Authors: Irving Belateche
As for me, I was barreling through the night at sixty-five miles an hour, the posted speed limit. I could’ve gone faster, but I didn’t want to hand myself over to the police.
It wasn’t long before the steady, full hum of the engine and the stillness of the night led me back to the image of Richie’s face. How it had suddenly appeared right there in front of me, terrified, followed by a hard, sickening thud, before it disappeared in a rapid jerk beneath the long hood of the car.
His parents probably knew by now. They were devastated. I’d killed their boy. They would live the rest of their lives with a hole in their hearts, forever grieving. I wished I’d been erased from existence, like would’ve happened in the science-fiction version of time travel.
I glanced down at the gas gauge and forced myself to make some practical calculations. The tank was three-quarters full. Estimating the size of the gas tank, the poor gas mileage of the fifties, and the number of miles I had to go, I’d have to fill the gas tank once to cover the round trip to Princeton.
If I topped it off now, I’d have to get gas another time, too, on the way back from Princeton, in the wee hours of the morning, should I be so lucky as to have accomplished my mission.
Gas would wait. I’d roll the dice and run down this tank, aiming to stop only once for gas.
I sped up, exited Route 220, and followed my directions for getting onto Route 76, the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Once there, I began the two-hundred-and-twenty-mile sprint that would take me to within thirty minutes of Princeton.
There were very few cars on the turnpike, so I upped my speed again. The sooner I arrived by Einstein’s bedside, the better chance I had of getting to that confession before Einstein handed it over to Clavin.
As the miles started to pass, the turnpike lulled me into a comatose state, which was a good thing. I didn’t want to see my dad’s blue eyes and I didn’t want to hear that sickening thud. There were long stretches of total darkness. Gloomy, undeveloped hinterlands, interrupted only by lit interchanges and a few pairs of headlights.
As I closed in on Princeton, I saw a sign for an upcoming service plaza and snapped out of my daze. This was an opportunity to gas up now, instead of waiting for the return trip. If the gas station was still open.
A few miles later, I pulled into that plaza. It boasted a Howard Johnson’s restaurant and an Esso gas station, both open. The parking lot had three cars in it.
I drove toward the gas pumps, but when the gas pump attendant stepped out of the cashier’s booth, I instantly changed course and swung the car around into the restaurant parking lot. I’d forgotten that this was an era when gas attendants pumped your gas, cleaned your windshields, and checked your tires.
The bottom line was that I needed to check my front grille for signs of my crime before allowing anyone near my car. I pulled into a space far from the three cars in the lot and out of view of the large bay window that fronted the restaurant.
Before stepping out, that feeling of dread came over me again. Would I find blood and flesh on the front grille? Well, it didn’t matter, did it? I had to get the job done regardless. I turned to the back seat in search of something to wipe the front of the car with. There was something there all right, but using it seemed callous and creepy.
On the back seat was a small, pink, button-up sweater. It must’ve belonged to the young girl I’d last seen riveted to Donald Duck. Her life would now always be tied to the death of that child at the drive-in. Her family car was the weapon that’d killed him.
I checked the glove compartment, hoping there’d be a handkerchief or a stack of paper napkins tucked inside. There wasn’t.
I grabbed the pink sweater and stepped out into the chilly night. As I moved around to the front of the car, I scanned the side of it to make it look like I was one of those obsessive car owners constantly checking for dings. This was my feeble attempt to cover up my true purpose in case the gas attendant or a restaurant patron was watching.
Not really wanting to face the grille, but also knowing I couldn’t delay the inevitable, I looked down at the front of the car. My eyes ticked over the grille from right to left and stopped on some small, bloodied scraps of clothes, lodged between the metal slats.
I lunged at them with the pink sweater, and as I did, I noticed there was something stuck to the inside edge of the oversized bumper.
A chunk of tattered flesh.
Turning away from the horrid sight, I knelt down and freed the scraps of bloodied clothes from the grille, using the sweater. Some stuck to the sweater and some fell to the ground.
When the slats were free of evidence of the crime, I forced myself to look back at the globule of flesh, then scraped it off the bumper, keeping it all wrapped in the sweater.
Then I reached down and collected the pieces of clothes that had fallen to the ground. Just as I was finishing up, I noticed something stuck farther back into the slats of the grille.
I reached in with my free hand and wedged it out. It was my father’s plastic nametag.
Richie Morgan.
My mind went numb for a second, no thoughts. Just a flood of darkness, like the thick gloom I’d been driving through all night.
I stuck the nametag in my pocket.
Then, from my kneeling position, I checked the grille, the bumper, and the ground, making sure all the grisly evidence was gone.
It was.
The only evidence that remained was the grille itself. It was ever-so-slightly curved inward at the point of impact. But the bumper was unscathed. Cars of the fifties were tanks.
I stood up and scanned the parking lot for a trashcan, then thought better of it. It’d be smarter to put the sweater in the car, drive back into the hinterlands of the turnpike, pull over, and bury it in the woods. I walked around the other side of the car, scanning every inch as if I were still on the lookout for dings, made my way around the trunk, stopping to buff a spot with my shirt sleeve, then ducked back into the car and stashed the sweater under the passenger seat.
Rather than drive off as if I had something to hide, I went straight for the Esso station. At this point, I thought it’d be less suspicious to get the gas and be done with it. The attendant probably wasn’t thinking that this guy is a child murderer. At worst, he was thinking that this guy is an odd duck.
As soon as I pulled up to the pump, the attendant was at my window, offering to
fill ’er up and check the oil
. I said yes to the gas and no thanks to the oil check. He went to work, gassing up the car and cleaning my windshield and windows.
I paid him with Eddie’s cash and told him to keep the change. He gave me an enthusiastic
good night, sir
, and I pulled out and onto the highway. My goal was to get rid of the pink sweater as soon as I entered another long stretch of country darkness.
As soon as that stretch came up, I couldn’t pull over fast enough. My emergency flashers stayed off. I didn’t want to attract the aid of a Good Samaritan, or worse, a policeman. But I did flick on the interior light.
I inspected the floor for evidence, retrieved the sweater from under the seat, checked the floor again, then clicked the interior light off and got out of the car.
The forest was bathed in a haunting glow, courtesy of the pale gibbous moon. I trudged through the underbrush, and about twenty yards in, knelt down and brushed the leaves away from the dirt. With my hands, I dug out a two-foot-square shallow grave.
I laid the sweater in the tiny grave and covered it with dirt.
The temptation to say a few words was strong. A prayer or a couple of lines of tribute to Richie Morgan, the kid who loved movies. But I didn’t give in to the temptation. That would’ve meant giving in to this current history. Accepting its facts.
I couldn’t do that. I had to ignore the power of this moment. Only then could I resurrect the flesh that I’d just buried. Only then could I breathe life back into the set of facts that made up the only history that mattered.
I quickly spread the leaves back over the grave, then stood up, ready to take off, when I suddenly remembered that there was one more piece of evidence I needed to bury.
My dad’s nametag. It now felt heavy in my pocket. I pulled it out and knelt back down. But I couldn’t do it. Something was telling me not to bury it. Even though I wasn’t superstitious, I had this feeling that the nametag had been embedded in the grille for a reason.
I stuck it back into my pocket and hurried to the car, hoping my hunch was right. If it turned out to be wrong, and the police tracked me down, the nametag would link me directly to the crime.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The rest of the trip was uneventful. It consisted of the dead of night, the engine’s drone, and the headlights of oncoming cars, which were few and far between.
I pulled off the turnpike and navigated the final streets to Princeton. When I arrived, the town was fast asleep. On my way to the hospital, I saw less than a half dozen cars on the road. Every store was shuttered for the night and every house was a dark silhouette.
The hospital was a different story. Though not every room in the five-story building was lit, quite a few were, including some on the third floor, home to the hospital’s most celebrated patient.
I pulled into the parking lot. Two dozen cars were clustered close to the hospital, but the rest of the lot was empty. I didn’t want to look conspicuous, so I parked near the cluster, but left myself a clean escape route. I checked the time on the car clock.
History had recorded that Einstein had already been sedated and would die in an hour. It had also recorded that he would mumble something in German first. But what history had not recorded was what Clavin had told me during his own deathbed confession.
He told me to take it, to give it to Mr. Van Doran.
According to Clavin’s final words, Einstein would hand his confession to Clavin and ask him to deliver it to Van Doran. I hadn’t thought about it before, but one deathbed confession was shedding light on another. Time travel was messy, but it had an elegant side to it.
By now, Einstein had probably written down his secret, and it was sitting next to his hospital bed. Of course, it was also possible that Clavin had already come and gone, with the secret in hand.
As I entered the hospital, I was on the lookout for him. The lobby, including the visitor waiting area, was empty, except for a security guard seated behind a broad desk. In modern times, the pending death of a major icon would’ve filled the lobby with reporters clamoring for updates and gossip. There would’ve also been a police presence keeping order.
I had to pass the guard to get to the elevators. He eyed me as I did, forced a smile and nodded. I nodded back and added a casual “Hi.”
“Howdy,” he said, keeping his eyes on me.
I walked by a line of phone booths, stepped up to the elevators, and pushed the “up” button.
“Excuse me, sir. We don’t allow visitors after nine o’clock.”
Luckily, I was ready for this. I knew that Einstein had been allowed visitors at all hours, and that these visitors were either family members, like his son, who’d flown in from San Francisco, or close friends, like a mathematician whom Einstein had known for over two decades.
I walked over to the guard. “I’m Professor Stanton and I’m here to see Professor Einstein,” I said. “I drove down from Harvard as soon as I heard he wanted to see me.”
The guard looked me over, and I hoped that when he got to my oversized pants and shoes, he’d peg me as a nerd, and that this would fit in with his vision of a professor.
I glanced around the lobby, leaned in close to the guard, and lowered my voice to just above a whisper. “Professor Einstein and I are working on a secret project.”
The guard’s eyes widened, and he scooted his chair up to his desk and closer to me. “I think he’s doing okay,” he said. “He’s had some other visitors up there.” He nodded to the elevators. “Third floor. ICU. Room 314.”
“Thanks,” I said, and quickly walked back to the elevator. It arrived, and as soon as the door closed, I braced myself for what lay ahead.
I stepped out onto the third floor and into a long sterile hallway. The nurses’ station was at the far end of the hallway, but it was presently nurseless. In the other direction, three people stood outside a room, which was about two thirds of the way down the hallway.
Without a doubt, that room was Einstein’s.
As I walked in that direction, my legs began to feel as heavy as lead and my thoughts became a jumbled tangle of things that could go wrong and had gone wrong.
This wasn’t the time to let panic take over. To escape my thicket of thoughts, I fixated on my surroundings, glancing inside rooms as I passed them. Patients were hooked up to IVs and bulky monitoring equipment. A nurse was in one of the rooms, administering oxygen to an elderly woman.
Then I turned my attention to the three people standing outside Einstein’s room. They were already watching me. But so what? What did I expect? I met their stares with a half-smile, indicating that they had nothing to fear from me, and logged their identities.
Ruth Meyer, Einstein’s assistant. Hans Albert, Einstein’s son. And Alfred Frank, an economist and Einstein’s good friend.
No sign of Clavin.
Getting past Hans and Alfred wouldn’t be too tough, but Meyer would be a different story. Not only was she always protective of Einstein, but she also knew every one of his friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. I couldn’t claim to be someone Einstein knew, so I planned on telling her I was a reporter for the
New York Times
, on standby, in case Einstein wanted to issue a statement.
The trio was standing on the other side of the doorway, so I peeked into Einstein’s room as I passed. He was lying motionless in his hospital bed, eyes shut, his face gaunt and pale. A nurse was checking one of his IVs.
Mrs. Ander, the nurse who’d hear Einstein’s final words.
As soon as I looked back at the trio, I met Meyer’s stern stare and threw my original plan out the window. I nodded and continued past her, as if I were going to another room.