and that was the end of the line.

  Pike was pretty dang sure this was the case. It would be unrealistic--even by his new standards of reality--for Andrea to be connected to Audrey.

  But why not put any concerns to rest?

  Andrea lived on Vallejo Street in the Hill Section. This was a decent sign, right off the bat, since it was across town from the Milburns’ territory of Birch and Ortega. The other thing was, it was ridiculous they called it the Hill Section, since Beacon was flat as a piece of slate. If you got down on your hands and knees, maybe there was a microscopic incline on a couple of the streets, but really not even then.

  There were front steps surrounded by nice terraced landscaping and before Pike could ring the bell Andrea opened the door.

  “You were watching out the window?” he said.

  “Sort of,” she said. “Can I get you a beer or something?”

  This caught him a little off guard, and he said no, so she went in the kitchen and came back with one for herself.

  “You don’t drink,” she said. “I knew it. You’re in training.”

  “Wait a second,” Pike said. “I thought you were in training, with the modern dance, or whatever you do.”

  “I watch the junk food. Beer is healthier carbs . . . And if it isn’t, I cheat sometimes.” A mischievous side of her was showing itself, which Pike had to admit wasn’t the worst thing.

  “Interesting,” he said. “Before we go any further, I have two questions for you . . . Where are your parents, and was I good at football?”

  “My question for you,” she said, “are you always this goofy?” She sat down next to him on the big plush sectional. There was a TV on with the sound off that must have been seven or eight feet wide, one of those massive jobs you see up front when you walk into Best Buy.

  “Every once in a while I like to get some perspective, from an outsider,” he said, which was true. He’d confirmed nothing had changed with football after his first failed trip to save Mrs. Milburn, but he hadn’t confirmed it again this time.

  “You were good,” she said. “You threw a lot of touchdowns.”

  “Did we . . . get to the playoffs in Fresno and everything?”

  “Most definitely. That’s where Anthony got hurt. You don’t remember?”

  Pike said of course he did, but he didn’t, since this was another unexpected development.

  Sometimes you didn’t need to follow this stuff up, you sort of knew the answer . . . In this case Pike would bet money that he somehow collided with Anthony in that game, even though they were teammates this time.

  “Let’s move to question two,” he said. “Your folks.”

  “They’re at some kind of a benefit tonight,” she said.

  “What about brothers and sisters? You have those?”

  “An older brother. He’s in Florida. Anything else?”

  “So why couldn’t you leave the house tonight?”

  “I could have, but this seemed easier.”

  “Oh . . . well before I get into your parents a little more--who’d you go out with before Anthony?”

  “You get right down to it, don’t you?” she said. “Marty . . . It was pretty obvious there, at least I thought.”

  “Clarke?” Pike said. “Not Matt Foxe before that then?” He didn’t know why he asked it, but he had a hunch.

  Andrea laughed and waved her hand like are you crazy.

  Pike said, “Where’d you live before?”

  “Before this year? Las Vegas.”

  “How about before that? And your parents I mean, before you were born.”

  Andrea said, “I don’t mind . . . but just so you know, I feel like I’m on trial here, frankly.”

  “You’re not,” he said. “You’re just under interrogation.”

  She smiled and squeezed his arm, and then she popped up and got some cheese puffs from the kitchen, so so much for watching the junk food, and when she sat back down she slid closer to him.

  “To pick up on your line of questioning,” she said, “before that they were in Philadelphia. Born and raised. You hear them speak, they both have the accent. I had a bit of a Philly one myself, but lost it when we moved to Vegas.”

  “Great, good to hear,” Pike said. “That they were back there, and not out here.”

  Andrea shifted her position and tilted her head slightly and looked at him. “You . . . are freaking something else,” she said.

  Pike was pretty sure he could have kissed her then, and it would have worked out.

  Of course there were two small issues. Anthony, who’d probably try to kill him, especially with Pike already knocking him out of the sectional playoff game.

  And Jocelyn. Not to mention his own conscience, for being a total ass.

  But he said, “You know that girl Jocelyn, right? How’s my relationship with her, would you say?”

  “Oh no,” Andrea said, “I’m not going there.”

  “I’m still trying to get to know her, is the reason I ask,” Pike said.

  “Welcome to the club,” Andrea said.

  “Jocelyn, you mean?”

  “No, I mean period,” she said, and Pike got up to leave, and she let him out, and told him this was one of the more unusual conversations she’d had in California, but she didn’t mind.

  Chapter 7

  Pike felt a little funny about it but on Tuesday at lunch he cornered Anthony in the quad, nothing to do with Andrea, but to see if he could get to the bottom of identifying Henry.

  Anthony was a nice-enough kid--he’d been a good sport in the hospital that time too, a lot friendlier than Pike would have been under the circumstances--and he said he’d check with his sister.

  What Pike liked was he pulled out his phone right then and there and texted her, none of this no problem, I’ll take care of it bull-roar, but straight-up hands-on.

  It was also fortunate that Anthony’s sister and Henry’s daughter still knew each other, despite Anthony’s family apparently living in Beacon and not Uffington like before.

  “Geraghty,” Anthony said after a minute.

  “Thanks man,” Pike aid. “How do you spell it?”

  Anthony looked at his phone and read it back. “What do you need with that guy?” he said.

  “It’s a long story. I told him I’d try to help his brother.”

  “Ooh, that one’s a tough deal,” Anthony said. “When you blindsided me, I flashed on that for a split-second.”

  “I blindsided you?” Pike couldn’t help wondering what happened if they were on the same team, though there were plenty of situations where you just didn’t see the other guy.

  “Oh yeah, dude. It was like, please tell me I can feel my right arm . . . Then it eased up, that part, but then my head . . . I had no friggin idea where I was.”

  “That’s my fault, then,” Pike said.

  “No kidding,” Anthony said, but like a good trooper he was smiling, okay with it like it was part of the game.

  Pike said, “So you know the story then? With Henry’s brother?”

  “It sobers you up,” Anthony said. “Very scary . . . It was also, whadayacall . . . controversial.”

  “It was?”

  “The story I got, his senior year, he’s defensive captain, right? They get into the championship game, but he rolls his ankle bad in the first half. They tape it, but he can’t go . . . Then late fourth quarter the replacement gets hurt--middle linebacker--and they put him back in.”

  “Ah no.”

  “He’s got no leverage, his form’s all screwed up, and boom, there’s a collision near the goal line . . . and you got the unthinkable.”

  Anthony was right, it was hard to hear about. The scenario was different too, where last time Henry’s brother was a freshman, and it was the first football game he ever played. While this one might have been the last,
even if hadn’t gotten hurt. But what difference did that make?

  “What about the guy now?” Pike said.

  “I have no idea. Can’t be good.”

  “No, it can’t,” Pike said, and the bell rang and he thanked Anthony and went back to class.

  After school on an impulse he dropped in on the librarian, Frankie.

  She wasn’t at her desk so he looked around the library, didn’t see her down any of the aisles, and started checking those side rooms where she’d helped him out before.

  She was coming off a ladder in the same reference room where she’d found him the original time-travel leather volume in that high glass case.

  “Hey stranger,” she said, genuinely happy to see him.

  He wasn’t sure if he was over-stepping it, but he gave her a hug and she was fine with it. “Well I’m back,” he said. “At least I think . . . That radio station thing, it helped.”

  “I’m so glad to hear that,” Frankie said, as casually as if he’d been thanking her for helping him with a school project.

  “Okay now here’s my next situation . . . if you don’t mind . . . ?”

  “I never mind,” she said, and she disappeared for a minute and came back with two steaming cups of coffee and handed one to Pike.

  “I don’t drink much of this stuff, but I’ll make an exception,” he said, and it kind of hit the spot, and pretty soon he’d gulped down the whole cup and he felt his energy level rising, though he had to slow himself down from talking too fast.

  “There was this accident,” he said, “in a high school football game. I’m pretty sure in San Francisco . . . The kid would have been, let’s see, his brother is probably 40, 45 now?”

  Pike realized he could have searched around himself, first, before involving Frankie, but he enjoyed having her help him.

  “So you’re looking for some accounting of the incident?” she said.

  “That would be great. To the best of my knowledge, the guy’s name was Jeff Geraghty.”

  He spelled it for her and she wrote it down. “I’ll have a look,” she said. “Anything else?”

  Pike leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “What I admire about you, is you continue to handle everything business-like . . . all the crap I throw you . . . and you don’t pry.”

  Frankie smiled. “I’ll take that as a compliment . . . So that’s the extent of what you need today?”

  Pike felt like adding something, questioned himself, and then let it fly. “And I think there’s something mysterious with you, below the surface . . . isn’t there?”

  She seemed off-balance just for an instant. “My, we’re certainly devoid of subtlety today, aren’t we,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Pike said. “This travel stuff, these new realities and such . . . or whatever the frig they are . . . sorry . . . I’ll admit, my outlook is, I’m more up-front with people.”

  “I can understand that,” Frankie said.

  “You can?”

  “Certainly.”

  Pike was having fun with it. “But you’re not going to give me a hint. What the real story might be . . . with the perfect librarian.”

  “No,” she said.

  “No, there’s no story? . . . Or no, you’re not going there?”

  “No.”

  “Well that narrows it down . . . anyhow, yeah, my full deal here, I’m trying to find this guy, and . . . you know . . . intercept him . . . Ideally without having to talk to the brother. The brother has more details, but I think I scared him last time I spoke to him.”

  “I see,” Frankie said. “So you’re trying to structure the project from the sanctity of the library.”

  “You really talk like that?” Pike said.

  “Only sometimes,” she said.

  “See what I mean? . . . The mystery part.”

  “Let’s get on the master computer,” she said, “and see what we might have in front of us.”

  Chapter 8

  Pike was in his room tapping a pencil on his desk, starting to wonder, did you need a girlfriend. Couldn’t you just dabble here and there, sample the menu so to speak?

  Hannamaker had actually stuck this concept in his head the last couple days. Not by saying it outright, but by his actions. Even the adventure of scrambling out of there from the JC college-girl mess was worth something, and then Jack dumps Alicia it sounded like, and he is free to play the field.

  Which Pike figured he might have been doing Sunday, with that perfume rising up out of The Box when Pike got there, though that was Foxe and Cathy it turns out, so what could you do.

  But still . . . He had to admit he envied Jack, all that freedom, while he himself was still feeling his way with Jocelyn. She was great, there was nothing you could point to, but it was tough barely knowing someone when it seemed like they knew you pretty darn well.

  That was the other thing that concerned him: In a moment of passion maybe, did he level with her about his situation, the way he had with Cathy? . . . Probably not, but it wasn’t exactly something you could ask her about now, and either way he didn’t need any additional unknown shit hovering over him.

  He hadn’t been communicating with Jocelyn as much since he stranded her at the movies on Saturday night. That was his fault. To her credit, she was giving him some space, not pestering him, and not texting him a whole lot.

  Pike was supposed to be doing a math worksheet but instead he’d just finished a video on Northern Great Lakes State in Minnesota. The reason was there’d been a football recruiting letter in the mail today when he got home from talking to Frankie, from an assistant coach out there, asking him to call the guy. Which he did.

  The dude sounded a little young for the job, but he was friendly, and fired up. Not as fake-fired up as the Utah State guy had been, more down to earth. Part of the reason of course was Northern Great Lakes State was one of those obscure D-2 schools that probably needed all the players they could get.

  But when Pike hung up with the guy he went ahead and checked out the video. The campus looked fine, and there was plenty of red and orange color with the leaves changing, though when they showed a clip from an actual game the students in the stands (and there weren’t all that many of them) looked pretty cold.

  Whatever. He could work on the math now . . . Or kill more time . . . One way, though you sort of never knew what you were going to get into when you did, was to call Mitch. Admittedly, he hadn’t checked in with the guy since Chico--or for that matter, he realized, he hadn’t even told him he was going to Chico. So what the heck.

  Mitch answered right away, but he didn’t sound that excited to hear from him, or else he was preoccupied.

  “You okay?” Pike said.

  “Yes, absolutely. I’m just dropping Lucy off. Can I get back to you shortly?”

  “Up to you,” Pike said, and this time he did start on his homework. It was hard to believe, they had finals next week and then Wednesday the semester was over and they were out for Christmas vacation.

  Man . . . A lot of water under the bridge this fall.

  He finished the math and opened up the book All the President’s Men. They were studying Watergate in his civics class, and it was actually pretty interesting. It wasn’t that far off from a good made-up detective story, these two guys, these reporters, piecing it together one scrap at a time. And all of it so low-tech. Landline phones and yellow pads and typewriters.

  Sometimes the two guys would have to not exactly cheat, but use creative tactics to get witnesses to admit stuff, and Pike liked how smooth they were under pressure.

  After a while he laid the book down and was dozing off when Mitch called back.

  Pike said, “You sounded kind of formal there, I didn’t recognize your voice at first.”

  “Well let’s get right to it,” Mitch said. “How’s tricks?”

  “Tricks?”

  “An old expression . . . on my end, I’m still down here in Anthem.”

  “Is that
right. How’s the Lucy person?”

  “She’s good, we just had dinner . . . hey, something that just occurred to me--you want to come down and meet her? Over Christmas?”

  Pike said, “Not to be rude about it, but on the list of a lot of things I got going . . . for better or worse . . . that would be at the bottom.”

  “What happened, I’m pretty sure now,” Mitch said, “the UFO discharged something over the town, specifically over the old silver mine.”

  Pike let that one sink in . . . He wasn’t going to dispute this stuff anymore. On the other hand, so what if it did?

  He knew it seemed ludicrous to dismiss something that was possibly that monumental . . . but the fact was, he was locked into it now, this endowment, this empowerment, whatever you wanted to call it.

  And how it came about was frankly less important than it used to be.

  But still, partly out of curiosity, and partly to let Mitch go off, Pike said, “It discharged something, why?”

  “Don’t forget,” Mitch said, “we’re talking 60 years ago. So Lucy was four. But she said it looked like it was in trouble, there was a grinding sound. That after the discharge, the sound stopped and the craft rose up and a few seconds later she zoomed away.”

  “She now,” Pike said. “But jumping around . . . everything okay with Melinda?”

  “Certainly. Why?”

  “No reason. You seem to be comfortable with Arizona though. And Lucy. No rush to get out of there.”

  “Oh, you’re saying that because I invited you down? It’s not like I’m taking up permanent residence, or anything.”

  It sort of sounded like he might be, but that really wasn’t Pike’s business, and enough with the small talk. “I straightened out--at least I think I did--that person who got run over by the car,” he said.

  “My Lord,” Mitch said, much quieter. “Please tell me about it.”

  Pike left out plenty of details, such as being an idiot and getting in trouble in the bar, and also having to play hardball with Mr. Milburn, but Mitch got the idea.

  Pike said, “Coming back, there’re a lot of odd-ball things, little coincidences, stuff turned inside-out, or reversed from where it should be.”