“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Nobody loves a smartass, buddy—when you get to be my age, you’ll know. In any case, I want you to take this as well as the notebook.” He held out a key. “It’s to the diner. If you should call me tomorrow and hear from the nurse that I passed away in the night, you’ll have to move fast. Always assuming you decide to move at all, that is.”
“Al, you’re not planning—”
“Just trying to be careful. Because this matters, Jake. As far as I’m concerned, it matters more than anything else. If you ever wanted to change the world, this is your chance. Save Kennedy, save his brother. Save Martin Luther King. Stop the race riots. Stop Vietnam, maybe.” He leaned forward. “Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives.”
“It’s a hell of a sales pitch,” I said, “but I don’t need the key. When the sun comes up tomorrow, you’ll still be on the big blue bus.”
“Ninety-five percent probability. But that’s not good enough. Take the goddam key.”
I took the goddam key and put it in my pocket. “I’ll let you get some rest.”
“One more thing before you go. I need to tell you about Carolyn Poulin and Andy Cullum. Sit down again, Jake. This’ll take a few minutes.”
I stayed on my feet. “Uh-uh. You’re used up. You need to sleep.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Sit down.”
6
After discovering what he called the rabbit-hole, Al said, he was at first content to use it to buy supplies, make a few bets with a bookie he found in Lewiston, and build up his stash of fifties cash. He also took the occasional midweek holiday on Sebago Lake, which was teeming with fish that were tasty and perfectly safe to eat. People worried about fallout from A-bomb tests, he said, but fears of getting mercury poisoning from tainted fish were still in the future. He called these jaunts (usually Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but he would sometimes stay all the way to Friday) his minivacations. The weather was always good (because it was always the same weather) and the fishing was always terrific (he probably caught at least some of the same fish over and over).
“I know exactly how you feel about all this, Jake, because I was pretty much in shock those first few years. You want to know what’s a mind-blower? Going down those stairs at the height of a January nor’easter and coming out in that bright September sunshine. Shirtsleeve weather, am I right?”
I nodded and told him to go on. The little bit of color that had been in his cheeks when I came in was all gone, and he was coughing steadily again.
“But if you give a man some time, he can get used to anything, and when the shock finally started to wear off, I started to think I’d found that old rabbit-hole for a reason. That’s when I started to think about Kennedy. But your question reared its ugly head: can you change the past? I wasn’t concerned about the consequences—at least not to start with—but only about whether or not it could be done at all. On one of my Sebago trips, I took out my knife and carved AL T. FROM 2007 on a tree near the cabin where I stayed. When I got back here, I jumped in my car and drove on over to Sebago Lake. The cabins where I stayed are gone; there’s a tourist hotel there now. But the tree is still there. So was what I carved into it. Old and smooth, but still there: AL T. FROM 2007. So I knew it could be done. Then I started thinking about the butterfly effect.
“There’s a newspaper in The Falls back then, the Lisbon Weekly Enterprise, and the library scanned all their microfilm into the computer in ’05. Speeds things up a lot. I was looking for an accident in the fall or early winter of 1958. A certain kind of accident. I would have gone all the way into early 1959 if necessary, but I found what I was looking for on November fifteenth of ’58. A twelve-year-old girl named Carolyn Poulin was hunting with her father across the river, in the part of Durham that’s called Bowie Hill. Around two o’clock that afternoon—it was a Saturday—a hunter from Durham named Andrew Cullum shot at a deer in that same section of the woods. He missed the deer, hit the girl. Even though she was a quarter of a mile away, he hit the girl. I think about that, you know. When Oswald shot at General Walker, the range was less than a hundred yards. But the bullet clipped the wood sash in the middle of a window and he missed. The bullet that paralyzed the Poulin girl traveled over four hundred yards—much farther than the shot that killed Kennedy—and missed every tree trunk and branch along the way. If it had even clipped a twig, it almost surely would have missed her. So sure, I think about it.”
That was the first time the phrase life turns on a dime crossed my mind. It wasn’t the last. Al grabbed another maxi pad, coughed, spat, tossed it in the wastebasket. Then he drew in the closest thing to a deep breath he could manage, and labored on. I didn’t try to stop him. I was fascinated all over again.
“I plugged her name into the Enterprise’s search database and found a few more stories about her. She graduated from Lisbon High School in 1965—a year behind the rest of her class, but she made it—and went to the University of Maine. Business major. Became an accountant. She lives in Gray, less than ten miles from Sebago Lake, where I used to go on my minivacations, and she still works as a freelance. Want to guess who one of her biggest clients is?”
I shook my head.
“John Crafts, right here in The Falls. Squiggy Wheaton, one of the salesmen, is a regular customer at the diner, and when he told me one day that they were doing their annual inventory and ‘the numbers lady’ was there going over the books, I made it my business to roll on up and get an eyes-on. She’s sixty-five now, and… you know how some women that age can be really beautiful?”
“Yes,” I said. I was thinking of Christy’s mother, who didn’t fully come into her looks until she was in her fifties.
“Carolyn Poulin is that way. Her face is a classic, the kind a painter from two or three hundred years ago would love, and she’s got snow white hair that she wears long, down her back.”
“Sounds like you’re in love, Al.”
He had enough strength left to shoot me the bird.
“She’s in great physical shape, too—well, you’d almost expect that, wouldn’t you, an unmarried woman hauling herself in and out of a wheelchair every day and getting in and out of the specially equipped van she drives. Not to mention in and out of bed, in and out of the shower, all the rest. And she does—Squiggy says she’s completely self-sufficient. I was impressed.”
“So you decided to save her. As a test case.”
“I went back down the rabbit-hole, only this time I stayed in the Sebago cabin over two months. Told the owner I’d come into some money when my uncle died. You ought to remember that, buddy—the rich uncle thing is tried and true. Everybody believes it because everybody wants one. So comes the day: November fifteenth, 1958. I don’t mess with the Poulins. Given my idea about stopping Oswald, I’m much more interested in Cullum, the shooter. I’d researched him, too, and found out he lived about a mile from Bowie Hill, near the old Durham grange hall. I thought I’d get there before he left for the woods. Didn’t quite work out that way.