Time Lapse Page 14

  “What kind of crime?” Pike said.

  “He doesn’t know yet . . . It looks like I’m going to have to go back there. That should be fun.” She sounded pretty scared.

  “Are they going to . . . like, hold you or something?”

  “The autopsy apparently came back inconclusive . . . but there may have been someone at the resort--the second one--who said they witnessed something.”

  “So? What did they witness?”

  “No one’s saying . . . I don’t know why I’m laying this all you . . . Maybe I’m thinking I might need you to break me out of jail, or something.” She was crying now. The irony, Pike thought, is she can break herself out of jail.

  “Okay Dani. Take it easy . . . You’re going to be fine. It’s only because of what went down in Pocatello that they’re even raising an eyebrow . . . Most important thing though, don’t talk about it to anyone.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Even if you think they’re your best friend. Like your lady in New York, the organ donor’s wife . . . Do not let your guard down.”

  “Okay . . . How are you?”

  “Don’t worry about that right now. I’ve got to take care of something this week. Hopefully . . . After that, you got my full attention.”

  “That’s sweet of you,” she said. “I’m sure it’s a false alarm, my mind running away from me, is probably all.”

  “When the dust settles, that type of thing usually is,” Pike said, having no idea what he was talking about but trying to help her relax.

  Hannameker had been holding off playing the drums out of politeness, and when Pike and Dani hung up he played for a while and then stopped and said, “Dog I have to be honest with you -- what was that? You’re not going gay on me now or something, are you?’

  Pike was still absorbing the phone call and was confused for a minute. “No, no,” he said. “That’s a gal. A girl, a woman, whatever . . . with an i.”

  “Fair enough,” Jack said. “Plenty of surprises out of you though, I’m learning.” Giving him an amused look. “Let’s see, you had a crime, a witness, a Pocatello thing, an organ donor . . . what else?”

  Jack was once again polite enough to not press the issue.

  “So,” Pike said. “Cathy then. Another day in the books.”

  “Yep. She’s actually going to stop by for a little while, if you don’t mind. She wanted to see the finished product, and maybe try to get inside the thing herself.”

  “Sure, fine,” Pike said, though he was thinking that was a weird thing for her to want to do, climb into it.

  “Hey listen,” Jack said. “I have to thank you once again. A lot of guys might hold a grudge, or whatever.”

  “Oh no,” Pike lied. “Water under the bridge. Totally . . . This is gonna sound kind of crazy, but Audrey’s coming over too.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. You know . . . she’s into seeing it too.”

  “Hold your horses there, pardner. Something like that, it wouldn’t just materialize out of thin air.”

  “No,” Pike said. “I forced the issue. Last night.”

  “Holy Smokes,” Jack said, and he put his hands on his head and started pushing his hair back, his eyes big.

  “If it’s any consolation,” Pike said, “she and I, there’s a chance at least, that it could be very short-lived.”

  Hannamaker was cooling down a notch. “Nah, that’s my fault,” he said. “Don’t pay attention to anything I just said . . . God bless you, go for it.”

  “Thanks . . . you eat?”

  “Actually no, I haven’t.”

  “I’ll go get a couple pizzas. You take it easy, play some more drums.”

  “That’s all right, I’ll go,” Jack said.

  “Nah,” Pike said. “You need to hold down the fort, so to speak. In case the two of them show up at the same time . . . Could be interesting.”

  “Fuck you,” Jack said, but he was smiling, and Pike was pretty sure things were back to normal.

  ***

  True to her word, Frankie the librarian came strolling into Starbucks on Wednesday at 3:30 on the button.

  She took her coffee straight and black, which Pike admired. He couldn’t understand the appeal of all the goofy, sweet concoctions at Starbucks that were pretending to be coffee but were more like fake milkshakes.

  In any case, Frankie got right down to business. She opened her laptop to something called the California Museum of Top-40 Radio.

  “Before we take a look at specifics,” she said, “my thought was this: If you can narrow your timeline focus through the use of music, and events of the day, I believe you’ll avail yourself of the best opportunity.”

  Pike was sort of following her, though it didn’t make a lot of sense. “You mean, figure out what songs they were playing back then?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, “but the idea is to try and utilize the whole package.” She started clicking around on the radio museum website. “Here, for instance,” she said. “KEWC, Sacramento. It’s one of the older stations on the west coast. The format now is talk, but in 1993 KEWC played hits of the day, as it was the tail-end of the top-40 radio era.”

  Pike was thinking if Frankie was 37 now, she would have been a teenager back then, and probably listened to that stuff a lot.

  She continued. “This is truly an amazing site, actually. As you can see, they’ve archived KEWC and several other stations. You can pick an exact week, and listen to their programming for one whole day, normally a Monday. Most of it has survived.”

  As a demonstration she tried the week of June 21st, 1993. The KEWC morning DJ started talking, and then a song came on. It was set up like a podcast, where you could advance through the day, and there were different DJ shifts, with a new one starting up every three or four hours.

  “But the music is essentially the same no matter what time you tune in,” Frankie said. “There was no wiggle-room. Stations were very much dependent on song charts to determine their playlists. They still are, at least those that remain standing.”

  Pike was following along on his own computer. He heard snippets of two songs that he sort of knew, Have I Told You Lately by Rod Stewart, and That’s The Way Love Goes by Janet Jackson.

  “Then there are the newscasts,” Frankie was saying. “A bit of a lost art today, with the proliferation of social media and such. KEWC had something called 20-20 Beat, which meant there was a 3-minute newscast every 20 minutes. An element you might appreciate is the clean, clear diction of the typical reporter reading the news copy.”

  “I don’t care about anyone’s diction,” Pike said.

  “Certainly not, not as pertains to your project,” she said. “I just wanted to bring to your attention the contrast, what with 25 years later, the errors and overall sloppiness of our current media.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” Pike said. “You want a refill? And how about a pastry or something, to go with it?”

  “You’re sweet, but I’m fine . . . The larger point of course, is that the newscasts bring to light the events of the day.”

  “So you’re saying . . . pick something that happened--something unique to back-then--pick a song, lump ‘em together, and away we go.”

  “Essentially, yes. Naturally that is something . . . the away we go part . . . that only you can determine.”

  Pike closed up his laptop. If he smoked cigarettes, now felt like a good time to light one up.

  He said, “If we were sitting here last summer having this conversation, I’d put a call in to the authorities to have us both hauled off to a mental institution . . . Now, what the heck, this sounds as good as anything else.”

  Frankie said, “I like your sense of humor, Pike.”

  “The good part, if there is one? I seem to be pretty okay at making it back. So if I screw up the outbound, you’ll probably see me again . . . Of course if something did happen to go haywire with the inbound--you might not see me for 23 years.”

  Pi
ke was trying to figure it out, did it work that way? Or would the one hour per one day rule still be in effect, and in that case how old would he be in 2017 if he got stuck in 1993, and had to live it out.

  It was too confusing, and what was the point? There was no point.

  “One final question,” he said. “Not so much a question, more like something to run by you . . . who is an intelligent person who thinks I’m crazy but is kind enough to play along.”

  “You may have me pegged incorrectly, your never know,” Frankie said, and she smiled. She was still being the objective librarian, which Pike could appreciate.

  “My friend and I, we built this little structure in my basement. It’s cozy down there. I feel like I can clear my head.”

  “A kind of sanctuary for you, it sounds like.”

  “Maybe, yeah. When I’ve . . . traveled . . . so far, I’ve gone pre-1956. It’s a long story. That part seems insane . . . Among many other parts, of course, but forget those. The point is, can I go from down there? The Box, we call it.”

  Frankie considered it. “I take it, the pre-1956 refers to the age of your starting point . . . If that’s the case, I don’t know that I would initiate a radical change.”

  “So if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it . . . that’s how I was looking at it too, unfortunately.”

  “Yet it occurs to me, are you certain how old your house is?”

  “I think it was built in the ‘70s. My mom was always complaining about the avocado green all over the place, and finally my dad agreed and they changed it.”

  “Is your house in a subdivision?”

  “You mean like a tract neighborhood? No. It’s just on a regular All-American street, I guess you’d call it.”

  “Are there variations in the ages of your neighbors’ homes? . . . What I’m getting at, is possibly your house replaced an existing one.”

  “Wow . . . and that one may have been pre-1956. That’s not bad . . . How would I know?”

  “I believe for starters you can examine the foundation. There’s also the assessor’s office, at City Hall.”

  Pike was flashing on poor Mitch digging through all those records down in some out-of-the-way dusty place in New Mexico, for what seemed like weeks. But this was interesting.

  “You’ve been great,” Pike said, and they both packed up their stuff and stood up. “I think that about covers it,” he said.

  The librarian put her hand on his shoulder and looked him straight on, and it was a different look than he’d seen from her before. “Godspeed,” she said.

  Chapter 18

  First Pike needed to eat, and then he really did have to get down to business if he was actually going to take this little road trip tomorrow.

  When he got home, Jack wasn’t in the basement, or The Box, so Pike texted him to see if he wanted to grab something, but he said he was having dinner at Cathy’s.

  Pike thought about it, stopped himself, and then went ahead and called Audrey. She said she’d love to meet him, only she had a huge night of studying on her plate.

  Of course she treated it like it was no big deal, as though she’d see him tomorrow at school, and they’d take it from there, and you couldn’t blame her.

  The other night, when Cathy and Audrey both came over, it started off weird, all four of them a little tight for their own reasons, but it ended up okay. The girls both made it over the top, into The Box, and Pike got a hold of a some beer from upstairs, and they told stories, and some of them were pretty dang funny. Especially Hannamker. Pike didn’t know he had it in him.

  Everyone stuck around until close to midnight, and Pike could see it was good for Audrey, that she needed more times like this, many more, where she could put the real world on hold.

  Tonight though, was what it was. What could you do?

  Pike settled on some microwavable potstickers from Costco upstairs which was a letdown but didn’t waste much time.

  He locked himself in his room and went back on that website, the top-40 radio museum deal. The example Frankie had run was June 21st, 1993, and that seemed decent, he couldn’t see why another week would be any better. It would be the beginning of summer, but probably not as hot yet as Mr. Milburn complained about Chico being at its worst, and the days would be nice and long, in case that might help anything.

  Audrey and Hailey would be out of school though for summer vacation, so that could complicate things a bit--but wait a second, there were no Audrey and Hailey up in Chico. Why he did keep getting mixed up on this stuff? The darn parents themselves would only be, say 20, 21, if they graduated from Hamilton in 1990. Which is what Audrey told him in the car on the way home from Manhattan Beach, and hopefully that still held.

  So yeah, what was wrong with that week in June? There was the slim possibility that the Milburns would have some vacation time around then and go someplace, but that was a chance you took, and even then you’d just most likely wait them out.

  There was the Rod Stewart song, the Janet Jackson one, and another by Duran Duran that was familiar, that the station kept playing that day too.

  The news part was all over the map. Pike kept skipping around on the podcast to different times of day, hoping to find something he could relate to. You had a major drug bust in Modesto, there was a rock concert in Sacramento where some idiot streaker delivered a pizza onstage naked, you had a shark attacking a surfer north of San Francisco. Three big rigs got into a jackknife thing together on Highway 80 outside Auburn, and there was a chemical spill involved, and a major traffic mess.

  Nationally you had the usual announcements out of Washington, most of them as boring as watching paint dry. Bill Clinton was president, he’d been in there about six months. Either way, national news wasn’t going to cut it for someone trying to land in Chico.

  Then on one of the evening newscasts there was one more announcement, almost as an afterthought, that the Sacramento Hobies were on the road in Chico tonight for the start of a three-game series against the Buttes. Jeez, these names, but Pike assumed it was baseball and googled it.

  The Western Straits League had apparently folded in the late ‘90’s, but right now, in 1993, there was a minor league baseball game going on in Chico. It was an independent league, so not your typical match-up between the farm systems of two major league clubs, but from what Pike could gather, the quality of play was good, somewhere between between double-A and triple-A ball.

  There was a photo of the stadium, if you could call it that, and it was a nice setting, with the far side, past the outfield wall, framed by surrounding orchards.

  Today, according to google, the whole shebang had been converted to a business park, out off 20th street past the fairgrounds, and a lot of those orchards were gone.

  Pike jumped ahead and found that on that night, Monday June 21st, Chico beat Sacramento 2-1 on a walk-off home run by Anthony Knight, who, as Pike kept searching, would go on to play two seasons with the Dodgers. There was a picture of the guy, smiling after the game, a slight gap between his two front teeth.

  Pike bookmarked everything and shut the computer down for a while and thought it through. All these bits and pieces, it seemed silly that that could work . . . But maybe, yeah, you lump them all together--the songs in your head . . . the game . . . the picture of the stadium that’s not there anymore . . . the dude hitting the walk-off . . . even the weather that day. Maybe you have a shot.

  In fact . . . why not put on the damn podcast while you were at it? You had the dj’s cracking jokes and announcing the songs and the news people chiming in every 20 minutes, starting every newscast with the time and date.

  What could that hurt? The worst thing is you might end up in Sacramento instead of Chico, though of course worse than that would be ending up there and also way off, which meant either before or after the Milburns actually lived in Chico. But Pike was learning that in this business--at least up to a point--you took your chances.

  Then there was the basement issue again, whether he
might actually get lucky and be able to travel from The Box.

  He went downstairs with a flashlight, and it didn’t take much to see that the foundation walls, coming up out of the very bottom point down there, looked kind of old. There was cement all over the place of course, but there were noticeable big stones, rocks, tied together in sections by some kind of mortar, and you could see transition points where it looked like fresher walls had taken over and filled out the rest of the basement up to where the wood began.

  It was all so silly but, as Frankie had said, and Mitch as well, why rock the boat? Though it was awfully appealing to use The Box, where not only did you feel safe and sound, but you didn’t have to go anywhere or dodge anyone, such as a custodian in a school closet.

  If it really turned out the house was built directly on the foundation of an older one, that pre-dated 1956, did that count?

  Pike was tempted to call Mitch. Not to ask him that question so much, but whether you could get screwed up somehow.

  In other words, if you tried to travel from a non-qualifying starting place, would you just fail and that was it, no big deal? . . . Or could something bad happen because you violated some rule?

  The problem was Mitch wouldn’t have a definite answer, but he’d tell him he’d raised an interesting and important point that needed to be addressed. And then he’d launch into telling you his latest findings in the southwest.

  Pike made a decision that he was going to roll with it, do his dealings from The Box, as long as he could confirm that there was pre-1956 prior-house history, and that would require a trip to that assessor’s office Frankie was talking about, in the morning. You could check a lot of that online, it looked like, but he felt better about seeing some actual paperwork.

  ***

  There wasn’t much to do the rest of the night except kill time. He tried to read a Harlen Coben mystery novel that he got for Christmas last year and had never opened, but that didn’t last long.

  An inspirational movie sounded better, something that would take his mind off what might, or might not, happen tomorrow.