The Bellbottom Incident (26 page)

“You mean, would they get along or go to war with each other?”

“Something like that. The living need the dead, but do the dead need the living also?”

Again I answered truthfully. “I think they do. To be remembered by them, if nothing else.”

“My skeletons, you know, they can talk…”
 

Tomorrow is no ordinary day for the book club.

Abigail was shaking my shoulder. “Julia, wake up, it’s morning.”

I groggily opened my eyes. It had been an uncomfortable night, and not only because I lacked a proper bed. After my conversation with Udo, I had stayed up to finish Vonnegut’s
The Sirens of Titan
on Dr. B’s e-reader, Udo’s fate weighing heavily on me, only dozing off when dawn started to break.

I sat up and stretched. Abigail was gathering her things, and Dr. Little was munching on a granola bar as he carefully repacked his duffel. All around, the islanders and their tourist guests were slowly stirring awake and beginning their day, with a handful of early beachgoers setting up umbrellas in prime spots. It was a weekday, so the beach would probably stay sparsely populated most of the day, until after work hours.

A sudden worry shot through me and I whipped around.

The book club was gone.

I stumbled to my feet in a panic. Udo and the others had left. I would never see him again. All that remained was a black, ashy spot where the bonfire had been and a smattering of trash.

“It’s all right, Julia,” Abigail said. “They’re over there.”

And indeed they were—in the lot of the nearest motel, congregated in the empty parking space between their two vehicles.

I breathed a small sigh of relief and set about rolling up my mat. I tried to gauge how I felt about things now that the sun was warming everything up, spreading its cheerful rays on people and buildings alike. Out of nowhere, something Nate had once said popped into my mind. It was a discussion we’d had amidst Pompeii ruins, in the dark, as World War Two bombs fell all around us. He had jokingly suggested that once we passed, perhaps we embarked on a new adventure as alien life-forms. It was as good as explanation of the afterlife as any. It wasn’t something I spent much time thinking about, as there wasn’t anything practical to be done about it one way or another.
 

I hoped wherever Udo was headed, he would find the answers he was seeking. What was meant to be was meant to be. I felt something akin to acceptance settle over me.

I bent down to pick up the two rocks Nate had sent. Not surprisingly, they had dug into my side as I tried to sleep, so I had taken them out of my coat. Dr. Little saw me slip the rocks back into the coat pocket. “I’m usually a stickler for these things, but I don’t think you need to bother. Plenty of rocks and stones all around the beach.”

I mumbled a couple of words about not wanting to leave time-displaced trash behind. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him the truth—that the stones, solid and grounding, felt like a connection to home. A connection to Nate. It was kind of silly, but there it was.
 

“If you folks need a bathroom, I can point you toward one,” Marlin called out to us. He had appeared out of nowhere and was cleaning up the trash left behind by the St. Sunniva students. I was a little embarrassed for them.

We did indeed need a bathroom. I was hopping from one foot to the other.

“I paid to use the one at the motel,” Dr. Little said.

Marlin approached with a selection of empty beer and Coke bottles hugged to his chest. The malodorous newspaper package, whatever it had held, was gone—another mystery lost to the sands of time. The bright morning sun revealed every leathery line above his scruffy beard, the result of both decades of Florida sunshine and age.

“The motel owner is a friend of mine. Let me put these in a safe place”—he was speaking of the bottles—“and I’ll take the ladies over.”

I stopped near Udo’s Ford Mustang, whose red was dusty and bug-splattered from the long drive south, and bent down to pretend-tie my shoe. Marlin had accepted an offer of coffee at the motel from the owner, a middle-aged woman with beads around her neck, and Dr. Little had stayed by the pier with our things.

“That’s a sweet ride for a college student,” I heard Abigail say under her breath.

The students were in the empty parking spot between the Mustang and the art bus, eating breakfast, some in lawn chairs, others on their feet, leaning against the art bus. When Xave had described it as being painted many different colors, he wasn’t kidding. Reds, blues, violets all swirled together like a fever-induced dream. The side door was open, revealing a messy interior—clothes, maps, bags, and other assorted belongings lay strewn on the seats. Soren—my dad, but he was too young for me to think of him that way—swung out and joined the others. So he had come along after all but must have spent the night sleeping inside the VW, probably because of his allergies.

I suddenly realized that I knew who owned the art bus—my father did. In fact, I had a vague recollection of seeing a picture of him and my mother in front of some van or other, but it had been a black-and-white photo, so the vehicle hadn’t stuck in my memory. I hadn’t made the connection until this very moment.
 

He offered Missy, who was in a lawn chair, a donut. She already had one, though, and had given half to Nathaniel. Some distance away Gigi was in a lawn chair pointedly reading a book (Anne Rice’s
Interview with the Vampire
, I noticed; what did Udo think of that one?). Soren passed the pastry to her. She took it.
 

It was all, for want of a better word, irritating. No one was acting like they were supposed to be, and none of the future life partners were neatly paired off. The pentagon I thought I had detected last night went something like this: Soren was only interested in Missy; Missy was mad at him for some reason and flirted alternately with Udo and Nathaniel; Nathaniel and Gigi seemed to have had a falling-out over Missy’s attentions, so Gigi was flirting with Udo; and Udo—he was like a eunuch, only interested in his art. He was draped over a lawn chair, not eating, silently studying the others, as if observing human behavior. There were bags under his eyes.

No wonder Sabina had been able to come along with the book club—not only did Udo have only hours left but the others were all busy with their own problems.

But where was she?

“You don’t think she wandered away from the book club, do you?” I whispered to Abigail uneasily, having straightened up after taking as long as humanly possible to tie my shoelaces.

But Sabina had come around from behind the VW. She paused briefly, and for a hopeful moment I thought she might have seen us from across the parking lot, but it was not to be—not just then, anyway. She had stopped to take in the ocean view, as many a visitor to Estero Island did. Someone offered her a donut and she took it. She was still in Dr. Mooney’s old lab coat and had unbuttoned it as the morning warmed up.

Leaving the ten of them—Sabina, Udo, Missy and Soren, Gigi and Nathaniel, and four other students whose names I didn’t know—to enjoy their outdoor breakfast, we went to rejoin Dr. Little by the pier.

He greeted us with a frown on his face.
 

“What?” I said.

“I was right.”

“About?”

“There does appear to be an impermeable bubble around the book club. I tried approaching them to ask for a cigarette light while you were using the restroom in the motel.”

“You smoke?” I asked.

“It was a pretext. I carry a pack for occasions such as this. Like I said, I tried to approach with a cigarette in hand, but History had other ideas. So it appears I may have been right. Because of the gravity of today’s events, the members of the book club are locked into their actions for the day.”

Abigail and I had noticed the bubble, too. “Hopefully, there’ll be an opportunity at the estate, assuming they head there right after breakfast,” I said.
 

“I wish we had confirmation that the CSI is on the Edison Estate. We only have your guess to go on, Julia.”

If he had made the “guess,” he would have probably called it a deduction, or at least a hypothesis, but I didn’t quibble.

Abigail gave a sudden peal of delight and pointed. “Is that a dolphin? I’ve never seen one except at the Minnesota Zoo. I wonder if it’s Fred.”

The dolphin, gray and smooth-skinned, frolicked in the water. Everything on the island seemed smaller and more intimate in the light of day—the motels and hotels, the cars.

Dr. Little noted, “We’re not here to sightsee. Better check that we haven’t left anything behind.” He unfolded the map Dr. B and Nate had sent us. “The Thomas A. Edison Winter Home & Museum is not within walking distance.”

“It’s about twenty-five minutes by car, if we had one. We can hardly go on foot, so we’ll have to use the Slingshot.” As we finished packing up, I added, “If you’re right about the book club being locked into their day, Dr. Little, why don’t we skip going to the Edison Estate and jump to the causeway,
after
the accident?”

Abigail lost her smile. “No, we should definitely try before.”

There was something in her tone I couldn’t put my finger on. I assumed that, like me, she was disturbed about not being able to save Udo. Thinking it might help us all to bring it out into the open, I said, “I know now there’s nothing we can do for Udo. I wish there was, that’s all. When I talked to him in the middle of the night, I kept brainstorming about how we could help him…but we can’t.”

“You talked to him?” Abigail asked.

“I didn’t learn anything we didn’t know already…except about him as a person. I wanted to grab your cell phone, Abigail, and use it to record his words, preserve a bit of him.” I sighed. “Not much we could do beyond that, is there?”

Dr. Little zipped his duffel bag crisply. “I’m afraid it might be worse than that.”
 

My own backpack was ready, too, so I swung it over one shoulder and went over to face Dr. Little. “What’s worse than knowing somebody is going to die but being unable to stop it?”

Abigail’s face crumpled. “He may very well take Sabina with him.”

“Uh, no,” I said in a brisk tone, as if this were an office problem to be dealt with and not a matter of life and death. Sabina’s. “The newspaper story said they were still searching for the driver’s body. There was no mention of any passengers.”

Dr. Little spelled it out, though I already had an inkling of what he was going to say. “I don’t know how deep the waters are by the causeway, but the authorities might not realize that there was a second person in the car. If Sabina’s body is found weeks from now—well, she’ll just be a Jane Doe.”

I brought out the only counterargument I could think of. “Wouldn’t the other students—Gilberte, at least, since she was the one who invited Sabina along—tell the police that there was a passenger in the car?”

“For all we know, the others may assume Sabina wandered off as suddenly as she showed up. They must know by now that she’s not a student. Even if they mention it to the police, they may not be believed. After all, no such person as Sabina Tanner exists in 1976.” He was silent for a bit, then added, “I hate to say it, but History may be about to right itself by letting the girl be lost forever. The scales of time need to be balanced.”
 

History may right itself by letting the girl be lost forever.

I dropped my backpack on the sand in anger. “Did everyone see this possibility but me? Is that why Dr. B sent us to the beach last night, so we could try to save Sabina before it’s too late?”
 

If Dr. Little was right, the cold, hard truth was that Sabina might perish in a watery death, from which we would need an abundance of good luck to save her. I had not come all the way here to let that happen. I said as much.

“I’m with you on that, Julia,” Abigail said.

Dr. Little stared at us. “I’m not saying otherwise. What I’m saying is…Well, all we can do is try. Assuming they’re heading over to the Edison Estate shortly, we should jump there and wait for a good moment to pull Sabina out. Why don’t you two go back to the parking lot to see if you can overhear anything that confirms the location of Udo’s CSI while I run the necessary calculations on my laptop?” Shielding the laptop from curious eyes behind the duffel, he bent over the Fort Myers map. “Let’s see. It looks like there’s a parking lot at the estate that would be a good place for us to jump…”