“How about you begin by telling me how I got here? You said you brought me. How?”
“I am a Sigma-W-Pi.” He put his hand down the front of his shirt and brought out a pendant attached to a thin silver chain. “See this?”
I nodded. It was a glistening silver pendant with a z and something else on it.
“This is the Sigma-W-Pi insignia,” he explained.
“So, what’s that? Like a cult or something? Is that it? Am I being held by a weirdo cult started by Dr. Sen?”
“Nope. Not a cult. I’m a time traveler.”
Perfect. A deluded cult. Drug induced, no doubt. Was Dr. Sen the head of a cult he had drugged into crazyland? I kept a straight face, though my lips quivered, and I was desperate to release a well-proclaimed snort. However, it was never a good idea to taunt the crazies. So I pursed my lips and nodded, while avoiding Stan’s eyes.
He sighed. “You obviously don’t believe me.”
“Well, it is a bit
out there
, don’t you think?” I couldn’t help but smirk.
He rolled his eyes. “I guess. It’s true, though. I am a time traveler. I not only travel through time, but I can also travel through dimensions and geographically. That’s all I had to do to bring you here. I simply wandered you over from your gym.”
Right. My head was starting to hurt. I put my fingers on my forehead and massaged it.
“Arizona, sit down and drink some more water.”
I did, walking back to the sand, sitting down, finishing what was left in the bottle, and then laying my head down on the sand. This day sucked. All that I had set out to do was to give David an opportunity to invite me to the Ball and, here I was, lying on a beach in the Bahamas with a guy who claimed to be some kind of time traveler. Gah. This was ridiculous.
What was it Kellan had said?
You’ve lost a year of your life.
Could that be true? It certainly would explain why I couldn’t remember stuff. This guy–Stan–seemed to know me, yet I’d never met him before. Or had I and somehow forgotten it in the year I supposedly lost? How had I lost it? Had I been in a coma? In my bed? It was all too weird.
“Stan, when did you meet me?”
“Last week, in Paris. I don’t understand how you can’t remember.”
“Can you tell me how we met?”
“Sure, but I’ve just had a text from Raj asking me to bring you to him. He’s waiting where he met you before. Come on, let’s go.”
“What if I don’t?”
“Arizona, the man’s not stable. Let’s not make him mad. I’m going to keep you safe, but I have to deliver you to him.”
“Why? Can’t you just take me home?”
“Believe me, I want to. But I can’t. My dad and Simla would be really ticked.”
“Simla’s sort of a friend of mine. She’d want you to take me home. How do you know her? What do you owe her?”
“Come on, Arizona. Let’s get moving. He’s waiting,” he muttered, sounding frustrated. The weird thing was that I didn’t feel afraid of him, even though he was clearly one of the bad guys since he was helping Raj. But, he seemed to be doing it with reservations; he almost seemed to be protecting me while holding me captive. It was confusing. When he extended his hand, I took it without hesitation and was immediately rewarded by a warm, secure feeling. We ran back toward the lonesome figure in the distance–Raj, I assumed.
“Your Highness, fear not, I’ll have your back,” Stan declared as we ran.
“What? Your what? I’m not coming across as
that
stuck up, am I?” I didn’t think I had been snobby in any way.
“No!” he exclaimed, suddenly stopping. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“So, how
did
you mean it?”
His face darkened, and he shook his head. “Never mind. Come on, we’re almost there.” He grabbed my hand firmly and pulled me along. We were back with Raj in no time.
“Thank you, Stanford. I’ll take it from here.” Raj dismissed Stan with a wave of his hand.
“I’m staying,” Stan said curtly.
Raj crunched his teeth, twitching his nose. Then suddenly, he smiled. “Whatever. Arizona, I haven’t had a reply from your mother yet, so you’re going to have to stay here overnight.”
“Let me call or email her. She’ll talk to me, and then we can get this straightened out.”
“I’ll let you email her, but no calling.” I guessed he was afraid that the call would be traced somehow. “I’ve arranged a room for you at the motel. Come along.”
“Dr. Sen, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll arrange Arizona’s accommodations somewhere I can keep an eye on her,” Stan interrupted.
“I can keep an eye on her at the motel. Her room is next to mine,” Raj replied.
“What if Wanderers try to rescue her? Only I could stop that from happening.”
Dr. Sen sighed. “Hmm, maybe. Where are you staying?”
“At a private beach house, not far.”
Raj perked up. “Does it have an extra room for me?”
“I’m afraid not, but I’ll have Arizona meet you here again in the morning.”
Raj dug his right black dress shoe into the sand, flicking it with the toe of his left one. He stood silently for a moment, and then looked up. “Okay. Have her back here at nine. I’ll send you an email for her to forward to her mother. Can you take care of that?”
Stan nodded.
“I’ll contact you if I need you to bring her to me any earlier. In either case, don’t be any later than nine.” He turned around and walked off.
“Right, let’s go,” Stan said.
“Where are we going?”
“Just a bit further long the beach to a place where you’ll be comfortable. You must be starving. I’ve called ahead and arranged to have burgers and fries ready and waiting. I assume you’ve not developed a fondness for escargot since Paris?”
“Snails? Yuck! No, definitely not. Biting into bugs is not for me. Yeah, burgers sound perfect. Do you–”
“Have any honey mustard to go with that?” he finished for me.
“How did you know?”
“I noticed you diving into it in Paris. It was an… um… unusual sight.”
“Here we go with that Paris stuff again. When exactly do you think you saw me?”
“A few days ago. And I didn’t just see you, we chatted. We had dinner together. We even danced.”
I rubbed my forehead. He was weirding me out. I decided not to press him for any more information just yet; I couldn’t process it. I needed to think. We walked along together in silence. Had I really lost a year? How? And what had I been doing during that time? Stan seemed to think we’d met in Paris. Could I really have traveled to Paris and have no recollection of it? What was it that people called that sort of thing? Temporary amnesia? All I knew about that was what I had learned from movies. Somehow, people totally lost their memories for a while. It usually followed some kind of trauma. Was that what had happened to me? What sort of incident could have caused me to lose my memory? I felt my head, massaging the back and top of my skull for evidence of bumps from being hit in the head.
Stan laughed. “Looking for evidence of a brain injury?”
“Yeah, sort of.” I sighed. “How else do you explain the fact that I honestly can’t remember you?”
Looking at me gravely, he pursed his lips. “I don’t know what happened to you after you left London–”
“London?” I interrupted. “I thought you said Paris? Geez!”
“We did meet in Paris. After your time in Paris, you traveled to London. That’s where you met my father.”
I clenched my jaw. One of us was nuts; that was for sure.
“Then you disappeared from London. I guess your grandfather rescued you. Perhaps you were injured during the rescue?”
“Rescue? What was I being rescued from?”
He pointed to a whitewashed Gaudi-inspired–I knew that from my trip to Barcelona–house. It was gorgeous. We walked through a gate into a fenced backyard dominated by a white marble pool surrounded by sand. Parasol-topped beach chairs lined the side of the oblong pool.
The pool water was perfectly still as we walked around it toward a raised patio with several picnic tables. After rinsing our feet in the warm stream of water from an outside shower, we entered the house through a set of patio doors. I stepped onto the white slate floor of the house and looked around in awe. It was all white, with a bit of cream, the kind of house Mom would adore. I preferred a splash of color myself.
“Whose house is this?” I asked.
“It’s one of my family’s houses. No one has actually ever used it, yet. I believe we’re the first. I hope everything is working okay. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet.”
“Mr. Stan? I am Billy, your housekeeper and cook.”
I turned around to look at the smallish man who had just appeared. He was smartly dressed in a pair of black slacks and white shirt.
“Nice to meet you.” Stan shook the elderly man’s hand. “This is Arizona. She will be our guest tonight. Can you get a room ready for her?”
“Yes, sir. How long will you and mademoiselle be staying?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Your dinner is ready. Shall I serve you first, and then get the room ready?”
Stan nodded, and we followed Billy into the dining room. We sat down and waited for him to bring our dinner. Once he’d done so, he excused himself, and Stan and I dug into our burgers.
“Stan, can I email my mom now?” I asked, after the first few bites hit my stomach and I could think again.
“Finish your burger, and then we’ll go find the study.”
“You don’t know where it is?” I gulped my virgin piña colada.
“No, this is my first visit here. It shouldn’t be difficult to find, though.”
And it wasn’t, but it was more of a den than a study. There were no study-looking desks, but instead it contained antique tables and French-looking chairs covered in silver-embroidered cream fabric. The only sign that it was a study were the two Mac Air computers sitting on the coffee table.
Stan walked over to the table and brought one of the computers to life. I watched as he opened up his email and scowled as he read through a message. “Arizona, Raj has sent me an email. He wants you to cut and paste it to your email account and send it to your mother.”
“What does it say?”
“Come see.”
It was short and to the point. There was no way Mom wasn’t responding to that. “Stan, do you know anything about these blueprints?”
“Not a lot. Can you send it off to your mom? The sooner she deals with this, the sooner I can return you home.”
I did what he asked and sent the message to Mom. She would get it immediately. Email from me went straight into her personal email account, then was pushed through to her phone. It would have been quicker to call her, but I supposed Raj wanted to limit my contact with Mom so I couldn’t tell her where I was. I stared at the screen waiting for a message from her.
“Come on, Arizona. Let’s jump into the pool and swim for a while.”
“I think we should wait until Mom replies.” My eyes were still fixed on the screen.
“She’s going to reply to Raj’s email, not yours, remember?”