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Poor Jim. I couldn’t help but feel a teensy bit sorry for him. After all, his baby ran off with another man. A young man to be exact.

I guess he should’ve kept away from Runaround Sue.

CHAPTER 16

SAYING GOODBYE

After half an hour without headlights behind me, I pulled off to the side of the road to look for a map. The bad thing about the 1960 Corvette? No glove box. And of course no GPS.

In the trunk, I found a towel, a black purse, two empty bottles of Tequila, and an overnight bag. The purse contained a pearly pink wallet with a ten dollar bill and Susan Summers’ driver’s license, a half-empty pack of cigarettes, and a tube of lipstick so red it was almost orange. At least the overnight bag proved helpful with extra clothes – a pencil skirt and sweater – but how was I supposed to find my way to Porter’s bank without a map?

I shimmied into the spare clothes, then started off again, hoping my instincts would guide me to Cincinnati.

At around one in the morning, after over a dozen U-turns, I spotted the city lights in the distance. I pulled into a breakfast diner parking lot and wrangled the convertible top into place. Then I slept, rather uncomfortably with the garment box under my feet, until dawn.

A knock on the driver’s side window jerked me awake. “Hungry, sweetie?”

I opened my eyes to the oval, cheery face of an older woman with pointed glasses. Her silver hair was teased in a beehive, and she wore an apricot-colored waitress dress. The name tag at her breast said LAMERLE.

“Come on in, sugar,” she said, waving me toward the door of the diner. “I’ve got grits. I’ve got hash. I’ve got flapjacks.” She kept listing foods as she walked, but I couldn’t hear her anymore.

After I checked to make sure the Portrait of a Young Man was safe and secure, I opened the passenger door and almost fell out onto the pavement. Every muscle was stiff, and my stomach growled, demanding a living sacrifice. LaMerle unlocked the diner and held the door open for me. I fell into a blue vinyl booth by the front windows so I could keep an eye on my hundred-million-dollar Corvette. A drumline marched and pounded inside my head.

“You look like you could use some coffee,” LaMerle said. She shuffled behind the counter. The coffee maker was filled, then set to percolate. “You like ice in yours? Folks say I’m crazy, but I like mine with ice. You let me know if you want ice.”

I sat there, forehead and nose pressed to the laminate tabletop, wondering if I was experiencing a hangover. My mouth certainly felt rank enough, but maybe I was just tired. I didn’t feel drunk last night, but then again, I wasn’t sure if I would’ve noticed anyway. The only time I ever had alcohol was when Uncle Lincoln handed me a frozen peach schnapps at Christmas and told me it was a slushy. I spit it out on his salmon corduroy pants.

I downed LaMerle’s coffee, without the ice cubes, even though I hated the stuff in Base Life. In this body, though? Coffee was a sweet, dawn-kissed beauty. It was a pure need, like warm blood and fresh air. Like life couldn’t start without it. It was strong and helped shovel the heaviness of sleep off my back.

LaMerle whipped up some fried eggs and a strange kind of sausage made with pork and oats she called goetta, and I devoured those as well. When the breakfast crowd picked up, I left her a nice tip for letting me sleep in her parking lot and giving me directions to the bank.

The Cincinnati Mutual Bank and Trust was a two story brick building at the center of town. Porter had descended back to 1953 a long time ago and opened an account there, which he still had today. He chose that particular bank because it was one of the only ones still intact, having never moved their safe deposit boxes or gone through the renovation after a fire or flood. I was to leave the painting in his box, where it would remain hidden until he collected it in Base Life, over fifty years later.

Which, you had to admit, was pretty freaking genius.

But first, I had to find the key.

There was a post office across the street from the bank where Porter kept his safe deposit box key hidden on the roof. That was so he could retrieve it throughout time. I thought that was pretty ingenious too. I found a fire escape ladder at the rear of the building and climbed. I was still afraid of heights, but since I’d climbed a much taller building with Blue, this three story number wasn’t such a big deal. At the top, I found the air vent on the north side Porter told me about. My hair whipped and swirled as I searched for a loose brick in the low wall surrounding the roof. When I found it, the cement around its edges brittle and flaking away into dust, I pried it out of its pocket with my fingernails.

A flutter of triumph. The tiny brass key winked at me from inside.

I retrieved the garment box from the car and entered the bank. It smelled like new carpet and cigarette smoke. I lifted my chin high. I told the portly, mustached teller exactly what Porter said – that my name was Casey O’Neil and I wanted to open my family’s box, number fourteen.

I expected some resistance, but the teller just nodded and brought me back to a vaulted room with hundreds of narrow brass doors. He stuck his own key into one of the doors and unlocked half the lock. I unlocked the other half with my key. Then he slid the safe deposit box out of its cubby. It was a larger box than all the others – nearly three times the size. He set it on a metal shelf, then left the room to give me privacy. I lifted the long, wide lid.

Inside, there were treasures. A drawstring pouch full of pearls. Several stacks of cash, all in different currencies. An etched, wooden box with gold coins. Dozens of passports, driver’s licenses, and birth certificates. It was Porter’s secret stash – one he could access across time. I ran my fingers over the pearls, the cash, the coins, just to feel the thrill of all that wealth kiss my skin. Then I placed the painting in the box, still wrapped in a sweater.

It was hard to say goodbye, to leave the Raphael behind in that cold, sterile bank vault. But I’d trusted Porter this far, Lord knows why, and I hadn’t caught him in a lie yet. I just hoped we were doing the right thing. That I was on the right side. (And that stealing the Raphael from Gesh would feel like a good kick in his balls.)

DRIVING 101

After I replaced the safe deposit box key in its hiding place, I stopped at a small hot dog joint for lunch. Two construction workers across the street whistled at me when I climbed out of the ‘Vette, which had certainly never happened to me before and took me by surprise. I considered flipping them the bird, the sexist jackasses, but wasn’t sure about the kind of impact that would make. It couldn’t have made much of a difference, right? But I was too scared to chance it. So I flipped them the bird in my mind.

I stopped short before I entered the restaurant, confused by a sign on the window and the two separate entrances. In large painted letters, one side of the sign read: WHITES with an arrow pointing to a door on the left. The other side had an arrow pointing to the right and read: COLOREDS.

The hell?

Of course I’d learned all about segregation in school, and read about it last week when I did my last minute research on the Sixties, but seeing it in action was enough to turn my stomach. I didn’t want to eat on the WHITES side. I’d much rather sit on the COLOREDS side, but if flipping the bird at those construction workers might’ve caused a stir, then making a radical statement like that certainly would.

I turned back to my car. I wasn’t hungry anymore.

What good was traveling back in time if you couldn’t change things? If you couldn’t make a difference? Tell people of their ignorance? Warn them of the outcomes?