The Bellbottom Incident (20 page)

I brought them up to speed and underlined that they were
not
to tweet or post about any of this, even if they were used to sharing news, bad or good, online. “We don’t need everyone on campus and beyond in our hair at the moment.”

“We wouldn’t do that, Julia,” Jacob said, checking his hand on its way to the phone in his back pocket. “Can we come along and help look for her?”

“I’m not an expert on American history,” Kamal said, “but I’d be glad to lend a hand.”

I appreciated their concern, but we didn’t need more boots on the ground. I instructed the pair to help Dr. B and Nate with the present-day research that needed to be conducted, then quickly downloaded a biography of Vonnegut’s life onto Dr. B’s e-reader. I did the same with all of his works I could find that predated 1977, up to
Slapstick
, published in October 1976, just in case.
 

 
“Thanks for the use of your e-reader, Dr. B. I may have run up a bit of a tab—I’ll reimburse you when I get back.”
 

“Don’t worry about it, Julia.” She was readying New York City coordinates—I was going to pop in quickly to Kurt Vonnegut’s house there, before rejoining Dr. Little and Abigail on campus.

I took a step toward STEWie’s basket, then turned back. “Dr. B?”

“Yes?”

“Sabina’s presence cannot be what made Udo leave school…not even in a small way? That has to be right, doesn’t it?”

She nodded without glancing away from the screen. “Correct.”

“But the other way, that
could
happen? I mean, if Udo’s plan all along was to leave school and disappear—for whatever reason—there’s nothing to stop Sabina from also…disappearing.”
 

She stopped what she was doing and looked up at me. “I suppose it’s a possibility, yes.”

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Jacob said as if quoting from somewhere—a
Star Wars
movie probably; he loved them.

“I don’t. Sabina’s smart,” Kamal said. “She wouldn’t do anything dumb.”

“I don’t know that any of us go out of our way to do dumb things,” I said. “It’s part of life.”

Nate walked me to the basket. “I’ve got everybody in the campus security office working on finding Udo Leland. How has Dr. Little been?” he added, as if taking a stab in the dark about where exactly the problem might lie. The young professor was not exactly known for his interpersonal skills.

“Well, you know him.”

“True. He did seem quite put out with what’s happened—more than circumstances warrant, perhaps.”

“Never get between a professor and his research, I guess.”

“Still, I might take a look around his office.”

“You don’t think he had anything to do with sending Sabina into 1976, do you? He’s been helpful—for him—really more overworked and overtired than anything. Maybe his long hours are catching up to him.”

“That’s probably all it is.”
 

He offered me a steadying hand to climb STEWie’s platform, and after the briefest of hesitations, which I’m sure he noticed, I accepted it. Once I was secure on the platform, he passed me the freshly recharged Slingshot. “I do wish I could come along. How’s Abigail holding up?”

“You know her. She’s very…resourceful. As for me, I feel I’m in 1976 on borrowed time—I expect to be sent back by History any second, my mother being, er, pregnant and all. Besides, I’m not sure I’m of much use. I don’t seem to be an expert on anything that will help us catch up with Sabina, like seventies literature or the ins and outs of time travel.”

“Nonsense. I trust Abigail—very much so—but Dr. Little is a professor, and she’s a graduate student. I’m glad you’re there—
you
can overrule him if it came to it.
She
can’t.”

This was somewhat true—there was a deeply entrenched power structure between students and professors, one I was outside of. I gave him a small smile. “I believe Abigail would be very much up to the task if it came down to choosing between antagonizing Dr. Little and helping Sabina. But I see what you mean—there’s a power differential. My position doesn’t depend on his goodwill…hers does.” I had put my coat back on in preparation for 1976. I tucked Dr. B’s e-reader into a pocket. The newly charged Slingshot was in my backpack, where it took up most of the space.

“Good luck in New York City.”

“Thanks. Nate, I—”

But I didn’t get to say more. Bright light filled the room, and STEWie’s basket whisked me away.

The nineteenth-century brownstone stood inset a bit from the neighboring buildings on a one-way street. Ten steps led up to an ornate front door. A small chubby angel sat perched above it like a benevolent gargoyle. I set down my backpack and checked the house number—228. A cloak of noise lay over the city—car horns in heavy midafternoon traffic, sirens, construction. I had arrived in a quiet spot to one side of the steps, opposite what seemed to be a gated-off photo studio on the street level of the four-story townhouse. The black metal railing edging the front steps felt cool to my touch.

The upper levels had three windows each. There was no movement behind them.
 

If the pedestrians walking by briskly, as if they all had someplace to be, were surprised by the sight of me appearing out of thin air, none showed it. It
was
Manhattan, after all. And it was election day—the news blared from a TV through an open window on the neighboring building.
 

I moved from the railing to the curb to scan the cars parked bumper to bumper on both sides of the one-way street. It didn’t take long. There was no sign of either Udo’s red Ford Mustang or the art bus, which Xave had described as “colorful, very colorful.” A
few trees stood on each side of the street. City ones—spaced out, semi-healthy, and surviving as best they could in the urban shadows. Having checked a map back in the lab, I knew that 228 East Forty-Eighth Street stood a couple of blocks away from Manhattan’s East River; a
quick search in the e-book biography had yielded the address, and Dr. B had woven it into STEWie coordinates.
It was hardly a location that anyone would describe with the words
tree
or
ocean
.

I felt a bit deflated. I had asked Dr. B to send me to Vonnegut’s New York residence in the hopes that the book club had come to pay their respects to the famous author. But they weren’t here.

I poked my head around a parked car to check again, and a yellow cab whizzed by with an irritated honk. I jumped back toward the curb but took one step too many and bumped into a fast-moving pedestrian. Both of us lost our balance, though a last-second acrobatic twist on my part made me land on my bottom and not on the backpack holding the Slingshot. We disentangled ourselves and I offered the fortyish-some woman sporting a leopard-print pantsuit a hand up. She accepted it, got to her feet, and helped me dust off the city grime that had collected on my coat. I picked up the purse she had dropped and handed it to her. It was all very civil and quite unlike the mental image I had of Manhattanites. I apologized for tripping us both, and she said, “No harm done, darlin’. Have you voted? Very important to vote.” I nodded yes without meaning to, and she continued on.

I nursed my sore elbow and watched her walk away. My quick stop in Manhattan was turning into a bit of an embarrassing disaster. I tried to look on the bright side. At least I hadn’t twisted an ankle or wrist—or crushed the Slingshot, which would have been the most
disastrous of all possible scenarios.
 

A second taxi honked at me and I waved a
no
in its direction before retreating
back into the shadow of the stairs, protectively holding the backpack with the Slingshot to one side. The question facing me now was whether to wait a bit in the hopes that the book club would choose this particular moment to arrive—granted, highly unlikely—or to type into the waiting Slingshot the coordinates Dr. B had prepared for me and jump to St. Sunniva campus to meet up with Dr. Little and Abigail. I did a quick mental calculation. Thornberg to New York could probably be done in a full day and night’s drive if the students took turns at the wheel and made no long stops along the way. Given that they had left yesterday morning and it was now midafternoon, if they made good time it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that they were just around the corner, inching their way closer through Manhattan traffic. I decided sticking around an extra half hour or so couldn’t hurt. Besides, I could use the time to leaf through the Vonnegut biography and see if there was anything in there that might help with our current problem.
 

I leaned back against the stairs with one of my feet crossed over the other and got out Dr. B’s e-reader from my coat pocket. Luckily, it had been undamaged by my fall. Also luckily, Dr. B had it in a brown leather case, so at first glance it’d be mistaken for a hardbound book by pedestrians going up and down East Forty-Eighth.
 

I took a quick look at the contents and jumped to a chapter about the author’s early life. I wanted to find out about his background, because I figured Udo probably identified with him for reasons other than just the desired fame. Apparently Vonnegut’s parents (like Udo’s own, I suspected) were wealthy…or had been until the Wall Street Crash of 1929. I jumped a bit further ahead and stumbled across something even more interesting. Vonnegut had left college midway through his studies.
 

In Vonnegut’s case, it sounded like he had been pushed into studying the sciences by his father and older brother, and it hadn’t been a great fit, and then the war had come. Vonnegut had left Cornell to join the war effort. I
skimmed the Dresden part of the biography, which sounded like a positively awful experience for the twenty-three-year-old Kurt as well as everyone else involved. He had returned from Europe with a Purple Heart and a ceremonial Nazi saber, and re-enrolled in school, this time at the
University of Chicago, but
his idea for
a master’s topic (comparing Cubist artists in Paris with nineteenth-century Native American uprisings) was turned down by the anthropology department for being too ambitious, and he had left school for a second time.
 

I considered all this, pausing in my reading. If Udo was not coming back to St. Sunniva after the CSI visit, was he leaving school to follow in Vonnegut’s footsteps? I knew that United Nations Plaza, where I had once visited on a high school trip, was a short walk from here. Was he planning on joining the Peace Corps?
Did
the Peace Corps have anything to do with the UN? I had no idea, but Udo volunteering for it was as likely a possibility as any.

I shifted in my spot by the railing. The problem with Udo trying to emulate his hero Kurt Vonnegut was that it wasn’t how life worked. Even if you have similar roots and try to take the same path, it doesn’t mean you grow to be an equally tall tree. I had seen enough siblings come into the science departments and leave with very different outcomes, from successful PhDs to dropouts in the first semester, to know that. And Udo was trying to force his transformation into one of the American greats.
 

And it hadn’t worked, had it? Because Udo was nowhere to be found in modern literature.

Realizing I had lost track of the time, I glanced up to see a tall man approaching from the direction opposite to the flow of traffic. I snapped the e-reader’s case shut. The man had curly hair and a bushy mustache and eyebrows, like a Mark Twain look-alike. His pace was slightly impatient, that of a resident returning home. Was he was coming back from voting, a meeting with an editor, or an early celebration lunch for his upcoming fifty-fourth birthday?

My feet shuffled me out of the shadows of their own accord, not propelled by History but by curiosity. Kurt looked a little taken aback by my sudden appearance and flicked away the match he had just used to light a cigarette. He took a long drag off it, then offered me one out of the red-and-white pack of Pall Malls cupped in his nicotine-stained hand.
 

“No, thanks, Mr. Vonnegut.”

“What can I do for you, young lady?”
 

“Uh…”
 

I was speechless for a moment, as (a) I had never met a famous historical figure before, and (b) I didn’t know where to begin or what to say.
 

“Well?” Another drag on the cigarette.

“Have any students made a pilgrimage to your place today? They would have arrived in a red Ford Mustang and a painted VW van.”

“Odd question.” He took another long drag. “To answer it—no. They used to come more when I lived in Barnstable. Anything else?”

I shook my head, staring at this middle-aged man whose life story I now knew from beginning to end, having skimmed most of the biography. I could tell him what year his divorce would become final and how well his not-yet-written novel
Timequake
would sell. It was an odd feeling, to say the least. Had I told him right then and there that thirty years from now he would trip on a dog leash at the bottom of these very stairs and hit his head on the pavement and not recover, I imagined his reply would have been “So it goes,” with an accompanying shrug.