Dane thought it over. “Two railroad cars? Out of one?”
“Bizarre, isn’t it?”
“Two Danes sitting in the same chair.”
“Yes.”
“What would that look like?”
“I don’t know. You might see them both, you might not. Only Parmenter would know.”
Another connection, a lightbulb coming on. “Carson!” Dane said. Preston and Arnie waited. “Carson, the dove. The four doves out of one. She did a routine with four doves but she only brought one… . I figured she secretly loaded the other three.”
“Maybe she did,” said Arnie, not sounding very sure about it.
“Or she”—Dane reviewed, piecing it together—“she generated three more Carsons in three other time dimensions and made them look like four at once in ours.”
“Four events that could have been microseconds apart made to happen in the same place at the same time,” Preston suggested.
Arnie sang the theme music from The Twilight Zone.
“So!” Preston leaned forward in his chair, intense like a storyteller. “Imagine this with me. Here’s … Eloise … sitting in her chair and I’m telling her to levitate a pencil over which she, the girl in the chair, has no control. Somehow, through some connection with this Parmenter and whatever he’s come up with, she generates a second Eloise on a second timeline, unseen by us, who picks up the pencil, rotates it, and makes it fly around the room.”
Dane ventured, “An Eloise who was there five minutes before?”
“Or a microsecond. Or a nanosecond. And on her own timeline so that she is writing her own unique history, free to act in her own way, make her own choices, carry out her own actions, but still remain in essence the original Eloise. Mind-boggling—and pure speculation, of course.”
“So this second Eloise can fly?” Arnie asked.
“ Ifany of this really works, I’m guessing— guessing, mind you—that she can interpose herself between our time and space and hers anywhere she wants. If she could position her time and space four, six, however many feet above ours and penetrate our time and space from there, she would appear to us to be suspended in midair, flying, or at least the pencil she’s holding would appear so.”
“So how does she levitate?” asked Arnie.
Preston could only throw up his hands.
Dane’s mind was racing along with his heart. “So Eloise Kramer is some kind of timeline duplicate, the Mandy Whitacre who existed forty years ago.”
“But would she have any idea?” Preston mused.
Arnie winced. “All right, time to call a halt here. Gentlemen, you took a wrong turn. Reality’s the otherway.”
“I was hoping I could speak with her after the show, but she’d left abruptly.”
“And I can’t imagine why, with you being so nice to her.”
Preston gave Arnie an impatient look. “Well, she didn’t exactly go crying to you.”
“I wasn’t her manager anymore.”
“And not her friend either.”
Arnie took the blow but didn’t bend. “No. I wasn’t. She has that attorney to manage her now. She caught a flight back to Spokane, back to him and his big plans. Let him deal with her.” Then he told Preston, “And she wascrying, by the way.”
Oh, the feeling. Dane sighed, resting his forehead on his fingertips. “And I told her to leave, to get out of my life and never come back.”
For a moment, words fled away. Arnie crossed his arms and looked out the window. Preston drew a deep breath and sighed it out long and slowly. Dane just remembered the last time he saw her; she was wearing that beautiful blue gown. She was wilting, dying against the doorpost, and he was walking away.
At last Preston asked Dane, “Well, did she ever say anything to you, anything that would reflect on, uh …”
“She said she was a little crazy, that she’d been in a mental ward … that she thought she was someone else.”
Preston’s hands covered his nose and mouth as his eyes widened. “Who?”
“She didn’t want to tell me, so we never talked about it.” Then he gathered strength and added, “But I did find out from a person connected with the hospital that when she was in the hospital she called herself Mandy.”
Preston reeled a little at the news. “Oh, Dane. Ohhh, Dane. And this was before she met you?”
“That’s right.”
“She was calling herself Mandy before she even met you?”
Dane could feel Arnie’s stern, cautionary look and just wagged his head. “It’s hard to be sure.”
“You need to talk to her about this.” Then Preston thought again and his face fell. “But that wouldn’t be easy, would it?”
“That’s why I never went there.”
“What?” asked Arnie.
Now Dane was feeling impatient. “You’re the one who thought shewas hustling me. What if I, the older guy, were to suggest to her, a cute, sexy twenty-year-old, that I married her forty years ago, so she’s my wife, or is about to be, or was?”
Arnie wilted a little. “I see your point.”
“Especially since we don’t reallyknow what we’re talking about,” said Preston.
“Ah!” said Arnie, “now there’s wisdom!”
“But Parmenter knows,” said Dane.
“If we can find him,” said Preston. “I tried to track him down. I wanted to be the first magician in line to be his friend and collaborator … and it didn’t happen. Last I heard from my sources, he’d left Stanford. He said he was pursuing a privately funded project and had relocated”—pause for effect—“to Las Vegas.”
Another uncanny connection. Dane sank back in his chair.
“Oh,” Arnie mused. “A privately funded project in Las Vegas! I’ve seen those, the guy shooting dice, downing some drinks, a couple of younger women along …” He snapped his fingers. “Hey, younger women!” Dane sent him a corrective glare. “Think I’ll get some more coffee. Where are those cookies?”
“There ismoney there,” Preston countered, “and people who know how to make it and invest it to make more.”
“We have to find him,” said Dane. He felt ready to die trying.
“And maybe we’ve picked up his trail again as of today. Or, you could say, as of September 17, 2010, at that intersection in Las Vegas. I’d say that’s your starting point. Dane, my friend, it’s time to ask questions.”
Doris Branson, a lady in her fifties, managed the Orpheus Hotel Casino just off the Las Vegas Strip, was good to her friends, honest and shrewd in business, twice divorced, and—it seemed everyone knew it but she—prone to drinking.
Among friends such as hers in a town such as this, it was hard to make a case against alcohol abuse, but she got a strong hint about it when she bent her car around a palm tree in someone’s front yard. She paid a one-thousand-dollar fine, agreed to perform forty hours of community service in lieu of jail, lost her privilege to drive for ninety days, and had to devote a great deal of time and money to getting insured again after her insurance company dropped her.