Lost Friday Page 9

  “This better be good,” he said without so much as a good-fucking-morning-to-you-asshole. “Where the fuck are you?”

  “I’m… I’m on my way in, boss.”

  Romano went off like a rocket, but there was nothing I could do to avoid it. When he was done, hoping I hadn’t caused him to burst a blood vessel, I said, “Boss?”

  “Yeah?” he screamed.

  “I think something is really wrong.”

  * * * * *

  Romano said, “Let’s go to the conference room.”

  I was about to say, “We could talk right here,” but I didn’t, seeing as he got up and blew past me like I had a disease. I followed, catching glances, and in some cases sneers, from everyone in the newsroom. Someone said, “Great story, Johnny,” and I smiled weakly, thinking the praise would mean more if I knew what it was for.

  Romano pushed into to the conference room and I stepped in behind him, surprised to see a room full of people. I was curious as to why Roy Mulroney was at one end of the table, with six other people, three men and three women, sitting around it. I was clueless as to who any of them were.

  Romano announced, “There’s been a development.”

  Chief Mulroney looked at me, and said, “Are you okay, son?”

  Romano went on to describe my apparent space cadet demeanor. I found out that the people I didn’t know were Scott Reemer and Allison Kovar, both teachers from the high school, along with two married couples, Chuck and Jenna Robelle, and Robert and Anne Behari. In the middle of the conference table was a large sheet of easel paper, on which was drawn a diamond made up of four other diamonds. I looked at it, and somehow I knew.

  “That’s not exactly right,” I said.

  Suddenly, it was so quiet you could actually hear people breathing. Everyone’s eyes were pressing on me, and I could sense a thousand unasked questions lurking behind them. I motioned toward the diamond, and said, “It needs to be on a sea of red.” I went to a white board and redrew it.

  When I was done, Roy Mulroney said, “Okay, I know what the symbol represents, but what’s with the red background?”

  I looked at Roy, and said, “It’s blood.”

 

  Chapter 12… Jogging For Memory

  Romano said, “What do you mean, you don’t remember? You’re a reporter, Pappas, you’re supposed to remember everything.” He turned away, muttering something obscene under his breath.

  Romano could have the temper from hell, and when he was sufficiently pissed off it was like the inside of his brain filled with white light. However, rather than bench my miserable ass and assign me to covering the local school board meetings—which, for him, would have been the easy way out—he kept pounding on me. I think the only reason he hadn’t been decked sometime during his years as managing editor is because his instincts were razor sharp and he could smell a story from behind a brick wall. When his smeller kicked in, he used his anger like a club, beating the story out of you when you didn’t even know you had it in you. This was like that.

  “Think, Pappas, or is that hair of yours keeping everything trapped inside?”

  Remington snickered, and I thought: what the hell was wrong with my hair? I had good hair, nice, thick, black Greek hair. Oh, maybe that’s what he meant. “I am thinking boss, but I can’t remember, I’m telling you.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Not even the president?”

  “What president?”

  “Of the United States.”

  “What about him?”

  Romano waved his arms like a wounded pigeon. “I don’t believe this.”

  From the other side of the table, Roy asked, “You don’t remember talking to President Richardson on Sunday, with me?”

  “Sorry, Chief.”

  Romano threw down the last three copies of the Asbury Park Press. “Do you remember writing any of this?”

  All the papers led with my byline. I scanned the articles, picking out some pretty fantastic sounding stuff. “I wrote this?”

  Romano said, “Check your notes.”

  My notes. Of course. “Let me go to my desk.” A reporter’s notepad went everywhere he went; I mean, on vacation, on a date, to the strip joint, everywhere, short of the shower. If I had written the stories, I would have notes on them. I found my most recent notepad still in my jacket, and I hustled back to the conference room like a little chipmunk.

  Romano said, “Well?”

  I began shuffling through the pages and sure enough, I found notes on each of the stories. Man, had I been through the meat grinder, or what? My nerves buzzing now, I said, “Sorry, boss, I’m still coming up blank.”

  “So, how do you know this is a swastika on a field of blood?” Roy asked, pointing to the middle of the conference table.

  Anne Behari said, “I’d like to know that, too.”

  I felt my face flush with embarrassment, although I wasn’t sure what I was embarrassed about. I kept flipping pages feverishly, scanning each page while nine sets of eyes burned into me like branding irons. I came to the last page, and stopped abruptly as I found a cryptic diamond drawn on the page. Next to it was written b6l9orogd. I deciphered it immediately, but like everything else in the notepad, I had no clue as to when I’d written it. I looked at Roy, noting that this last page of notes wasn’t reflected in any of the stories spread out before me. I must have written it afterwards, but where?

  “This answers Roy’s question,” I said, tossing my notepad on the table. “The word next to the diamond is blood.”

  Romano swooped down on it like a barn owl after a mouse. The word blood was written in a simple code I used when I didn’t want anyone to know what I’d written. I kept everything in lower case, and simply inserted another letter, or a number, between each letter of the word. I looked at Romano. “It’s a code I use when I write something about you.” That got a chuckle out of everyone, but Romano didn’t laugh and I could see his neck starting to turn red.

  He gave me a sideways look, and said, “What about this?”

  I looked at another note, which was: b3ahrnb6ibe. “Barbie,” I said.

  “Who’s Barbie?” Romano asked. “And why were you using code?”

  “I don’t know to both questions, boss.”

  “What about this, Einstein?”

  I looked again: j5u9rdy. “Jury.”

  Romano repeated the words several times. “Barbie, jury; Barbie, jury…. And this?” he asked, pointing again.

  This time the letters were all capitalized, which meant they were numbers. Lower case code is for words, upper case code is for numbers. That’s the code. Upper case was in CUMBERLAND code: C equals 1, U equals 2, and so forth, each letter representing a number. My father taught it to me, and I think he got it from a Hasidic Jew in the jewelry business who juggled his books. It was written: N-MD-UCRB. “Looks like a date,” I said. “9-30-2194, September thirtieth, twenty-one ninety-four.” No one asked anything further about the codes, but the fact that I’d used them obviously indicated that I didn’t want anyone to know what I’d written. I also figured I probably wasn’t supposed to be taking notes when I took them.

  “Blood, Barbie, jury, date,” Romano said questioningly.

  “Maybe the teachers aren’t the only ones who revisited the future,” Roy said.

  I felt my heart skip a beat, and I gave him a look.

  “What else would explain the memory loss?” he went on. “Maybe they tried to wipe out your hard drive again.”

  Everyone was staring at me, and I thought Remington was going to say, “Eeeuuw!”

  Romano said, “I wonder what it all means.”

  * * * * *

  That night—it was Tuesday, September 28th, four days after Lost Friday—I got home and went for a run on the beach. I ran regularly, but I ran on the beach when my brain was particularly clogged for some reason. Running through the sand was strenuous, espe
cially in the dark, and I considered sweating a form of pushing out the old, and bringing in the new. My eyes adjusted to the moonlight reflecting off the toast-colored Jersey sand, and I trudged along like a plow horse, my face pointed into a cold mist of rain and sea spray. I pushed myself to the point of pain, if only for the reason that I thought I might be dreaming. You see, it had all been explained to me that afternoon—the Lost Friday thing, I mean—and, listening to it, I don’t know if I believed it, or not. I think that between Romano, Roy Mulroney, and all the other people in the room, I was pretty much up to speed on the whole phenomenon, but it all sounded too fantastic. My notes filled in any blanks, and by the end of the session I think my natural curiosity was back and my innate reporter’s instinct was to find answers to the open questions, which were many. It also didn’t break my heart to discover that I was working with Kelli Remington. I think the group rehash of the events served to clarify some of the occurrences for some of the other people as well.

  Take the notion that Lost Friday had occurred only within the boro limits, for instance. That was somewhat inaccurate in light of the scientists’ abductions. Given that, no one knew if the future abductions of Allison Kovar and Scott Reemer could be avoided, but the fact that I had reported them being returned unharmed in the article I hadn’t written yet, indicated that, increasingly, Lost Friday revolved around the missing scientists and David Robelle. Like the teachers, everyone else from Sea Beach who was abducted, or would be abducted, had been, or would be, returned unharmed, but with no recall of the event, like me.

  For some reason, however, the memory loss regarding Lost Friday wasn’t complete with me, and it wasn’t complete with Anne Behari or Roy Mulroney, either. That conclusion came about based on my observation that the diamond doodle wasn’t a doodle at all, but a symbol. Each of us had subconsciously regurgitated it, yet none of us recalled how it came to be lodged in our brain cells. The speculation was that, just like Lost Friday, we were not meant to remember it. When we delved further into the situation, it was Robert Behari who revealed that Anne had a photographic memory. Me? I was a reporter. I was paid to remember stuff, and I was damned good at it, although Romano, that prick, wouldn’t admit it at the table. Anyway, Roy had that type of mind as well—a memory like an elephant, he said—could remember license plate numbers on stolen car reports for months, could recite crime scene facts in the minutest detail from memory, and he never wrote a damned thing down. Who knew? But, in thinking about it, I recognized that Roy seemed to know everything, about anyone, in Sea Beach. I mean, first names, occupations, what year they graduated high school, jobs, kids’ names, middle names, phone numbers, everything and anything about everybody, probably including shoe sizes and favorite colors. That’s why it seemed like he was everyone’s best friend. Who knew it was simply because he was a walking memory stick?

  The speculation was that the three of us, Anne Behari, Roy, and me, had seen the symbol somewhere in the future, and the memory erase we’d been put through when we were returned didn’t work exactly as intended. It was only me that recognized it as a swastika, however. Speaking of the swastika, there were some interesting facts about that, as well.

  I passed my first mile marker and my feet were starting to feel like cement blocks. Good, I thought. Push out the old, bring in the new. I pressed on, the mist like needles on my cheeks.

  About the swastika. Originally, when I revealed what it was, everyone in the room assumed it was an evil symbol, especially after having seen the ransom note in David Robelle’s room. The note revealed that David was taken by someone who had a cause, and the speculation was that one type of organization that had a cause was terrorists. That tied in with the swastika symbol quite neatly. However, it was Kelli Remington who popped out of the room and came back with some interesting information.

  “The swastika is an ancient symbol that goes back three thousand years—way beyond its association with the Nazis and World War II,” she revealed. “The word swastika comes from the Sanskrit svastika—su meaning good, asti meaning to be, and ka as a suffix. Even early in the twentieth century, the swastika had positive connotations. The Germans began using the symbol in the mid to late 1800s because it had a long Germanic/Aryan history, and they wanted to portray themselves as an established culture despite the fact that Germany was not a unified country until 1871. By the twentieth century, it had become a symbol of German nationalism, and in 1920 Hitler adopted the symbol for the Nazi flag as a representation of the German struggle toward unity. It was soon thereafter that the swastika became a symbol of hate, anti-Semitism, and violence, but for three thousand years it had represented life, peace, laughter, and good luck. Go figure.”

  “Where did you get this?” I’d asked Remington.

  “Off the internet.”

  You gotta love the internet. This raised some other questions.

  My side started to ache as I continued my run, and my legs were weakening. Push on, I said to myself, and I plodded on to the second mile marker and turned around. The ocean was to my right now, sounding like a monster in the dark, and my heart was pounding as hard as the cold surf.

  The other questions focused on several other aspects of Lost Friday. One was why the abductors attempted to delete the collective memory of the entire town with regards to the event. No one offered any ideas about that, except that there would have been no such attempt if there wasn’t something to hide.

  Another point of discussion was why David Robelle had not been returned, and that came back around to the ransom note:

  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.

  Why didn’t David’s abductors want anyone to know why he was taken, or, more precisely, that he was taken at all? And what about his obligation? What was that all about?

  Roy offered the notion that my stories worked just as he’d predicted they would. He’d told me to “print it all,” under the assumption that revealing things the abductors didn’t want revealed would force them to make another move—and they did. They hijacked my skinny butt a second time, and Roy’s theory was that I was taken to redo my memory cleanse to stop me from exposing more information. No one disagreed with that, seeing as the ransom demand insisted on keeping David’s disappearance a secret, but my stories pretty much blew that to kingdom come. With the Robelles at the table, no one speculated on whether the kidnappers would abide by the terms of the ransom note and never return David, but the fact that they hadn’t given us the futuristic finger regarding his return only went to confirm Roy’s theory that, while the threat couldn’t be ignored, kidnappers were kidnappers, and anything they said couldn’t be interpreted as their final word. They wanted something, and therefore there was always negotiation; it was simply a matter of how to do it. Their own ransom note dictated that, giving us only one card to play to force their hand. It seemed to have worked—as far as we could tell—but one huge question still remained: why David?

  That’s where Scott Reemer and Allison Kovar came into the picture. As you might imagine, they were both pretty nervous, facing a situation they couldn’t control, knowing they were going to be abducted again, and knowing that there was no way we could stop it from happening. David was quite brilliant, they revealed, a scientific and mathematical whiz kid, so much so that Princeton, MIT, and several other top-notch schools had already lined up with full rides for him academically. It wasn’t clear why the teachers were—excuse me, would be—abducted and returned, except, perhaps, to offer information on David’s scholastic passions, those being math, science, and football. And music, Jenna Robelle volunteered. It seems David was quite
proficient with several instruments without ever having taken a lesson in his entire life.

  “Science, math, music, and athletics are all connected in the brain,” Allison Kovar said. “David’s skills in all these areas indicate that he has the basis for being a scientist of the highest caliber.” Scott Reemer agreed.

  “What kind of scientist?” Romano asked.

  “Anything he wants,” Kovar replied. “But, more than likely he would gravitate to physics and engineering.”

  As I was listening to her, my mind drifted back to the coded notes in my notepad. I tried to make the mental connections. I watched Allison Kovar, sitting in her chair, back straight, answering questions like she was giving testimony. That’s when I heard the DING! go off inside my brain and I started to put it all together. The other people who’d been abducted were scientists, too. What could they have in common? David was a scientific genius. Could he, or would he, be important in this field? Hmmm. I thought again of the notes I’d written in code in my notepad: blood, jury, Barbie, and the date September 30, 2194. Blood, I think, was understandable: terrorists, blood, there was a tie-in there. Jury was more obscure, but the question came up; what do juries do? They listen to testimony, is what they do. And where? At trials. Again, DING! The word testimony had already crossed my mind.

  As I passed my third mile mark, I thought through the searing sting in my lungs that I needed to trust my instincts on this. I mean, I was in a zone. Usually, when I got like that and I listened to someone else, I screwed up. That wasn’t to say that I didn’t screw up on my own—I had, and plenty of times—but no one else could feel the facts the way I did. The elements lined up inside my brain once again: blood, terrorists, jury, trial, testimony, September 30, 2194—someone was on trial, and David Robelle, the scientists, and the entire town of Sea Beach were part of it. And, it had something to do with science, or physics, or both. Plus, it was important enough that the people who’d taken David didn’t want anyone in this time period to know what it was.