March 2005

They pulled into Nancy's office parking lot.

"Oh no," Eamon said.  "I can't go in there."

"That's okay," she said.  "You wait here.  I won't be a moment.  I just need to use the computer."

Eamon watched her dash from the car into the front door of the shiny glass building.  She straightened her shirt and shook hands with a few people before rushing past them and into her office.  While he waited he looked again at the photo.  Her name was written on the back.  Lyssa Anne Matney.  

The car door opened.  

"Okay," Nancy said.  She was out of breath.  "I got an address, but I'm not sure it's the same guy."

"Where-"

"Across town. Close to the beach.  The boardwalk.  This guy has a condo apparently."

"A condo on the beach?"  Eamon frowned.

"Yeah," Nancy said as she backed out of the parking lot.  "How could a guy go from homeless and broke and living with your father to living in a condo on the beach?"
Eamon looked down again at the girl.  A dark thought crossed his mind.  He looked at Nancy.  he could tell she was thinking the same thing.

"Blackmail would explain a lot of this," she said.

"I know it would," he said.  "But blackmail for what?"

Nancy shook her head and looked back at the road ahead.

"I have my suspicions, but for now let's just talk to this man and learn what he can tell us.  Anything he was keeping secret couldn't matter now, right?  Your father is dead."

"But Avery-"

"No." Nancy shook her head.  "If this is what I think it is Avery has absolutely no idea."

Eamon stared out the window not seeing but thinking.  Nancy took a deep breath.  A deep line of worry crossed her forehead.  

"You have to have some idea of what I'm thinking Eamon.  You're a smart man."

Eamon closed his eyes.

"I know," he said.  His voice was tired and low.  "I know what you're thinking.  I'm trying not to think it myself.  The truth is that I really don't know what he was capable of."

"I didn't even realize he taught at a high school."

"He did, but only for about two years.  There was a woman he was seeing at the time.  She went through some emotional trauma and asked him to step in and take over her classes for her.  I think she lost a baby or something.  I know it was something big like that.  Something where she expected to be happy and then her world fell apart and she lost it for a while.  He talked about it sometimes.  He said it was the most fun he ever had teaching."  Eamon paused for just a moment.  "It was the only thing I ever remember him talking about where he showed any joy."

"Here it is,"  Nancy pulled the car into a parking lot by a tall thirty or forty story building.  She parked by the massive entrance.  They found William Toussant's room in only a few minutes.  A quick elevator trip and turn a corner and there it was, on the side facing the ocean.  Eamon rang the buzzer.

"Who is it?"  The man had a deep rough voice with a slurred edge to it.

"Mr. Toussant?"  Nancy said.  "My name is Nancy Burghere and-"

"Burghere?"  The man mumbled in what sounded like shocked surprise.  "Is this about old man Moren?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you are some relation to him, I take it?"

"Well," Nancy's own voice dropped off.  "Not anymore, but I was married to his son Eamon for a long time."

"Oh, yeah.  I thought I recognized the man with you there."  The lock unlatched and a tall man with thick wavy white hair ushered them inside.  By the door was a computer screen.  The outside of the door and the hallway could clearly be seen.  The old man gestured at the screen and smiled.  "Beats a peephole, don't it?"  He led them into the living room and offered them a glass of iced tea.  The living room was lined with huge sliding glass doors and windows with an uncluttered view of the beach and the ocean.  

Eamon gasped.  

"Yeah," Mr. Toussant said.  "That's some view, isn't it?"  He chuckled.  "Of course, the first hurricane to come along will wipe the place out.  You just can't get home owners insurance in this building.   That's why my rent's so cheap.  The builders made this place the same time they made that one down south in Florida that got wiped out in that category 2 surge."  He thought for a moment as he sat down in a fluffy white recliner.  "I forget the name of that storm.  Shouldn't have collasped in just a category 2, you know."  Then he smiled at them. "Doesn't matter right now, though.  I've got visitors."  Nancy and Eamon sat on the grey corduroy couch opposite him.  "What brings the Burghere's to my humble abode?"

Eamon reached in his pocket and pulled out the school picture of the red haired girl.  he looked at it for a second before handing it over to Mr. Toussant.  

"This," he said.  

Toussant looked at it for a moment, squinted, pulled out his bifocals and looked at it again through them.  He turned it over and read the girl's name.

"Lyssa."  He looked at the front again for a long thoughtful moment.  "I guess you've been going through his things.  You'd be bound to wonder what all that hocus pocus stuff was about anyway."  He looked at it again.  "I never understood," He said quietly.  "He was so obsessed."  He handed the photo back to Eamon.  "It was as if that child bewitched him somehow.  But, you know...  The truth is probably much simpler to explain.  It was such a shock when she died right there in his arms.  He was so upset.  He was so...  in love with her."  

Nancy let out a soft moan and lowered her head.  Eamon just stared at the old man.  

"He never touched her until she died in his arms.  He had longed to for so long, you know.  But he knew it wasn't right, wasn't natural."  He leaned back in his chair.  "He wasn't teaching her class.  He was teaching a class across the hall.  But he saw her everyday." He sighed and stared far away.  "I really don't think it would ever have been more than a grown man's fantasies had she lived.  He would have found something else to occupy himself and forgotten all about her, but when that car hit her and he ran to her and she grasped his hand while the ambulance was coming....  It broke him.  Broke his heart.  Broke his mind.  He became convinced there had to be some way to save her."

"He went to your lecture?" Nancy asked.

"Oh, well," Toussant said.  He chuckled.  "It was just a dinner, really.  I got to running my mouth about this great idea I had for a story and your father," he said to Eamon. "Got there just as I was explaining about my theory for time travel, only everyone was kidding me and no one would take me seriously.  See, I wanted to be a science fiction writer.  That crowd would humor me and let me tell them my ideas for just so long before they'd start making suggestions and then making fun of me.  But this time, for some reason, Moren took me seriously.  He pulled me aside after the dinner and talked to me.  I tried to tell him it was all just made up....  Just a story, but he refused to listen.  So, he insisted I help him build this impossible thing I'd invented in my head."

"That's so crazy,"  Nancy said.

"He was a young and foolish man at the time, ma'am," Toussant said with a smile.  "I was too.  After a while he got me believing the damned thing would work too and I gave up my own life to help him."  He took a deep breath.  His voice deepened.  "I gave up the only chance I ever had to marry, lost my job, ended my career....  I even gave up writing.  To this day I just can't pick up a pen or sit down at a typewriter.  I just can't.  I work as a greeter at a variety store.  I take the bus everywhere I need to go.  I have no family and very few friends, but they are good friends.  We spend a lot of time together.  All of us loners and bums...."  He smiled at Nancy's sad expression.  "Hey, don't you worry about me.  It's not the life I thought I would have, but it's not a bad life.  At least not until that hurricane comes with this building's name on it."

"How did this time machine thing...  How was it supposed to work?"  Eamon showed no emotion.  his face was hardened in a look of determination.

"You want to know about the bottles."  

"That, and the drugs."

"Drugs?"  Toussant jerked his head back.  "What drugs?"

Eamon took a deep breath.   "There are machines there at the house in the lab.  Intravenous machines...  Medical equipment.  Two gurneys.  My brother's arms are lined with needle tracks.  He goes on and on about having left our father behind in this other world."

"We've seen pictures-"  Nancy's voice broke when Eamon turned to her and gave her a look that said 'be quiet' but it was too late.

"Pictures?"

Eamon sighed.

"Yes," he said.  "There are hundreds of them.  There are shots of the house completely destroyed in them.  Shots with Avery standing there in the middle of it and hundreds of shots of red haired young girls."

Toussant said nothing.  He stared in Eamon's eyes.

"I want to see," he said.  

Nancy took Eamon's hand.  He turned to her.  She nodded.  he took a deep breath and turned back to Toussant.

"All right," he said.  "But you have to keep this quiet until we understand what happened to my father."

The old man nodded.