Wednesday night last week the neon frog that had leapt high on Jumpin’ Jack’s sign for thirty five years jumped no more. He had just croaked. As had the whole casino.
“One night,” Ollie Booth said, his eyes still red after nearly a week to digest what happened. “It all happened in one night. Gone. Just like that.”
That one night was the Monday before the frog stopped jumping. According to witnesses and casino employees, in the span of three hours no fewer than sixty two spins of the roulette wheel came up as winners against the house for big money. The casino’s eight blackjack tables suffered similar losses, as well. By the time casino management got on top of the incredible run of bad (or good) luck, dozens of gamblers were besieging the money cages demanding their winnings. Police had to be called when it became clear that Jumpin’ Jack’s could not cover the losses.
State regulators are expected to...
Jay snickered at the clipping, wondering what the person who’d put these things in the book had been up to. Collecting bits o’ the weird? Some research project? Or maybe they had just been trying to pass the time. Surely there could be no—
(jay)
—more meaning to these scraps of past history.
But it did make interesting reading, and so he read on, moving through the remaining ones quickly now, taking in just the headlines, reading things such as
Jury Verdict Leaked In Fallmouth Murder Case
Mistrial Declared
and,
Three Time Lottery Winner Goes Crazy
Tortures And Kills His Family Of Nine
and,
Miss Mississippi Pageant Contestant Disqualified
After Disrobing On Stage During Talent Competition
and others. All—
(Jay)
—quirky and sometimes tragic stories of the most odd things happening to people. Strange, Jay thought as he moved through to the last scrap of—
(JAY)
—newsprint.
West Porter Couple Killed In Collision
He felt his eyes swell in their sockets. He read—
(JAY!)
—it again.
West Porter Couple Killed In Collision
It did say what he thought it said. West Porter Couple... He read on.
Buddy Svendsen—Staff Writer
West Porter, Wisconsin—Tragedy struck yesterday at the intersection of Flynn and Woolsey in the West Porter business district when a car driven by Walter Grady apparently ran a red light and was broadsided by—
(JAY!!)
—a police car from neighboring La Salle, resulting in his death and that of his wife, Jean. Their young son Jay sur—
(JAY!JAY!JAY!)
—vived the crash, and the two La Salle officers were injured. Both are recuperating at Langdon Memorial Hospital and are expected to recover fully.
Authorities say that the La Salle unit had its lights and siren active at the time of the collision, and that it had the green light. They are at a loss to explain how Grady could have—
(JAY!JAY!COMEON!JAY!)
—not been aware of either the traffic signal, or the La Salle unit’s warning devices, which were active as it pursued a car stolen by—
(JAY
JAY
JAY)
.....by.....by.....
“JAY!”
And suddenly Mari was there, leaning over him, one hand clamped to each of his biceps.
“Wake up, Jay. Come on. Come on.”
‘Wake up’? Did she say ‘wake up’? Why would she be saying that, urging him from sleep, when he’d been awake and fine just reading the—
His hands were empty. He stared at them, blinking hard. There was no book in them. No Volume S of the 1976
Book Of Knowledge
encyclopedia. No news clippings poking from between pages. No nothing. It wasn’t there. He opened and closed his hands once, hands that had just a few seconds before been holding that book. They had. Hadn’t they?
“Jay, are you awake? Are you?” Mari asked excitedly, her voice restrained in a hushed shout. The box of his letters rested on the floor at her feet, its flaps tucked shut.
Awake? Yes he was awake.
Now
he was awake. Was that all it had been? A dream? Had he been asleep? Lost in the Darvon fog?
“Jay? Jay?”
He looked up to Mari. She beamed at him, her blue eyes glinting not with tears this time, nor even sorrow, but with spirit. Her lips were pulled and curled into a wide smile that seemed the release of a thousand kept smiles, some joy that had come in unexpected ways to free its imprisoned expressions. She was up. Damn up about something.
“Jay, are you awake? Talk to me. Come on.”
“I’m...” A dream? It had been just a dream? “Yeah, I’m awake. I must have dozed off.”
“Jay,” she said, putting her hands to his face now, one pressed gently to each cheek. “You are not going to believe it. You’re not. It’s amazing.”
“What?”
She started to say something, but shook her head almost giddily. “I am starving, Jay. I haven’t eaten all day. I just got so into that...” And her fired gaze blazed at him. “Oh, God, Jay, it is amazing. I’ll tell you, but we’ve got to eat. I’m
famished
.”
Starving? How could she be starving this early? And what did she mean about not eating all day? “If you want breakfast, I’ve got a hot plate under the bed.” She was shaking her head already. “We can stop by the Rev M Up and get some—”
“Breakfast?” she reacted, letting go his face and bouncing spryly down to a squat before him. “It’s after four, Jay. I want some
real
food.”
“Four? Did you say four?”
She nodded. “How long have you been napping?”
Wonder bloomed on his face. “I don’t know. I must have just dozed off after I took my pill. I didn’t even know. I thought I was... Mari, I had the weirdest—”
“Jay, I am positively starving. Aren’t you?”
He wasn’t, really, but he nodded anyway. If it was four in the afternoon, he should have eaten by now. He looked at his watch and saw that it was just after four, which meant she was right, and which meant that he had almost certainly been (asleep? entranced?) out of it for six hours. Six hours! If not more.
Mari vaulted up from her squat and leapt a few inches off the ground, spinning in mid air all the way around like some cheerleader gone mad, and landing facing him again, standing now, some energy within her surging right then. “Oh, God, Jay, you are not going to believe it!”
She had not held back any of her voice on that proclamation, and from between the stacks of books a woman emerged. Not the woman from the counter, no. This one was older than her, and wore a knitted shawl over her bony shoulders to beat back the library’s ever-present coolness, and it was an equally bony finger that she put to her lips and shushed Mari firmly.
“Sorry,” Mari said, smiling and cringing, the zing within her hard to contain. “Sorry.”
The bony old woman receded back into the stacks after giving the boisterous patron a last, stern look for good measure.
“Mari, what is this thing that’s got you so excited?”
“You’re not going to...” And she hushed her voice down when it seemed threatening to rise. “...believe it!”
“Believe what?”
“We’ve gotta eat first,” she said, and put her hands out to him. He took them, and she helped him to stand. He gathered his crutches from the table (the table where
no
encyclopedia had been, it now appeared obvious), and she the box from the floor, wedging it under her arm. “There’s a diner, right? By where we met?”
Met? Okay, he thought, that was a different, if true way to characterize their ‘coming together’. “The Plainview Grill.”
“Right. Good. That’s good. That’ll be great. Good.” The words flew from her like bullets from a Tommy gun. She gripped his left arm with her free hand and began to ‘help’ him toward the exit. “Come on. We’ll eat, and I’ll tell you all about what I found.”
“What did you find?” Jay asked as he was nearly dragged down the aisles of books, trying hard to keep up and keep up
right
at the pace she was setting.
“It’s so amazing,” she told him as they moved past the front counter once again, heading out this time with the woman staring at them no less curiously over her bifocals. “I can’t wait to tell you, but I am
starving
. We’ll eat, and I’ll tell you. Okay?”
Okay? Like there was any choice in the matter, he thought as she scooted him out of the building and practically tossed him into the front seat of her Honda.
Thirty Four
Salvation
He had always come alone, and had always taken a seat at the far end of the lunch counter in the dim part of the place, but this time he was with someone, a woman, the very same woman who had nearly run him down to dead, and he had taken a booth with her right near the front door, and when the woman had waved for the waitress with some impatience and ordered for them both—hamburgers and fries and cokes—with nary a look at a menu, well, Chloe Alkan could only lay a nosy and suspicious look upon them through her small round specs.
Jay felt this, and couldn’t meet the gaze she kept upon them even as she took their order to the grill.
Mari saw his reaction and motioned for him to look at her. “Ignore that, Jay. Have I got news for you!”
“You’re so excited,” Jay observed, wondering how a library could bring on the state of near euphoria powering his lunch companion, when all it had done for him was spawn old memories that had twisted into some crazy dream. The encyclopedia, the accident. And all those other vignettes ala newsprint thrown in for, what, spice? Courtesy of the painkillers, he figured, but it was still weird. Cosmically weird. And that last clipping that his numbed brain had conjured—what was that? A taunt? A reminder? Or just medicated neurons firing wildly.
“You would be, too, Jay.” Then she reconsidered what she’d just said. “You
will
be, too, Jay. You will.”
“What, Mari? What is it?”
“It all came together at the library, Jay. Well, the biggest parts of it did, anyway. And I was right.”
“Right about what?”
“That it just couldn’t be what you thought. I just knew that. I couldn’t have come all this way just to kill you. You couldn’t have killed anyone because you didn’t want to. I didn’t know what it all really meant, but once you let me read your letters I did know something—I knew what you knew. Your confessions to yourself. All the things that you thought you made happen.”
“I’m not sure about that anymore,” Jay told her, speaking his revelation of that morning. The one that had preceded the fog by a hair.
“Good, because that was not what happened at all, Jay. At all.”
Their cokes came, Chloe leaving with a long, prying look once again, and Mari took a long draw on the straw that sank deep into the glass of crushed ice and soda.
“Then what was it?” Jay asked with quiet eagerness, putting his hands ‘round the cool, sweating glass but not drinking yet.
“Jay, I started with what I knew. With your letters. The dates, and the times, and what had happened, and I looked up all sorts of news accounts of the tragedies. That library is
amazing
, Jay. Some
big
cities would kill for something like that, with the computers, and the microfilm, it was so
easy
to find things out. I’d put information in the computer and I’d be looking at the
New York Times
for this date, or the
Des Moines Register
for that date. I looked up each one of the things that had happened, Jay, and I compared the times on your letters to when they had actually happened—Los Angeles is three hours after east cost time, right?”
He nodded, and now took a sip.
“I had to figure out all the times ‘cause yours were all Plainview time. This is Central Time, right?”
“Right,” he said. He hoped the sugar and caffeine she was sucking down right then weren’t going to amp her up any more than she already was, because whatever was in her head was moving at miles a minute, just a bit faster than her mouth.
“So I looked them all up, and your times were just a little bit ahead of the times the things actually happened. You
did
know they were going to happen. You had it right, Jay.”
His heart sank a bit. He did not want to have it right. Because couldn’t that still mean...
“You had it all right except for one thing,” she said, her blue eyes raging with deep, deep delight right then. “The number.”
“The number?”
“Your number was wrong, Jay. The number you put in your letters. The number of people who were going to die.”
“The number?” he said again, perplexed. He had been so certain. He had known how many people were going to die. Exactly. Were the tails wrong? “I don’t understand.”
“You were one off,” she told him, putting her coke down and reaching across the table to take his cool hands in hers. “One off. If you said thirty people were going to die, only twenty nine did. Forty eight, it was actually forty seven. Do you understand?”
He understood what she was
telling
him, sure; what he had
known
was off by one life. But other questions raged from that revelation. Other questions he did not have time to entertain because Mari requested something of him right then.
“Jay, tell me about it. About the visions, or whatever they were. I mean, you said something the other night when you were all drugged up and I was reading the letters. You said that you’d never been eaten by sharks before, but that falling from a hundred and fifty feet was nothing? What did you mean by that?”
Okay, he thought. Now she was getting into rough stuff. Things he had committed in short form to those letters she had researched precisely so he wouldn’t
have
to think about them anymore. But now she wanted him to, wanted as she held his hands, her thumbs rubbing slowly, reassuringly over the rise and fall of his knuckles. Wanted as her blue eyes urged him on, emoting that all would be okay. She was here. He could tell her.