Time and Trouble

by Gillian Roberts

  Nothing was real there. Nothing was hers. Nothing was safe.

  But here, she could become someone new. She could take a new name, become Gwyneth, leave that world and join this one. The people on the field were her kin. They, too, saw the ugliness around them and invented their own better universe, their own escape hatch. The Middle Ages as they should have been. Chivalry, courtesy, and honor. That’s what bound them.

  She looked beyond the jousting knights to where Luke watched from the far side of the field. He wore a thickly belted chamois vest (kirtle!—she had to start thinking in the right terms) and had a small falcon on his glove. She loved Luke’s face, the way the muscles below his skin held his features almost regally, but kindly. Her first impression of him had been that he was astoundingly clean, even if she couldn’t explain what that meant. He would have been a genuine knight, if such things still existed.

  He must have felt her eyes on him, because he turned, smiled, half waved.

  A breeze ruffled her hair as she returned the greeting and for once, she didn’t mind. Her hair’s wildness had bothered her until Luke praised it, saying her red curls—“the color and movement of firelight,” his words—were like a princess’s in a fairytale.

  In the distance, thick-faced cows regarded the goings-on with low-grade interest. They didn’t seem to care that medieval cavorting was decidedly odd in their twentieth-century pasture, or that this attempt at time-travel was, frankly, amateurish. The jousters’ broadswords were rattan wrapped in duct tape, their shields, aluminum foil over cardboard. Some knights were female.

  And Luke’s hawk had been rehabilitated after being grazed by a semiautomatic bullet. Not a King Arthur kind of injury. Hand-raised, the kestrel couldn’t be released back to the wild and wasn’t much of a hunter. A few years ago, Luke had adopted her and stocked his parents’ freezer with “kestrel chow”—mouse carcasses, which infuriated his mother so much she ordered her son, his bird, and his bird’s mice out of her house.

  Which was fine with him. You have to know what you want, Luke said. And then, you have to know how to let go of all the rest.

  Luke knew, and she would learn. He would teach her.

  Tension claws ungripped, let go their hold, so that the sun finally reached and warmed her, all the way through. The field blurred in a haze of contentment, colors dancing on motes of light. Maybe she could stand the rest of her life. Maybe she could even change it, save herself and Wesley, too. Something in her chest cavity stopped clawing at her. Relaxed, expanded, gave off warmth. The future unfurled, possible.

  And as if echoing the feeling, something glowed on the ground.

  Treasure. Of course. Today, right now, here with all the good magic and possibilities. A sign.

  When she looked again, the small flash was gone.

  On hands and knees she combed the tall grass, feeling mildly foolish and getting very muddy, knowing that she’d find a fragment of a beer bottle or taillight, if anything.

  Still, she wanted it. It didn’t matter what it had been, it mattered that it would become her touchstone and promise, a tangible reminder of that sudden sense of a future. Something her own to hold onto.

  She patted the ground with fingers held flat, searching, refusing to believe the gleam had been no more than a trick of the light.

  “Lost a contact lens, mistress?”

  She smiled as she continued exploring. “What happened to staying in character? Medieval contact lenses?”

  Luke stood above her, tall and radiant, the kestrel riding his right forearm.

  “I saw something. Now I can’t find—” And then her palm grazed it and her fingers circled its cool solidity. “Look,” she whispered, holding out a heart-shaped wafer. She passed it to Luke, who now kneeled beside her.

  His kestrel cocked its head as if appraising the trinket’s worth. “It’ll be pretty when it’s cleaned,” Luke said. He rubbed it with his thumb. “Gold, I think, and there’s a design cut into it. Like filigree, I think they call it. Pretty. You can wear it on a chain. It has the loop for it.”

  “You think somebody in your group dropped it?”

  He shook his head. “This is the first time we’ve been here, and this thing’s been around awhile. The design’s packed with dirt. It’s the rain. It pushes all kinds of things up. Besides, nobody but you’s been over on this side.” He stood and held the charm to the light. “Bet it’s been here a long time.”

  Waiting for her to find it. She felt a thrill at the base of her throat, like a purr wanting to happen. “An amulet,” she whispered. “A sign. I was so upset—”

  “I know.”

  “—because of—”

  “I know.”

  “—then I felt this hopefulness, and that very second, that’s when I saw it was there for me. Like I made it happen. Do I sound—do I seem crazy?”

  “Not a bit.” He bowed, his hand cupping the trinket as if it were priceless treasure as he transferred it to her palm. “Your token, m’lady. Might be we’re standing on a treasure trove, a pirate’s booty. We aren’t far from the coast, from where Sir Francis Drake himself landed. Maybe the rains split open a long-buried treasure chest of his, and there’s more.”

  “And you accuse me of having an overactive imagination.” She slipped the heart into her jeans pocket, while Luke found a digging stick. She didn’t need more treasure. She had her amulet. But she didn’t want to dampen Luke’s pleasure in turning everything into an adventure. In the sunshine, the hair on his head and forearms became spun gold, hyper-real and fantastic at the same time. She watched him poke the ground, pull back tangled grasses with his stick, dig shallow trenches. His hopeful noises of discovery were followed by sighs and mutters.

  “I was wrong,” he eventually said, brushing perspiration from his forehead. “No treasure, no pieces of eight, no gold—”

  “No matter.” It was better that there’d been only the one special thing waiting for her.

  “No trunk,” Luke continued. “Got roots, but not a trunk or branches. Sorry.”

  “About no treasure—or about that awful pun? Botanically speaking, there couldn’t be a trunk. There’s only grass here. No trunk, no roots, no branches.”

  “Wrong, because there are roots. Look.” He poked the stick vigorously, almost angrily. The kestrel raised her wings, then seemed to remember they’d been clipped and she couldn’t fly.

  The thin, bright sounds of madrigal singers traveled across the field as Gwyneth squinted into the shallow depression where a cluster of brown twigs splayed out of a piece of bark. “Must be left from a tree that died long ago,” she said. But these weren’t wispy like root ends. And their shape, so basic, so familiar…

  “No.” She straightened up and put her hands in front of her face, literally pushing back the idea blustering its way into her brain. “Oh, no.”

  “What?” Luke asked.

  She swallowed hard and took the digging branch from him, carefully pushing earth off the spot where the twigs joined. And there five of them became one, part of a sturdier looking stick. “A hand,” she whispered. “A skeleton. An arm.”

  “Impossible. Your imagination is so… They’re brown, not the right size. They don’t look anything like bones, they’re pieces of something—”

  “They’ve been in the ground. They’re tiny. They wouldn’t look like a Halloween toy or biology-class model.” She pushed away more dirt, slowly following the line of bone as if deciphering a grisly map. “Maybe it’s an Indian burial site. That must be what—”

  “Jesus! What’s that?” Luke shouted.

  She took deep breaths and stared at the ragged-edged, discolored clot.

  “It’s a… It’s clothing. For a minute I thought—there might still be… It’s mostly clothing,” Luke said softly. “Pants? Plastic pants?”

  She gagged. The things babies wear over diapers. So small, no more than a toddler. And no ancient Miwok Indians wore plastic pants.

  The madrigal singers’ voices
played vocal tag, rising, then cascading in counterpoint, crossing paths, interlocking, reversing order.

  “There must be a reason,” Luke finally said.

  She pushed and scraped again. They both saw the hollow-socketed, earth-dyed skull. She let the stick fall.

  “Maybe this was a family cemetery,” Luke said. “Used to be lots of babies died, and they buried them right on the farm.”

  “Wouldn’t there be a marker, a coffin?” In the full heat of day, she felt chilled.

  “Probably once was. Things disintegrate.”

  “No. There was still that stuff…and the pants.” Her mouth flooded with a sour fluid, and she had to swallow again, hard. “Pioneers didn’t have plastic pants. It can’t have been buried all that long ago.”

  The ugliness of the real world was back with a vengeance, wings beating, talons tearing at her until she covered her eyes, to block out everything. “Somebody buried a baby in an unmarked grave,” she said from behind her hands. Her grief astounded her. For the baby, yes, but also for herself. Knowing this made her more dead now, too.

  “We’d better tell the police,” Luke said.

  “Not me! No police!” She didn’t want her name on anything. Besides, if she let herself see them as protection, a refuge, she’d tell them more than just about this child. She’d tell too much, because she wanted to. But she wasn’t finished with high school yet, she had to hang on a few more months, she couldn’t endanger Wesley, she had to think it through. Her mind tilted, became hard-edged and out of alignment. “No police, Luke! Please!”

  The kestrel blinked, unfazed by screams, as if its reptilian eyes had impassively watched a thousand years of human distress.

  She couldn’t think. Couldn’t risk. Couldn’t move.

  Be Gwyneth. She slipped her hand into her pocket and clutched the charm and calmed at its cool pressure. She took a deep breath.

  “Maybe you’d better go home, then,” Luke said. “I won’t do or say anything until you’re gone, and I won’t mention you. It’s okay. Doesn’t matter.”

  She slowly released her breath. The edge of metal pressed against her palm. “Luke?” she said, “about the charm? It’s too big to have belonged to a baby, so would you not mention it? It was above the ground, separate, and it’s—it’s my talisman.” She sounded like a baby herself, but she couldn’t control a rising panic so hot and total, she was in danger of spontaneous combustion.

  “Still and all,” Luke said. “I’m not sure we shouldn’t—”

  “I need it!”

  “Get ahold of yourself,” he said. “Not everything has to do with you. You’re so… Try not to mix things up that way.”

  She was listening only for his decision about the golden heart. “What the hell,” he said. “Keep it. Why not?”

  She blinked hard and smiled through a haze of suppressed tears that gave him a halo, as if he were made of heat and light. He didn’t know it, but he was her true talisman, her knight in shining armor. He would save her. If only she could keep him in her pocket, with her all the time.

  But at least she had something now. And she could be Gwyneth when she needed to be. That was also something.

  Four

  I can do this, Billie told herself. I can definitely do this. Fact was, anybody could sit and stare. An autistic three-year-old could pull it off. But all the same, it felt good to be competent, even at inert passivity.

  She’d bulldozed her way into this job, then had come to understand that she probably hadn’t needed to. Not that Emma Howe admitted it for a minute, but you’d have to have zero powers of observation not to notice the two empty cubicles at the agency or that the office manager–receptionist’s “illness” seemed permanent.

  Billie tried not to imagine what had happened to the trio. A plague, a force of nature—or Emma?

  Emma’s ad was still running, and twice, Billie had seen men whose half-hidden air of supplication suggested they were looking to be employed by Emma, not looking to employ her. Still, the extra cubicles remained unoccupied.

  Yet despite all the evidence against it, Emma still behaved as if she’d done Billie an enormous favor by giving her a chance. She narrowed her eyes suspiciously each time she looked Billie’s way, as if the interloper were attempting a scam that Emma was determined to expose.

  “Not yet,” she’d said when asked if there was anything she could do besides read a dry tome about rules and regulations. But then, Billie heard Emma on the phone, sounding less sure of herself than was usual. She was promising someone that she’d make him, it, a priority. “No more delays, Harold, I promise you that,” she’d said, and immediately stomped into Billie’s cubicle, tossed a file onto her desk and said, “This’d fit you. A lifestyle verification. One Sophia Redmond slipped on the pavement on ‘A’ Street. Hit her head on the way down on a lamppost and claims permanent disability. Can’t work, can’t walk without help. Wheelchair or cane-bound from dizzy spells, loss of balance plus back and neck pain. No known medical reason ascertained for it. Insurance company wants a look-see, and they want it immediately. They’ve authorized two, maybe could stretch it to three days.”

  Her first case, albeit of less than Sam Spade caliber. All decked out with cheap and quick business cards and a beeper. Very professional. On surveillance. She loved the sound of the word, so much better than “a look-see.” Sur…veil…lance. Rolled on the tongue like a chocolate truffle.

  But it boiled down to sitting in her car diagonally across the street from Sophia Redmond’s house. Mostly in the passenger side of her Honda as she awaited Sophia’s exit and whatever happened next.

  So far, in two days, Sophia had emerged once, during a lull in the storm. A tall, sinewy woman with a frizzy halo of rusty hair, she’d leaned on a cane and a redheaded girl’s shoulder as she slowly navigated the five porch steps down to the pavement, her face gray with effort and pain, until she settled into a waiting wheelchair and directed the girl’s attempts to clean storm debris from around the house.

  Later, with branches and twigs piled at the curb, the sullen girl reversed the process, slowly guiding the woman up the front stairs and into the house, then folding the wheelchair and dragging it up as well.

  Billie was pretty well sold on the authenticity of Mrs. Redmond’s woes. She filled the time by reading, with frequent eyes-to-the-white-house interruptions, three newspapers, using a flashlight when the sky darkened and heavy rain made vision difficult. She had the San Francisco Chronicle, the Marin-Sonoma Independent Journal and the New York Times. She read them in reverse order of circulation size, and was now up to date on Bosnia, AIDS research, a burst dam in Rwanda, the drug-related death of a TV star, current political sniping, a new play by Tom Stoppard, the estimated density of the Sierra snowpack, the All-Pro Conference in Hawaii, and the latest Doonesbury. That information had been acquired in fits and starts throughout the day, and now, with yet another glance toward the house, she thumbed the I.J., starting from the back section with “Lifestyles,” human interest stories. The section that had profiled Emma a week ago. She worked forward, tossing the sports section. Local teams’ stats and scores could wait until Jesse was older and Billie presumably would be obliged to care about such things so that she didn’t warp her son out of acceptable shape.

  The downpour eased, but that was the only change. The white house was sealed, lights on against the dullness of the day.

  Billie needed a bathroom. She had avoided all liquids even though every movie detective—male, of course—ingested countless cups of coffee. Which sounded irresistible on this wet and chilly day.

  But she’d had none. She was, in fact, dehydrating while sitting in the middle of endless rain.

  All the same, her bladder had hit flood level.

  She had read a suggestion that a PI carry a wide-mouthed jar for such emergencies, but this did not seem applicable to those of the female persuasion, particularly when wearing slacks. Stripping and straddling a jar in the back of a Honda wasn’t he
r idea of professionalism, but heeding the call of nature bare-assed on this quiet, privileged cul-de-sac, seemed an even worse idea.

  If she had to come back tomorrow, she’d wear a skirt. Long, loose, retro Summer of Love type thing if she could find one. And carry a mixing bowl with a lid. Had Tupperware ever considered this a selling point for their burp-top containers?

  The question remained. How did the penis-challenged PI pee? True equity lay in being able to unzip and relieve oneself standing up and barely revealed. Not penis envy, Sigmund. Peeing envy.

  Meantime, she tried to dissociate from the discomfort. Think positively. What a good job she’d done of doing nothing. A-plus for effort, if not achievement.

  Not much longer to go, in any case. Emma would observe Sophia Redmond after five, would make note of any after-dark boogying, and the insurance company had only authorized two days’ worth of surveillance.

  Billie reached the last of her reading material, the front page of the I.J. She skipped the newest commission report which—surprise, surprise—said the county needed better mass transit and moved to the description of another heist by the jogging burglar. Very Marin to have an aerobically fit thief who knew the hillsides well enough to remove jewelry from their wealthy homes and flee on his secret woodland paths so quickly that security companies answering the alarms found the valuables—and the burglar—long gone. She imagined his ad in the personals: Self-employed professional, fit, loves nature, diamonds and starlight runs, seeks slender SWF who likes same and can keep secrets.

  She scanned the street again. The rain had become negligible, no more than driblets. She thought she saw two shadows, both of them upright and moving at the Redmonds’ bay window, but they were blurred by a lacy curtain so that they could have been anyone.

  Tomorrow, if the insurance authorized a third day of surveillance, she’d bring her Walkman and a book on tape. She was getting whiplash from the up and down of her vigilante newspaper reading.