“I think you might know more about that than anyone in the chief’s office. However, I urge you to substantiate any information before you report it.” Of course, I knew that was like asking a starving man not to eat a steak.
“Have there been any reports of a cult invasion?”
“Has anything been detected in the water? Some people are saying something about nerve gas.”
“There are reports that this is the result of some special government experiment. Do you know anything about that?”
“What about terrorists?”
I answered the questions as best I could, which means I hardly answered any of them, and instead of calming things, I think I whipped them into a lather. There were just too many loose ends. Finally, after about forty-five minutes of torture, the chief pushed his way to the podium. “One at a time,” he called forcefully.
“Has anyone been examined by a doctor?”
“Has anyone’s memory loss become permanent?”
“Have other towns in the area been affected in the same way?”
The questions went on, and on. Like me, however, Roy didn’t impress anyone with his grasp of the situation. Fifty minutes and probably a hundred questions later, the chief held up his hands. “That’s all for now,” he said, and he left.
Reflecting, I thought: cult invasion, nerve gas, CIA experiment—it had all come out during the news conference, and I figured most of it would turn out to be bullshit. One thing didn’t come out, however, and that was about our missing quarterback, David Robelle.
* * * * *
“My name is Johnny Pappas. May I come in?” I showed my Press ID.
Chuck Robelle was a big guy, early to mid-forties, looked like he could’ve been a quarterback himself, no problem. The mom, Jenna, looked a couple of years younger, and would’ve had no problem being a homecoming queen in her younger days. Young David had good genes, I determined quickly. I’d tried to weasel some information about the Robelles from Roy before coming out. He knew everyone, and I figured it was as good a background check as I could get. He didn’t say much, however, and my instincts told me that his sparse responses were rather calculated. I managed to find out that Chuck and Jenna had been high school sweethearts, had married early, and both had gone on to make something of themselves. Chuck was a partner in a small law firm. Jenna was an associate professor at the community college. Jenna served some coffee, and sat down next to Chuck at the kitchen table. I noticed a picture of three kids on the console table in the family room.
“How did you manage to find out about this?” Chuck probed.
“I was at the station when the call came in,” I replied. Chuck had a visual grip on me, and I was almost afraid to make a move. Clearly, he didn’t feel like being Mister Social, but he was hardly the picture of anguish I had expected. Neither was Jenna, and that wasn’t at all the way a mom would act. I decided this was no time to beat around the bush and I looked Chuck straight in the eye. “Are you going to answer my questions, or am I wasting my time?”
Chuck measured his response. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On what you already know.”
I thought: was it me, or was something strange happening? If I didn’t know better, I would have thought they were trying to suppress the fact that their son was missing. It dawned on me that I hadn’t heard the words amber alert at all that day, and I suddenly wondered why Roy didn’t publicize the situation at the press conference. It would certainly have gotten the word out and people looking for David almost instantly. As a matter of fact, outside of the initial report, I hadn’t heard a single word to the effect that David was missing.
“All I know is what I heard when I was in Chief Mulroney’s office. I assume it was one of you who made that call.” Chuck and Jenna looked at each other and held each other’s gaze. Something was definitely up. “Was it?” I pressed.
“I was the one who called,” Jenna replied, “but that was before—”
“Honey,” Chuck shot tersely.
Jenna never completed her sentence and Chuck slapped me with another stare. “We don’t want to jump to any conclusions, Mister Pappas. Perhaps there’s an explanation for this.”
I wasn’t used to people calling me Mister Pappas, and it threw me a little. With me, it was more like dickhead, especially when I was drilling down on something my interviewee didn’t want me to drill into. The day’s events flashed through my mind like a slide show, and I deemed that if I hadn’t lived through it, I wouldn’t have believed it myself. It was all too weird, and so was this interview. I decided to come at it from another angle. “What was Thursday night like? Did anything unusual happen?” I assumed they’d gotten caught up in the Lost Friday experience just like everyone else.
“It was just a normal night,” Chuck said, verifying my hunch. “I got home from work a little late, and Jenna was teaching a night class so she wasn’t home when I came in.”
“When was that?” I said quickly, trying to keep him rolling.
“Around eight. David was doing his homework, and the twins were parked in front of the TV.”
“We have a pair of fraternal twins,” Jenna interjected, seeing me glance at the picture again. “A boy and a girl.”
“I’ll bet they keep you busy,” I said. She smiled, but said nothing. I shifted my attention back to Chuck, and decided to stop pussyfooting. “Why don’t you want the fact that your son is missing to be publicized?” Chuck didn’t even flinch. He did look at Jenna, however, whose eyes were welling up. “This is bound to get out,” I said boldly. “There are probably thirty news teams camped out in Sea Beach by now, and they’re all tripping over each other trying to put a different slant on this. If one of them gets hold of the fact that David is missing, who knows how they’ll play it?” I hesitated, and added, “I’m one of you. I live here. I’ve watched your son play football.” And I had. “Obviously, there’s something you want to say or you wouldn’t have let me in here when I identified myself as a reporter. Why don’t you let me help you?”
Jenna took Chuck’s hand, and said, “We’ve got to say something, Chuck. We’ve got to find out what it is.”
It, I thought instantly. What was it? My heart fluttered. Chuck sighed deeply, sliding the peppershaker from one hand to the other. I could see him wrestling with his emotions.
Abruptly, he said, “The first we knew that David was missing was this morning when his coach called for him.”
“Go on.”
“I thought it was kind of strange for the coach to be calling here when David should already have been at school, but I figured maybe David didn’t feel well, or something. I mean, I hadn’t actually seen David yet. I thought maybe he was still in bed. Jenna happened to come down from upstairs just then, and I covered the phone and asked her if David had stayed home sick.”
I looked at Jenna.
“I hadn’t seen him either,” she said. “David often just grabs a breakfast bar and dashes off to the bus stop before I’m even out of the bathroom.”
I nodded. “They start school pretty early, don’t they?”
“He normally catches his bus about 7:15. Before I came down I’d noticed that the lights in his bedroom were off, and I figured he’d already left.”
“Anyway,” Chuck went on, “I told the coach that as far as we knew, David was at school.”
“It sounds like you didn’t know about this Lost Friday thing at that point.”
“I didn’t,” Chuck said. “I mean, we didn’t. To us, it was Friday morning, just like any other morning.”
“When did you find out about Lost Friday?”
“Right then,” Chuck explained. “The coach surmised that I didn’t know, and he said something about it. To tell you the truth, I thought maybe the coach had hit the bottle early, or something. I hung up the phone and said to myself, ‘What the hell was that?’”
??
?What did you do then?”
Chuck hesitated, a major breather. “That’s when we went upstairs.”
That’s it? That was hardly something gut-wrenching—unless there was something upstairs that caused it to be so. “And David wasn’t up there, was he?”
“No, he wasn’t, but there was a ransom note.”
Hello. My insides started tingling the way they do when I know I’ve bitten into a story. Not that Lost Friday wasn’t a story, mind you, but there were already scores of reporters on top of it, and I was going to be a tag-along unless I covered it from a different perspective. I’d thought about that only briefly during the day, as I’d been kind of busy with the press conference and all, but I knew I needed to come up with something unique, and so did my editor. We’d talked about it over the phone—also briefly—and my thought was that I would cover the story from a personal perspective, seeing as I lived in the town and I was probably the only reporter who could write about it from personal experience. The thing was, as an investigative reporter I hadn’t even taken the time to investigate myself, or what happened to me. Hell, I still didn’t know if Murph’s wedding had actually taken place. Also, from the sound of the questions at the press conference, it sounded like some of the other reporters had already uncovered events that I hadn’t even heard about. I was already behind the 8-ball, the clock was ticking, and I didn’t have a single word down on paper.
“Well, it wasn’t really a note,” Jenna interjected while I was tingling away.
What did that mean? Either it was a note, or it wasn’t. “Can I see it?” I asked.
Again, Jenna and Chuck exchanged telling looks. “It’s bound to get out,” Jenna said, and she burst into tears. “I just want my son back.”
Chuck put an arm around her, and pointed a finger at me like it was a gun. “You have to promise me you won’t make this into a freak show,” he said. Tears were welled up in his eyes also. “All we want is our son back.”
Something terrible moved over me. Here were two people whose son had been taken from them, and the most important aspect of that occurrence seemed to be how the incident was going to be reported. The Robelles were reasonable people, it seemed, and for them to be concerned with anything except their son’s return made no sense. This was more than an abduction, my instincts told me, much more. I suddenly went from tingly to jittery.
“I won’t do anything that would jeopardize David’s safety,” I said, “including talking to the police, or the FBI.”
I guess Chuck believed me because he got up and said, “This way.” Jenna trailed along as I followed Chuck upstairs to one of the bedrooms—David’s bedroom, I assumed.
Chuck turned before opening the door. “You need to prepare yourself.”
The energy was pumping through my body, and I could actually feel the adrenalin starting to ooze into my bloodstream. “Go ahead,” I said, guessing I was as prepared as I was going to be, but… for what? Chuck swung the door open, and I instantly understood Jenna’s comment about the note not really being a note. The best way to describe it is that the words were there, hanging there, sort of, except that they weren’t printed on anything. The first thing I did was look into the corners of the room, but Chuck anticipated my action.
“There are no projectors or lasers in this room,” he said with certainty. “And nothing is coming in from outside.” He pointed to the windows, over which the shades were drawn. “I don’t think this is a projection or a hologram of any sort.”
I looked at the words, which were just hanging in the middle of the room. I tried to walk around them, but no matter where I went the words appeared exactly the same way, right in front of my eyes, no matter the background or the angle from which I viewed them. I’d never seen anything like it. It was like I was viewing them from inside my own head. I approached the words, but they didn’t get bigger, or smaller, as my perspective changed, and, they remained seemingly within reach. I went ahead and tried to touch them, but my hand couldn’t seem to reach them, or slide behind them, or cover them. They seemed two-dimensional, as if they were on paper, but they weren’t. They were just there, illusory but visible, unchanging, as if part of the air itself. I took a small pillow from a chair and tossed it towards the words, but again they remained unchanged, and I couldn’t tell if the pillow flew in front of them, or behind them. I went to David’s desk and picked up a baseball bat that was leaning against the wall there. I took the bat and positioned it horizontally above my head, lowering it in front of my face. The words remained before my eyes, uninterrupted by the descending bat. I looked around, noting that everything else in the room looked normal. I understood now. A kidnapping was bad enough, but this was more, much more. I took out my notepad and turned to Chuck.
“Do you mind if I write this down?”
Chuck said, “Go ahead, if you think it will help.”
“I don’t know what to think,” I said truthfully. I glanced at Jenna, and said, “Would you please call Chief Mulroney and tell him I’m here, and that he needs to get here right away? And tell him it needs to be him personally, not one of his men.”
Jenna said, “Sure. I’ll use the phone in our bedroom.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I started writing the first line of what was in front of me: Your son is with us in the year 2194....
Chapter 4… Big Ice
Roy went through the same drill I’d gone through earlier and tried to reach into the words. “I’ve never heard of any technology that can do this,” he said, finally satisfied that it was no illusion.
Roy was hardly the picture of a man in control, and if there was one thing about Roy that stood out, it was just that—the type of guy you’d turn to if the hordes were charging. His cell phone went off, which was good because for a second I thought he’d turned into a statue.
“Well it only took them six damned hours to get here, and I’m tied up right now,” he carped into the phone. “Just tell them to have a seat and shut up for a while.” Seeing my questioning look, he said, “The FBI boys finally made it.”
Chuck Robelle said, “You’re not going to bring them in on this, are you? You’ve read the demands.”
Roy put a hand on Chuck’s shoulder. “I’m not doing anything right now, but I’ve got to think on this. I’ll be back, okay?” Chuck and Jenna both nodded, and Roy turned to me. “Johnny, you ride with me so we can talk about this and everything else that happened today.”
I looked at my watch. It was 4:05 and I needed to get a story in by 6:00. The paper was going to lead with it, and plowing out two thousand words in less than two hours was going to be challenging, to say the least, especially when I recalled my editor’s warning.
“There are going to be a thousand stories out there tomorrow, and this is happening in our own back yard. Make it good, Pappas, and don’t come to me with the same shit everyone else is going to shovel.”
Well, that was clear. I needed something good, something unique, and something on time. So far, I had none of that.
“Are you coming?” Roy barked as I stood there wondering how I was going to accomplish the impossible.
Outside, I hopped into Roy’s truck and we chugged back to the station in silence. I thought Roy had wanted to talk, but his eyes seemed kind of glazed over and focused on something far away. I took the opportunity to try and come up with some brilliant insights on what had happened during the day, and I pulled out my notepad. Roy’s truck bounced and rattled so much, however, that I could barely read what few notes I’d taken. It didn’t matter though; the story—or lack of one—was in my head. Breathing in the smell of fish and cigars from inside the truck, I suddenly realized that what I was holding was possibly the biggest story since… what? The ascension of Christ? This was far beyond wars and invasions. This was far beyond medical breakthroughs. As far as I knew, this was beyond anything anyone had ever experienced. I reread the words from David Robelle’s room,
which I’d transcribed onto my notepad:
Your son is with us in the year 2194. He is
safe, and will continue to be on the condition
that you do not report, or repeat, anything
about what you see here. We will return
David unharmed once he has fulfilled
his obligation to our cause. If you violate
this demand, you will never see him again.
The note was unsigned.
I turned to Roy, who was still staring intently through the windshield. “You’re not going to let me write about this, are you?”
“I figured you’d get around to that sooner or later,” he said.
* * * * *
Back at the station, I commandeered a computer while Roy busied himself with the FBI pukes, as he called them. All the while, my mind kept focusing on the enormity of what I couldn’t reveal. Time travel: was it possible? What was the cause mentioned in the note, and why would David be important to something that was happening 190 years from now? Listening to the activity around me, the questions were stacked like bricks inside my head. Normally, when I had a grip on a story, the keyboard strokes were a symphony in my ears. Now, my fingers may have well been those of a dead man.
I got up and went to the water cooler, hoping a lightning bolt of inspiration would blast through the roof and strike me. As I filled my cup, I noticed the door to the holding cells in the back of the station. There were three cells, I knew, and my eyes settled there as I drank. I poured myself another cup of water, and I remembered what Roy had said earlier in the day, that one of his officers had put a TV back there on Thursday to let the prisoners watch a football game. I wondered if it was still there. I peeked in; it was. I walked in, noting a bouquet in the air somewhere between piss and Pine Sol, and I switched on the TV. The very first image was Irene O’Connor—damn her, she was everywhere—and I noticed a couple of pictures superimposed on the screen behind her. One of them was the governor. I punched up the sound.
“We go now to ABC News correspondent Scott Crowder at the statehouse in Trenton, where Governor McKenzie has already begun addressing the matter.”