Fingers plucked, hands darted, unfinished puppies were made whole, but Shepherd did not answer the question.
‘I stink of worse than sweat, don’t I? Treachery. I’ve stunk of that for five years, and I always will.’
The man’s self-dramatization and self-flagellation infuriated Dylan, for just as in the motel room the previous night, it wasn’t a fraction as sincere as Proctor might believe it was, but allowed the creep to indulge in self-pity while calling it courageous self-analysis.
‘And now I stink of this.’ He watched as the young puzzler puzzled, and then said, ‘What a wretched little life. One day, I’ll be your redemption, boy, and maybe you’ll be mine.’
Proctor stepped from the room, left the house, went out into the night of February 12, 1992, beginning his journey toward his so-called redemption and his fiery death in Arizona more than ten years later.
The puzzle-working Shepherd’s face had acquired a glaze of tears as silently as dew forms from the air.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Jilly said.
‘Shep?’ Dylan asked.
The older puzzler, who shook with emotion but did not cry, stood watching his younger self. He didn’t immediately reply, but after his brother spoke to him twice more, he said, ‘Wait. No gooey-bloody Mr. David Cronenberg movie. Wait.’
Although they supposedly weren’t engaging in teleportation, per se, and although the mechanism of their travel still mystified him, Dylan could imagine lots of errors in transport almost as unpleasant as those portrayed in The Fly. Accidentally folding onto a highway, in the path of a hurtling Peterbilt, could be a quashing experience.
To Jilly, he said, ‘Let’s wait till Shep’s confident of doing it right.’
Here a bit of golden fur, there the tip of a black snout, and here a quizzical eye: Although time seemed to crawl, the boy’s hands flew rapidly toward a full solution.
After a few minutes, older Shepherd said, ‘Okay.’
‘Okay – we can go?’ Dylan asked.
‘Okay. We can go, but we can’t leave.’
Baffled, Dylan said, ‘We can go, but we can’t leave?’
‘Something,’ Shep added.
Interestingly, Jilly was the first to understand. ‘We can go, but we can’t leave something. If we don’t have everything we brought, he’s not able to fold us out of the past. I left my purse and the laptop in the kitchen.’
They retreated from the dining room, leaving younger Shep to his tears and to the final pieces of his puzzle.
Although he could have felt the light switch if he’d touched it, Dylan knew he couldn’t turn on the fluorescents any more than he had been able to stop a bullet. In the kitchen gloom, he couldn’t see if the purse and the laptop, which Jilly had put on the table, rested in the inky blots that traveled under their feet and that spread between them and everything they touched here in the past, but he assumed the black puddles were there.
Slinging the purse over her shoulder, grabbing the laptop, Jilly said, ‘Got ’em. Let’s go.’
The back door opened, and she whirled toward it as if certain that the door-busting, window-bashing, steroid-chugging crowd from Holbrook, Arizona, had folded themselves back to this California yesteryear in hot pursuit.
Dylan was not surprised to see a younger version of himself step through the door.
On February 12, 1992, he had been attending an evening class at the University of California Santa Barbara. He’d ridden to and from class with a friend who had dropped him off at the end of the long driveway less than two minutes ago.
What did surprise Dylan was how soon after the murder he had arrived home. He checked his watch, then looked at the pig-belly clock. That February night, if he had arrived home five minutes sooner, he would have encountered Lincoln Proctor as the killer left the house. If he’d arrived all of sixteen minutes earlier, he might have been shot dead – but he might have prevented his mother’s murder.
Sixteen minutes.
He refused to think about what might have been. Dared not.
Nineteen-year-old Dylan O’Conner closed the door behind him, without bothering to switch on the lights, walked through a startled Jilly Jackson. He put a couple books on the kitchen table and headed toward the dining room.