The Far Time Incident (39 page)

Lewis got to his feet and moved behind my chair.

I felt his fingers wrap around my throat, tighten.

So that was the way it was going to be.

I tried to grab his hands with my own, pull them away, but I don’t think I really managed to, only in my own mind.

Then I heard the wail of an ambulance as it tore down the emergency route to the TTE building. That gave me the will to croak out, “Jacob is putting the story on his blog. Many, many readers—”

I felt his fingers stop, go limp. No doubt he assumed that the siren meant the police were on their way to arrest him. I gasped and fought for air as he stood hovering over me for a minute. Then I watched as he went back to his desk chair and sat down as if the air had been pumped out from his spine.

I heard running footsteps in the hallway.

It was over. Which was good, because I was about to faint. I felt myself slip out of the chair and slump onto the floor just as the door flew open with a crash.

I woke up in the hospital, with an IV line in one hand and the other wrapped in a bandage. Sunlight streamed in through the open curtains of the window. I felt my forehead. The fever seemed to be gone. Faustilla’s curse tablet had not worked. We had made it back. We were safe.

Several get-well cards and a vase with flowers sat on the bedside table. I didn’t feel like reading the cards just yet. I just lay there, enjoying the peacefulness of it all—and the modern amenities.

After a while, a nurse came in, asked how I was doing and if I needed anything—“Bathroom,” I croaked—and after that and a sit-down shower had been taken care of, I learned that I had been out for forty-eight hours and that they wanted to keep me under observation for at least twenty-four more.

The day brought a steady stream of visitors—Helen and Xavier, who were back to their tightly buttoned-up academic selves, though I sensed a certain warming in their relationship; then a hospital physician with four residents in tow to check on my progress; then Kamal, looking clean-shaven and wearing a bright yellow St. Sunniva T-shirt; followed by the entire astronomy grad student section, who had made me a gigantic
You’re a Star
get-well card. Dr. Rojas stopped by, freshly released
from jail. He looked gaunt but he was smiling (I vowed to do all I could do restore his reputation in the academic community). Later Dr. Little came to see me, armed with a picture of his newborn daughter. He begrudgingly said, “You should write down an eyewitness account of all the places you saw. It will have academic merit.” In an unexpected bit of kindness, he left his laptop so I could catch up on news and e-mail. Dr. Baumgartner, looking like the five-month STEWie halt had provided a well-needed rest, brought by a box of chocolates and Penny Lind, who took photos of a recovering science dean’s assistant in a decidedly unstylish pale-green hospital gown for the
Les Styles
blog.

Abigail and Sabina stopped by midafternoon, which made me feel best of all.

I had been lying in the hospital bed, staring out the window at the birds bobbing on the lake, mulling over what would be best for Sabina. The child needed a safe, structured environment in which she could adjust to twenty-first-century life. Young people adapted easily, so it wasn’t like I was expecting any problems on that score. It was just that I wasn’t at all the motherly type. I couldn’t even keep a potted plant alive, and I didn’t know a word of Latin.

But Sabina needed a home.

Abigail, whose unconventional childhood had produced a practical and openhearted individual, set my worries to rest. She had always wanted a family, she said, and a sister would be more than she could have hoped for.

For her part, Sabina seemed to have taken everything in stride, including the news that Nate and I weren’t married and Abigail and Kamal weren’t our children. Abigail and Sabina were almost the same height, so the older girl’s clothes hung only somewhat baggily on Sabina, no more so than they might on many a modern teenager. They looked like sisters who had
inherited wildly different genes, Abigail’s petite and Nordic, and Sabina’s bigger-boned and Mediterranean. The crescent moon, which I’d learned was called a
lunula
, hung around her neck like a modern revival of an ancient religion.

“There’s just one problem, Julia,” Abigail added.

“What is it?”

“I’ll have to move out of grad student housing. They don’t really make accommodations for family members. I’ll look for a place in town, but that might bring up some awkward questions.”

That, at least, was easily solved.

“My house has a mother-in-law suite with a separate yard entrance. It was put in by the previous owners, before my parents bought the house,” I said. “I was planning on renting out the extra space, so this will save me from having to look for a tenant. I don’t cook, though.”

“We’ll manage, Julia.”

“And we can build a doghouse for Celer in the yard,” I said. “Speaking of Celer, where is he?”

“The vet wants to keep him for a few days, for shots and stuff.”

There was only one bit of bad news—Dave, Abigail’s boyfriend in the Athletic Department, had not waited for her. “I can’t blame him.” Abigail shrugged. “He thought I was dead. He offered to break up with his current girlfriend, but I said no. It would have been too weird.”

As she and Sabina left, I heard Abigail explaining what a mall was in a mixture of English and Latin—like a long Pompeii street of shops, only indoors—and saying that a shopping spree might be in order. I heard Sabina exclaim at the idea that one’s clothes should be changed and laundered daily.

For dinner, the nurse brought me a tray with orange juice, fruit, toast, and a strangely colored Jell-O that reminded me of Abigail’s vision of what STEWie’s basket might look like. I was supposed to be replenishing my fluids and, as I nibbled on the fruit cup and sipped the juice—I couldn’t say that I had much of an appetite yet—a thought kept rather unexpectedly popping into my head. Why hadn’t Nate stopped by? Perhaps he was busy. There were reports to be given, Lewis Sunder to be processed, and he had to catch up on everything he’d missed during the time we were gone. I had just managed to convince myself that his absence meant that he was just swamped at work, when a gruff voice said, “That wasn’t very smart, confronting Lewis Sunder like that.”

His uniform was back on, as if we had never left. The small dog at his feet set about sniffing the room, its long chestnut ears vibrating with excitement above a chestnut-and-white coat.

“I suppose it wasn’t,” I admitted. I pulled the hospital blanket farther up. The visit from Penny Lind had left me keenly aware that the hospital gown was not the most flattering of outfits. At least I had showered and my hair was clean and combed. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I don’t think I’ve ever felt sicker in my life—I thought I was going to die.”

“You did look like crap.”

Well, he was certainly being a lot less formal. Of course, the case
was
over.

“I went into Dean Sunder’s office—he’s not the dean anymore, is he?—into Lewis’s office because I wanted to look him in the eye. I had to know for sure if he had done it…and why.”

Wanda, having finished her examination of the small hospital room, came over and put her front paws on the bed to let me rub her silken ears and head. She seemed a cheerful sort. I wondered how she and Celer would get along. “Are dogs allowed in hospitals?”

“Probably not.”

“She seems all right.”

“Van Underberg’s been taking care of her just like you said he would.”

“Nate, why did you leave your previous job? At the Boundary Waters Canoe Area?” I asked, letting Wanda have some of what had turned out to be peach Jell-O.

He moved from the bed to the window and stared through it for a long moment.

“I resigned. There was an incident. It’s a bit of a long story, but let’s just say I got involved with a suspect. Someone had been setting fires throughout the BWCAW. I was positive the arsonist was one of the teenage kids camping in nearby Voyageurs Park, perhaps a group of them, not this one—uh, person who was up for the summer.” He turned back to face me. “She was a photographer and I had been taking her out in my canoe in my free time. She had pretended to be a canoeing novice. Wanda was her dog.”

“And it turned out that it was her all along?”

“She borrowed the canoe after hours to set fires at various points on the islands. Pretty soon we had our hands full fighting the spreading fire.” His voice grew deeper. “The fire got out of hand and we lost someone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I was blinded by her interest in me. No blame came my way, but I felt I had to resign. I applied for the job here and got it. Chancellor Evans, well, she seemed to think I would do fine here.”

The door opened before I could say anything and the nurse shooed Nate and Wanda out, saying that dogs were not allowed, and in any case, visiting hours were over. I settled back down on my pillow as she checked my temperature, and thought about things.

It was the wrong time for both of us. I was working on living alone, not to mention that I had no idea if my divorce from Quinn had gone through after its weird legal limbo of five months. I’d have to give him a call and let him know I was alive. As for Nate—he had to come to terms with the fact that he was merely human, just like the rest of us. Mistakes were made, people got hurt, and sometimes it took time to move on. Still, I understood him a little better now. He had to learn to trust again.

I did notice one thing. He hadn’t gone back to calling me Ms. Olsen, but he hadn’t called me Julia either.

The enormity of what we had done took a while to sink in. We got chewed out by Chancellor Evans for breaking a long list of rules by (a) pulling Sabina and Celer out of their own time and (b) roaming around campus without first undergoing the necessary decontamination procedures. If plague-ridden fleas and lice appeared on campus, Chancellor Evans said, she would know who was to blame. But she did help us conceal some of the details of our story to protect Sabina’s privacy. That part of the story did not make it onto the news. We also took pains to protect Dr. Mooney’s reputation. Almost everyone on and off campus assumed that his disappearance to Pompeii had been an accident, one that had been exploited by Lewis Sunder; none of us corrected that mistaken impression.

As for Sabina herself, short of trying to organize exploratory time-travel runs, we had no way of knowing for sure what had happened to her father and grandmother. Going back to search for them would have been the time equivalent of looking for a needle in a haystack. I found peace by deciding that Secundus of the soulful eyes had found his mother and they had made it out of Pompeii. They had lived out their lives with the knowledge that Sabina and Celer were somewhere safe with us.

Abigail said that Sabina sometimes sat on the shore of Sunniva Lake in silence, watching the finger-size fish flit about. I suppose it was as close as she could get to the seashore she’d left behind. She had taped the photos we’d taken of her hometown above her bed; Abigail had promised her that the two of them would one day go to modern Pompeii and fulfill Sabina’s vow to the goddess Diana. Not a blood sacrifice of a goat or a pig (which was what Sabina had wanted), but a less messy one in the form of a few drops of wine sprinkled onto the still-standing stones of the Forum temple where Diana’s statue used to stand across from her brother’s. Hopefully that much could be done without the tourist site guides noticing. For now Abigail and Sabina were taking it a day at a time and having fun with (and some odd discussions about) modern conveniences like pretzels, ice cream, computers, bras, toothbrushes, TV, hair conditioner, and chocolate.

For his part, Celer seemed to have decided that the whole house belonged to him, and he spent equal amounts of time sleeping in their part of it and in mine.

I had added a pushpin of a different color, red, to the smattering of blue ones on the STEWie map on my office wall.

There were only two problems. One, though Sabina’s spoken English skills were improving drastically day by day, her writing skills were not keeping pace. In the end Abigail decided not to worry about it and to let Sabina use the computer, where the spell-checker was her friend. Sometimes I heard them laughing about a funny post on Jacob’s blog.

Two, I hadn’t heard back from Quinn yet and had no idea if I was divorced or not.

One particularly warm July afternoon, as I jotted down a note to call Maintenance to inquire when they would get around to spraying the rapidly multiplying mosquitoes on the lake, a knock came at my open office door. It was our security chief.

“Just stopping by to drop off some papers for Sabina and to ask for your advice about something—where are you going?”

Nate had a manila envelope in his hands, I noted as I rushed past him. “I left something in the microwave.”

He followed me to the building kitchenette as I explained, “I’m preparing a cheese fondue for the new science dean—it’s going to be Dr. Braga from the Department of Earth Sciences. She’s moving into her office this afternoon and I wanted to welcome her properly.” I opened the microwave door to reveal a congealed and unappetizing-looking yellow mess. “Well, that didn’t work at all. Perhaps they’d let me use one of the Bunsen burners over in chemistry or a laser in one of the physics labs.”