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Theda shoved her left foot into her combat boot. It’s not just a letter.
“I’m going back to New York. Now. Today,” Conlin leaned against the stone fireplace and folded his arms.
“No. Not now,” Jackson had changed into a pinstriped, deep blue suit that was similar to Conlin’s. He buttoned the double-breasted jacket with quick fingers, his eyes never leaving Conlin’s.
“You gonna stop me?”
“You think you’re going to take off and leave me without wheels? Not going to happen.”
She tied the left boot as a tingling burn burst in her frozen feet. There’s more. If that were the last letter he would ever write, it woudn’t be that one. I’m sure of it.
“You think you can take me? Want to try?” Conlin crossed the room and stood toe to toe with Jackson, who jammed his arm into his overcoat.
She tied off the right boot with an irate tug that almost snapped the rawhide laces. She sat up straight, feeling her gun which was back where it belonged under her coat. She narrowed her brown eyes at Jackson and Conlin, who were now face to face, although Jackson was a good four inches taller and Conlin’s eyes stared into Jackson’s collar. Conlin was impressive. Jackson had at least fifty pounds on him, but he stared up, arms at his side and hands curled into fists, and she had the suspicion that Jackson wasn’t exactly itching to fight him, or else he would have clobbered him by now.
Regardless, they were insufferable. The sooner she got away from them, the better, but then what? She stood and wandered over where a dust covered cedar chest that emitted a faint odor of fish. She unfolded her father’s letter and read it again, the arguing fading behind her thoughts.
Those strange letters he signed off with. What were they?
YMJ LTI TK MTLX
With one gloved finger, she wrote them in the dust. They meant nothing to her. She looked at the letter again, her eyes skimming the words. Then, she saw it.
Now, I’ve crossed the Rubicon, and I leave it up to you to look after your mother and sister.
Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. The die is cast he had said. There was no turning back. It was a common enough saying that anyone would understand.
Except that when Theda Evora was a young girl, one of her favorite things to do was to lay on her belly on the floor of her father’s office on a Saturday afternoon while he wrote in his journal of the patients he had seen that week, chronicling their illnesses, his diagnosis and how they were fairing if he had followed up. To keep his curious little daughter occupied, he invented games. One he called What Did Julius Say? and explained to her what a Caesar Cypher was. Caesar fought many battles, and his scouts sent him urgent messages constantly, but do you think it was safe to send a message written in plain Latin? No, Caesar, who was the cleverest of them all, used what was called a Cypher. There was a number that was the key. That number was the letter in the Latin alphabet that got paired with ‘A’ and followed by the rest of the alphabet. The messages were then scrambled and if the reader didn’t know the right number, it was nothing but gibberish. Caesar knew the magic number and with his codex, line up the scrambled letters in the right places and he was able to read the messages from his scouts. The lesson is to know the magic number.
Harold would then give her math problems to solve and once she had the magic number, she would write the alphabet down, and create her own Caesar Cypher. Harold would drop little pieces of paper down to her to cypher.
Theda drew the alphabet into the dust.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
She smiled. It was obvious from this sentence what the magic number was:
Do you remember that 13th of July in 1914?
The number was thirteen. She counted thirteen letters until she landed on M:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
MNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKL
Then, she coded Harold’s sign off:
YMJ LTI TK MTLX
MAX ZHW HY AHZL
She pressed her lips together. No. It wasn’t right. But it had to be a Caesar cypher.
The voices behind her rose and she threw both her hands over her ears. “Stop,” she gritted her teeth and turned around.
They looked at her. She would have to figure it out later.
“As much as I’d love to watch the two of you slug it out, it’s late. I loathe to point out the obvious, but any minute someone’s going to check that cellar and find no one there, if they haven’t already. They’re going to send a posse out for you,” she jutted her chin at Jackson. “How long before they block off the roads out of here?”
Jackson shook his head. “They won’t do that,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because they want it out,” he said. He turned back to Conlin. “Guess we never thought that we would be the ones who carried it out of the lab.”
“No. Dr. Andersen never let me in on that one.” Conlin backed up a step and his shoulders dropped down from where they had been hovering around his ears. He paced the room, stopping in front of the door. “I say we go back. All get in the car and head to New York.”
“I’m not going anywhere until I find my family,” Theda said.
“They’re looking for you specifically,” Conlin said. “I heard them. They find you, and you might never see the light of day again.”
“What do they want from me?”
“Andersen said he saw you in another time. One not of your own. If he knew that, then Thrax must know it, too.”
Jackson laughed. “She still doesn’t believe it. Look at her face.”
“Miss Evora,” Conlin said patiently. “Believe what you want at this point but at least believe that they are after you. If you believe nothing else, believe that.”
“Mr. Conlin, it doesn’t change anything. I cannot just drive out of Fort Riley and leave my family here. I need to return to the base. I’ll take my chances.”
“I’m going back, too,” Jackson said.
Conlin’s head whipped around. “You can’t. You’ll be in jail in no time, and you know you’ll never make it out of jail alive. If you even make it to jail. Those Wanted posters with Andersen’s face will be replaced with yours before the morning runs out.”
“There’s still a chance to stop this,” Jackson said. “Still a chance to kill this flu where it lands. I read those papers. Gitchell, his name is. Albert Gitchell. He’s the first to report to the infirmary with the flu. If I eliminate him, it ends.”
Conlin shook his head, his face a grimace. “How many times I gotta tell you the facts? You can’t do it. You won’t do it. Know how I know? Because it’s still up here.” He tapped his temple three times with his index finger. “If you try, it won’t happen, because we still know it. It’s still in existence. No, Jack, it’s not gonna work and you’re just going to get yourself killed. But you know what? Fine. That’s what you want to do, then do it. I’m getting the hell out of here. Today. Miss Evora,” he turned to her. “You’re a bigger fool than this guy if you stay here. You’d do better for your family to get out of this mess instead of stepping back into it.”
“I’ll come with you to find Gitchell,” she said to Jackson.
Colin raised his arms and let them drop back down again in exasperation. “That’s the way you want it, then that’s what we do. Let’s go. Now. I’m not heading into the thick of that place, though, and that’s final. But I’ll see you to the train station and then I’ll just toot on the road back east.” He opened the door and walked through, leaving it swinging open.
Jackson looked her up and down. “You sure this is what you want?” he asked. “He’s right. You’d be smart to go with him.”
“Not without my family,” she said quietly.
“Alright then. Let’s go.”
The Martin Wasp was warm. Is this what the future held? Automobiles with heating units? From the backseat she blurted, “Why you?”
“What?” Jackson said from the passenger seat. His eyes met hers in the mirror he had been checking, making sure they weren’t being followed.
“Why were you chosen to…travel?”
Conlin took a deep breath. “Because of the slips,” he said. “He and I…we experience seeing another time. It comes out of nowhere. I see the past. I’ve walked into houses and seen the people who lived in them before. People long dead. My granny, she used to say that I had the second sight and we kept it a secret because she thought that people would treat me differently when they knew that I saw things that other people didn’t see. But it wasn’t any precognition or whatever the technical term for it is. It’s an experience of entering a different time. When it happens like that, we can’t control it.”
“It happened to me a few days ago,” Jackson watched out the window. “I slipped into the forest in Germany. Not like I wanted to be there.”
“What does it feel like?”
“Like you can’t breathe,” Jackson said. “Like the air is being squeezed out of not only your lungs but your head. Then you’re there.”
She was quiet. The worm of doubt was back and now she knew why it had been nagging at her for the last two days.
It was in her father’s letter.
Do you remember that 13th of July in 1914? The time you and I walked through South Cape May, sand at our feet, the soft and salty breeze like a sacred promise. You were still so young, but you could hold a conversation better than almost any adult I’ve ever known. It’s one of my most sacred memories.
She did remember that walk, but not because she could recall any of their conversation. She and Harold had strolled through the last streets of the New Jersey shore town, the part that narrowed until it was nothing but a sandy point jutting into where the Atlantic Ocean met the Delaware Bay. Theda, barefoot, kicked small white pebbles from their path, occasionally bending to pick up the small, quartz stones that they called Cape May diamonds that sparkled in the surf.
Suddenly, she had stopped. Her head, which only a moment ago was clear, was overcome with a suffocating pain that throbbed behind her skull. She staggered backward. Harold, who was lost in his own thoughts, kept walking slowly, still talking to her. Theda put her hands to her temples and opened her mouth but only a wheezing breath came out. The last house on the strip, her favorite little white house with red poppies in white pots, ran in watercolor threads.
When her vision cleared, she was under water. No, not quit under the water, but there was water gushing past her in violent surges. The sky, which only a moment ago was a crystal blue, was almost black and the ocean spouted white caps that rushed to her. She opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out.
Then the vision cleared. Harold, ten paces ahead, turned. Theda! he called and rushed back. She had collapsed into a seated position. Harold picked her up by her shoulders. What happened? Are you ill?
She explained that for a moment, she had blacked out. She had seen the ocean angry, she had said, trying to find a more sophisticated word but her mind had retreated to a primitive level where language was difficult. The angry ocean covered the little white house and knocked the planters over, the red poppies drowning. Harold’s face had grown solemn. He perhaps feared she had had some sort of strange episode. He glanced at the sky. No storms today, he had said. Only blue skies. Maybe someday a big one will hit here. Maybe years and years from now. But not today.
“Something like that happened to me once. In South Cape may,” she said before she could think better of telling them. The memory of that day had stayed dormant for years but now that it was back, the feeling returned as if it had just happened.
She told them the story.
“South Cape May?” Conlin said. “That place is gone.”
Her heart began to thump hard in her chest. “What?”
“That town is no more. It got swallowed up by the ocean in the great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944.” He half turned, taking his eyes off the road, and smiled. “Welcome to the club, Miss Evora.”
It's good to read Theda's story again! I enjoy every episode. When you wrote about the slips, I immediately thought of, "Time keeps on slipping into the future" ("Fly Like an Eagle" by the Steve Miller Band).
Gripping. And nice evocation, Alison. ...NB: I've launched my serialisation of The Wrong Man, in case you'd like to give it a whirl in exchange! https://annieblackwell.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-wrong-man-a-historical