What Dane suddenly understood, he also had trouble believing. “You forced her to move that pencil.”
Preston was amused by the twist of it. “And I was as lucky as any man could ever be. I bet on her being dishonest about being honest. I bet on her really being able to do it.”
Arnie was stung for a moment. “Whoa, whoa, hold on. What are you saying?”
“You asked if we knew where we were going with this. Well, for a moment, let’s go here: It would not have been enough for her to rig the pencil or my desk or the camera, as impossible as that would have been anyway. She would have had to rig the whole room. My desk is at least two hundred pounds, that camera weighed well over three hundred, and yes, I did question the TV crew and the set builders, all close friends and associates. They were as amazed as I was.”
“You’re not saying you owe her a million dollars?”
Preston feigned offense. “Oh, perish the thought. She never made a challenge, and the offer is for anyone proving psychicability.”
“Then how do you explain it?”
Preston clapped his hands together, then rubbed them lightly. “All right. We are here, so let’s do some exploring.” He turned to Dane. “Pardon the question. Did you see Mandy die?”
The question hit like an arrow. Off guard, unprepared, Dane tried to grasp the question and why Preston would even ask it.
Preston asked again, “Did you see her die?”
Dane fended him off. He couldn’t bear to revisit that room. “Of course I did.”
“How do you know she was dead?”
She wasn’t?No, he couldn’t carry that hope again. He turned up his hands, let them drop. “She had to be.” Preston was still waiting. “The heart monitor went flatline. She was gone.” He drew some breaths to keep emotion down.
“Then what happened?”
“Preston …” Arnie cautioned.
“They wheeled her out of the room,” Dane answered. “That was it.”
“Who?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who wheeled her out of the room? Who was there?”
“A doctor and a nurse.” Something connected, something so far from credible …
Preston pressed his gaze.
Dane could see Kessler standing over his dying wife and the nurse continually fingering the wires from the monitor. He could remember a strange hastiness in getting Mandy out of the room. Why the hurry if she was dead? “Dr. Kessler. Margo Kessler.”
“Did you see Mandy cremated?”
Dr. Kessler was wrong, wasn’t she? There was never an effect from the medication, Dane was never crazy, never hallucinating. She was wrong, all along—or lying.
“Dane? Did you see Mandy cremated?”
“Of course.”
“In a cremation casket?”
“Yes.”
“Was she in it?”
Wasn’t this grasping at straws? He wished it wasn’t.
“Do you have direct, personal knowledge of Mandy’s body being in that casket? Did you see it yourself?”
The question was unfair. “I didn’t pry the casket open and look, no.”
“Preston, come on,” said Arnie. “Give the man some space.”
Preston pulled a photograph from his satchel and placed it on the table in front of Dane. “Have you ever seen this man?”
Dane was afraid to hope. He’d been through so much, and this … what could it accomplish other than to stab him with fresh pain he’d taken months to get over? He cared little for Preston’s photograph …
… of a man he’d seen before. A man in his forties. Thin, graying hair, wire-rimmed, professorial glasses, a somewhat stern, focused expression.
He plucked the photograph from the table. “Who is he?”
Preston was intently reading his face. “So you haveseen him before?”
“Who is he?”
Now Preston was the one shaken. “His name is Jerome Parmenter, former professor of physics at Stanford. I say ‘former’ because he seems to have disappeared.”
chapter
34
Dane was trying to breathe. His hand was shaking.
“You need some water?”
Dane nodded. Arnie hurried to bring a glass.
Dane’s heart was racing. Anger, hope, relief, anxiety, all boiled inside him at once. “He was there at McCaffee’s …” He told Dane and Arnie the whole story of the man he’d seen in McCaffee’s, sitting in a corner with a computer while Mandy—Eloise—tried to levitate and came crashing to the floor.
Preston was as agitated as he ever got, which wasn’t very, but on him it was impressive. “Unbelievable! The odds! I was shooting in the dark, following a hunch! Unbelievable!” He grabbed at the photos on the table. “Let’s make some room here!”
They put away the photographs. Dane set aside his computer. The table was clear.
“The odds!” Preston was still recovering. “But I shouldn’t be surprised. Sooner or later the pieces had to fall together.” He reached again into his satchel and produced a small stack of lengthy articles in fine print from professional journals and scientific publications, some featuring the same photograph. “No, this is not from my pleasure reading list. My staff is always investigating new ideas and technologies that could be useful for new tricks and illusions—and psychic hoaxes, either one—and they sniffed out Parmenter. Here’s a man with cutting-edge interests: interdimensional crossovers, electromagnetic pulse, scalar waves, time travel. He’s a regular Tesla, or Einstein.
“This article deals with his work on interdimensional displacement, ID, the whole idea that an object can be shifted from one dimension to another, moved an inch or a mile, and returned to its original dimension so that it seems to have been instantly transported from one place to another.”
“Beam me up, Scotty?” said Arnie.
“It would be that impressive if it really worked and a stage magician could get hold of it. Imagine the illusions—but they wouldn’t be illusions, would they? They’d be the real thing.”
Dane couldn’t believe it yet, but a building tension was gnawing at his insides. “Her entrance on your show … she used to do that sort of thing at McCaffee’s, just appear out of nowhere.”
“Okay,” said Arnie, “we’re doing sci-fi now, everybody keep that in mind. We’re not going to get carried away here.”
“I’m afraid there’s more.” Preston leafed through the stack and found an article from Scientific American. “Timelines. How it could be possible for an object—maybe a person?—to occupy multiple timelines at once and thereby exist as a multiplicity.”
“Multiplicity. Of course,” said Arnie. He was kidding.
“Take comfort, I’m not that far ahead,” Preston assured them. “Here’s what I gathered from the article: Dane, here you are, sitting in this chair at … two thirty-five in the afternoon. On our timeline, in our time dimension, you’re the only Dane there is. The Dane who was sitting here five minutes ago doesn’t exist anymore. He was the two- thirtyDane. You’re the two thirty-fiveDane.”
“But he’s the same guy,” Arnie countered.
“Except for the time; that’s the point of the article. You’ll never see both Danes—the Dane in the present and the Dane from the past—sitting in the chair at the same time unlessyou can place the two-thirty Dane on a separate timeline, then pull that timeline up to a point contemporaneous with the timeline of the two thirty-five Dane. Then you’d have two Danes existing at once in the same place because they would be in the same place at different times. It would be the same event happening twice at the same time.”
Dane and Arnie stared at him blankly.
“I don’t totally get it either,” he admitted. “The article uses the example of a railroad car passing through a railroad crossing.” He pointed out the illustration on the second page. “Here we are, the observers, sitting in our car waiting for the train to go by, and right in front of us, at this instant in our time, is the railroad car. Consider that an event, the railroad car passing directly in front of us. But two seconds ago it wasn’t in front of us, it was about a car length down the track to our left. Imagine that as another event that happened in the past. Now imagine if you could isolate that past event, that car at that place in that instant of time, move the event to a parallel track, analogous to a second timeline, and then shift that track forward so that both events are now occurring side by side at the crossing. You would have what would look like two identical but separate cars going through the crossing at the same time, but what you’re seeing are two different events on two different timelines. The same car twice at the same time.”