Colin looked at me skeptically over his glasses. “In evidence. You’re telling me there were two Alessandras running around your house and neighborhood.”
“Not two girls, exactly,” I said. “Two possibilities, momentarily unresolved. We say an electron orbits an atomic nucleus, like the Earth around the sun, but it doesn’t really. It’s part of a waveform, a probabilistic cloud that exists at every point around the nucleus at the same time, with some probability. Similarly, a particle can have an up spin or a down spin, but until it resolves, it has both—it’s in quantum space, spinning both ways at once. For Alessandra, I think the wave resolved once I picked her up in the car, or maybe slightly before that. The two versions didn’t deviate all that much.”
“That’s the most ridiculous theory I ever heard,” Colin said.
“Wait,” I said. “This is the important part. If Alessandra could split, then why not Elena and the others? They were about to leave the house. What if one version of them did leave the house, before the varcolac arrived, and thus weren’t killed?”
“This is wishful thinking,” Colin said. “Don’t do this to yourself.”
“It makes sense,” I said. “The varcolac wouldn’t arrive at a single, discrete point in time and space, like we would. Its arrival would be smeared over a range of times and places, with some probability.”
“You’re losing me,” Colin said.
“Me, too,” Marek said.
I growled, angry at them. Why couldn’t they understand? “When you go somewhere, you arrive at one time,” I said. “At five o’clock, say. But a varcolac doesn’t. It arrives at 4:45 and 4:46 and 4:47, through to 5:15, and may eventually resolve to only one of those arrival times, though some have a higher probability than others. That means it arrived both before and after they left the house. They became entangled with its probability wave and split, one version of each of them heading off in the car to the NJSC, oblivious, while the other versions were caught and killed.”
Silence. “Well,” I said. “What do you think?”
“A lot of crazy things have happened today,” Marek said. “Sure. I believe you.”
Colin yawned. “It’s two-thirty in the morning,” he said. “Could we figure out what universe we’re living in tomorrow?”
I apologized and let him go. I didn’t know how I was going to sleep, though. I was buzzing. They were out there somewhere, alive. Tomorrow, I would find them.
Colin left us with a promise to bring us breakfast in the morning. I tried to convince Marek to take the other bed, but he insisted on the floor. The bed springs were old and creaked loudly, but as soon as I lay down, exhaustion took over, and I knew I was going to sleep after all. With a last nervous glance at the backward mirror, I closed my eyes. I dreamed of an endless hall of mirrors and of Elena, always just glimpsed in a reflection, but never there when I turned around.
I woke to Colin shaking me, his eyes wide. “Jacob. Jacob! Wake up. You have to see this.”
I groaned and sat up, slowly registering the unfamiliar surroundings and remembering the horror of the day before. “Why couldn’t you have let me sleep?”
“Look.” He thrust a piece of smartpaper into my hand. It was a news feed, and I read the headline.
I scanned the article and saw my name and an old picture of me. According to the article, I had been arrested for the murder of Brian Vanderhall, who had been found shot to death in his office at the New Jersey Super Collider. There was nothing about the deaths of my family, just that I had been picked up at my home, and the police were making no further comment.
“Why would they lie about that?” I asked. “You’d think they’d want people to know they were looking for me.”
“Maybe they aren’t.”
“What do you mean, they aren’t? I’m a murder suspect; of course they’re looking for me.”
Colin smacked me on the side of the head. “Wake up. You were the one going on last night about being in two places at once. Why should you be any different?”
CHAPTER 16
“The People call Sheila Singer to the stand,” Haviland announced.
Terry cursed and started rummaging through his papers in a way that did not inspire confidence. “Your Honor,” he said, still rummaging. “I have no knowledge of this witness.”
Haviland’s smile grew brighter. “Her name was provided to the defense weeks ago, in the discovery process. She works at the New Jersey Super Collider.”
Probably twenty percent of the NJSC’s three thousand employees had been on the prosecution’s list of possible witnesses. Terry had made me go through them all and identify all those I knew, had ever worked with, or had seen during the events of last December third. It was a standard lawyer trick, apparently, to drown the opposition with irrelevant entries in order to hide the ones that really mattered.
“What is her relevance to this case?” Terry snapped.
“I hope her testimony will make that plain.” Haviland was positively beaming now.
“There’s nothing irregular here, Mr. Sheppard,” Judge Roswell said. “The name is on the list. You may proceed, Mr. Haviland.”
Terry glared at me, but I shrugged. I had no idea who Sheila Singer was, and when she took the stand, I was even more confused. She was twenty-something, slender, with a low-cut, turquoise blouse and a short, black skirt that revealed legs a half mile long. If I’d seen her before, I would have remembered. She flashed a brilliant smile at the jury.
“Ms. Singer, please state your name for the record.” She did so, and he asked her to tell the court what her job was with the NJSC.
“I’m a receptionist and tour guide,” she said. “I meet visitors who come to the center, and I sometimes take groups through the parts that are open for tourists.”
“Do you get a lot of tourists?”
“Of course. It’s the biggest scientific instrument ever created.” A sly smile at the jury. “Some people think the bigger the better.”
I coughed. Haviland looked a little annoyed. “Were you working on December third?”
“Yes,” Singer said. “I was stationed at the reception desk in the Feynman Center. That’s where I work when I don’t have a tour, so I can answer questions, give out maps, that kind of thing.”
“So, your desk is the first thing a visitor sees when they enter? The first place they would go to ask a question?”
“Yes.”
I could tell Terry was dying to object and ask what the point of this line of questioning was, but he held back. It was probably just what Haviland was waiting for.
“Do you know Jacob Kelley, the accused?” Haviland asked.
“No. I don’t think we ever met,” Singer said.
“But on December third, you heard his name, didn’t you?”
“Yes. There was a woman who asked for him. She seemed quite upset.”
“Did the woman say who she was?”
“No. She had three children with her, two girls and a boy, and she said she was looking for her husband and asked if I knew how to contact him,” Singer said.
I stood up slowly, staring at her.
“What time was this?” Haviland asked.
“Just before five o’clock.”
“How can you be sure of the time, Ms. Singer?”
“Visiting hours end at five o’clock. It was the end of my working day.”