OMG, A CUL8R Time Travel Mystery (31 page)

“Can’t say I’m sorry to hear that,” Zoey snorted.

“Who knows how many more girls would have died if we hadn’t stopped him,” Scott pointed out.

“As a coach, he had almost unlimited access to the students.” Austin shook his head.  “I’ve spent a lot of time with him, and I never would have guessed.  It just goes to show that people aren’t always who they seem.”

“You’re lucky he didn’t like boys,” Kelly teased.  “I’m sure a hunky guy like you would have been his first choice.”

Scott laughed and Austin tossed his empty drink can at him.  Scott managed to catch it and immediately threw it back.  Austin dodged it, rolled over and stretched out his tall frame on the rug between Kelly and Zoey.

Zoey extended her long legs out so they would catch the afternoon sun, intentionally brushing them against Austin’s.  She frowned when he didn’t seem to notice.  “I still can’t believe what happened.  Yeah, I know . . . I was there.  But it all seems like a weird dream, you know?”

Kelly nodded.  “It does.  When I woke up in my own bed this morning, it took me several minutes to convince myself that just hours before, we’d been in 1966.  If it wasn’t for all the sand in my clothes . . . well, and the clothes themselves, I might have thought I was making it all up.”

“I’ve got the broken ribs to prove it happened.”  Austin pulled off his t-shirt and revealed a darkly bruised area that covered much of his right side. 

Zoey gasped.  “They’re broken?”

“Maybe just badly bruised,” Austin admitted.  “Their middle linebacker was all-state, and he spent more time in our backfield than I did.  Of course, being dropped on the sand like a bag of rocks didn’t help.”

“What did your dad say when he took you to the doctor?”

“Didn’t go to the doctor and didn’t tell my dad.”  Austin tossed his shirt aside.  “How could I explain it?”

Zoey rolled her eyes.  “How can anyone explain it?  I was there, and I don’t understand anything that happened.  I know you told me how it all works, but it doesn’t make any sense.  You said you heard Wendy’s voice on that Thomas Edison radio…?”

“Edison called it a
Telephone to the Dead
,” Scott explained.  “It was one of his inventions that never quite made it to the mainstream.  He was determined to find a way to talk to the dead, but for whatever reason, he passed it off to one of his muckers ...”

“Muckers?”  Zoey interrupted.

“College graduates who worked on Edison’s inventions so he could keep developing new ideas,” Scott explained.  “Kelly’s great-great grandfather was a mucker, and he must have believed in the project so much that Edison gave the machine to him.”

“We found it in my aunt’s garage when we were cleaning it out for the garage sale we’re having on Saturday,” Kelly spoke up.  “My aunt’s house originally belonged to my great-great grandparents and has passed down through the years to her.”

Zoey leaned back and tried to process what she had been told.  “So then Scott invented a time travel thingy for his phone so we could go help Wendy?”

“I’d been working on the app for a few months, but I hadn’t tried it out until this all came up,” Scott explained. 

“Yeah, poor Violet was our first volunteer.”  Austin laughed.

“Violet, the turtle with all the jewels glued to her shell that we picked up on the beach in 1966 and brought back with us . . .
that
Violet?” Zoey asked.

“How many Violets do you know?” Austin laughed.

“She’s my sister’s pet.”  Scott grimaced.  “Lily was really upset when Violet went missing.  And I didn’t dare tell her we sort of
lost
her.”

Austin yawned.  “Luckily, it all worked out.”  He lifted his arm and laid it across his eyes. 

All four teens were silent, each deep in thought about their recent time travel trip, how different things had been in the Sixties, and yet how many things were very similar to life today.  The high school had been in the same place, although the building had undergone several renovations and expansions since, and the kids had dressed much more formally and had very different hair styles.  But, when it came right down to it, those kids had worried about the same things such as acceptance, grades, parents, dates and college as the kids in 2013. 

The fact that Wendy had been inappropriately involved with a teacher was all too common now.  The older man had manipulated the emotions of the younger, more vulnerable girl, convincing her he really cared about her when all he had actually wanted was another plaything he could abuse and discard.

Kelly was still trying to process that she had, unintentionally, come face-to-face with her own grandmother who had been only sixteen at the time.  It had been weird and wonderful, even though her grandmother had had no idea of the magnitude of the moment.  Kelly smiled at the memory of seeing her grandmother riding bareback on a big black horse.  It certainly had taken away the mystery of from whom Kelly had inherited her love of horses.

For Scott, it had been a geek’s proudest moment.  The phone app he had conceived had worked perfectly.  To be honest, even he had been shocked when they were swirled into that dust cloud on this beach in 2013 and shook the sand off in the same spot in 1966.  But even though he had meticulously planned the trip, there had been many surprises along the way, the first of which was having Zoey push her way into their triangle just as they were transcending.  Then the whole school experience had created crises that had caused spur-of-the-moment changes in the plan, not the least of which was when they realized they were chasing a serial killer and not investigating a suicide as everyone had assumed. 

Austin, too, was thinking about their trip.  He had been a last minute replacement for the injured quarterback, and ultimately the star of the homecoming game even though his aggressive play had resulted in his painful ribs.  He had discovered that girls in the Sixties threw themselves at jocks with as much enthusiasm as girls today.  And, he had to admit, it had been fun to blow up Coach Decker’s truck, even though it had sort of been an accident.  Ever since Kelly Welch had moved in next door to Scott a couple weeks ago, life had gotten a lot more exciting.  He slid a covert sideways glance at her.  She was sitting, looking out at the water, letting the afternoon sun wash over her.  Zoey was more classically beautiful, but there was something compelling about Kelly.  She was smart and funny and always enthusiastic about everything they did.  Her full lips smiled easily and her greenish-brown eyes sparkled with life.  Austin couldn’t put his finger on it, but he felt a connection to her.  She was the first and only person with whom he had talked about losing his mother.  He hadn’t even shared his feelings of loss and loneliness with Scott, who had been his best friend since they were in diapers.

Unfortunately, Scott had met her first.

CHAPTER TWO

“I just don’t understand the whole time travel thing,” Zoey said with a frown.  “How could we be here one minute, then flash back to several centuries ago, then jump back here without losing a minute?”

Scott dug his bare toes into the soft white beach sand, trying to think of ways to explain to Zoey something so complicated as time travel… especially when geniuses much smarter than he such as Einstein and Edison hadn’t been able to.  “Some people believe in something like the grandfather paradox. You know, if you were to travel back and kill your grandfather that you would never be born so how do you exist?  Theories like that are the reasons some people give for why time travel to the past is impossible.” 

“Now you’re just making stuff up,” Zoey challenged.

Without lifting his arm off his eyes, Austin spoke emphatically.  “Scott never makes stuff up.  His brain is plugged directly into Google.”

Scott ignored the off-handed compliment that could have been interpreted as a jab, but he knew his friend meant it to be positive.  “It’s well documented.  The grandfather paradox is pretty linear thinking first postulated in 1943. What I did was exploit dimensional time-space with a wormhole of sorts.”

“Is it a parallel universe kind of thing?” Kelly asked.

“No, because if it was a parallel universe none of the changes we caused would affect the universe we’re in now.  It’s more like multiple time lines.  That allowed us to end up in a different branch of history than the one we departed from originally.  There’s a whole element of
quantum mechanics
that gets into things like
quantum suicide and immortality
.  Got it?”

“So the yearbook, the sheriff department press release and the newspaper articles are still out there somewhere, but just not in our universe?”  Kelly tried to phrase the question so she didn’t sound as confused as she felt.

“Exactly,” Scott agreed with enthusiasm.

Zoey yawned.  The explanation had gone past her span of attention.  “It’s all too
Big Bang Theory
for me.  I’m feeling pale.  I lost several days of my tan when we were back in 1966.”  She lay down next to Austin and pulled the brim of her hat forward to cover her face. 

A stiff wind off the Gulf whipped Kelly’s long dark brown hair in a swirl around her face.  Using her fingers, she combed it back, gathered it into a ponytail and secured it with the scrunchie she had been wearing on her wrist.  She glanced over at Scott who hadn’t taken off his t-shirt and was liberally applying suntan lotion on all his exposed skin even though it was well out of the sunlight.  She debated on whether or not to leave her shorts and shirt on.  The tankini she was wearing underneath wasn’t revealing in any way, but Kelly wasn’t all that confident about her body.  In her opinion, there was too little on top and too much in the middle.  For about the millionth time, she wondered how many laps she would have to swim in her aunt’s pool or how many donuts she was going to have to resist before she lost her puppy fat.

But, she finally decided, she was at the beach, and the only two people who knew her were her friends . . . and Zoey, who didn’t really count.  She glanced around.  There were people of all ages, shades and shapes lying around, playing in the sand or splashing in the surf.  Apparently, not a single one of them cared about Kelly’s muffin top.  Before she could change her mind, she yanked her shirt over her head and wiggled out of her shorts.  To her great relief, Scott barely glanced up from his task of covering every square inch of his body with SPF-50 sunscreen.

Kelly spread on a thin layer of SPF-15, then stretched out on her stomach and propped herself up on her elbows as she squinted out across the sparkling water between Fort Myers Beach, or FMB as the locals called it, and Sanibel Island.  She was still not accustomed to the view.  Until a couple of weeks ago, the only beach she had frequented was Galveston which was different from FMB on many levels.  The sand here was whiter, the water clearer and the sunsets were epic.  Galveston had been a great place to hang out, but it faced the east, so unless you were a sunrise-kind-of-person . . . which Kelly was not . . . the sun setting on the landward side was just a not-so-subtle signal that it was time to pack up the surfboards and head home. 

Some changes were good.  Others . . . not so much.  Moving to FMB, making new friends and going on a crazy time travel adventure back to 1966 to help save someone’s life were definitely in the
good
category.  Leaving her home, her horse, her old friends and her life in Texas were in the
not-so-much
category.  But the worst part was that she had lost her parents in a car accident which had triggered this change in geography by forcing her to live with her aunt Jane. 

She sighed. To be fair, her aunt was really nice and was trying hard to make things as comfortable as possible.  It was probably as big an adjustment to Jane who was an assistant district attorney with a heavy case load to have an almost sixteen-year-old thrust upon her as it was to the teenage girl herself.  Not only had Kelly lost her mother, but Jane had lost her only sibling.  Kelly felt the familiar rush of tears filling her eyes, and she hurried to brush them away before anyone noticed.

“You’re going to have to remember to wear your sunnies, Kelly.  You’re in Florida now.  Ya know…the sunshine state?” Scott smiled as he spoke.

“Sunnies?” she echoed.  She couldn’t tell if he had noticed the tears or not.  She hoped not.  Their friendship was still too new for her to let him see her being all mopey and leaky.

“Yeah…that’s Aussie for sunglasses.  I’ve been reading up on Australia a lot lately.  I’ve always wanted to go there.”

Kelly pulled her sunglasses out of her beach bag and put them on before turning to Scott.  “So would I, and now we can.  Right?”

“Absolutely not,” Scott retorted.  “You know the rules.”

Kelly laughed.  “I was just testing you.”

“Unless someone needs our help and just happens to live Down Under,” Scott suggested hopefully.

“Maybe we can start screening the calls.  Instead of saying
Hello
, we can start the conversation with
Good-day, Mate
,” Kelly suggested.  They both laughed, knowing how ridiculous that sounded, then glanced around them nervously.  To anyone eavesdropping, it would seem to be a casual conversation, but to Scott and Kelly who had made a startling discovery in the garage of her aunt’s house, the calls they were referring to weren’t anything that could be heard on just any phone.