The Bellbottom Incident
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2015 by Neve Maslakovic
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.
The quotes in chapters 15 and 27 are reprinted, under fair use, from
The Sirens of Titan
, Kindle edition, RosettaBooks, © 1959 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The quote in chapter 19 is reprinted, under fair use, from
Slaughterhouse-Five
, Kindle edition, RosettaBooks, © 1969 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
This is a Westmarch Publishing book.
www.westmarchpub.com
for Libby and John
A girl lost in time. A list of numbers that would shut down the time-travel lab. And a death.
Only the first of those things was my fault. The rest just sort of…happened.
Let me back up a bit, to the evening I found out that Sabina had jumped back into the past. No, to that morning, a crisp Saturday dawn. Because what happened then set it all into motion.
Nate had driven to the house in response to my text message alerting him that rumors about Celer’s ancient Roman pedigree had started to seep out online. I would have called them wild rumors, except that they happened to be true—we
had
rescued the dog from the first-century eruption of Vesuvius, along with Sabina, the teen daughter of Celer’s owner. Pedigree was entirely the wrong word, though. Celer was a gray-brown animal of no particular breed, a shopkeeper’s companion.
As to why we were in Pompeii at all—well, in my capacity as science dean’s assistant at St. Sunniva University, a school nestled in Minnesota’s lakes and hills country, I was called upon to help when a problem in the Time Travel Engineering (TTE) lab came up, which happens more often than you’d think. The SpaceTimE Warper (STEWie) was a tangled knot of mirrors and lasers in the oversized lab on the west side of campus. The contraption had sent a few companions and me on an unexpected voyage to ancient Italy. One of my fellow travelers had been Nate Kirkland, chief of campus security and a newcomer to our town of Thornberg.
We’d returned from that foray into the past with an extra person. The thing about time travel is that there are rules, four of them—no, more than rules,
unyielding cornerstones
—one of them being that History cannot be altered, down to the course of a single person’s life.
History protects itself.
Had Sabina been slated to live through the eruption,
to make it out alive as pumice and lava overtook her hometown,
we wouldn’t have been able to link hands with her and use the Slingshot to get us all home. It was that simple.
For the six of us from the twenty-first century, Pompeii had been what we at the university called a
ghost zone
, a well in time you did not want to fall into, as you were unlikely to make it out alive. The person Sabina had bonded with the most was a twenty-six-year-old TTE grad student, Abigail Tanner. Abigail had no family of her own and was quite happy to be guardian and mentor to Sabina, an arrangement eased by her working knowledge of classical Latin. I had invited the pair to live with me rent-free, which is how I’d become Aunt Julia to a thirteen-year-old girl.
For the past four months Sabina had gotten to know modern life in all its glory and shortcomings. Cell phones. Chinese takeout. Chemistry class. Being a teenager was hard enough, and when you’re the only one in the world whose mother tongue is Latin—well, it’s that much harder. The immigration paperwork Nate had procured for her listed Italy as her place of birth, though Sabina was no more able to speak Italian than I was able to converse in Old English. For the method of entry into the country—the options were land, sea, or air—we had put down
air
, as it was the closest thing to spacetime warping.
In my defense, I had been distracted by other matters. There had been my ex-husband’s failed attempt at blackmail, which had ended badly. The hold Quinn had over us was that he knew Sabina’s true background, that she wasn’t a typical immigrant from modern Italy. We had dodged a bullet with Quinn (quite literally in my case), but Sabina had been a bit quiet since. We had tried to shield her from the details, but the threat had left some scars.
Then there was the
other
distraction, this one a good one. From the front steps of the house, I watched as Nate pulled into the driveway, and went to meet him. He hopped out of the Jeep, gave me a long kiss, and said, “Chilly this morning. Is Celer ready? My grandmother will look after him until the gossip dies down. I think they’ll get along just fine.”
I had met Mary Kirkland and was the recipient of both her hospitality, in the form of one of her famous meals, and her sage advice, so I knew this to be true.
Celer, whose name was pronounced with a hard
k
, had come outside with me and was lounging in the shaft of sunlight streaming into the open garage. “It will only be temporary anyway,” I said to the dog, as if he could understand me. One of his eyes was half-closed and the other on Nate’s dog, Wanda. The spaniel, having jumped out of the Jeep, was sniffing a walnut discarded in a flower bed by a squirrel, energetically wagging her tail all the while.
Nate pulled away from me as Abigail joined us in the yard. She gave Nate a friendly wave and took a seat on the steps where I had been waiting just moments ago.
Nate greeted her, then turned back to me. “Julia, why did you ask me to bring Wanda?”
“I—we were hoping you could leave Wanda with us for a few days. To keep Sabina company. Also, so I can pretend Wanda is Celer if anyone takes the Twitter rumor seriously.”
“Will that work?”
“I researched it over breakfast,” I explained, watching Wanda, who had a royal bearing and a silky chestnut-and-white coat, push the walnut around with her nose. “Cavalier King Charles spaniels trace their lineage to exactly six mid-twentieth-century dogs. Meaning she could not have been brought back from 79 AD with genetic certainty. She’s too pretty and refined.”
“Got it.”
“It’s not exactly ethical to lie, but if it will protect Sabina from being outed as an ancient Roman and the blast of publicity that would ensue…”
Instead of agreeing with me as I’d expected, Nate turned to where Abigail was silently following our conversation from her seat on the front steps. “What do you think, Abigail?”
She and I had already hashed out the pros and cons over breakfast, and Abigail had reluctantly agreed to my plan. “Well, sooner or later we’ll have to tell the world who Sabina really is, but I guess swapping the dogs will buy us some time.”
“What did Sabina say about it?” Nate asked.
“She’s sleeping in,” Abigail said.
“Sleeping in?” Nate repeated in some disbelief. After helping her father in his store for so many years—and having been in indentured servitude before that—Sabina was accustomed to waking up before first light.
“I asked her to give it a try. That’s what normal teens are supposed to do on the weekends, right?” Having grown up in a series of foster homes, Abigail had never been a normal teenager herself.
“Well, I certainly did my share of sleeping in on the weekends,” Nate said.
“Me too,” I admitted. “It seems like a long time ago. Let’s let her sleep. Besides, why worry her? She has enough on her plate. The Twitter rumor is just Quinn’s way of sending us a message. No point in worrying Sabina. The Internet will move on by school time Monday—a day or two at the most, isn’t that the rule?—so she probably won’t even hear about it. We can come up with some excuse as to why Celer is at Mary’s, that he needs more vet shots or something.”
Mary Kirkland lived in St. Paul, a two-hour drive away. It was a thin story, but Sabina was in the unenviable position of having to accept everything that was to her unusual as being normal
here
. I felt a slight pang of guilt but pushed it aside.
Nate’s brow had acquired a dark furrow at the mention of my ex-husband. He nodded. “All right then. I’ll drop Celer off at my grandmother’s, then swing back here later with Wanda’s bed and grooming brush. C’mon, Celer.”
Celer gave Nate a
humph
sort of look at being forced to move from his sunny spot but climbed into the passenger seat of the Jeep anyway.
“Don’t worry,” Nate told him. “Kunshi will take good care of you.”
Abigail went back into the house, closing the door behind her softly so as not to wake up Sabina. Nate hopped into the Jeep. “Wanda likes to be walked three times each day,” he instructed me.
“Three?”
“Four would be better. A good mile each time. One of my retired neighbors helps me out with that during the workweek.”