This_Shared_Dream

Jill, Brian, and Megan

AN EVENING OF FUN AND GAMES

July 13

JILL RAN OUT the front door, climbed into Brian’s truck, and fished out the keys from under the seat. She tore through the streets and got to the station in five minutes flat.

Megan stood out front. She looked curiously small; uncharacteristically bedraggled. Her lovely black hair, usually precisely combed, flew every which way, and her frown was ferocious. You wanted to give Megan plenty of room when she was mad.

She was carrying not only her briefcase, but another bag. The jacket of her gray pantsuit hung from her hand and dragged on the pavement as she hurried forward and yanked open the truck door.

“God, I’m glad to see you!” She heaved her stuff inside and climbed in.

“What’s going on?” Jill did not start the truck. “You saw Mom? Where? Let’s go back and look for her!”

“I tried. I didn’t recognize her at first, because she was younger, in her WAC uniform. She hugged me tight. Right there! Right on that spot on the sidewalk! She certainly knew me. She said something about the war going on for much longer than they thought it would, then she hurried into the station. I guess I was just in shock and couldn’t move, for a minute, but then I ran inside and everything was old. Like the forties. The people, everything. And I think I saw her, but I’m not sure, she walked out through a gate and the train there was pulling out. Then it all changed back to … now. She’s gone, Jill. Can we go home? To your house?”

A WAC. Right. Jill put the truck in gear and sped off.

Megan continued to chatter. “I was followed this morning. By a short man in a hat. But I think he got off the train early and came back in this direction.”

“I was followed at the market today. By a short man in a hat.”

“If it’s the same one, he’s very busy.”

“And not particularly interested in anonymity.” Jill pulled up to the front of the house. Megan opened the truck door, slid down to the curb, and grabbed her jacket and briefcase. Jill picked up the other bag. “Inhancex? More memory stuff?”

“It’s that Game Board I got when we were little.”

Jill stared at Megan across the truck seat. “What?”

“Oh, you might not remember. It was a long time ago. Vodka. Straight. On the rocks. Immediately.” She slammed the door and headed toward the house.

Jill tossed the keys under the seat, grabbed the bag, got out, and leaned against the truck door, which closed with a reluctant clunk. My life is ringed with fear, she thought, angry and struggling against a wave of resignation. She pulled open the zipper of the bag.

Inside was another Infinite Game Board.

God! Not only did they promise infinity; perhaps the damned things were, actually infinite. Jill had a vision of them marching along like the animated mops in an old Disney cartoon about the sorcerer’s apprentice …

But wait. Daniel had said something. About … Estrella, the Spacie. The old ones replicated.

Okay. Another clue. Apparently, so did Game Boards. But from what? What was the source?

She quickly rezipped the bag and forced herself to breathe slowly and deliberately, to cycle the image of air through her lungs, up through her head, out the top.

It didn’t help. Her heart raced. She pushed off from the truck and was dizzy, so she waited until the spinning stopped, and then walked steadily up the front walk, feeling as if she was battling hurricane-force winds as she carried the bag containing the Game Board. The green, flat lawn seemed fragile and ephemeral, as if it might wink from existence at any time, taking everything else with it. Washington’s famous summer haze hovered over the creek that they considered theirs. Her freshly watered hydrangeas weighed down their branches, their purple blooms huge ostentatious jewels. The freshly painted gingerbread proclaimed her home a sparkling specimen of High Victorian. Her little Whens, although he claimed to see ghosts, was her perfect boy. She even had money, a job, and a bookstore where she would now stock comics. All was well, except that it frigging well wasn’t.

She wanted to fling the Game Board far away, back to whatever abominable place had spawned it, but she knew:

Their parents had built it.

It was here.

It would not go away.

Stubbornly, it—no, they! the prolific, ever-multiplying Game Boards, would surf onto the beach en masse, wherever the Dances happened to rent a beach house, guided by their heavy burden of histories, and glitter and wink on the sand, happy to have reinvaded their lives. They would escape the center-of-the-earth cave where they’d been dumped by gliding down a subterranean river, and pile up just below Sam and Bette’s little grotto, and sing entreaties to children to play with them. They would craftily lodge themselves into a single meteor-lump after being shot into space and return in a triumphant streak of light, signal Brian and Megan and tell them not to worry, they would be home soon, and land in a smoking crater in the woods out back, perfect and undamaged, ready to wreak havoc. The Game Boards would arise from the deeps of time, pursuing them with their siren call.

The three of them had to learn how to use the Game Board. Then she paused as she realized: They had to remember how to use it. And then they had to decide what to use it for.

She stomped up the front stairs and strode into the library.

Brian sprawled on the couch, holding a sweating beer. Megan lay on the floor, on her back, a throw pillow under her head, staring at the ceiling, a glass of vodka on her chest, the bottle ready at hand on the coffee table.

Jill said, “Megan, I’m so sorry that I don’t have any San Pellegrino, but—”

“Shut up,” said Megan.

Someone had thoughtfully provided Jill with a bottle of pinot grigio and a wineglass, and she poured herself a nice cold half-glass of straw-colored wine. A plate of cheese and crackers rested atop the papers piled on the coffee table, and Brian had his own giant-sized bag of barbecue potato chips.

Jill considered closing the blinds, but decided that if she left them open they could see anyone who might try to listen in.

She sat on the floor next to the coffee table and pulled the Game Board out of Megan’s bag.

“I thought you said you put that upstairs,” said Brian.

“I did. Megan has another one.”

“You have one too?” asked Megan. “My, my, my. I came home yesterday, and Abbie was playing with it.” Megan sat up and glared at Brian and Jill in turn. “PLAYING with it!” She lay down again, held her glass on her chest, and resumed staring at the ceiling.

Jill said, “I have something to tell you.”

“Yes, Jill, TELL us,” said Megan. “We are all ears.”

Jill could tell that Megan was just a wee bit tired and on edge. She turned to Brian. “Have you finished reading Dad’s papers?”

“What is this,” asked Megan, “an exam?” She lifted her head at an angle that looked quite strenuous, but which enabled her to take a sip of the vodka before she let her head fall back onto the pillow. “Why don’t you ANSWER some questions?”

“I’ve read some of them,” said Brian.

“What do you think?”

“I gather that Eliani Hadntz gave Dad the plans—”

Megan was roused enough to sit up while simultaneously holding her vodka so that she did not spill a drop. Jill thought Megan might even jump to her feet, but no, she was too tired and settled for a ramrod-straight back. “You said that last week. I want more.”

“Here’s more. Gypsy Myra.” She ruffled through some papers on the coffee table and pulled out an old mimeographed comic book. “Remember this?”

Megan paged through it. “No. I mean, kind of, I do know that you wrote comics for a while. I never read them. But you’re right. I do know Eliani Hadntz, and she looks pretty much like this woman. I’ve only seen her once. But I’m pretty sure this is her.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“She’s a colleague. I met her at the Cuba conference. And, in fact, she has helped me complete my memory project. I have ninety pills of her memory drug right here in my purse.”

“Finally!” asked Brian. “Let’s take some.”

“I already have,” said Megan. “Then the Game Board showed up. Do you think there’s a relationship?” She rummaged in her bag and got out the bottle of capsules. “Feel free, my little guinea pigs. What the f*cking hell. Good for the mice, good for us, that’s my credo.”

Brian immediately took two, looked up, then took another one. “HD-50?”

“That’s what her literature calls it. All the info is on my Q, if you want it.”

Brian got up, left the room, and came back holding a bottle. “Here they are.”

Megan said, “What?”

“Yeah. The new supplements that came in the mail. They say ‘HD-50’ right here on the label.”

Megan grabbed the bottle and shook some of them out. “I’d have to analyze it, but my guess is that they’re the same. They came with this month’s vitamins? I’ve been too busy to open my box. I’ll check these out.”

“Cindy’s been taking it too. And the kids.”

“Do you think—no,” said Jill.

“No.” Megan shook her head. “She couldn’t, she wouldn’t.”

“She could and I think she would,” said Jill.

“Couldn’t or wouldn’t what?” asked Brian.

“Get this stuff into everyone in the world, somehow.” Megan dropped several capsules into a pillbox from her purse and handed Brian the bottle.

Jill said, “You know that she’s the one that got us into this mess?”

“No, Jill.” Megan lay down on her back again. “Another fact you have neglected to share with us.”

“I didn’t even know her name until a few weeks ago. I mean, I must have known it, briefly, but I’d forgotten it.”

“I’m trying really hard not to act as pissed with you as I really am,” said Megan, once again addressing the ceiling fan. “Since you seem to know so much f*cking more about everything than we do and haven’t had the decency to tell us.”

Jill didn’t say what immediately came to mind, which was that she was grateful for Megan’s restraint, because she did not like standing outside when lightning was shooting to the ground and exploding nearby trees, which was what Megan’s anger used to resemble, before she’d gotten so much—Jill sighed—control over it.

“It’s no good to sit there and sigh,” said Megan. “I am not well-versed in the language of sighs.”

Jill noticed that Brian was carefully not opening his own mouth.

“I’m sorry.” Jill stood up and paced from the rocking chair in front of one end of the fireplace wall to the edge of the desk and back again as she plunged in. “Okay. It’s my fault that you lost Mom when you were so young. I did too, but I was older, and I knew what had happened.” She tried her breathing exercise again. This time it seemed to work. Her voice shook only a little, though her lungs felt squeezed; tight.

Brian said, “How—”

Jill held up her hand. “Let me talk. Look at those Gypsy Myra comics. Hand Megan a few.”

While paging through them, Megan abandoned her prone position. “This is weird stuff, Jill. John F. Kennedy assassinated? In—”

“Wait, Megan,” Brian interrupted. “This is even weirder. Martin Luther King assassinated. In—1968? The inner cities of the whole country torn by riots? Fires? Megan—”

“That’s right. Jill, Brian and I have dreams about this. But both of these men are alive.” Megan turned her pale, puzzled face toward her sister.

“Robert Kennedy killed too?” asked Brian, in total disbelief. “In ’68 too? Damn! That would have been awful. What is this all about?”

Jill grabbed her glass of wine and dropped into the rocking chair and crossed her legs. “It really happened. To me. And to—that other world, that other timestream. It wasn’t a dream.” She lowered her voice a notch, and fixed her gaze on a handy, neutral windowsill across the room.

“I was working for the Poor People’s Campaign that King started, before he was murdered on April fourth, in Memphis.” Brian opened his mouth and she said, “Stop interrupting. I’ll get off track and I have a lot to say. You’ll just have to believe me. Or at least listen.

“In that world, life, timestream, whatever—in which you two, by the way, were definitely present—FDR did not sign the Civil Rights Act in the late forties. It was enacted by President Johnson after JFK was assassinated; it had already been proposed by JFK.”

Brian watched her face intently. Megan was lying down again, eyes shut, her face as placid as if she were hearing a favorite bedtime story. Jill hoped she hadn’t passed out, but she seemed to have a tight grip on her glass. She continued to tell them the history that had never happened. They had to know why she had done what she had done, and without that history, they would never understand.

“The 1964 Civil Rights Act was groundbreaking. It outlawed discrimination by hotels, restaurants, public places, and in employment. It said that schools had to be desegregated, which reinforced a 1954 Supreme Court ruling. It ensured voting rights. It was not well accepted, in the South particularly, but that applied to other locales as well. Federal funding was denied to schools that refused to desegregate, which gave the act some teeth. Some places in the South simply stopped having public schools. Negroes with my kids? No way. Hard to imagine, I know, but that is the way it really was. Before, and after, there was horrible violence. Federal marshals had to escort some little black girls to school in New Orleans in 1960, and after that a lot of whites withdrew their kids. A lot more happened than I have time to go into right now.”

Jill rocked back and forth, back and forth, in the old chair as she spoke, soothed by its rhythmic creak.

“King led nonviolent protests that illuminated, on television, how bestial the resistance to desegregation was. Over a quarter of a million people came to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, during which he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial to a sea of listeners. That speech became famous all over the world; he won the Nobel Peace Prize; he—he—”

Jill wiped tears from her eyes and smiled. “It’s kind of strange, isn’t it, for me to cry when here, he’s alive? And had a slightly different past? But I was there. I heard it. People believed in him.”

“What about when King was killed?” asked Megan.

“Assassinated. Shot while he was on a hotel balcony in Memphis. Oh, there was an uprising all over the country. He was a magnificent speaker—as he is today. The reaction was pure rage, for a lot of people. He’d kept the Civil Rights movement nonviolent—”

“Civil Rights?” asked Brian. “As in the Civil Rights Act that Truman signed in 1950?”

Jill sighed. “Yes, but that did not happen in the … other world. In that timestream, in D.C., peaceful gatherings and vigils turned into riots quite suddenly. Johnson—”

“Who?” asked Megan.

“JFK’s vice president his first term. He deployed National Guard tanks; they were everywhere, and you couldn’t go anywhere because of blockades. Brian, you and your friend went on a bike tour to the most dangerous places and when Dad found out he grounded you. The city was on fire. Looting, violence, clashes. Marines guarded the Capitol with machine guns. Several people were killed, but mostly in fires. It lasted for days. And, of course, the destroyed businesses were all black-owned; all this happened, as in most of the cities, in black areas. We heard that people in the suburbs were terrified that blacks would go out into Virginia and Maryland and burn down all the Tall Oaks subdivisions and shopping centers. Detroit was destroyed.”

Megan said, “I think Brian and I remember that. Not the big picture, just the local scary stuff. All the neighbors afraid. So there must be some kind of … bleed through. Like the memories are there, in our brains, just not accessible.”

“Hmm. Interesting,” Jill continued, “I was pretty torn up, and it was therapeutic to use that energy to work on the Poor People’s Campaign. We got people to contribute plywood for shacks, a sewage system was set up, and about five thousand people were living on the Mall. Not just blacks, but American Indians, Puerto Ricans, poor mountain people. In June, fifty thousand people marched. But by then, Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated too—he was even more liberal than his brother.”

“Incredible,” said Megan. “Really different. Stunningly different. But things changed. Somehow. You still remember all this. If we were there, why don’t we remember it?”

Jill thought for a moment. “I can’t tell you that. Maybe because I hogged the Game Board, and touched it, and used it, for years, to get my comics, like an addiction. And when everything … changed, it was kind of like a different past slid in, like a slide in a projector, with whole new events and meanings feeding into and out of them. I remembered the last slide, and if you superimpose them, some of the things in the two histories are the same. This one seems better, I must say, although not as exciting. In 1968, a lot of people were taking LSD—”

“Like today,” said Megan.

“Yes, but—well, let me continue. The mayor of Chicago cracked down on protests at the Democratic National Convention. I went to that too. Got clubbed in the head by police.” She smiled. “I survived. Nixon was president.”

“Richard Nixon?” asked Brian. “People voted for him? That’s bizarre.”

“I thought so too. In 1970, Nixon escalated the Vietnam War and invaded Cambodia. Students protested all over the country. Back then, there was a draft lottery, so all these young, college-age men were in line to fight and die—but for what? It was completely different from WWII, when Dad volunteered.”

Brian nodded. “That’s my nightmare, Jill. I’m dropping something called napalm on Cambodia, and then—” His breath got sharp; jerky. His face paled, and sweat popped out on his forehead. He wiped it off.

Jill’s eyes softened in compassion. She said in a very soft voice, “It wasn’t a dream.” She got up and rummaged through the pile of comics, pulled one out. “Read this.”

Megan sat on the couch next to Brian. Finally, Brian looked up. “So I—died? In a plane crash?” He turned pale.

She said, “Maybe. If that other timestream had continued. I saw from the Game Board that it would. I really don’t know the mechanics of all this. I’m not sure anyone does, not even Hadnzt.”

“It’s Q, of course,” said Megan. “I guess if Q is self-aware … but how did you know about these alternatives?”

Jill said, “It came in images, from the board. Pictures. That’s the way it always was; that’s why I did comics. I believed in the pictures the board showed me. They had a certain … imperative quality. That’s one reason I hid it from everyone, and I didn’t tell anyone about it. But I didn’t think, or know, that I could do anything.

“That year, 1968, was wild. The Soviets cracked down on Czechoslovakia, sent in tanks; it seemed like repressiveness was spreading. All over the world, student protest escalated. Nixon seemed terrified of the protests here. I don’t think he believed in freedom of speech. He believed he could do whatever he wanted to just because he was a president. Then, in early May 1970, four students were shot and killed by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio. They were having a peaceful protest about the Cambodia escalations.

“That was a flash point. Students and professors occupied university buildings, just like in 1968; a lot of schools shut down, National Guard everywhere. It seemed unbelievable—unacceptable—to a lot of us that our own country, the Land of the Free, was so repressive. Before, when mostly blacks were killed during protests and riots, it hadn’t been so apparent to white America that this might apply to everyone who questioned or opposed the government.

“Kent State was the last straw. As soon as I heard about it, I realized that the only way to change all that, to keep Brian from joining the Navy and getting shot down, to prevent JFK and King and RFK from being assassinated, to prevent the Vietnam War from escalating, was to thwart the first assassination, in Dallas. JFK had been for civil rights; JFK had a plan on his desk to draw down American advisers in Vietnam the very day he was murdered. Mainly, though, I was really, really furious.

“Back then, a lot more students hitchhiked. I guess they didn’t all own cars, like they do today. I threw some things in a backpack and headed for Dallas, November 22, 1963. The board turned into a map, kind of, and while I was hitchhiking, time just seemed to turn back from 1970 to 1963. Every time I got a new ride, it was in an older car, and the roads were smaller. The brands were different, the clothes were different, and I stayed mad, and then Hadntz picked me up in Arkansas. I’d been sitting by the side of the road for about ten hours, eating dust, and listening to men yell nasty things out the window at me when they drove by. I was ready to call Mom and Dad. But by then, I think they’d already started on their own way back, to find me, Mom and Dad and Wink. They’d been involved in however the Game Board came to be—which I don’t know anything about—and they knew how to get to Dallas too. I think they came in some kind of plane. One thing Dad told me, before he clammed up, was that the plane had grown from one of the HD versions. So it does grow. But—according to what rules?”

“It grew in the Oberammergau Messerschmitt caves,” Brian said, nodding. “When we went there—remember?—I thought there had been some recent activity.”

“Right,” said Jill. “My question is: After all this happened, why didn’t Dad tell me?”

“I’ve wondered about that a lot,” said Megan. “I think they were trying to protect us.”

“They knew that Hadntz could go from one time to another.” Jill looked at Megan. “I guess she still does too.”

“I don’t think I like her very much.”

“Why?”

“Because she plays with people’s lives.”

Brian said, “She doesn’t think of it as playing. I’ve read her papers. She believes quite strongly that she is improving all of humanity. She talks constantly about the possible causes of war, and how to biologically modify that tendency.”

“How?” asked Megan.

“The latest modification papers I’ve found in her notes implicate males, I’m afraid. I guess history bears this out.”

“So what’s her solution to that?” asked Jill. “A world of only women?”

“No. Let’s see. Behavior modification, emphasis on education, learning, science, for women as well as men, women equally involved in government, getting to the biological roots of patriarchal control, or reproductive control, removing the profit from war, in particular giving young men another purpose in life besides gangs … lots of vectors. I guess Mom and Dad believed in what she was doing, and her methods, at least at one point. Or maybe that was their friend, Wink. His timestream split from Dad’s in August 1945, and he lived in a world where everything had improved in those ways. He couldn’t get to—to that old world, where you lived, Jill, where we lived, very often. All that stuff is in the notebooks. They called that time-shift a nexus. So it had happened before, but I don’t think Wink could control it. He just knew when it might happen. For instance, the first time it happened—when Dad saw Wink after Wink’s parents told Dad that Wink had died—was at a veterans’ reunion, and that’s when they started to piece together what was going on. There’s a lot about quantum splitting, and consciousness, and the Many-World theory—you’ve both heard of that.”

Megan turned to Jill, “What happened when you met Hadntz? What did she look like?”

Jill laughed. “She was dressed like a cowgirl. You would have loved her truck, Brian. She was drinking a beer. I realized who she was, and that’s when she told me her name. We talked. She told me to turn around and go home. She said that no matter what happened, she thought that in the long run it would all average out. But she didn’t try very hard to discourage me. She gave me a pistol.”

“What kind?” Brian asked.

“I have no idea. We stopped and she showed me how to use it, had some target practice with all the beer bottles rattling around in the back of her truck. She dropped me off in Dallas in front of the book depository. Oh, you don’t know. John Kennedy was murdered during a motorcade, from the sixth floor of that building, or so everything that I’d read about it and everyone claimed. After the murder, there was the Warren Commission report, all kinds of studies. I’d read them all before I went to Dallas.”

“Who did it?” asked Megan.

“They said that a guy named Lee Harvey Oswald did it. He had some connections with the CIA. He’d been a Marine, officially defected to the Soviet Union, and some people—they were called ‘conspiracy theorists,’ or just plain nuts—claimed that he’d gone on behalf of the CIA, or else how did he get back into the U.S. so easily with J. Edgar Hoover, a virulent anti-Communist, heading the FBI? Some witnesses also said that they heard shots coming from a nearby rise that they called ‘the grassy knoll.’ Oswald was arrested in a movie theater in Dallas, and—now this is the weirdest thing—he was being moved from the jail a few days later, all on national TV, and a guy named Jack Ruby, who owned some strip clubs, rushed up and shot him right in the stomach. I saw it. You guys saw it too. Right on the living room TV. It was pretty shocking. And extremely suspicious. Ruby died soon after that from cancer or something.”

“We saw that on TV?” Megan was incredulous.

“We were living in Germany then, so it wasn’t live, but Mom was furious that we saw it; she thought Dad ought to have known it was going to be broadcast. Whoever set it up made damned sure it was on TV, in the middle of the day, when everyone was glued to their sets. When we got back to Washington, everybody was still devastated. Everybody loved Kennedy.”

“Not everybody,” said Brian. “That certainly isn’t true here.”

“Lots, though. I remember being in Peoples Drug and a man looking at magazines picked up one with Kennedy on the cover and just exploded, coughing and crying. You guys watched his funeral cortege on TV too. It had a black horse in it, with no rider, and the boots in the stirrups faced backward. Solemn. Eerie. Dignified. Just hoofbeats, drums, bagpipes. And so sad. The whole country was in mourning. He was so hopeful. He talked about landing on the moon, improving education, all kinds of things.”

“He obviously angered someone.”

“Well, the Mafia was high on the list of suspects, because his father, a pro-Nazi during the time he was our ambassador to England, made his money in the bootlegging business, and Kennedy didn’t get Cuba back for them, which was where they were making a ton of money. Bobby Kennedy was the attorney general and was really cracking down on the Mafia. But, I don’t know. Hoover said ‘We’ve got to convince the American public that Oswald killed Kennedy.’ Why? People suspected the CIA and even Lyndon Johnson, his vice president.

“So. This is what I did. When Hadntz dropped me off, I went upstairs to the sixth floor of the depository and hid behind some stacked boards they were using for construction. I knew all the details about it, like I said, I’d studied it, it had happened seven years earlier. Then two men showed up, not Oswald, with some old rifle, and they hung out and smoked and joked and waited. When Kennedy came around the corner in his convertible, they were supposed to fire, but I jumped up and shot at the one poking the gun out the window and rather surprisingly wounded him. Dad came out shooting from behind some boxes. I was astonished. The one I’d shot shouted, “Make the decoy shot!” The other guy picked up the rifle, but Dad then—he told me, I don’t remember—Dad carried me downstairs and took me to the car.” She was talking now as if in a trance. “I had a bullet graze on my forehead.

“We drove out of town to a little airstrip where the plane had been, the plane that brought them there. Mom and the plane were gone.” Tears welled in Jill’s eyes. “Just … gone.” She leaned her head back in the rocker and the tears rolled down her face. She got up, grabbed some tissues, blew her nose.

“Dad and I drove back here, and it was like when I went, only things got newer and newer and we were back here. We came into the kitchen and Brian and his friend were here. But it was … it was clear that Mom had been gone a long, long time. I think that Mom knew the truth. I didn’t do anything that would have stopped the assassination, so it must have been her, or maybe Wink, or even someone else, who took out the real assassin, and after that, Mom…”

Jill took deep breaths and turned her face away. When she turned back to them again, her lips trembled; her eyes anguished. She howled, “Mom just disappeared! My heart … was broken. Dad’s too. We were just so, so sad.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest, so that her hands held her opposite shoulder, and she shook her head back and forth, staring at them, her face crumpled in agony while she wept.

Brian and Megan both jumped up and crushed her in hugs. Megan said, “It’s all right, Jill, it’s all right.”

“It’s—not—all—right,” she managed to get out, in jerky words.

“You did what you thought you had to do,” Brian said. “You didn’t know that would happen.” He handed her some tissues. “Please, Jill, it really is all right. From my point of view.” He rubbed her shoulders, and Megan hugged her until she calmed down to snuffles.

“Have you ever told anyone else?” asked Megan.

Jill blew her nose. “Dad knew, of course. But no. No one. Oh”—she laughed, weakly—“the therapist. Nancy. She thought I was crazy, of course. But she did say that I had to tell you. I guess”—Jill hiccupped a few times—“she was right. But it was always too hard. And … Daniel.”

“Daniel?” asked Megan.

“Detective Kandell,” Brian told her. “He’s investigating the break-in. But why tell him?”

“When you wouldn’t even tell us,” Megan said.

“It’s very strange, but he remembers coming here when Mom had a school. His little brother went to school here. So there’s some weird kind of … connection. A bridge between the timestreams that we share. A … nexus? I have no idea why he remembers and you guys don’t. But he’d forgotten all about it until he saw the Magpie picture on the wall.”

“A likely story,” said Brian.

“Yeah,” Jill said. “It’s weird. But he did show me where he carved his initial in the sunroom—”

“What?” Megan looked incensed.

“And I do remember his little brother. And Daniel remembers me.”

“Kind of crazy,” Megan said. “Maybe he’s, you know, a creep.”

“I don’t think so,” Jill said, surprised that she was defending him.

“I really don’t either,” Brian said.

“We’ll have a chance to meet him and his family. I invited them for tomorrow.”

Megan rolled her eyes. “Great. But it’s still all a puzzle, mostly.” She picked up the board. “Maybe we can use this to find Mom and Dad.”

“No!” Jill jumped from her chair and yanked it from her. “That’s what you might think you’re doing. It’s seductive. It has its own agenda. It used me. We need to figure out what it really is, how it’s really meant to be used. It might be just a vestige of what Hadntz intended. We need to get in touch with her. After all, she showed up at the party.” Jill unlocked the desk, which she’d kept locked since the party, and got out Hadntz’s card. “There’s no contact information on it. Just her name. On the back it says, ‘The work never ends.’”

“Mom told me kind of the same thing in the station. I already told Brian. Something about the war lasting a lot longer than they thought it would.”

“Yeah,” Brian said. “It is a war. This board is obviously Q, maybe an early prototype.”

“I think Mom and Dad created Q,” Megan said.

“I do too. From Hadntz’s plans. Well, Mom just facilitated it. We’ll probably never know the whole story.” Brian dragged the box of notebooks out from behind a chair. “It’s all in here. Sketchy, but if we pool our information we’ll have a lot to go on. I’m an engineer, after all; Megan’s got a physics degree. And now we have the latest incarnation. Hadntz-dust, the HD-50, the magical memory neuroplasticity drug that will change us all into drooling babies. Can’t wait. When will it start to work?”

“Not babies,” Megan was focused and professional, on her own turf. “Probably a bit older. Cindy mentioned once that in her Montessori teacher training course, everyone said they were sure that they were still going through sensitive periods, even in their twenties. It’s true. Your brain’s still growing in your twenties. Evolutionarily speaking, once you’d gotten your kids grown up, that is, through puberty and into childbearing, probably the only next useful task for you was helping raise the grandkids. Provide wisdom. So maybe this is the next way for humans to engineer our own future, our own destiny, by modifying our biology.”

“It’s just not fair,” Brian said. “When I was a kid I thought I’d grow up and be finished. You know, myself. Instead, I keep changing from one person to another, and they’re all just kind of thinly connected with these memories and histories that seem continuous. Is that right, Megan? You’re the expert.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying.”

“Every change is worse than before. More painful. Disease. Memory loss. Yuck. And speaking of memory, Megan, where did you say you first got the board?”

“You don’t remember? We went to Peoples Drug to get Jill some cough medicine and I found it up on a high shelf and Mom bought it for me.”

Brian and Jill looked at each other. Brian said, “I have a different memory. We found it in the attic under some floorboards.”

“That’s my memory too,” said Jill.

“So? Do we vote?”

“You’ve heard of false memory?”

“I do research on false memory, as you well know, smarty-pants. But this memory is real.”

“So is mine,” said Jill.

“How do you know?”

Megan roused herself, backed up to the desk and leaned against it. “You’re right. We don’t know. Not really. It’s the oldest philosophical question in the world. It’s called phenomenology. We only know because we know. Our senses tell us.” She reached over and picked up the board she had brought, unfolded its metal legs so that it was like a foot-tall table, and set her glass of vodka on it. “Maybe we just have different pasts.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” asked Jill.

“That’s a good question. We have events in common, but, of course, even this moment is different for all of us. Depending on birth order, every child experiences a different family too. Whole groups of people can convince themselves of something—or, more usually, politicians can do that. Fascinating stuff.”

“Hitler, for example,” said Jill.

“Yes, it works best when there is extreme censorship, but trying to shame a group of people for their beliefs or memories can have an accretionary effect.” She sighed. “Well. I’m glad it’s not blinking.”

“Blinking?” asked Brian.

“It was blinking the other night.” Suddenly, Megan shook with laughter.

“What?” asked Brian.

“Where I saw Mom. At the station. There were lots of men. They were all wearing hats.”

A laughing fit swept through them. Jill’s stomach ached. Tears streamed from Brian’s eyes. Megan howled and curled up, knocking over the Game Board but, of course, holding on to her glass, now almost empty.

“Ahhh—haaa,” she gasped at last. She caught her breath, blew her nose again, and said, “Even Mom was wearing a hat.”

“Look,” said Brian. “Tell us about these pills.”

So Megan told them about how she’d met Hadntz, about her meticulous research, and about how she’d made the brain plasticity drug. And about Hadntz’s note that she had taken it. “I’ve tried to get in touch with her again, but she never responds.”

“Maybe that’s why I could play so well when I went to the jazz club a few weeks ago,” Brian said.

“Neuroplasticity is powerful stuff.”

“I don’t know why I didn’t make the connection, though. The papers start calling the Device a ‘Hadntz Device’ pretty early on, and then later iterations are HD, and numbered, and then the vitamins—ha!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Megan said. “Back up.” Her hair was no longer plastered to her head by sweat, but flying out whenever the fan turned her way, making her look like a wild woman, thought Jill. She thoughtfully refreshed Megan’s vodka. They’d eaten most of the cheese and crackers.

“Yes, please,” said Jill. “I haven’t read the papers either.”

Brian closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “You know Dad’s war history.”

Jill said, “He trained at Aberdeen on assembling and troubleshooting the M-9 Fire Director, part of the SCR-584. It could track and shoot a missile in flight, and intercepted Hitler’s doodlebugs. It had a 99.9 percent success rate and ended the V-1 attacks. He was in England for a year and a half in Ordnance, preparing for Operation Overlord, and in December 1944 was sent to Camp Lucky Strike at Le Havre to follow the Battle of the Bulge mop-up and set up a troop supply station in Mönchengladbach, Germany, in the British Sector. They were there till August of ’forty-five, and then were sent back to the States, supposedly en route to the Pacific to supply the invasion of Japan.”

“Yes,” said Brian. “True on the surface. But what he and his pal Wink were really doing, completely on their own, was trying to follow the plans Hadntz kept updating.”

Jill templed her fingers and bent her head forward.

“So, Jill, what are you thinking?” asked Brian.

“I’m thinking that every time there was an advance in her prototype, time changed. Or—our timestream shifted. Came into being. Whatever. And I think HD-50 is a prototype change, an advance. Wait a minute. I just remembered something.” She looked at Brian. “Remember when I told you that Mom and Dad visited me at the hospital?”

“Yes. I even told Megan about it.”

“Two other people also dropped in that night. Like, visiting hours for Jill Dance, psychotic, are from midnight to three A.M. One was a medium-tall man. Wearing a fedora, of course, but kind of familiar, and for some reason, comforting. Hmm. I guess he’s the Walking Man. He came before Mom and Dad. Didn’t say a word, stayed about two minutes. The other one was really scary. He seemed to be some kind of German SS guy. He had those little lightning insignias on his collar, or somewhere. A metal skeleton-head pin in the center of his hat. I screamed, and he left right away.”

“Okay,” said Megan. “And?”

“Let’s say that these crazy Nazis—I know they’re still around—know about the Device, and about Mom and Dad, and have been just hanging out, waiting. I’m afraid that I made Koslov suspicious. He’s one of the people you overheard at the party, Megan.”

“Right.”

“Although he is Russian, so theoretically, he should hate the Nazis. But if one of them could get into the hospital, they could also probably get my therapist’s records, in which I talk freely about my various insanities. Which they know are real.”

Megan nodded. “That really makes sense, in the context of what I overheard at the party. So people are trying to get the Device.”

“The plans, the notes, the Device, whatever. But if it is the Game Board is really Q—”

“It replicates,” said Brian, excited. “From what I understand, for a while, it was just a clear chunk of stuff, with colored threads inside. Dad wrote a lot of stuff in some kind of code, but he taught me the code when I was a teenager. It seemed like it was just for fun, but I guess he intended for me to read these notes.”

Jill nodded her head. “So let’s say it changes into things that are pleasing to the user. The attractive Game Board. Spacies. And it has the capacity to replicate, to spread. So, Megan, maybe—”

Megan frowned. “Maybe the one in my house just … I don’t know … grew? Jim said that Abbie found it next to a stack of old photos that I took from the attic.”

Brian added, “Right! And the day I found the saxophone in the attic, I found a loose board, and it seemed strangely familiar. I pried it up, and the hole was empty. I felt around and some gooey gunk got stuck to my hand, and I wrapped it up and tossed it in the car. Maybe that’s what turned into my Game Board.”

“And maybe,” said Jill, sitting absolutely still in her rocking chair, electrified, “I don’t really need one because probably this whole house has changed into one huge Device.”

“Ugh,” said Megan, looking around. “I guess the point is that we have to put this all together, try to figure out what’s happening, and try to decide what to do about it. For instance, someone, or some group, I guess, is doing its best to make it unpleasant to live in this house. That is bothersome.”

Brian said, “Yes, but Detective Kandell is on their trail.”

“On Jill’s trail, more like,” said Megan. “You said he took her to the market? For three hours? That’s detective work? Give me a break.”

“Daniel was protecting me. Someone was following me. A short, dumpy guy. With a hat, of course.”

Megan said, “Oh, it’s Daniel now. Well, the pursuer that Daniel so bravely saved you from sounds like the guy who was spying on me on the train. He got off around eight A.M. and I think he took the train back in this direction. So, maybe Kandell is legit.” She shook her head. “I just don’t know if I can handle this, Jill. So much is missing. I know that the people on the porch talked about Mom having a nursery school, and I know that she was taking courses at Georgetown, but I don’t recall the school.”

“I remember you in 1967 too,” said Brian. “You were painting with oils. Filling the house with noxious oil fumes.”

Jill said, “See, I don’t remember that. I can certainly imagine myself doing that, but I’ve never used oils, not this me.”

“You could probably create a very respectable false memory of having done that,” said Megan.

“How could I tell if it was real or false?”

“You can’t, not without outside corroboration. And young memories, in particular, are often false, because they’re constructed communally. Your uncle tells you about the time you fell in the pool when you were two and he rescued you, and pretty soon all the pictures are there. Voilà! So with more enhanced Total Recording of Life, as in the proliferation of home movies, home videos, photos, you can certainly think that you’re actually remembering when actually, you’re reconstructing, imagining.”

Jill said, “But the point is that, for both of you and presumably the rest of the people with you in that life, the international political situation was bland and quiet, right? Economy good, no Vietnam War, no split Germany, no Soviet appropriation of satellite countries, very little Cold War and even that ended after the Bay of Pigs when Kennedy and Khrushchev negotiated the Munich Disarmament Treaty. Those are things I can read about. Remember, after JFK’s assassination I have a gap of seven years, because I was in the first timestream. And once I returned here to yours, the whole past was different, starting near the end of WWII. That’s the timeframe I studied to get my doctorate. My lost years. I still slipped, and landed in St. Lizzy’s Home for Wayward Timestreamers.”

“It wasn’t bland and quiet,” said Brian. “It was really exciting. China, Russia, Europe, and the U.S. were holding the Moon Congress in Paris, and all the countries of the world had representatives, and they were hammering out the legal framework for the colony. I started engineering school so that I could be an astronaut. I was in a frac band.”

“Frac band?” asked Jill.

“As in ‘fractious.’ Or ‘fractured.’ It was a style of music that incorporated elements of classical, jazz, and rock. I played the guitar. And the sax, of course. We had some success. As in, once we got a job in Roanoke. I guess that’s when I started drinking too much and dropped out of school. We thought we’d gotten big. Instead, frac music just kind of went away. Too weird, I guess.”

“Yes,” said Jill. “Things got dull.”

“But things got done,” said Brian. “We developed Q … or, I guess, it developed itself. It gave itself a chance to blossom.”

Megan picked up the board. “You know, there must be a way to make this thing tell us what it’s all about.”

Jill sidled over to Megan and looked at it, then began tracing some of its patterns. “Mesmerizing, isn’t it? Like, when I was little, I’d play on this Oriental rug, and every design seemed to go somewhere, like those steps, there, over in the corner.”

“Yeah,” said Brian. “I know what you mean.”

Jill nodded. “I left the original Game Board in Dallas. Considering everything that’s happened, the thought of trying to use it, however we would do that, makes me feel rather sick. Besides, as far as I can remember, I never really used it. I was used by it. The board would manifest pictures, or would just be blank and I would get pictures in my mind. But these narratives, and these pictures, came from the Game Board. I realized, at some point, that this narrative that I was cartooning had a strong connection to reality. Each panel, each point of a story, branches. At any point, you can take many directions. The story divides, and you, the artist, pick one of the possible paths. Sometimes it seems a lot easier, but that’s because maybe you see a point far off, like a mountaintop, that you head for. But that just means it’s easier to ignore all of the possible side paths. It’s just like the decisions we make in everyday life, all the time.”

“It sounds a lot like quantum mechanics,” said Megan. “The Many-Worlds theory, where existence is always splitting. Some astrophysicists are now saying that there are infinite worlds, where people exactly like us are living our lives exactly like we do.”

“So what would be the philosophical difference?” asked Jill. “That sounds rather uninteresting. Just slightly different, now, that’s interesting, and seems more like what’s happening now. I used to read about all this in comic books too, believe it or not. In the fifties and sixties they were absolute purveyors of pure weirdness. Also, one of the big philosophical problems for quantum mechanics is the observer. Does the observer really make a difference? Is Schrödinger’s cat alive or dead inside the box before we look at it? One interpretation suggests that our own will and intent influence reality on a very fine, quantum, level.”

“Like magic,” said Brian, with a certain glumness.

“Not exactly,” said Megan. “We can definitely work on our very own lives using the tools of will and intent, and other tools like neurolinguistic programming, which bypasses the conscious mind; we’re still trying to figure out how that works. Because it does.”

“I think the only way that we could possibly figure out how this thing works or even what, exactly, it does is to study those plans,” said Brian. “Although first we’d have to get advanced degrees in a lot of different disciplines.”

“We already have some,” said Megan. “We need to find Handtz.”

“Will she want to be found? Will she talk?” asked Jill.

“Good question,” said Megan.

“I’m beginning to think that Koslov might have been in this other history. Mom and Dad and Hadntz’s timestream. Obviously, some people have been in both. Hadntz has been; Wink, Dad’s pal, was able to move between two of the trajectories. I know because I saw him, at that last reunion, the night before everything—happened. He was in this house. We all used the Game Board. Even you, Megan. Brian was going to Vietnam. And then—the next day was the Kent State Massacre, and I was on the road to Dallas. But before, whenever Dad talked about him, Wink had died in the war. Koslov has some strong connection to Hadntz; he translated a book of poems by Hadntz’s mother. They’re beautiful, by the way. All these people at the party, the ones out on the porch, have suspected Mom for a long time. A very long time, according to what you told me about what you overheard. And they’ve kept an eye on us. I’ll bet each of you have people watching you too. People in your lives, that you work with.”

“Cindy!” Brian said. “I knew it! The ultimate spy. She even married me.”

“No need to actually work with them.” Megan laughed. “There was that little twerp on the train today. I was going to call you, Brian, and hand this board over to you on the way to the station. But I overslept, then fell asleep on the Metro. I had to run for the train.” Her laugh grew more hearty and she wiped tears from her eyes. “Poor fat little guy. He must have about had a heart attack. Now, he might be right outside the window.”

Jill got up and looked out both windows. “No, but our children and spouses have just pulled up and I’ll bet all of them are expecting dinner. I’ll hide the board, and you guys tell them what’s for dinner.”

“Pizza,” said Brian.

“We’re having pizza for dinner tomorrow on the woodstove. Daniel and his dad and grandma and little boy are coming.”

“Seems like a bit of bad timing,” said Megan. “We have a lot to do, a lot to talk about. Can’t you uninvite them?”

“I could, but I don’t want to. Don’t you think we’ll all be completely tired of talking about it by then? And all the kids will be there too.”

“I’m already exhausted.” Megan flopped backward onto the floor. “And I, for one, have no objection to pizza two nights in a row.”

* * *

After dinner, Zoe sat cross-legged on the old floral rug in the Halcyon House living room, a comfortable, sprawling, square room of deep chairs and couches flanked by an eclectic mix of tables and reading lamps, the upright piano, and a fireplace centered on the back wall. The wall was filled with deep, spacious shelves, and opened, on one side, through French doors, onto the house-long, screened-in porch.

Her father stood next to her, sorting through a vast collection of old 78s. He shook his head now and then, finding one with a chipped edge, which he set in one pile because he could play part of it, and setting those completely cracked, or even in shards, in another pile. He sighed and muttered and sometimes exclaimed happily.

On another shelf were 45 records with large holes in the middle, mostly records that Brian and the Crazy Aunts had amassed when teenagers. Bitsy and Whens really liked them; they’d put them on a little record player kept on a lower shelf and dance around like maniacs.

Those on another shelf were 33-1/3 records, sorted into two categories: rock and jazz. Zoe searched in vain for classical, and found a quick run of musicals. My Fair Lady, Oliver!, and The Music Man.

She began to go through the jazz LPs, which her dad assured her had lots of good music on them. Some individual titles triggered music in her head, like “A Tisket, A Tasket”; she heard Ella for a moment, her voice bell-clear. Some artist names were familiar, but she couldn’t particularly link the names to any piece of music. She did enjoy some of the piano artists, especially Keith Jarrett.

“Look!”

Brian paused in his sorting.

“Let’s play this.”

Brian bent down. “Stéphane Grapelli. Jazz violin.”

“Jazz violin?”

Brian smiled. “Listen.”

Zoe listened. And listened, until bedtime, when the adults closed the doors and went back to talking. Talk, talk, talk, that’s all that grown-ups ever did. Well, her father, at least, did like to play music.

Zoe

ZOE’S ADVENTURE IN MUSIC

July 14

THE NEXT MORNING, she got up very early and listened some more, refusing breakfast. The grown-ups all went into the library and shut the French doors. Of course. She put a Grapelli LP on and set it to play over and over again. Finally, she felt someone approach, stand next to her, and nudge her with a foot.

“Zoe! Are you dead?” It was Whens.

She didn’t open her eyes. “Not hardly.”

“We’re tired of that silly music.”

“I’m not. Go away.”

“I’m going to change it.”

“You’d better not.” She felt Whens standing there for a minute. Then he went away.

Zoe got up and hurried upstairs to the ballroom. Fetching her violin, she went back downstairs. Good. No one had touched the record.

She turned the record over, and set her violin on her shoulder. After a short hiss, the first track, “Sweet Lorraine,” began to play.

She played along almost perfectly, and frowned when she varied from Grapelli. She played along with both sides, turned off the record player, ran up to the ballroom with her violin, and shut the doors. At the front of the ballroom, she commenced to play.

She duplicated the entire LP perfectly, but the music drew her to try other things as well. It was an intriguing music, beckoning her to become a part of it in a new way, to expand it, to hear many different options echo in her mind at once, each a pathway, and instantaneously choose which one she wanted to try. It opened her up in a way that most classical music did not—maybe because that was all so old and settled? She could add depth, timbre, emotion, to it, yes, she could work hard to master it, but it was not inviting in the same way.

She was completely exhilarated, and did not know how long she had played, or what, really. Yes, she liked gypsy jazz violin! She wondered if Grandpa Sam had any other gypsy jazz downstairs.

Her eyes closed. She imagined a real gypsy sat on the ballroom floor. Her multicolored skirt tented her knees, on which she rested her head. Zoe could not see her face, for a cascade of curly black hair, liberally streaked with pure white, as if she’d been painting, hid her face. A thin, old bald man stood next to her, and he played and the gypsy stood and played along with him, furious swirling music, filled equally with inky blue darkness and brilliant joy, gold, with spikes of spring green and rose-pink.

She opened her eyes, and they were still there.

They stood, together, the man with a grave, distant smile, and the woman with closed eyes. Zoe was transfixed.

The music spoke of a hard and necessary parting. It spoke of grief, and endings, yet hinted at a beginning, for Zoe. And, perhaps, for them.

But it sounded like the woman’s good-bye song. She was leaving forever. Her sadness was so overwhelming that she could not speak it, but the man understood it, could play it. There was great joy in it too, somewhere, like the most poignant hymn Zoe had ever heard.

Zoe took up her own violin and played, absorbing the music with something she knew must be her soul, until she had to burst out in her own contribution, filled with sweetness, regret, and good-bye; and then it was past all speech, and Zoe played, and played, and played, crying with great, mingled joy and sadness—joy at the beauty of the world, sadness at its inevitable loss. She closed her eyes, watching the colors of it, distant and also close, a place she could see in her mind and walk into, and she did. There was fire there. Death. Unspeakable horrors. She cried as she played, and finally all became light once again, and colors, resolved into a shimmering rainbow.

Zoe felt her mother’s gentle kiss on her forehead.

She opened her eyes. The man and woman were gone.

“That was beautiful, honey.” The door stood open. “Come on. It’s late. You didn’t have any lunch. Or dinner.” Cindy ran her hands down both of her daughter’s arms. As if in a dream, Zoe allowed her to take the violin, settle it into the case and snap it shut. That did not stop the music. She allowed her mother to lead her out of the ballroom and downstairs, where some pizza, and some cookies were left.

It was loud here, with different music. But she had to remember!

Zoe stood next to the empty chair at the table, assailed by the gypsy sounds of the old tablecloth, on which apples danced with pears between strong red and yellow stripes, and the distant, dancing gypsy sounds coming from her Crazy Aunts, her father, and the old things from long-ago Russia from Grandma Bette’s family in the very top cupboard shelves. And everyone was talking. She half-turned to get her composition book and pens. Cindy gently grabbed her shoulders. “Sit,” she said. “Eat.”

Amid the strident harmonies, the distracting chatter, hoping the other music would continue until she could write it down, she did as her mother asked.

The rainbow music had to be finished now, anyway, because Whens whispered in her ear, “Zoe! We can’t find Grandma!”

She had to write it. Grandma was part of the same music.

Jill, Brian, and Megan

TRANSFORMATIVE PICNIC

July 14

ON SUNDAY MORNING, bleary-eyed, Jill, Brian, and Megan dragged themselves into the library bearing mugs of steaming coffee, bagels with contents ranging from cream cheese and lox to peanut butter and jelly, piles of Sam’s notebooks, the two Game Boards, their Q’s, Megan’s shared information about HD-50, and a huge determination to bull their way through to understanding of their situation, and a plan of action.

Megan started, after swallowing a mouthful of breakfast. “I’ve been Q’ing Hadntz, but she doesn’t respond. She never has; it’s all one-way.”

Brian said, “I’ve come across several photos of the original incarnations of the Device.” He shared them on Q. “The first one is just kind of a metallic-looking blob, but Dad writes:

Power sent through solution made via Hadntz’s plan. After several hours, hear faint music. Radio? Can’t be. Some jellylike substance forming in solution. A spark, pure oxygen present, explosion, during which mind ranged through intense musical revelations, seemingly embedded but now forgotten. Brilliance, a sense of altered time, a sense of other paths, other avenues of probabilities. Wink reports same in that instant.

Following small fire provoked search of premises, resulting material passed through several hands and made to disappear by Company Magician Kocab. Returned later for bottle of Scotch from Mountbatten’s private stock, though says a few beers would have been sufficient to work his magic of remanifestation. Hidden in good place, along with precious cavity magnetron magnanimously provided via unknown source.

Surprise trip to Bletchley Park, via limo (Wink disappointed, no booze on board), for low-key questioning about radar event observed during time of fire. Shown plans of a Device, but different from one we built with Hadntz’s additional microfilm from London. Disavow any knowledge. Saw little of place but looks like great place to work. Wink and I mum.

“Skip to six months later,” Brian continued.

Caravan of three hundred command cars en route through frigid France. Avoid St. Lo, not worth rooting out Germans holed up there. Stop for the night, actually find abandoned house! Even lumber for fire! Heaven! Out of blue a woman arrives: Major Elegante. I remember her, quiet in corner, on December 8, 1941, while questioned about the disappearance of Hadntz after Pearl Harbor. She has provender: wine, cheese, bread! Trade stories about Fifty-second Street. Next A.M., abrupt change of demeanor: Pulls rank, orders Wink to drive her Deisenberg, she interrogates me about visit with Hadntz, to underground missile factory where Hadntz found daughter, and V-2 assembly plant at Nordhausen. Wants details of interiors, etcetera. Has order allowing Wink to hear. Records with steno. Finds plans and Device in duffle, drives off, leaving us with command car in snowy field. Nearby ghastly swollen bodies of men, and cows, back of head or arm poking out from snow, remaining carnage of Battle of the Bulge.

Brian flipped pages.

“Next mention of the Device is about a month later. He and Wink are setting up a lab in an abandoned warehouse in Gladbach. A German engineer, Perler, shows them a Device, German-made, and says that he has surmised they are trying to make one from what they have been saving as they salvage equipment from Dusseldorf to fix the German telephone system in Gladbach:

Perler says plans came from blond woman with Berlin accent who said there needs to be a network of Devices for it to work. Wants to trade for sarin gas to kill Hitler; claims Hitler is in Berlin bunker. We cannot procure sarin nor anthrax, but keep his Device. After seeing Bergen-Belsen, begin work on new incarnation. Calls for organic material this time, something to do with H’s DNA speculations. We add blood from ceremonially nicked fingers: Wink’s idea. Add power to solution. Light, heat, no explosion: visions, like a new brain, feel rearranged, changed, after several hours, which pass like seconds. Left with clear, oblong object. Perler breaks in, steals back his Device. Major Elegante shows up in Biergarten, has orders for me to drive her to Berlin. Weird scene, Russians everywhere, at big jazz show Elegante buys HD plans from some Russian, has me photograph them. Afterward, I take her to Ravensbrück to look for her cousin. No luck. Eventually end up at some manor house, some high command guy she knows, she has to leave suddenly, leaves me book of Chinese poetry. And, not coincidentally, I think, the Russian plans. Miss her.

* * *

“So there,” said Megan.

“Yeah,” said Brian. “They collaborated on that Device for years. There’s more important stuff, though”:

We leave Mönchengladbach having repaired Olympic pool from 1936, damaged by bombs. En route, Wink and I taken from caravan, put on a plane, eventually shipped to Tinian, on observation plane behind Enola Gay. Both of us sickened: just a stunt, killing innocent Japanese. However, Device changes during atomic explosion: I see time as a foam, infinite worlds of consciousness, as I hold Device to window (we surmise we are there via Hadntz’s manipulations; she added a note in own handwriting to “bring it with you.” On return over Asia, Wink and I surmise that proximity to subatomic particles released during bomb detonation changed Device—but how?

On return to States, we exchange addresses, phone numbers, promise to meet on Easter next, I keep Device, store in parents’ attic. Men in black visit my Cleveland apartment, question me, leave. They know I have something. What, or where, though, they do not know.

Brian said, “Then later, while we lived in Hawaii, he apparently met Wink on Midway. Wink gave him a new incarnation of the Device from another time line. He decides to distribute the Device across the Pacific. It is apparently malleable, and grows.”

“So then,” said Jill, “we moved to Germany, and then here, and they hid the ‘malleable Device.’”

“The HD-10,” Brian interrupted.

“In the attic. Where we found it, it bonded with our kiddy minds, and turned into this super-attractive Game Board, which changed our brains. Maybe it made me into more of an activist than I would have been.”

“Perhaps,” said Megan. “But I doubt it.”

“She talks about altruism a lot in her papers,” Brian said.

“Right,” said Megan. “And when we talked in Cuba, that was exactly her slant. Maybe her increasingly refined versions of the Device enhance whatever helps humans enlarge their vision of who, exactly, is in their ‘in-group,’ people they would help without question, would sacrifice for. And enhances whatever causes us to be empathic. I’m also thinking about the latest studies about the power of screen violence. There is no pain. Depending on how the movie or whatever is engineered, we cheer when the enemy dies, no matter how gruesomely—they usually did something very clearly evil, and need to be punished; revenge is satisfying. Proven: Seeing violence on-screen or participating in it in a game actually does make children more prone to commit real violence. Contrast that with how soldiers who have actually gone through battle feel. They are, essentially, proxies of some government, conditioned by patriotism to defend their country ‘right or wrong,’ fighting proxies in the same situation. But no matter how they feel about the enemy going into it, and no matter how good they feel about their victories, about having survived, about having eliminated those who are a threat to them, about forming a bond with their ‘brothers,’ traumatic stress, and inability or unwillingness to talk about their experiences, which sometimes become completely submerged, often results. In fact,” she said, looking at Jill, “I think that’s what happened to you.”

Jill sat back in her chair, as waves of revelation washed through her. The therapist’s mouthed words had meant nothing until now. Suppression, yes. Unwillingness to talk. Almost as if she had committed some vast genocide, destroyed a world. And now, with Daniel’s revelation, and the other things that were happening, yes, relief felt like a weight had been lifted from her chest, she could breathe, she could—

The air she breathed in so deeply came out in a sob, and she lost control, continuing to cry, but she tried to smile as tears welled, as her brother and sister once again leaned over her chair and embraced her, held her as she shook with great, racking breaths that emerged not as words, but just as sounds, as she gradually calmed, washed by vast, deep healing.

By now, the tissue box was almost depleted. She blew her nose, said, “Coffee, anyone?”

She was surprised when she saw it was only ten thirty. It seemed to her that great ages had passed.

When Jill left the library, Cindy looked up from a book she was reading in the living room, across the foyer, and smiled. Bitsy lay next to her on the couch, asleep. Zoe was upstairs, playing something gorgeous.

In the kitchen, Jill washed her face and saw that Cindy had brewed a new pot of coffee. Jim was outside, playing with Abbie and Whens in the new sandbox that Brian’s crew had knocked together in an hour. Jim turned to look at her, smiled, and waved.

At least, thought Jill, piling bagels, cream cheese, the pot of coffee, and cream and sugar onto a tray, some things in this world are going well.

She’d only been gone five minutes, but Brian and Megan had moved on to Topic B: What to Do Now.

“I’m not sure what Hadntz expects us to do with the HD-50,” Megan was saying. “I’ve talked to a lot of prominent people, people I even know, who went through trials with it, and hear nothing but good things. I’ve started taking it. I feel … I don’t know, energized, I guess. Able to look at things differently. And in terms of retrieving memory—I think it’s helped us realize what happened.”

Jill took her seat, with a fresh cup of coffee. “Insofar as the HD-10 was supposed to grow and spread its influence wherever it went, I’d say that just being in this house has a definite influence. But one problem with Hadntz’s ideas are that she seems to just want to … inflict these things on people in general, rather than giving them a choice.”

“Dad said something about that somewhere. Ah, notebook number seven.” He flipped through the pages he’d flagged with stickies. “They’re on the drive from Nordhausen when he asks her about this.”

One of the first times I’ve seen her angry, almost out of control, fierce. She compares war to disease: smallpox, polio, the bubonic plague. So I too begin to wonder: Why not treat war like a disease? If it can be cured through some inoculation, through some agent with no ancillary harm, it does seem a good thing. While various agencies and organizations decry war, they are an impotent minority when the war drums begin to beat. I do not want revenge for Keenan’s death, and I don’t believe he would either. He was there as a soldier, and as I and a few others know, our own nation failed to protect him. The radar report from Opana Point of approaching planes was dismissed. No, I just want him alive again, alive to live out his promise, to raise his children. Killing others will not bring him back, nor will it prevent future wars. We should know by now that horrific weapons, like gas, machine guns, and explosives, do not deter nations from going to war. They are just new ways to inflict damage on the enemy. After seeing these slave labor camps, I am indeed willing to help Hadntz in her mission in any way that I can.

Perhaps that was her reason for taking me.

“The question,” said Jill, “is whether increased intelligence, awareness, whatever you want to call it, actually does decrease violence.”

“I think it’s a moving target,” said Megan. “But coupled with enhancement of empathy—I mean, I remember crying and crying when I was little and watching Shirley Temple play Heidi, when she was taken away from the Alms-Uncle and made to live in Frankfurt. The plight of others, even imaginary others, really moved me. I wanted to keep every child in the world from that pain.”

Brian said, “That has to be coupled with a real ability to do something. Which we may have. But I don’t know how we actually go about presenting this choice to people. Haven’t a clue.”

“We have our own strengths,” said Jill. “I think that the Montessori pods are a great start.”

“Well, if music helps, I’m getting better by the hour,” said Brian.

“Thank God,” murmured Megan. “That frac stuff gave me a headache.”

“Oh, this is pure jazz. Dad jazz. The kind that seems to have synergistically helped his insights into how to make the Device and what it could do. We have another problem to consider, though. A more immediate one. That group of people that Megan overheard during the party think that Q is hidden in the house. And they’re right. But what are their goals?”

“The Clarissa person seemed to hate all of Jill’s plans for Africa, the schools,” Megan said. “I got the distinct impression that they want to use it for their own ends.”

“That may simply be impossible,” said Jill. “Unlike the atomic bomb, this changes human brains. Human behavior. Maybe if we just give it to them—contrive to make them think it has fallen into their hands, or something, they will be changed by it.” She grinned. “Clarissa could definitely use some Q-work. She’s been trying to throw up roadblocks against the school project since I started it, years ago.”

“Our way right, your way wrong,” said Brian.

Jill replied, “I just believe that access to education is a human right, for everyone, men and women. You know, Grandma Elegante’s dad took her out of school when she was in eighth grade. Her mother died, and she had to take over the housework. She was bitter about that till she died.”

Brian nodded. “Great-grandpa Dance’s father told him at that age to quit school or move out. He moved to town and shoveled coal for the city’s steam plant so he could get his high school diploma.”

“Grandma was a girl,” said Megan. “She didn’t have that option. It’s much worse than that in a lot of the countries today. Girls just aren’t allowed to go to school, period.”

“So—to get back to the break-in,” said Brian. “I surmise that Dad left important notations in those books about the Device. But how did the thief know which ones to take?”

“Some of them were nosing through the books during the party,” Megan reminded them.

“Right,” said Brian. “Brings us back to the same question. Whodunit, what are they doing with it, what can we do about it?”

“And where are we going to hide those notebooks now?” asked Megan.

“The attic, of course,” said Brian. “Let’s say that thief gets up there and starts looking around.”

Uproarious laughter.

“Well,” said Brian, “that’s a unanimous yes. And the Game Boards? Use them, touch them, wrap them in anti-Q cloth?”

Jill was thoughtful, then she spoke. “I kind of used yours on Friday night, and was just swamped with ideas, memories, vignettes of Dad’s, actually. But it may be just a very personal thing. I wonder what would happen if we just ‘gave’ one of them to that crowd. Some man called last month and demanded the Device.”

“You never said anything!” said Brian.

Jill just looked at him.

“Okay, okay. But they know about it, they want it.”

“I don’t think they should have it,” said Megan. “What if they went back in time and changed the war? Made Hitler live, or something.”

Brian said, “Might it not have some kind of fail-safe? It is, after all, the Device, and it does implant ‘good’ pathways, ‘good’ ideas. At least, that’s the plan.”

“But we don’t know if it works. Who decides what’s good?”

“It accesses and assesses everyone. All the time. It’s pure democracy in action. Read the papers.”

Megan stood up. “All I know is that the kids have been playing in the attic a lot. So we need to be smarter than Mom and Dad.”

“The board wanted us to have it,” said Brian. “That’s all there is to it.”

“Well, I hope the board does not want Abbie to have it,” said Megan, crossing her arms. “I’m sorry,” said Megan, “but I’m crashing. That vodka last night…”

Brian smiled. “HD-50 can probably cure a hangover.”

“Good God! It’s two in the afternoon.” Jill jumped up. “I have to get dinner started, anyway.”

“Dismissed,” said Brian, stood, and stretched.

* * *

Jill went through her prep work for the picnic with an oddly light heart. Despite all this angst, she realized that she was looking forward to seeing Daniel again.

She planned to set the kids to chopping mushrooms, onions, and other ingredients for the pizzas. All the vegetables were on the kitchen table, along with knives and cutting boards. They would each make their own pizza, since no one could ever agree on toppings. The dough was rising in a huge bowl on the counter; she lifted a red-and-green striped tea towel and punched it down.

It was a lovely, hot day, around four in the afternoon. A slight breeze occasionally stirred the leaves of the oak tree just outside the tall kitchen window. Brian was outside, readying the grill, turning on the water, and gathering furniture from hither and yon, including a big comfy wicker chair for Daniel’s grandmother.

Everyone, except the kids, had slept pretty late after last night’s powwow. When Jill had gotten up at ten thirty, she’d found Bitsy, Whens, and Abbie in the attic—probably looking for that Game Board that Abbie had described to them, along with the great betrayal of her mother confiscating it just like she had confiscated her classbook. Jill shooed them downstairs, saying it was too hot, but they went back up as soon as she got busy again. It was actually hidden in the basement.

Her thoughts turned to Detective Kandell. He was only one of the disturbing events of the past few days, but at least she could focus on him.

He was about five eleven, and seemed fit; at least, fit enough to jog a few miles a day, but muscles didn’t bulge out of his shirtsleeves like a bodybuilder’s would. His skin was medium-dark, a rich, glowing color, and he wore a short, plain beard; none of that weird fancified facial hair she often saw around town. He kept his graying hair short, but she could imagine him in the sixties with an Afro. He had a marvelous sense of low-key humor. And he was smart. Very smart.

His eyes were quite sharp; no doubt about that. No sleepiness about him, but instead an alert quality; she could almost see him thinking. His voice was soothing, which, she told herself, was a good alarm sign. She thought Megan might be right—he liked her. But, on the other hand, there was obviously a lot he was not telling her. Maybe he just wanted to seem friendly in order to get some answers to whatever his questions might be.

Jill was now deeply unsettled by the break-in—much more so than she had been originally. It took a while for things to register, with her. She was glad that Brian and Cindy were moving in. Right now, they were bringing over a load of boxes from their apartment. Jill and Brian had both decided that Dad’s papers should remain at his apartment, for now. It seemed certain that the thief, who could be any number of people, was looking for them.

And for the Game Board.

She agreed with the theory that the boards had simply grown, but what had activated them to do so, just now?

Obviously, she thought, as she whirled wine-plumped sun-dried tomatoes in the blender along with fresh basil and an unholy number of garlic cloves, some party, or parties, wanted them to use the boards. How did they know about the board? How did they know what they were capable of?

Could it be Q itself, deciding?

She jumped at a touch on her shoulder.

It was Daniel.

“Sorry to startle you,” he said. “Zoe let me in. So tell me what to do.”

“You can get about fifteen plates from up there.” She pointed to a high cupboard. “There’s a stepstool.”

“Real plates? Are you nuts?” He climbed up the stepstool and began handing down plates.

“Not a polite question. But I’ll let it pass. The kids will use paper plates. Where’s the rest of your family?”

“Dad will bring Ma Ellington—Arabelle—around five thirty, and Ron, my son. Arabelle tires easily.”

“Are you related to the Duke?”

“Actually, yes. Descended from one of Edward Kennedy Ellington’s many uncles.”

“Impressive.”

“Well, any musical talent seems to have passed me by, although I do like jazz. And opera. And Motown. Where do these dishes go?”

“Outside on that big slab of stone.”

Daniel glanced out the window. “Now that’s what I call impressive.”

“Dad rented a crane to get it situated on the base. He just loved it. And his gardens. This was his little paradise, really.”

Daniel gave her a look she couldn’t read, which wasn’t surprising, considering that she didn’t really know him. He took the dishes outside and came back in to pile silverware in a basket, muttering, “No plastic? This is insanity.” She heard him opening and closing drawers, then he went back outside, this time with a tablecloth draped over his shoulder, clutching a beer in his right hand.

Megan finally dragged herself into the kitchen; she’d napped after their morning session. She said, “Remind me that I don’t drink the next time I request alcohol.”

Jill said, “I did, remember?”

“But in such a rude way.” She poured herself some orange juice. “Who’s that guy?”

“Detective Kandell. Daniel. He lives a few blocks over.”

“Ah.” She gave Jill a knowing look. “So that’s the wonder-man. I gather he kind of likes you.”

“Strictly professional,” she said. “Although Brian did know his little brother, Truman, in high school.”

“Truman Kandell? I remember him too, kind of. Neat. Maybe something’s coming back. The HD-50 is stimulating my neurons. At least I have great life insurance.”

They watched Daniel out the window. He turned and waved at them, yelled, “Am I doing all right?” He was setting out the silverware in rows on one of her fifties tablecloths. Jill would have dumped them in a pile. But she definitely would have used the tablecloth.

“Superlative!” Jill yelled back.

Megan said, “Jill, you can’t deny it. That guy is really trying to impress you.”

“Maybe he’s just insanely compulsive.”

“That impresses me.”

* * *

Megan had the kids outside running through a sprinkler, except for Zoe, who had retired to the ballroom to play her violin. Jim was finishing the salad, and Jill had just slipped the flounder into a half-gallon of milk in a large bowl, a practice that everyone always made fun of as a waste of milk while they scarfed down the final product. She decided to make a roux-based sauce with the leftover milk, this time.

Then Daniel was in the kitchen. “Where’s the salt and pepper? Oh, not these cardboard shakers! I’m simply not used to doing without cut-glass shakers. But I’m flexible.” He grabbed them, along with the pizza toppings in their Tupperware containers and said, “My mother always soaked the fish in milk. Delicious.”

Jill watched him descend the stairs, a bit vexed. He knew how to say way too many right things.

Arabelle and Gerald Kandell arrived; Jill only knew because she looked out the window and saw Brian wheeling Arabelle’s wheelchair over the lawn, getting her down to the party. Ron, Daniel’s son, walked next to his grandmother.

Ron was not at all shy; Whens had him putting together a pizza right away. Jill noticed that Whens was drinking one of Zoe’s Slingers and decided not to mention it. She descended the stairs with a big bowl of flounder breaded in cornmeal. “Hi!” she shouted. She set the bowl on the table. Daniel introduced them.

A beautiful wild halo of white hair surrounded Arabelle’s heart-shaped face. A tiny gold cross on a thin gold chain nestled in the hollow of her throat. Stick-thin, she wore a cool white linen dress with a Chinese scarf that Jill recognized from the Smithsonian catalog, held to the dress with an old-fashioned rhinestone brooch.

“How nice to meet you,” said Jill. She shook Arabelle’s thin, frail-looking hand, noticing that she had very long, though gnarled, fingers, and a surprisingly strong grip.

“Yes,” said Arabelle. “What a lovely place you have. You can’t see how beautiful the gardens are from the street.”

Brian furnished Gerald with a beer and took him on a tour of the house. Cindy slid the kids’ pizzas into the wood-fueled oven. Jill began to fry the fish, Arabelle at her side in the wicker chair, facing the party, clutching a glass of red wine with both arthritis-ravaged hands.

“Who is playing Vivaldi?” she asked.

Jill looked up at the house. “That would be my niece, Zoe. Brian’s girl. She should be out getting something to eat.”

“She’s very accomplished. I’d like to meet her.”

“Whens, could you please go get Zoe and tell her it’s time to eat?”

“Could she bring her violin?” asked Arabelle.

Zoe emerged in a few minutes, frowning, carrying her violin. She stomped down the stairs and declared, “I am not hungry. I’m busy.”

Arabelle said, “Would you mind playing that last passage again?”

Zoe’s face lit up. “Well, I’m trying to get it right.”

“Could you please hold this?” Arabelle handed her wine to Jill, who set it down and turned the first batch of fish over.

“Let me have your violin,” she asked Zoe. It was more along the lines of a command.

Zoe handed it over.

Arabelle astonished Jill by firing off the passage with great verve, despite her crippled hands. “I used to be better,” she apologized. “But you must set the bow position before moving it.”

Zoe said, “I know. I try, but it seems like I just can’t get it right.”

“Here’s a very simple exercise you can try,” Arabelle said, “Set. Up-bow. Set. Up-bow. You must separate the movements. Exercise like that a few minutes during your warm-up. Soon it will be yours.”

Zoe tried it. She smiled. “Yes. That’s better. Thanks. I’ll put this away now. I think I’m getting hungry.”

Cindy had been listening. “Do you teach?” she asked Arabelle.

“I used to, but it’s more difficult now. Some days I just can’t move my hands.”

Daniel came over. “Arabelle trained in Europe.”

“Seventy years ago. Seventy!”

Cindy said, “Please think about teaching Zoe. I don’t think the teacher she has now is doing her much good. She seemed very pleased with your suggestion, and that’s really unusual. So—think about it.” She frowned a little. “It’s about all she does. Besides write music.”

“What does she write?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know much about music, and she says it’s mostly too hard for her to play.”

Arabelle smiled again. “Interesting. I will think about it.”

Jill, all consumed by the picnic, did see Daniel talking to Brian and Megan now and then, in a serious fashion. She even saw him writing some notes. And then, after dark, as they were all sitting around the fire, although rather far back as it was still hot, Jill felt a pang and realized that she missed him. That was really not good. She had no intention of getting romantically involved with anyone. Nothing but trouble.

Gerald was telling stories about the architect who had designed their house, and told them that it most likely contained one or more of his trademark secret passages, listening tubes, and hidden doors with little rooms behind them. The kids got pretty excited about that.

Jill saw the red glow of a cigarette down through the garden, near the creek, in her mother’s grotto.

Her heart swelled; for a moment, she could almost imagine that Bette was there, making wisecracks, or just relaxing.

She walked down through the damp grass and found the stone steps.

Inside the grotto was Daniel.

“I was wondering where you were,” she said.

“I’m here. Just thinking.”

Jill was oddly glad to see him. “Mind if I sit with you?”

He smiled. “That would be just fine.”

Jill

THE FIRE THIS TIME

July 17

JILL AWOKE to a great whooping, and powerful strobe lights—those of the sturdy alarm system Sam had installed when Bette’s school was in the house. Manfred barked in her face.

She smelled smoke. Sam had also installed sprinklers in the big wooden house. Why weren’t they on?

She ran to Whens’ bedroom. The bed was empty.

“Stevie!” she shouted. “Whens!”

She wondered where the fire was as she wildly searched rooms, and was fleetingly and deeply thankful that Brian’s family was spending one last night in their apartment, though most of their stuff was here. She smelled smoke, but saw no blaze anywhere as she searched the upstairs. Fire engines pulled up in front, adding to the din.

She heard someone yelling and she said, “Up here!”

In a moment, the fireman, carrying an ax and clad in protective clothing, wearing a mask, had found her. “Anyone else in the house?”

“My little boy. Stevie. I can’t find him.”

“You’ll have to leave. I’ll find him.”

Manfred appeared in the doorway, barking, then wheeled and went to the second-floor door to the attic. Taking the steps two at a time, Jill dashed upstairs, following Manfred. “Stevie!”

They burst into the attic. The fireman was right behind her. “He’s not here.”

“Whens!”

Manfred had Whens by the arm, and dragged him from behind a dresser. “Ow! Stop!” he yelled, hitting Manfred on the head with what looked like a board.

The fireman stepped over and grabbed the boy. “Now run,” he instructed Jill.

Once they were out on the front lawn, Brian’s truck rounded the corner. He jumped out, took one look at the house, ran back to his truck, and dashed inside, gripping a flashlight.

Jill yelled, “Brian!” A fireman held her arm, keeping her from rushing after him.

Flames shot from the sides of the screened-in porch, licking the old lumber of the house, filling the already noisy scene with deep crackling sounds. The firemen aimed their hoses at the base of the fire.

Brian staggered from the house, coughing, and ran around to the side of the house.

Elmore arrived in his Mercedes. Tracy—Lavender Lady—was in the front seat. Elmore slammed the car door and went directly to Jill and grabbed Whens, who still clutched the red board from the attic in both hands. As Whens dangled, Elmore said, “He can’t stay here anymore. It’s dangerous.”

“How in the world did you know there was a fire so quickly?”

“Ambulance-chasing friend.” Elmore turned and started walking toward the car. Whens wailed, kicked, bit, and pummeled his father with the board he still clutched with one hand. “No! No! I have to stay here! No!”

“Ow, you little brat.” Elmore slapped his son’s face. “You will never bite me again! You’re going with us.” He wrestled the board from his son’s hands and flung it to one side. As it fell, it opened up to reveal the black and red squares of a checkerboard. Whens’ wails were deafening. Elmore shouted at Jill, “This is all your fault!”

“Don’t we have enough to worry about?” she yelled at Elmore. “I’m calling the police. Where’s a telephone?” She grabbed a neighbor’s phone from her hand and dialed 911. “Yes? My husband is illegally taking my child. Yes. I have custody. Thank you.”

“See,” she said. “You can’t just take him.”

“Watch me.”

Whens sobbed, limp, in his father’s arms.

Brian strode across the lawn and said to Jill, “The chief says it’s—” Then he noticed Elmore and Whens, and stopped.

“The chief says what?” demanded Elmore.

“Ask him yourself,” said Brian, and walked away.

If he hadn’t been so nasty, Jill would have been glad to relinquish Whens to Elmore for the night. But now she dug in her heels. Even Tracy got out of the car and tried to convince Elmore to leave him with Jill, citing various child custody cases while he glared at her.

He set Whens none too gently in the backseat, slammed the door, and stalked to the driver’s side.

“He needs a car seat,” yelled Jill.

Elmore roared off. Jill could see Whens pounding on the rear window, hysterical.

* * *

By three in the morning, the fire was completely out. The living room stank of smoke, and the neighbors had all gone back to bed, with promises of help if needed. Brian and Jill sat on the front porch, talking.

“The chief was pretty sure it was arson,” said Brian. “They’ll start a thorough investigation in the morning.”

“Isn’t that what you do?”

“It’s one of my specialties, and I charge a lot for it, but I can’t step on their evidence. I have an interest in this. I mean, a somewhat negative one.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, in arson, the first suspects are the owners, obviously. And we have sprinklers. The instant I got here, I knew they weren’t on—that fire should not have gotten out of control. Someone must have shut off the sprinklers and disabled the water-flow alarms. First I went inside and checked the breakers; they were fine. Then I went to the pipe—it’s around the side of the house there, and is always on. Period. It had been shut off.”

“But how could someone just do that?”

“It’s outside. You’ve seen it, I’m sure. It’s on the side of the screened-in porch behind the peony bushes. I had it chained in the on position just to keep the kids from playing with it and accidentally turning it off. I never imagined that someone would come and deliberately cut the chain and turn off the valve. I check out the whole system once a month, breakers, battery backup, and so on, because this house is just a tinderbox. Two weeks ago, the chain was fine.”

“Oh.” Jill was silent for a moment. “But why would I start a fire with my little boy in the house? And turn off the sprinklers?”

“People do really strange things. So let’s think about who else it might have been. Elmore? He got here awful fast—like maybe he was just around the corner.”

Jill recoiled from the thought. “Absolutely not.”

“Then it must be one of those people from the party. This is getting serious, Jill. At the very least, we need to track down whoever did this and charge them with arson. Maybe they’re trying to kill you.”

Jill was silent for a moment. “Maybe, but why be so obvious? Why leave such a big loophole—possible rescue? Why not poison, or just a hit-and-run while I’m riding my bike? That would be ridiculously easy. Is the chief sure about arson?”

“Reasonably. They found an empty gas can on the porch. They took it for fingerprints.”

“Why would anyone be so clumsy?”

“Maybe they’re not technologically inclined. A lot of people think that the evidence will burn up in a roaring fire. The porch was a good place to start it, though—good ventilation. And they knew the house had sprinklers, so my vote is for the conspirators. They’ve been inside; they’ve seen the sprinklers.”

“We need to call a cleanup company first thing in the morning,” said Jill. “Aren’t there companies that specialize in cleaning up after fires?”

“Yes—more suspects. Let the insurance company choose one.”

Jill sighed. “I guess Elmore is right. This really isn’t a very safe place for Whens. He needs to stay with Elmore until we know who did this and why.”

“It’s not safe for you. I think you need to at least sleep at our place, and just come here in the day? We need to rethink moving in.”

“Nope. I’ve got Manfred.”

“Right. Are you a complete knucklehead?”

“Probably, but I’m staying. Remember how we were talking Sunday about how the house may have turned into a huge Hadntz Device?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe the person who started the fire knows this and wanted to destroy it. Maybe he hates the Hadntz Device.”

“As good a theory as any, except he may just hate you.”

“Daniel is investigating all the people who were out on the front porch at the party.”

“I wish he’d get a move on. And I hate to be so jumpy, but who is that sinister man walking down the street?”

“That guy? He looks all right to me.”

The man paused in front of the house. “Had a fire?”

“Yes,” said Brian.

“Everybody all right?”

“Everybody’s fine, thanks,” said Jill.

“Good,” he said, and continued down the block.

“Was that the Walking Man?” asked Brian.

“He was definitely walking. But he wasn’t wearing a hat,” said Jill.

Jill

JILL’S RECEPTION

July 19

TWO EVENINGS LATER, Jill was at a World Bank reception at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C., after a long day of dealing with insurance agents, repair people, and an arson investigator. She barely got there on time, but she had to attend.

Jill, in the midst of dignitaries wearing suits, black dresses, or exotic garb, said, “I don’t believe that” to her immediate companion, and was suddenly, instead, in a London pub, surrounded by hard-drinking servicemen and vivacious women coifed and dressed in the style of the 1940s.

An ominous whistle pierced the air briefly. Everyone stopped talking. Benny Goodman, facile and riveting, played out a break.

I’ve been here so often, she thought.

In the corner of the pub, a dark-haired woman had clearly been arguing with a serviceman whose face Jill could not see. She opened her red-lipsticked mouth to retort but did not break the silence; the spell of waiting for the fall of the bomb could not, apparently, be broken. The pub smelled pungently of dark ale and whiskey.

A dull explosion; a glass fell from the bar and shattered; the Goodman record skipped. The V-1 had fallen elsewhere, not here; the roar of conversation resumed.

Then Jill was back, her familiar world restored. She staggered as if that persistent vision had a gravity that suddenly let go, and she glimpsed slices of the outdoor garden, rich with opulent flowers and well-dressed people in golden sunlight, a potted tree, the bar. The hubbub of many languages rose around her as she crashed against the UN representative from Nigeria, down from New York especially for this reception, especially to talk to her. He staggered sideways. His martini and her glass of wine plummeted to the bricks and smashed.

Then there really was a brief silence as Bill Anderson, conveniently next to her, reached down to help her up. She rose on one knee and tried to shoo him away, but he grabbed both of her hands and pulled her up. Because her eyes were just inches from his chest as she stood up, she noticed his name tag, which said that his name was Wilhelm.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, irritated and embarrassed, brushing Mr. Umbobi’s martini from her black silk dress. “Mr. Umbobi, are you all right?”

“No, no, I am sorry,” he said, his voice deep and earnest. “I have ruined your dress.”

“Don’t believe in what?” asked Wilhelm. He would always be Wilhelm now, she realized.

Jill cast her mind back with great difficulty, then realized that Wilhelm had been seriously eavesdropping on her conversation with Mr. Umbobi. “Nothing.”

Wilhelm said, “You’ve been working too hard. Maybe you’ve caught a flu or something.”

Conversation resumed, the incident forgotten, except that Mr. Umbobi patted her on the shoulder as Wilhelm led her away and said they could lunch together tomorrow.

She pulled away from Wilhelm and set up the lunch date with Umbobi, and a Four Seasons employee moved in to clean up the mess.

Wilhelm had called for his car, despite her protestations that first, she was fine and would stay, and then, that she would take a cab, and then she was in his car, feeling uncharacteristically foggy. One of her knees was bleeding, as if she’d fallen while roller skating. What a fiasco. Maybe she was sick. But she was mostly angry. She had had a lot of work to do at this reception.

* * *

Wilhelm pulled up in front of the house. Jill opened her door. “Thanks.”

He jumped out of his side. When she turned back from gathering her purse, he was next to her, holding out his hand. “I’ll help you inside. Is there anyone you want me to call?”

She tried to pull her hand back, but his grasp was strong, and he propelled her from the car in one quick yank. She staggered to catch her balance, and he put an arm around her waist.

Manfred clicked down the walk. “Get away!” said Wilhelm, swinging one hand in Manfred’s direction. Manfred looked at the human pest, then sniffed at him. Jill saw her upper lip tremble just a tad, a prelude to baring her teeth. Her growl was a low, long rumble.

“Don’t worry,” said Wilhelm, reaching inside his jacket. “I’ve got a—”

Jill wrenched herself free, knelt, and put her arms around Manfred’s neck. “She’s my dog. What are you doing out, girl?”

Manfred wagged her tail. Jill stood with great determination, rather dizzy, and grasped the fur of Manfred’s back to steady herself.

“Will he hurt me?”

“She. She is very protective.”

Wilhelm stepped toward her.

“I’m fine.” Jill retreated a few steps.

“You’re not fine. I just saw you faint. Gosh, what happened to your house?”

“Just a little fire, the other night.” Jill started down the walk, concentrating on each step.

Wilhelm followed. “That’s terrible. How much damage?”

“Not too much, thankfully.”

“Where’s your house key?”

Jill smelled mint, roses, and cigarette smoke. “I think I have company.” She raised her voice. “Who’s there?”

The man sitting in a wicker chair on the porch stood, a dark shape in shadow. All Jill could see was the end of his glowing cigarette.

“I’ll call the police,” said Wilhelm. He pulled out his phone.

“Hold your horses,” said Jill. “Who is it?” she called again.

“It’s me.” Daniel ambled over to the top of the stairs.

“Hello, is this the police?” said Wilhelm into his phone.

Jill giggled. “This guy is the police.”

“What?” He squinted at Daniel. He looked crestfallen. “What is he doing here? He isn’t in uniform.”

“He’s a friend of mine, Wilhelm.”

Wilhelm swallowed. “Oh. What’s this Wilhelm stuff?”

She pointed to his name tag. He reached up and tore it off. “It’s Bill.”

Jill said, “Thanks for the ride. I can make it from here.” She reached out toward Daniel, who was next to her now. He took her hand firmly.

“Detective Kandell.” He offered his hand to Wilhelm.

“I’m Bill Anderson from the World Bank. Jill just passed out. I’ll help her inside.”

“I don’t think I really passed out,” said Jill.

“She wouldn’t go to the emergency room.”

“I don’t blame her,” said Daniel. “Come on, honey.” He put his arm around her waist.

Jill almost resisted. Then she saw his point. “Thanks, babe.” She turned to Bill/Wilhelm. “Thanks again.”

Wilhelm drove off with what seemed an unnecessary rpm ratio. Jill watched his taillights and started to laugh. “Honey?”

“Babe? I wouldn’t have thought you were the fainting type.”

“I said, I didn’t faint! It’s these stupid shoes.”

“He says his name is Anderson? The Anderson from the party?”

“The very same. Bill is mainly German. I used to work with him a lot more, but when I went back to school they put me in Africa. I’m not sure that I’m the best person for the job, mainly because I know a lot more about European history and World War II. I’m part of a team, of course, but I’m not sure I’m doing Africa much good. And now that I’m missing that reception, not to mention looking so stupid in front of everybody—”

They were on the porch now; Daniel had practically hoisted her up the stairs and settled her in a chair as she chatted. The condensation on a tall glass of something cold sitting on the table next to her, shimmered in the streetlight. The front door was open a bit.

“Did you go in?”

“Nope. I walked over here with my drink. Nice evening for a stroll.”

“I assume there’s nothing alcoholic in that open drink.”

“Of course not.”

“Why is the front door open?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I waited. I knocked, and there was no answer, but Manfred came out and said hi. I called Brian, and he said you’d gone to a party and they were all at the apartment, packing—they’re still moving in?”

“We all hashed it over, and they decided that they still want to.”

“Well, Brian was surprised about the door, but said that they must have left the door unlocked and that I should lock it. I thought I’d finish my drink on your porch. It’s quite pleasant.”

“It’s odd that the door was unlocked. We’re trying to be more careful. Oh, shit—” She staggered to the railing and vomited into the garden. “Ugh.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then was sick again.

Daniel put his drink into her hand. “Rinse.”

She rinsed out her mouth and spit. “Wow. That’s strong.”

“Something you ate?”

She returned to her chair rather shakily and plopped into it. “No. I didn’t have time to eat anything. I only had a few sips of wine—” She frowned.

“What?”

“I wonder if someone put something in my drink.”

“Like who? Like what?”

“Like Wilhelm. He thoughtfully brought me the wine. Like what? I’m not sure. But I’ll tell you something interesting. He didn’t ask me the way to the house.”

“Major mistake.”

“Well, he did come to the party.”

“I only retract major.”

She took a deep breath. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a bath. Want to wait downstairs?”

Daniel stood at the foot of the stairs while she pulled herself up by the banister. “You seem kind of weak, honey. Holler if you need some help.”

“You wish, babe,” she said, over her shoulder.

* * *

When she got back downstairs, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, Daniel was reading one of her mother’s Chinese poetry books. He closed it and held it on his lap. “Elegant. And ancient. Huang Po is one of my favorites. Helps put things in perspective. Feeling better?”

“A little. A lot, actually. Wow. That’s never happened to me before. Very unpleasant.” She lay down on the couch. “So you just came by to visit?”

He looked slightly apologetic. “Yes and no. I have something to tell you.”

“What? That you work for some kind of black ops part of the government and know where my parents are?”

His hand went to his mouth. Astonishment filled his eyes, but his voice was mocking. “Jill! How did you know?”

“Well, let’s see.” She held up both hands and ticked off points with her fingers. “One, you showed up suspiciously quickly when the house was broken into.”

“Mistake.”

“Major.”

“Minor.”

“Major. Two, you know way too much about jazz.” He and Brian had talked jazz into the wee hours after the picnic.

He protested, “It’s my heritage.”

“Way too much. You’ve studied it in order to ingratiate yourself.”

“Ellington was my uncle. Brian wanted to know about Uncle Ed Ellington. And a lot of people know about—”

“Okay. I’ll give you that. But three, you act in ways that seem unprofessional for a police officer, but fine for a spy, because they have no morals.”

“Excuse me, but aren’t you of the opinion that your mother was—is—a spy?”

“She is not a spy. She works in intelligence, and she is saving the world.”

“That’s no excuse. Besides, I have plenty of morals.”

“I didn’t say that you have no morals.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I said that you act unprofessionally, for a police officer. It seems to me that they don’t generally start personal relationships with the people they’re helping. They especially don’t show up at their house all the time not dressed—”

“I’m dressed!” he objected. He grinned, and then he couldn’t stop laughing. “Jill, you sure can spin a tale! You’re amazing.”

“Not wearing their uniform.” She frowned, crossed her arms, and stared at the ceiling. “Now you made me lose count.”

“Wait, Jill, wait.” He caught his breath. “I’m pulling your leg. I am not a spy. I do not report to Langley, then drive around D.C. in an out-of-date police car. I do have a confession to make, though. I find you attractive, and interesting, and I wandered over here to see if I could help with the moving process and further ingratiate myself. And make sure the arson team came by today; they should have sent me a report.”

“They were here. Excuse me if I get just a wee bit upset, but it seems to me as if there are a lot of people nosing around here, including you. And another thing: You knew about my mother’s school. A very major mistake. To mention it. You’re trying to throw me off the track.”

“I was … surprised,” he said. “Truly. That’s what opened all this up for me. Like—I don’t know—like those buried memories that seem to conveniently surface on the witness stand, I guess. I’m helping you—or rather, I want to. I’m on your side.”

“I’m not on a side.”

He sighed, sat cross-legged on the floor next to her, but not too close, and took her hand. She didn’t object. In fact, it was comforting. “Jill, I’m sorry. I know this must be disappointing.” He smiled, but quickly made his face serious again. “I’m really, really, not a spy. I’m not quite that glamorous. But I am a moderately smart guy, if I do say so myself, and I’m afraid you are on a side. It certainly seems that way. At least, there seem to be people on some other side who are hatching conspiracies, breaking into your house, tailing you, burning your house down, slipping you drugs, and things like that that you really oughtn’t ignore quite so strenuously. But—and excuse once again this untoward talking behind your back—but Brian says that you’re very good at ignoring things.”

She wanted to jump up and yell at him, but felt a bit weak, and she didn’t know what she’d say. “Then tell me what my side is. The side of good, I hope?”

He shoved aside the coffee table, stuffed a handy couch pillow under his head as he stretched out on the floor, crossed his arms, and looked at her appraisingly. “I would imagine, knowing you, and observing the other side’s criminal behavior, that you are probably on the side of good. Or, at least, law-abiding. But you tell me. What in the world is going on? I don’t want to scare you, but I’m pretty sure that Brian locked the door when he left. So let’s put it together. That guy slipped you a drug, and took few pains to hide it. I guess he’s never done it before because he overdosed you and you vomited it all up. Otherwise, you’d probably have forgotten the rest of the night. Just a blank. Someone came over in advance of your friend Wilhelm and made sure the door was open so if he couldn’t find your keys he could get in.”

“How do I know it wasn’t you?”

“It wasn’t, but you don’t know.”

She sighed. “I do know. He keeps trying to ask me out, and I keep avoiding him. Are you saying he gave me a date-rape drug?”

“I think so, but I’m not sure that rape was the object.”

“Well, look, he knew I’d be occupied all evening there. If he wanted to rob my house, why not have his cohorts come over while I was busy?”

“Maybe he wanted you here, so he could talk to you. So you could just show him what he was after. Those drugs erase volition. Do you know what they’re after?”

She was silent.

“If you want me to leave, just say so. No offense taken. I’d rather stay here until somebody gets back, but you can lock the door and I can sit on the front porch.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Okay. Then can I get you something to eat? To drink? Some hot tea and crackers?”

“Crackers, cheese, and wine. And water. And peppermint tea. It’s in the side cupboard. No drugs, please, or I’ll report you.”

* * *

“This spy stuff is hungry work,” she said, finishing off her snack. “Nice wine choice. You’ve been paying attention.”

“Thank you very much, but I got it out of your own pantry. Do you normally buy wines that you don’t like?”

“Don’t change the subject. Tell me what you’ve deduced about this grand overarching conspiracy.”

“It has something to do with Q.”

“I may fall asleep.”

“Let me jump forward a bit.”

“Do.”

“It seems that there are a lot of people—a new kind of people, I suppose, that walk from one time line, one gestalt, to the other.”

Jill set down her wineglass and looked at him. “Just like walking across the room.”

“Right.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Evidence.”

“What evidence?”

He looked at her with his head tilted. “Are you one of them?”

“If I were, why would I tell you? Or, for that matter, why would I not tell you?”

“You might not tell me if you were afraid that I might have you committed.”

“Oh. Right. So why would I tell you?”

“To increase the gestalt.”

“To what?”

“I have more to tell you, and it’s what I intended to tell you tonight, anyway. I’ll start with a little story about my dad. It’s about when he was in the war.”

“But—”

“Just listen. He was recruited to spy on the Nazis in Morocco. I grant you that this was unusual, but he’d had a high school year in Europe studying architecture. Arabelle had connections. She always pushed him, and got him that scholarship—chiefly, she said, to show him that elsewhere in the world, Negroes were treated like people. He spoke French and German. He’d learned them so that he could read novels and philosophy in the original. When he came back, he was an able draftsman, and got a drafting job in a local, prominent, open-minded architectural firm, and started school at Howard. Because of his language skills, his firm took him along to the high-profile parties and diplomatic dinners where they made connections and got jobs—they discovered he could sell the firm to foreigners pretty well. He met Dulles at one of these parties, and Dulles snapped him up. He was perfect for the OSS; they sent him to Istanbul and then Morocco.

“No one ever suspected he was a spy; he was just an African working the black market, not to make a pun or anything, tending bar, waiting tables, operating as a manservant so he could be in people’s rooms and go through their papers and pockets. In Casablanca he met a gypsy violinist. The violinist knew a woman named Eliani Hadntz. My dad heard the most amazing things about what she thought. Now, he was terrifically unuseful in Europe, being black and therefore always a bit too remarkable. But after Berlin fell, there were months of complete chaos, and he was right in there with his cigarettes, dollars, and diamonds—all OSS issue. And he was able to trace something that intelligence was calling the Hadntz Device.”

Jill felt weak. “And?”

“He traced it to Germany. To a small city called Gladbach, actually. He was there, ostensibly part of the French Underground that was allowed to retaliate against the Nazis. It was a thin cover, of course, but it was pretty chaotic then. He was there when a certain … event occurred. It was an event related to the Device. But then the Device went to Russia. And then the leads all went dead. But I do know one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Your mother gave the plans to someone who sold it to the Russians.”

“They were our Allies.”

“Yes. They were.”

“Can you prove this?”

“No. Of course not. And my old man is as closemouthed as your parents apparently were. He returned, picked up his architecture career, but as you might know, and I know from being in law enforcement, one is never really free of the OSS, or the CIA. At some point, he was alerted about your mom being right here.”

“So—Truman was a baby spy?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I imagine that he was behind Truman coming here to school. I imagine he came to any gatherings. But by that time I think he’d sworn off all of that. He didn’t want to do it anymore. Happy family man and all of that. Then, with all the assassinations and riots, he might have become a little more serious.”

Jill asked, “He remembers? You remember? You know, I’ve wondered for years what happened to all the people from what I called Before. Now I know. They’re everywhere. Except that my therapist isn’t one. Or maybe she is. She’s a spy, like you.”

“Jill, I’m not a spy. I didn’t really remember until I saw that Monet. Mom is the one who told me all this about Dad, before she died. Not him. She told me never to tell him that I knew. I think she kind of wanted me to understand his … quirks. But I don’t think that she knew about the jump, the implications of what he’d told her. She just kept living along, like most everybody else, and was completely in this new reality. And I didn’t know—I wasn’t sure—till I came here. Just vague dreams, questions, that déjà vu feeling. When I saw that picture, I just suddenly made the connection. That’s all.”

Jill felt exceedingly dark, and grumpy too. “Now that your dad has been to the picnic and allowed to prowl all over the house, courtesy of me, what does he think?”

“I don’t know.”

Jill glared at him.

“Really, I don’t. He’s a philosophical man. Prone to long spells of quiet. I did ask him, believe me, when we got home. What he thought of the house, and all, and he said he was utterly delighted to have the chance to see such an architectural gem, with hardly anything ruined by uninformed renovations.”

“That’s for sure.”

“He and Arabelle had a wonderful time. It was so nice of you to invite them.”

“So which side is he on? Did you tell him what you told me? That you remember the time jump?”

“No.” He was quiet for a long time. Finally he said, “I want to. I’ve tried. I will. Because it’s important not just to you, but, obviously, to a lot of people. But I know he’ll deny everything and be difficult and avoid me for weeks afterward, just like when I used to ask him about Mom. Only worse. Before I met you, I thought I might just be imagining everything, like my past was just a very real dream. I don’t think that most people recall their pasts all that clearly. Try it yourself, day by day.”

“No thanks. Do you think I could ask him about it?”

“I certainly wouldn’t mind if you tried. He might be of some help, but he might not know any more than my mother said he did.”

Jill stared into the room, her anger growing. She could not move. Her body was stiff; her mind was stuck. She had trusted this man. Well, kind of.