Stay in Los Angeles.
Instead of a signature, there’s a phone number.
“What is it?” Iffy whispers behind me.
I silently read the note again and then move back down the steps and hand it to her. While she’s looking at it, I punch in the number from the bottom of the note into my phone. The line rings at least a dozen times before a generic message tells me that the subscriber has not yet set up voice mail.
The note did warn me he wouldn’t answer, but the fact that it proves true makes me want to slam my phone into the ground. Though I doubt he’s inside the house, I march up the steps and pound on the front door.
“Kane!”
Iffy rushes up behind me. “Quiet,” she whispers. “You’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.”
“I don’t care,” I say and then yell his name again.
Iffy looks through the window and then says, “I don’t think anyone’s here.”
At the very least, Lorna or the old woman should have come to investigate the noise by now. We should have heard the creak of the floor or even seen a light come on, but neither has occurred.
Kane has been here and gone, taking the women with him.
I knock again, but instead of yelling this time, I growl in frustration with the final slam of my fist.
Concerned that Kane might somehow be keeping tabs on us, we don’t go back to Marilyn’s house for fear of leading him to Ellie and instead take a room with two lumpy beds in a cheap motel on Sunset Boulevard just ten minutes from his place.
While RJ and Iffy seem to fall asleep almost immediately, I stare at the ceiling for at least an hour before I finally drift off. I’m not sure that I’d use the word sleep to describe my state over the following five hours. It was more a weave of different levels of semiconscious that were all far from restful.
When my eyes open for good, it’s a little after 7:00 a.m., and I’m more exhausted than I was when I lay down.
I can hear Iffy in the bathroom, taking a shower, while RJ is nowhere to be found. I grab my phone and try calling Kane’s number again, but the result is the same. This time I’m too tired, however, to even work up the urge to throw my phone on the ground. I lie back down and stare at the familiar spots on the ceiling.
The front door opens several minutes later, and RJ comes in carrying bags in each hand. I smell coffee and immediately sit back up.
“Hope you like doughnuts,” he says.
I shuffle over to the dingy dresser where he’s set everything down, and grab a coffee from one of the bags, dump in some cream, and take a sip. It’s hot but not unbearable.
“Thanks,” I say and take a longer drink.
RJ pulls out a long, chocolate-covered doughnut and plops down on the other bed. Between bites, he says, “I called a friend of mine from school while I was out.” Another bite. “He works part-time at Verizon. Asked him if he could dig up any info about the number from your note. Maybe even tell us where it is.”
I stop drinking. Verizon, I know from commercials, is a phone company. “He can do that?”
“He said no promises, but he’d check. Oh, and it’s going to cost five hundred bucks. That’s okay, right?”
I get to my feet, excited. “Absolutely. When will we know?”
“Whoa, relax. He doesn’t go in until noon.”
Noon? I was hoping we’d have the information before my ten o’clock call with Kane. “No way he can go in early? I’ll give him another five hundred.”
“He’s already a little skittish about doing me the favor. If we push him, might back out.”
My shoulders sag. That is a possibility we can’t chance.
I wander over to the window and pull the curtain back. Another beautiful day in California. I just hope this place is still called by that name when the sun goes down.
We leave the motel at nine thirty, and park on a street just a couple blocks from Kane’s house. None of us really think that’s where he’ll be, but on the off chance he is, we’ll be close.
I try the number at 9:50 and again at 9:55, each time hearing the same recording. The second it turns to ten o’clock, I try again.
One ring.
“Hello, Denny.” Kane. It’s a voice I think I’ll never forget now.
“What do you want?”
“Right to business, huh? Okay then,” he says, nervous, almost as if he’s unsure of himself, “tell me, why is your chaser machine not working?”
His phrasing is odd, but the mere fact he calls the device a chaser means he must have something to do with the institute, right? Of course, if he is from the institute, he should know why the device doesn’t work. But what about the pictures in his house? Pictures of a much younger Kane taken here, in this world. This is his time line, isn’t it? Or are they fakes?
“You’re institute security, aren’t you?” It’s a stab in the dark, but the best guess I can come up with.
“What?”
“Administration, then.”
A pause. “Oh, I understand. No to both.”
This leaves only the possibility that I’ve already dismissed, but I say it anyway, “A rewinder?”
There’s almost a boylike quality to his voice when he says, “I wish.”
Clearly he knows what a rewinder is. But if he’s not one, and not security or administration, then what is he?
“Then what—”
“No,” he says, suddenly truculent. “It’s my questions that need to be answered. Not yours. Why isn’t it working? I know it should. You used it yesterday.”
I don’t answer.
“Maybe you think I don’t know what your machine does, but I do. It’s a time machine. You even used it to check up on me yesterday.”
Again I remain silent.
“I know you found my recording device on your roof and changed the memory card because you goofed up. If it had been completely blank, I would have thought there’d just been a glitch. But you left my tag with the date and time at the beginning. Only I hadn’t recorded that tag yet.”
I’d put the card in so that he might think the recorder had failed to work properly, but I had forgotten about the recording at the beginning. If I’d erased that, we’d probably still be playing our game of hide-and-seek in San Diego, and I might have even already gained the advantage on him.
It’s the little things. The twelve-second mistake I made in 1775 that allowed George Washington to live, and now the four-second recording I should have erased but didn’t.
“Why isn’t the device working?”
There’s a way I can make everything right, I realize, and it even involves telling the truth. “Because it’s keyed to me.”
“Keyed?”
“It’ll only work if I am the one who activates it.”
Now it’s his turn to remain silent.
“It’s no use to you,” I tell him. “Just give it back to me and we can go our separate ways.”
“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Once you were alone with it, you’d go back to some point where you could make sure I wasn’t a problem for you, maybe even keep me from being born.” He pauses. “Which is kind of funny if you think about it, since I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”
I don’t know how, but he knows I’m the one who brought this world into existence.
“I promise you that I won’t do anything to harm you.”
“I know you won’t. What you are going to do, though, is help me.”
“Help you what?”
“Keep your phone close, Denny.”
“Help you what?” I repeat.
But the line has already gone dead.
I try calling back, and am sent once more into the land of a dozen rings and generic messages.