Lost Friday Read online

  I collapsed into a heap as I completed my run, and thought that the bastards who’d taken me weren’t as smart as they thought they were. Their technology didn’t work. I still remembered something, as did Anne Behari and Roy Mulroney, and I figured the next step for me would be to get us back together, and search the nooks and crannies of our brains and bring out whatever was hiding in there.

  I didn’t know who the fuck Barbie was, and I wondered if that was important.

  Chapter 13… More To Come

  The phone rang. It was Romano. “Where are you?” I asked, rubbing sleep from my eyes.

  “At the office.”

  I looked at the clock and saw that it was 5:30 in the f’ing morning.

  Romano said, “When are you coming in?”

  “You, me, and Remington have a meeting scheduled for 7:30, remember?”

  “Forget it. She’s gone. I sent her to D.C. last night,” Romano admitted.

  “You did what? I thought I was in charge of her assignments.”

  “Yeah, well, write a letter.”

  “Who’s she going to see?”

  “The president.”

  I whipped off the covers, feeling the effects of my nighttime run on the beach. I didn’t mind, however, figuring I wouldn’t feel sore if I’d wakened up 190 years into the future. “How’d she wangle that?”

  “She called the White House and told someone down there that if the president didn’t agree to see her immediately and set things straight, she publish the truth about his visit to Sea Beach without his input. Someone called her back right away.

  “What truth was she talking about?”

  “I don’t know; she was bluffing. I need you to come in as soon as possible,” Romano went on.

  “Why?”

  “Because Roy Mulroney and I are waiting for you. We have Krispy Kremes.”

  Roy was there too? Nerves were fraying, I figured. I was getting sick of this early morning shit. “Do you have any of those glazed jelly ones?”

  “Just for you.” Romano hung up.

  Bribing me with Krispy Kremes? Good move.

  * * * * *

  I walked into the conference room and the TV was on. Romano slid a box of donuts across the table and said, “Shut up and listen.” CNN was on, and some morning news chippie that I hadn’t seen before was rattling on about Lost Friday, saying nothing that we didn’t already know. As predicted, however, my write it all story had ignited a media firestorm. There were three reports. The first was from NASA headquarters, and had to do with what was already being touted as “helium byproduct.” The second was from the Pentagon, and the third was from the White House. That was the most accusatory, and I knew some poor government schmuck who knew nothing about it would end up explaining why the abductions of the NASA scientists had been squelched. There were all kinds of speculation on what the doodle meant, but none of it had to do with a swastika on a field of blood.

  Normally, Romano was about as emotional as a block of ice, but he was sitting there proud as a peacock with a hard-on. For the last four days, the Press had scooped every paper in the country, on the biggest story in the country, and perhaps the world. As I sat there contemplating the situation, I thought: funny, my name was never mentioned in any of this, and I was the one who broke all these stories. Not only that, these so-called reporters on CNN were regurgitating my stuff as if they’d scooped it themselves—the bastards. I figured that, at minimum, I warranted an on-camera interview with Paula Zahn, or something.

  Roy looked at me, and said, “It worked. We’ve got everybody running around looking for smoke signals.”

  “That’s just peachy,” I said sourly. “We’re not getting credit for any of this.” Usually, Romano put me in my place when I used that snotty tone of voice, but he didn’t. Looking at his expression, I think he saw my point. Therefore, I got even snottier. “And what’s with the National Guard checkpoints?”

  “We’re still being overrun by media people, souvenir collectors, and pain-in-the-ass whack-jobs who have nothing better to do,” Roy replied. “Not only that, at least one of those terrorists is among us, and I need to find out who that is. I still need to protect this town, and I figure limiting access across the borders might be a good way to do it.”

  “Can you do that?” I asked. “I mean, legally?”

  Roy’s gesture made his answer abundantly clear. Looking at the TV, I knew he was right once again. Unfortunately, it also limited CNN’s ability to interview me and tell me how great my stories were. “It should be us on that TV screen,” I said.

  “That’s not important,” Roy went on. He tossed the future newspaper on the table. I’d almost forgotten about that. “We need to get back to why David Robelle is so important, and how the teachers tie into this. Johnny, you’re going to write another story.”

  I heard Romano grunt and figured he’d just had an orgasm.

  * * * * *

  Allison Kovar was nervous, and Scott Reemer was wary. I’d thought about interviewing them separately, but concluded the synergy of having them together might be helpful in discovering how David Robelle tied in to Lost Friday. Funny, before our session I started writing questions about their solo excursions into the future, but then I remembered that they hadn’t even happened yet. I was getting so confused with the time thing that I couldn’t remember if I was coming, or going, or doing both at the same time.

  “Do you think there’s any way to avoid being taken again?” Allison Kovar asked, the revelations of the day before clearly weighing heavily on her. “I’ll go and live with my sister up in Long Branch if I have to.”

  That wasn’t a bad thought, but I said, “Given the abductions of the NASA scientists, it seems unlikely that locating outside the town limits would prevent it. Besides, unless you stopped teaching, you’d be in town most of the time anyway.”

  That unsettled her even more. Allison Kovar was a small, wiry woman, late fifties maybe, never married, I’d discovered. She’d been teaching math for thirty-four years, nineteen of them at Southern Shore Regional High School since its inception. Her eyes were quick, and bright, and she was the type of woman who could be sharp as a tack well into her nineties. Not teaching math was out of the question for Allison Kovar.

  Scott Reemer was nothing like her. Big and hulking, he came across like a big teddy bear, but he displayed a passion that seemed to glow behind soft, chocolate-colored eyes. I figured in another life he’d been a Labrador retriever. Scott Reemer had been at Southern for three years.

  “Let’s talk about David Robelle,” I said, ignoring the apprehension that hung in the room like smog. “What would make him so important to the people who abducted him?”

  “Futuristic terrorists,” Reemer spat belligerently. “Let’s call them what they are. Doing otherwise makes them more noble than they deserve to be.” Anger flared in his eyes.

  We’d commandeered an empty classroom, and both teachers had arranged to take lunch at the same time. Only Scott was eating, however, perhaps more a nervous reaction than hunger. I proceeded cautiously, not only because I didn’t want anyone’s thought process to lock up—I need creative thinking here—but also because I was still in the process of rediscovering Lost Friday, and all its implications, for myself. I must have reread my stories and reexamined my notes a hundred times since my follow up visit to the year 2194, and I had a sense of what the teachers were feeling. I mean, I’d come back relatively unharmed, and I didn’t feel all that rosy about it; for them, well, I figured they were in constant upchuck mode. Still, I was hot-to-trot on the story again, and I had to find out what was so important about David Robelle.

  “David has the quickest mind I’ve ever come across,” Allison Kovar volunteered.

  “Ever?” I questioned. “How long have you been teaching?”

  “Not just in teaching,” Kovar responded. “I mean, forever as I know it. My advanced senior class in differ
ential calculus?”

  I nodded.

  “He’s teaching it.”

  “What do you mean, he’s teaching it?”

  “Just that. I arranged for him to take the class even though he’s only a junior, and three weeks into it he’s got the text memorized, and asks if he could teach a couple of the classes.”

  I thought, differential calculus, eeyouza! I would rather have gotten a tooth drilled.

  Scott Reemer said, “Did you know he scored 180 on an IQ test last year?”

  “That’s pretty high, isn’t it?”

  “David’s intelligence is probably in the top one-half-of-one-percent of the world’s population, possibly higher.”

  Higher than one-half-of-one-percent? In the world? “Who has IQs like that?”

  “Just to put it in perspective, Einstein’s IQ was about 160.”

  “You know a lot about this IQ stuff?”

  “I’ve had some training. I’m also a guidance counselor, and I have to know how intelligence measures work.”

  “So if Einstein is at 160, who’s at 180?” I asked, really interested in hearing this.

  Reemer said, “Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci.”

  “No shit—I mean, no kidding,” I corrected for Kovar’s benefit. “David Robelle is up there with them?”

  “And Galileo.”

  Hello. I looked at the notes I’d just written: destined for great things, research scientists, intelligence in the top one percent. “Does David have any hobbies?” I asked.

  * * * * *

  “When were the teachers abducted?”

  “You mean, when will they be abducted?”

  Roy said, “Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

  Time was a blur for him too. “According to the article I haven’t written yet…” I don’t know why, but I smiled at that. “… Allison Kovar and Scott Reemer were abducted together.”

  “Do you mean actually together, or in the same time frame?”

  I looked at the article, although I didn’t need to. “I wrote that they were abducted on the same day. I don’t know, I mean, I didn’t know—”

  “You mean you won’t know.”

  “Right… any more than that. I suppose it’s possible that they could have been taken from separate locations.”

  “And when is that going to be?”

  “The second of October.”

  “That’s only three days from now.”

  I saw the twinkle in Roy’s eye, and took a moment. I’d been with him so much the last five days that I’d learned to recognize his idiosyncrasies. “What?” I said.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You don’t have to.” I shifted away, as much from the fact that Roy was starting to get a little gamey as anything else. He’d started with Romano before dawn, and he probably hadn’t showered since the day before. Now, in his office, the whole room smelled Roy-like.

  I yawned, and reached for a Styrofoam cup of Demetrius’s motor oil coffee. After my interviews with the teachers, I’d stopped at the diner and got a couple of them to-go. Unlike the previous days, the diner was nowhere near as full, and I figured the National Guard checkpoints were having their effect. Demetrius said that most people were actually relieved the checkpoints were there, and, for the most part, everyone was going about their normal business. Sitting there, waiting for the coffee, I must have zoned out. I reflected, oddly, that in times of great danger, or great horror, people did that—they went about their business. In my own mind, I traveled back in time, observing people during the Holocaust, or Vietnam, both times I’d never experienced, and I saw people performing the menial tasks of everyday life, waiting for the unspeakable to descend down upon them. That’s what it was like in Sea Beach, and it was no way to live.

  I asked Demetrius to put the coffees on my tab, and figured I’d head to the station to touch base with Roy one more time before my deadline. That’s when I saw her. If you think Kelli Remington had legs, you should have seen this fine specimen of babehood. She came up to pay her check just as I turned to leave. She took her change from Demetrius—who was drooling all over the counter—and she did one of those stretch moves as she put on her jacket. It must have been a religious jacket, because I immediately thought: Jesus Christ! At minimum, she was Victoria’s Secret material, and she gave me a little smile as she sidestepped my tongue, which had inexplicably unfurled itself and was flopping around on the floor in front of her.

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  Demetrius said, “She must be new in town. She’s only been in a couple of times.”

  “Reporter?”

  “I don’t think so. She’s nothing like you. Besides, she wouldn’t be able to get through the security checkpoints if she didn’t live in town, right?”

  I said, “Right,” and reeled my tongue back in; a chick like that was probably married to some rich dude with a big schnitzengruben, who ate skinny Greek reporters for lunch.

  I got to the police station around two, and filled Roy in on my session with the teachers.

  “I already know all that,” he said when I told him that David was a genius.

  “You do?”

  “It’s my job. I was hoping you’d come up with something new.”

  So much for investigative reporting. I looked out the window and sulked for a minute, watching the wind gusts off the ocean suck up debris and whirl up the street. Christ, I thought, I might as well just hang around Roy all day and simply report on that. All of my feeds had come from him anyway, and I had the feeling that if I won a Pulitzer for any of this, it would have his name on it.

  Roy sensed my frustration. “What are you all pissed off about?”

  “If you already knew about David, why the hell did you send me out there? Between you and Romano, I wonder who’s in charge of this story.”

  “Don’t get your undies in a bunch, son. It was you who figured out the doodle; it was you who came up with the date; and it was you who came up with the idea of a jury.”

  Yeah, it was, wasn’t it? I felt a little better.

  “I’ve been trying to tie it all together,” Roy went on.

  Okay, now my juices were flowing again. “What’s a jury?” I asked.

  “Why are we going over that again? You know what a jury is.”

  “I mean what’s its function?”

  “To hear evidence and give a verdict.”

  “Right answer. And to hear testimony.”

  “All right,” Roy said. He leaned back in his desk chair, making it creak with pain, and laced his fingers behind his head. “So there’s a jury and a trial going on in the year 2194, and—”

  “Not necessarily,” I interrupted.

  His eyes met mine. “So, what is it then?”

  “Think about it. The date.”

  Roy took a sip of coffee, and grimaced. “What about it?”

  “If the date has anything to do with the jury, or a trial, what would it be? Once a trial starts, you can’t predict the exact day it will end, or the exact day a jury will hand down a verdict. You can, however, designate the day a trial will start.” A smile actually found its way to Roy’s face. I hadn’t seen much of that lately.

  He glanced at his desk calendar. “If this were the year 2194, that would mean that the trial would be starting....” He looked up at me. “Tomorrow.”

  You know how it is when you’re playing computer solitaire, and the cards start falling, one-after-the-next? That’s how it was right then. I turned and spoke into the window. “Roy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What happens before a trial starts?”

  “You have to select the jury.”

  I whirled. “And where does the jury come from?”

  Roy’s eyes got as big as saucers. “A jury of one’s peers! Holy Jesus! David Robelle is on trial, and the residents of Sea Beach were taken for the jury selection. That’s why they had to live within the town�
��s borders.”

  “Could it be Allison Kovar and Scott Reemer were taken, I mean, will be taken, two days after the start of the trial to give testimony?”

  Not able to sit still now, Roy started pacing. Me? My heart was beating so hard I felt it pounding in my ears. “What about the NASA scientists?”

  Roy scratched his head. “I don’t know. Maybe they’re on trial too.”

  It made sense. All of them were on trial—for something—but we needed to know what it was, and why people from this time period were being tried 190 years from now. I needed to know those scientists’ identities, and what they were working on. I suddenly knew Remington’s next assignment.

  I watched Roy pace, and said, “If the trial starts tomorrow, that means that twelve more people are going to disappear from Sea Beach today.”

  Roy just looked at me, and he had this real blank look on his face.

  Chapter 14… Dinner At Roy’s

  This time, I wrote the story the way I wanted to write it, not worrying about instructions or approvals from anyone. Of course, Romano had some suggestions, but I said, “I’m not rewriting one single, solitary, goddamned word.”

  He smiled momentarily, and said, “Okay, print it.”

  Now, rereading the headline, I got all goose-bumply. KIDNAPPERS NEED BOY GENIUS. The story was basically a profile of David Robelle, and laced with innuendo. I didn’t actually write anything about a trial because all of that was speculation and I didn’t have a source, except myself, but I wasn’t ready to write about my own abduction—yet. I’d do that when I knew all the facts. Still, I knew that the story would create another buzz, and I called the Robelles to let them know it was coming.

  I reviewed the story with Jenna—Chuck was putting in some time at work; the guy was steady as a rock—and rather than objecting, which is what I expected, she said, “At this point, it doesn’t matter. With all of the other garbage in the news about David, at least I know whatever you write will be the truth, Mister Pappas.”