The Time Change Trilogy-Complete Collection Page 5

The tide was two feet away when the rock-busting equipment arrived. Three men stood on the wall and pounded with pickaxes below their feet. Two men placed the heavy metal pry bar in the middle of the wall, and Quentin Drake, a giant of a man, picked up the king-sized sledge hammer and began hitting the bar like a chisel.

  The tide was a foot away and the unnatural barrier had Jack’s internal warning buzzer on full klaxon-mode. He had seen or read about something like this somewhere.

  None of the men pounding on the wall were having any kind of luck even making the smallest of dents. Jack took some shovels of the incoming tide and splashed it up on the wall where the men pounded with the chisel bar. Instead of the water revealing rock, it revealed a glass-like material with rainbowed bluing, as if singed by a giant blast.

  What kind of material was lying hidden beneath these shallow waters and how did it get here? Jack wondered and splashed more water, this time further away from the working men. The tide was lapping at the bottom of the wall and he got right down in the water and examined the rock closely. Jack wasn’t a geologist, but he had taken a geology class his sophomore year. This wasn’t rock—this was shocked quartz grains and impact-derived glass. It had probably happened when a fifty-mile-wide impact crater had been created thirty-five million years ago, about five miles west of the town of Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore. This impact ring was probably a broken-off piece of the comet or meteorite.

  He couldn’t tell if the lagoon below was on the inner or outer side.

  The tide was coming in faster and water was now standing two feet deep in front of the wall. The foreman was bellowing to the men to work harder and faster.

  This was a problem.

  Jack threw several shovelfuls of water on the lagoon side of the glass wall. He hopped up and straddled the rim. The water was nearly four feet high on the tide side of the barrier. A couple of the men working in the lagoon pit pointed and laughed at Jack’s frantic attempt to scrub the wall. The bluing effect was ten times greater on this side of the wall, which meant that the blast had happened on the lagoon side and radiated outward, making the tide side weak and vulnerable to cave-ins.

  Especially with the added pressure of the incoming tide. Especially without the accrued sand to reinforce it. With pressure, this rock wouldn’t crumble—it would explode like safety glass.

  “You men down in the hole, get out!” Jack was standing on top of the wall and screaming at the top of his lungs. A few men made their way to the ladders and started out, but the majority just stared at him.

  “What the hell are you doing with my men? Only I tell them when to quit. Now get down or I’ll cut your dick off.”

  Jack turned back to the lagoon and managed to scream louder, “Cave in! Run for your lives!”

  This got their attention. Those who couldn’t make it to the ladder ran to the gradual incline a half a mile away. Jack was watching them go when a shovel hit him in the guts. Jack fell backwards off the wall into the tide side of the water. He was completely submerged and he felt the impact of the shovel hit the top of the water. He kicked off the wall and pushed himself out toward the river.

  He surfaced and Drake, the big, burly foreman, had his shovel raised over his head, ready to strike. The wall gave an ear-popping crack.

  “You need to get everyone out of the water!” Jack yelled. The men all turned in his direction, shaken from the loud sound. Jack was angling toward the distant shore.

  “You sons of whores. Stay where you are and keep working on that wall.”

  “The wall is going to explode.” To accent Jack’s statement an even louder crack came from the glass wall that was now nearly covered in water. The men threw down their tools and started running.

  “I’m going to kill you.” The foreman was in the middle and still coming after Jack. Jack reached the other bank and started running.

  A sound like a giant cannon exploded. Chunks of glass the size of human heads rained down into the lagoon. The water that was being held back, shot over the edge behind it. The foreman was caught in the pull and was shot out into the rapidly filling lagoon.

  Glass blocks, like large pieces of safety glass, littered both shores, especially on the lagoon side of the wall.

  The lagoon had nearly been filled with the incoming tidal water. A couple of men down on the far bank moaned and rolled on the ground. Several men were swimming a hundred and fifty yards up the lagoon. Ladders, buckets, and various other debris that had been down in the hole now swirled around in the water. So did two struggling men.

  Without thinking, Jack ran along the shore and dove headfirst into the lagoon. He swam toward the two men. One was the big foreman Quentin Drake and the other was an older black man. The black man’s struggling slowed and he went under. Jack reached below the surface, grabbed the man by the back of the neck, and hauled him up to the surface. Then he kicked toward shore, dragging the man behind him.

  Jack handed the man off to a couple of men on shore and dove back to get Quentin. The man was nowhere in sight. The men milling on the shore watched Jack and he yelled to them. “Where is he?”

  They gestured down in the water.

  Jack swam to where he thought he’d last seen him and dove straight down. He tried to open his eyes but the water was impenetrable. He hit the bottom and felt his way around until his lungs ached. He surfaced, gulped some air, and went down again. Jack tried ten times and found nothing. Finally, he swam to where they had hauled the black man to shore. Ten men were watching as Jack climbed up onto dry land.

  “Did you ever see him come back up again?” Jack asked.

  “Nope,” a skinny, muddy man in the group said.

  “How’s the guy doing that I brought over here first?”

  “You mean the nigger?”

  “The black guy, yeah,” Jack said.

  “Dead.”

  “Dead?” Jack was stunned.

  “Drowned. Can’t believe you chose to save a nigger over a white man,” the skinny man said.

  “Screw you,” Jack said as he plowed through the men, wanting to see what had happened to the black man himself.

  The woman who had been looking at him earlier was bringing down a large flatbed cart pulled by two horses. She drove to where three injured men sat. People picked up the three men and the body of the black man and loaded them onto the wagon. She was off in less than three minutes.

  She gave Jack a look which seemed to ask how he could have let this happen, then announced that she was going to the doctor’s and that anyone else who was hurt would have to get there another way.

  After all was said and speculated upon, Jack was the last to leave the scene of the accident. He sat on the jagged wall almost at the point of where it had exploded near the center of the inlet. The tide had reversed and Jack was totally amazed at the volume of water that flowed past his feet.

  You could definitely put a tidal generator on this thing. Didn’t that Murphy McCord guy say he had one hooked up?

  He must have been there an hour after the last person left when he heard a voice from the shore behind him.

  “People say that you warned everyone, that you saved quite a few lives. People would have been trapped down in that hole had it not been for you.”

  It was the woman he’d seen earlier, the one who drove the wagon. Jack stood on the wall of rock and walked over to her. He was close enough to speak but remained silent.

  She watched him approach and openly studied him. She didn’t say a word either.

  “How are the people you took to the . . . hospital?”

  “Doctor’s office. They’re doing OK. Except for the colored man you tried to save. The doctor said he probably died of a heart attack; whatever it was, he didn’t drown.”

  “Last I saw of him he was alive.”

  “Three people died today so far—the colored man, a teenaged boy, and Quentin Drake, our project foreman.”

  “Our? Is this your place?”

  “It’s my father’
s. And all anyone knows about you is that your name is Riggs. So Riggs, is that a first or last name?”

  “Jack Riggs, and it’s a pleasure to meet you.” Jack extended his hand to shake business style, but she put her hand in his and left it there without shaking. He wondered if she wanted him to kiss it. “And your name is?”

  “Frances Sanger.”

  “Frances Sanger,” he repeated. It was making sense.

  Looking him directly in the eye, she finally gave his hand a slight shake and withdrew it. “You seem like a very peculiar specimen.”

  “I know I probably look peculiar, “ he said, “but I’m from New York.”

  “Are you talking about your clothes? I’m a buyer. I just returned from a buying trip to New York, and I didn’t see anything like what you’re wearing.”

  Jack realized he wasn’t going to get out of this quite so easily. “Ah, my best friend is a designer, and I guess I was his guinea pig.”

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m not familiar with that kind of pig.”

  “What I meant to say is that he used me to test his new fashions.”

  She looked at him skeptically and let the subject drop. “Sounds to me as if you’re somewhat educated. Or am I giving you too much credit?”

  Without thinking, Jack blurted out, “I have a degree from William and Mary.” This was true and Jack didn’t hesitate, knowing that the College had been founded in the late 1600s.

  “What did you study?

  “My major was Health Sciences.” Jack would usually laugh off this question by saying his minor in college was Unrealized Goals.

  “My husband—I mean my ex-husband—went to William and Mary. He’s a lawyer named Abner Adkins. You two must know each other.”

  “Name doesn’t ring a bell,” Jack said. How could he tell her he’d been in the graduating class of 2000?

  “Is it just me, or do you think it’s strange that a man with a college degree is covered in black clay and digging a ditch?”

  “A man’s got to do whatever he can to get by. But yes, this is not quite the kind of work I’m accustomed to.”

  “And just what kind of work would that be?”

  “I’m a teacher.”

  “Teacher, huh? Let me see your hands.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Let me see your hands.”

  Jack held them up, palms facing her.

  “Come closer, I’m not going to bite.” As Jack approached, she reached out and grabbed his hands, pulling him to within inches. He was close enough to smell her perfume and what he figured to be the fresh scent of her long blonde hair. As she examined his hands, he examined her. Her strong grip contrasted to the softness of her hands in his.

  “No calluses,” she said releasing her grip. Jack let his hands stay in her open fingers, relishing her touch. She stood straight and moved away from him. “Well, wherever you’ve been working, it hasn’t been with these hands.”

  She turned and addressed him directly, as if she, and not her ex-husband, was the lawyer. “I’m curious about something,” she said. “When I said you were peculiar earlier, I wasn’t talking about the way you were dressed. How do I put this so it doesn’t sound judgmental? Why did you try to save the Negro instead of the white man?”

  It was the last thing he expected from her. “I didn’t set out to save a person of one particular race and not another. The old guy looked like he needed the help more.”

  “You didn’t know he was already dead?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why didn’t you try to save the foreman?”

  “He looked fine when I first swam by. I did go back for him, but by that time he had disappeared.”

  “You couldn’t tell he didn’t know how to swim?”

  “No.” Jack was getting angry.

  “Did you have an argument with him right before the accident?”

  “Wow, I feel like I’m being interrogated. I was trying to clear the people out and he wanted them to continue working.”

  “You knew the accident was going to happen before it did?”

  “Yes, that wall was made of glass, and it was buckling the wrong way.”

  “I’m just worried you’re going to have problems with Quentin’s brother Miles. He’s a bigger reprobate than Quentin was. He works security for the same company as my ex-husband does in Williamsburg. The SAC.”

  “Am I supposed to ask what this ‘sack’ is?”

  “It’s the Southerners Against Compromise, but I only know that because I used to be married to their lawyer. They’re a big manufacturing concern that steals patents from Northern companies and makes cheap imitations.”

  “They sound like bad people.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” Frances looked around as if seeing things for the first time. “I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this.” She stopped and stood there blank, amazed, and shaken.

  “I’m sorry about going off on you like that earlier,” Jack said. “I’ve suffered a string of….” He thought about what to call it. “Adverse circumstances, you could say. Misfortune, plain bad luck to put it mildly.”

  “Maybe I can speak to Daddy and he could put something a little better than a shovel in your hands.” She turned and walked away without once looking back, and all Jack could do was watch her go.

  As she walked away, Jack had an eerie feeling that this had happened before. He had a sense of some preordained, mystical junction. He certainly knew he wanted her, but for the first time in his life he wondered if he’d found a woman who was more than he could handle.

  CHAPTER 8

  February 1856

  Worth a Try

  It was Saturday and there was a break in the work at the estate. Miss Nancy Hart Douglas, the widow who owned the boarding house, had received Jack into her home with a certain exuberance. She was a robust woman, tall and stocky, not to the point of being stout, but a hundred and fifty years later, she would have thrown the shot put. Despite her size, she carried herself daintily like a woman half her bulk and half her age. Except for the grayness of her severely-bunned hair, she had a pleasant face, and you could tell she had actually been pretty at one time.

  In Norfolk’s relative smallness, hers was one of three places that took in boarders. All three were run by women of various ages, appearances and characteristics—dubious and dingy, severe and suspicious, and in Miss Nancy’s case, calm and confiding. Miss Nancy’s was also the only one that allowed both male and female residents.

  It was a large, openhearted contraption of a house, located on Fenchurch and Union Streets, one street off Main and two blocks from the docks, a giant rambling wooden structure that would have been lost among similar buildings except that it was pink. Under Miss Nancy’s direction, a former boarder with more time than money had painted the house for her. In a town where there was very little paint on anything, a pink thing had a tendency to get noticed.

  Eight men and two women were boarding when Jack arrived. A young married couple and three of the men had been given the four bedrooms; the other four men shared an oversized partitioned parlor, and the other woman had a small room in the back with its own entrance. The married couple were teachers; six of the men worked on the docks or on a boat; and the other man was the clerk, Pete Snider, who Jack had first met at the Dry Goods Store. The single woman, a lady named Lottie McIllree, was most likely a prostitute.

  Miss Nancy’s relationship with Jack had a jaunty, flirty, borderline bawdy feel to it right from the start. The deputy who told the sheriff and the mayor what a hero Jack was had told the same story to the landlady. She said she’d be proud to house a real life bandit fighter, and even changed the bedsheets on Jack’s bed to a freshly laundered set.

  After he’d been paid for his first days of work, Jack paid Miss Nancy for his two-night stay on credit and for a week in advance. Then he talked her into letting him borrow her horse. He declined her offer to ride with him in her buggy, saying that he
was going to go through some rough country to try to find some of his lost supplies. Miss Nancy’s horse was more accustomed to pulling a cart than being ridden, but she had an old saddle and he made do.

  Beginning at eight o’clock in the morning, Jack retraced his steps to Murphy’s place, but the old man was nowhere to be found. A winter rainstorm was beginning to fall, and by the time Jack reached the spot where he thought he’d awakened to the nineteenth century, it had turned into a full-fledged thunderstorm. He was strangely excited. He tied the horse to a tree and got on his back in the mud, hoping against hope that something extraordinary would happen and he’d be struck again and return to his life in the twenty-first century. But as he lay there, he wondered what his hurry was; any return would put him smack back into a bunch of unpleasant situations—Ashley, Shalah, the Norfolk police, the FBI, and Homeland Security. Besides, he hadn’t done his lesson plans.

  After an hour during which nothing happened except that he got thoroughly soaked and filthy, he gave up and headed back to town. If I’m ever going to get back to my own time, it’ll have to be some other way than this. Besides, I’m not sure I believe in time travel. What makes me think I could figure out a way to flash ahead to 2013? Anyway, this place doesn’t seem so bad, he thought as he kicked the horse to a trot.

  CHAPTER 9

  February 1856

  He Doesn’t Tell Murphy

  On his way back, Jack stopped by Murphy’s house again and this time he was at home. Jack had discovered that Murphy really had been a Texas Senator and his family had indeed been killed by Indians. He found him sitting on a crate, smoking a corncob pipe under the overhang of his front porch.

  “Jack Riggs, come in out of the weather! It’s coming down like a cow pissing on a flat rock.”

  “Hello, Mr. McCord.” Jack hitched his horse to a tree, hopped over the electric fence, and stepped onto the dry porch.

  “I won’t have any of that. I told you the name was Murphy.”

  “You’re right, you did. I stopped by earlier and you weren’t home.”