Jaclyn the Ripper (16 page)

Detached, she watched him press a flurry of keys. Then he put the phone back in its box, nodded and grinned. “Done.”

“Thank you
so
much.”

She paid for the phone and accessories with Heather's Visa card and was on her way out the door when the salesman called out to her.

“I was wondering,” he stammered, “unh, like I got my break in a few minutes, and hey, d'you want to get some coffee or something?”

“Oh, thank you,” she said, smiling sweetly and putting her hand on his chest. “I'd love to, but you're too young and pretty to die.”

He stepped back and cocked his head as if he hadn't heard right, then figured she was joking and laughed weakly.

But she was already gone.

 

Back in the Mercedes, cruising east on Santa Monica, she opened her new cell and made her first call.

“This is Holland,” he answered.

“Oh, yes, Lieutenant Holland,” she said breathlessly. “We met earlier today, and I—”

“Jaclyn!”

“The same.”

“What's up?”

“I wanted so much to ask a favor of you this morning, but the timing was unfortunate.” She hesitated. “Oh, I'm so bad at this sort of thing, but maybe if you'd allow me to buy you lunch or, or—”

“Hey, try me.”

“
Try
you?”

“What's the favor?”

She smiled, took a breath and plunged in. “Since they knew I was coming to the west coast of California, my parents asked me to try and find a dear friend in San Francisco that they've lost track of. A Miss Amy Catherine Robbins. I've had absolutely no luck, and its suddenly occurred to me that a police lieutenant might know how to go about it. . . .”

H.G. paused at the house on Marina Boulevard, turned and looked back at the green sward across the street and the Golden Gate Bridge. He breathed in the crisp, refreshing air from the bay and wondered indignantly why Amy had never talked about growing up here. The house rivaled Spade House in its size and feel. Maybe she'd never mentioned it because she didn't want to hurt his feelings. Obviously, she'd grown up with all the latest conveniences and probably wasn't impressed that he had wanted to install electric central heating at Spade House—a revolutionary concept in 1901. No doubt she'd secretly laughed at his picshuas of automatic brooms and self-making beds. He knew that he was overreacting, yet couldn't help but think that their love might always have been compromised by white lies and omissions.

Earlier that morning, Amber had journeyed online again and become hopelessly lost in a sea of irrelevant Web sites. Then H.G. had narrowed their search considerably by entering Amy's employment history at the Bank of England in 1979. Amber hadn't seen how it would help, but having beginner's luck with the mouse, H.G. serenely continued to click
and eventually stumbled onto the bank's database of archives. The human-resources file on Amy Catherine Robbins listed her parents, Kevin and Elizabeth Robbins, as the ones to contact in case of an emergency. Not surprising after thirty-one years, their phone number had been disconnected, but H.G. and Amber were hoping they still lived at 239 Marina Boulevard.

A subdued Amber rang the doorbell, still embarrassed by the night before. She had tried to blame it on the bartender who kept refilling her glass with vodka, then on Wells himself, because he was charming, witty, famous, handsome—not to mention historical and out of his own time—but that didn't work, either. The stark reality was that she had made a complete fool of herself. Worse, she didn't feel guilty and wondered when it would happen again.

A Hispanic maid finally opened the door a crack, endured H.G.'s barrage of questions about Amy Catherine Robbins, then smiled and shook her head.

“
No hablo inglés. Momentito
.” She disappeared inside the house.

“I must remember that.”

“What?”

“When I'm in a conversation and I can't think straight, instead of making a fool out of myself, I merely say ‘
No hablo inglés
' and walk away.”

Her eyes downcast, Amber forced a small laugh.

A tall, striking woman in a maroon business suit appeared in the foyer and appraised them with a curious smile. “Yes?”

“My name is Wells. Herbert George Wells.” He extended his hand. “Would you be Elizabeth Robbins . . . ?”

“No,” she said apologetically, “I'm sorry.”

His hopes shattered, he was wondering what they could possibly do next other than go back to the tyranny of the Internet, but the woman was still talking.

“They moved away after the earthquake in 1989.”

“1989?” H.G. gasped. That damned seismologist, W. K. Chichester, had been wrong by twenty years!

“You should've seen this place.” She led them into a spacious living room with floor-to-ceiling glass that faced the bay. “It was totally wrecked. Incredible. An absolute mess.” She misread H.G.'s baffled expression. “Have you ever been in a major earthquake?”

He shook his head.

She chuckled. “I was at the game. Game three of the World Series. They hadn't even thrown out the first pitch, and you should've felt Candlestick Park rocking and rolling.” She smiled nostalgically. “Anyway, we'd been looking for a place in the Marina, and a week after the quake, our broker brought us here. . . .” A bigger smile. “The Robbinses sold for fifty cents on the dollar. Then we rebuilt.”

“It's beautiful,” Amber crooned.

“Thank you.”

“Do you have any idea what happened to the Robbinses?” asked H.G.

“I believe they moved to Beverly Hills,” she said, “but I'm not really sure. Its been years, you know.”

“Beverly Hills?”

“They had a daughter,” she mused, “a cute little girl. She must be in her thirties by now.”

 

“How could you not know that Amy had a sister?”

“She never talked about her family,” he said weakly as they hurried back to the rental car. “I can only suppose she was allowing me to revel in the somewhat dubious accomplishments of 1979 and then translate that for our own world.”

“How selfish.”

“When we talked, we talked about our own family,” he protested. “The boys, Gip and Frank, and, and—”

They got in the car, and Amber pulled out onto Marina Boulevard without looking. Drivers swerved and leaned on their horns, but she paid them no attention, still preoccupied with Amy and her family. “She didn't think about them? Or remember?”

“I didn't say that. I said she never talked about them. How can I presume to know what she was thinking?”

“You'd been married for eleven years.”

“Blast it, I told you! When she was Catherine, she would go for long walks on the beach or vanish in the garden house, and later I would find her writing poetry or arranging flowers. She would take imaginary lovers in her dreams.”

“What's that got to do with her sister?”

“I was merely trying to explain.”

“Maybe you were uncomfortable with the life that Amy had led in the future. Before she met you. Men are like that.”

“Balderdash!”

“Maybe you told her not to talk about her family.”

“She was free to discuss whatever she pleased,” he said hotly. “And just for the bloody record, she was quite happy in our world.”

“If it had been me and I had a sister,” Amber said defiantly, “I'd talk about her whenever I damn well pleased.”

Amber felt better. His presumed ignorance of his own family gave her a reason for anger and frustration. Should he ask why she was upset, she wouldn't have to mention her unforgivable weakness, those moments in his bed, and apologize for the umpteenth time.

Now they were on Van Ness Avenue, mired in traffic, inching south toward the freeway and the airport. At the rate they were going, Wells mused darkly, they might as well have been on their way to Mexico.

“I could get there faster on a bicycle,” he said. “Not to mention a motorbike.”

Helicopters circled up ahead like angry hornets, indicating that there was an accident or crime or chase or alert or some sort of disruption.

“You know, there mustn't have been a lot of forward thinking among the road builders in the last half of the twentieth century.”

She glanced at him quizzically.

“They didn't anticipate the profusion of motor cars or the fact that modern man would be virtually helpless without them.”

“Your point?”

“Why not build roads underground? Or stack one on top of another? Then there would be no traffic jams, and we could all get to where we were going quickly and efficiently.”

“They already tried that here,” she replied, smiling wickedly. “It worked great. . . . The Nimitz Freeway was a double-decker.”

“Yes?”

“The earthquake flattened it in '89.”

 

They were on the first space-available flight to LAX, H.G.'s spirits rising with the aircraft, finally leveling off with a generous sense of well-being, especially now that they were supposedly out of earthquake country. In fact, he couldn't remember when he had felt this good. Though still a neophyte, he already adored flying: it was an example of how technology served the common man so that he might be free to become a citizen of the world.
Certainly, if one can go everywhere this quickly, then one can be a part of everywhere just as quickly
, he thought, not realizing the deadly irony of his observation or the contributions of jet engines to global warming. He was in far too good a mood. The tea that the flight attendant had served wasn't all that terrible, either—despite the paper cup that he jokingly deemed more appropriate for urine samples should one's physician desire a uroscopy.

Amber worried that his ebullient mood was on account of Amy and hated herself for it. She had volunteered to guide him through her world and help him find Amy, not wreck his marriage. Yet she couldn't stop her feelings from running amok. She asked herself why she had done it in the first place—he wasn't paying her a salary, he wasn't promising her anything. Was it as simple as his limpid blue eyes? No, no way, even she knew better than that. Rather, he was the stuff of dreams, and not just the sexy kind. He was the portal to parallel universes, and now that she knew they existed, she didn't want to be forever stuck in a world that since yesterday at the Getty had become proverbially flat. Risking her career, maybe even her life, was worth it all for that one glimpse or leap or whatever into the beyond—or so she had told herself. What she hadn't counted on was him. Maybe it was as simple as his limpid blue eyes.

She turned and gave him a warm smile. “Can we go somewhere?”

“We are going somewhere.”

“I mean in
The Utopia
.”

“I have to repair it,” he said noncommittally.

“We'll be vaporized together,” she mused. “A ménage of molecules.”

He didn't smile.

“Come on, don't be so rigid.” She turned, her breasts brushing his arm. Then she gently touched his face. “I mean, I want to understand. . . . Is it like flying?”

“No,” he said patiently. “Because one doesn't
go
anywhere. You get in the time machine at a ‘present,' and you get out at a ‘future' or ‘past.' It's only like flying if at some point in your journey, the time machine happens to be on an aircraft.”

“Oookay. . . . Do I just sit there, then?”

“No. You're vaporized.”

“I know that. What comes next?”

He frowned testily. “Didn't we talk about this yesterday?”

“I didn't get it yesterday.”

He sighed with resignation, gathered his thoughts. She'd ruined the plane ride for him, so he might as well give it another go, and perhaps then she would stop pestering him. He pushed the residue on his tray table to one side and found a single grain of sugar from the sugar packet. He centered it, then held it up on the tip of his finger. He explained: “Believe it or not, within this minuscule speck of sugar are universes, planets, and creatures living lives, some intelligent, some no doubt meaningless.” With a flourish, he flicked the grain of sugar into space and chuckled at her shocked expression.

“Lest you think that I just destroyed countless civilizations, consider this: We have no idea how time is measured in that grain of sugar. To its creatures, a billion years might've passed in the millisecond it took me to pick it up. . . . Maybe I created thousands of earthquakes by launching it into the air and mass destruction followed when it hit the floor.”

“I get that.”

“No, you don't get that. . . . Someday we, too, shall hit the floor . . .
when some enormous creature on some enormous planet flicks our world off its finger and—catapulted out of orbit—Mother Earth hurtles towards an enormous pile of rocks somewhere.”

“Okay, but I gotta tell you . . .” She shook her head firmly. “At work, I look through microscopes every day, and I'm pretty sure that a grain of sugar is made up of particles. Not planets.”

“Does not the structure of an atom resemble a solar system . . . ?”

She paused, confused, then bit her lip. “What does this have to do with time travel?”

“I am merely pointing out the immensity of the cosmos so that you can accept that every moment of our lives is reflected in parallel universes, each one different from the other depending upon the density of dark gravity and the vagaries of fate.”

“I don't care about that!”

He shrugged in frustration. “Perhaps you'd care about being reduced to a vapor not knowing if you'd ever again be the lovely young woman that you happen to be right now.”

“I just want to go with you,” she said petulantly.

He closed his eyes, but could no longer ignore her insinuations that hung between them like delicate perfume. “ 'Dusa,” he said patiently, “I'm not interested in a passade.”