Tesla's Time Travelers (17 page)

“Don’t call me ‘useless,’ that’s what John Wilkes Booth said just before he died when he looked at his hands.”

And so it went: Back and forth. Back and forth. The ghosts kept arguing.

Minerva was confused. Weren’t people in heaven supposed to be happy? Why were the Beards arguing?

“Please don’t fight,” Minerva begged.

“Ah, let them fight, Minerva,” Heath said. “I’ve never seen ghosts fight. It’s kind of cool.”

Mary Beard looked at Minerva on the wharf as Bette and the Anderson twins left the dock. While Mary was staring at Minerva, Charles took the opportunity to float off and away from his wife, muttering, “It was supposed to be ‘till death do us part’ not eternity.”

When Mary realized her husband had fled she called after him, “Coward, come back and fight!”

“Mrs. Beard, why are you acting that way with Charles?”

“I want to put some life in the man, dear,” she replied.

“But Mrs. Beard, he’s dead.”

Mary shook her head. “Heck, he was dead when he was alive. Never wanted to have any fun. Just sit all day in a dusty library at Carpenter’s Hall. That’s all he wanted to do on this trip. Sit in an old library. Hang out with some musty old books. I mean, really, why bother to even come? You don’t think there are archives in the afterlife?”

“There are?”

“Of course, dear. Filing cabinets everywhere.”

“Why don’t they use CDs instead of paper?”

“They do, dear. You should have seen it before the seraphim went digital with the records. It was a mess, let me tell you. I mean, I couldn’t believe some of the people they let into the place, and I blame that on sloppy paper work from days gone by. I think we’ll see less riff raff in Beulah Land with computerized records. St. Peter doesn’t need that dusty old book now, he has a laptop and just types in a name and click, your whole life comes up. Peter calls it ‘Whoogle’ because they find about whoever they want. They can even bring up video clips from a person’s life,” Mary went on.

“Like
YouTube,”
Minerva said. She remembered the Christmas song from her childhood: “He knows when you’ve been sleeping; he knows when you’re awake.” It was kind of scary to think that St. Peter could just click a moment from a soul’s past and play the “vitae video,” as Mrs. Beard called it. Minerva listened to Mrs. Beard until the ghost started complaining once again about her husband.

“Mrs. Beard?”

“Yes dear?”

“I’m a bit worried about the soldiers on Mud Island. I think we ticked them off.” Minerva thought of saying the vulgar version of “P.O.,” but Mrs. Beard was not only dead, she was a
really old
lady too, and that would be improper, as her grandmother always said. “Could you float over there and see what they might be planning?”

“Reconnaissance?”

“Yes, see if they are going to chase us, if you can.”

“I can do that, dearie,” Mrs. Beard replied, and floated off across the Delaware River.

“Where is Mrs. Beard going?” Bette said to Minerva as she joined her peers on Front Street on the dry Philadelphia cobblestone.

“I asked her to fly over to Fort Mifflin and see if the soldiers were going to chase us,” Minerva replied. “They did shoot at us, after all.”

“Smart thinking, Minerva,” Bette said, as the Anderson twins walked ahead of them. “Look at them, Minerva, Dumb and Dumber.”

Minerva chuckled. “Well, this certainly turned out differently than Mr. Greene planned, didn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I think it has been sort of fun. One good thing came out of it, I think.”

“Oh, what’s that?”

“I got to know you better.”

Minerva stopped and gave Bette Kromer a big hug. “That’s a nice thing to say, Bette.”

“Yes,” Bette smiled. “You’re not as evil as I thought you were.”

“Neither are you,” Minerva replied. “You know, we never saw or heard much of the debate on independence, but I got the gist of it all by just sitting down with Benjamin Franklin.”

“That amazes me, that you sat next to Franklin,” Bette said.

“Well, you spent a lot of time with Betsy Ross,” Minerva replied.

“That’s true. Look, here comes Victor.”

“He’s carrying a cane, but I hope he got the riding crop. I don’t think I want to spend my life in the 18
th
century, do you?”

“Heck no. I mean, outhouses and chamber pots. And the smells,” Bette went on. “It’s like one big boys’ locker room with smelly socks.”

“How do you know about boys’ locker rooms, Bette Kromer?”

“I have two brothers, Minerva, and they leave smelly socks in the bathroom all the time, and their athletic supporters too.”

“Gross.”

“I’ll say,” Bette said. Then, putting her voice up an octave, she said, “Hello, Victor.” As usual, the change in voice had no positive impact on Victor.

Victor ignored Bette, as he was busy exchanging punches to the shoulder with the Anderson twins. That was the weird way boys showed affection, Minerva realized. Why couldn’t they just hug? Finally, the ritual punching completed, Victor said hello to the girls. The kids formed a huddle on Front Street, moving to the sidewalk as a carriage came their way.

“Did you get the riding crop?” Minerva asked.

“Yes. I gave it to Mr. Greene. We’re set for departure at five. We’re going to have to carry Mr. Greene though. He seems to have sprained his ankle…”

“How mad is Mr. Greene with me?” Heath asked.

“Very,” Victor said. “I’d say ‘Green Hornet’ stage.”

Green Hornet
was the nickname the students gave Mr. Greene when he was angry with his students.

“Detention, you think?”

“I’d say Saturday School.”

“No, not the ‘Breakfast Club.’”

Minerva smiled. The kids at Cassadaga Area High School had nicknamed Saturday School detention after the 1980s movie
The Breakfast Club.
It was the ultimate pain: going back to school for a kid’s day off. Saturday was the only non-school, non-church day of the week, the only day when a kid was free, and to be locked up in Saturday detention was worse than an outbreak of acne before the prom. Minerva watched the change in Heath Anderson. He hunched his shoulders and reminded Minerva of a balloon that had suddenly lost its air, for he seemed limp and lethargic.

“Buck up, Heath,” Bette advised. “Heck, with the way things have gone today, maybe we won’t even get back to our own time and you won’t have to pull ‘Breakfast Club.’ Look on the bright side,” she added sarcastically.

Homecoming, Minerva thought. The Homecoming Dance. Was she going to miss the Homecoming Dance? It was going to be her big moment, an old fashioned spotlight dance with Junior, the football star, the girls of the school dying with envy with her every step across the dance floor in the arms of her football Adonis. Suddenly, in her mind, she wasn’t dancing with Junior, but with Victor, and Victor was smiling, but they were both in their colonial costumes. Oh, heavens, she wondered. Was that a premonition? Were they going to be stuck in the past dancing at some Patriot ball? Would she have to spend the rest of her life in petticoats? And corsets? She didn’t even want to think about the chamber pots, or the horse droppings.

“Minerva?” Victor said. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, snapping out her of thoughts. She was blushing. “Let’s check in with Mr. Greene.”

As they walked up Arch Street and turned the corner, Mrs. Beard returned from her scouting mission.

“What did you see, Mrs. Beard?” Minerva asked.

“A longboat,” Mary Beard replied.

“What about the longboat?” Victor asked.

“It’s filled with soldiers, and they are headed from Mud Island this way,” she said. “They didn’t seem happy.”

“What’s going on?” Victor asked.

“The soldiers fired on us,” Minerva said.

“You mean with bullets?” Victor asked.

“I would say musket balls to be correct,” Bette said.

“What?”

“Well, Victor,” Minerva said. “We sort of had to tie up the soldier that was guarding the twins.”

“They had us digging their stupid moat,” Justin whined. His twin brother Heath didn’t say a thing. Minerva assumed Heath was conjuring up images of Saturday School. He had been hit over the head with the “Breakfast Club” and he would be useless for the rest of the trip. That was the bad news. The good news was that he would also be harmless.

“So,” Bette said. “I think we made a few soldiers pretty angry. I mean, two girls overcame a guard? That guy must really be taking heat.”

“Tough on the 18
th
century male ego,” Minerva added.

“Tough on male ego in any century,” Bette said.

They laughed in unison. Sisters at last!

Chapter 13

Take charge, Victor, Victor Bridges told himself. You are the president of the club. He looked at his peers standing there, gazing at one another in stunned silence in the middle of Arch Street, and waiting like a herd of sheep for some type of order, or for a carriage to run them over.

“Let me have your attention, people,” Victor said. “I’m going to see what is up with the soldiers. You four go check in with Mr. Greene,” he ordered. His “sheep” looked at one another. Victor half expected someone to say, “Bahhh.”

“That might be dangerous, Victor,” Minerva said.

“Why? They haven’t seen me,” Victor replied. “They can identify you guys, but they don’t know me. I can find out if they are really looking for you or just coming to Philadelphia to hang out.”

“He’s right, Minerva,” Bette agreed.

“Mrs. Beard, would you accompany me?” Victor asked the ghost.

Mrs. Beard beamed. “Why of course, young man,” she said, sounding a bit like a coquette with a hint of flirtation in her voice. Victor wondered if all ghosts were as goofy as Mrs. Beard. But then again, it must be a drag being a ghost. What would he miss most if he were a ghost? Food. He doubted there was pizza in Paradise. Or cheeseburgers, no matter what Jimmy Buffett sang in that song of his.

A dozen soldiers in Patriot blue uniforms and tri-corner hats were standing on a wharf as their commander, a man of about thirty with a no-nonsense square jaw look about him, asked questions of the locals. The soldiers reminded Victor of Revolutionary War re-enactors he had once seen at Valley Forge on a summer vacation, but these weren’t re-enactors, these guys were real, with real muskets and real bayonets that were ominously fixed to the ends of their weapons. Mary Beard floated in and around the young men, evaluating each soldier’s physique with an appreciative eye as if she were at a Chippendale show. Victor shook his head; he couldn’t believe God would allow dirty old ladies in heaven. Maybe the Beards had only made it to Purgatory and were in the line for heaven like the tourists at Space Mountain at Disneyworld, but with a celestial sign that read, “Paradise: Fifty-year wait from this point.” His mother said he sometimes let his imagination run away with itself, and it certainly did in school if he had a seat by a window, but this was certainly no time to be thinking whether heaven was laid out like a theme park, so Victor shook out his mind like he would a dusty floor mat in his dad’s car and brought his attention back to the reality of the situation.

“Did you see two men and two young women in a rowboat?” the commander asked an old man, whom Victor assumed to be a local fisherman, seeing as the old man had a casting net and poles in his boat.

“They were friends of Mrs. Bridges, they were,” the fisherman said. “Borrowed me boat, they did.”

“Sir,” the commander said, his chiseled face bristling. “They are Tory spies. The men are escaped prisoners.”

“The devil you say!” the fisherman replied.

“Which way did they go?” the commander asked.

“I don’t know for that, sir. I didn’t pay them no never mind as they brought back my boat in ship-shape and Bristol fashion.”

The commander was flustered, Victor thought. He seemed to be angry as well. He was probably responsible for the prisoners, and two prisoners escaping probably weren’t going to do much for his career track as an officer.

“You there!” the commander said, pointing at Victor. “I want a word with you.”

Victor felt a cold shiver run through his body, like the time when he was stopped by a police officer when he was driving through Deland to go to an away school basketball game. It was only a burned out taillight bulb, but fear had coursed through his body until the officer told him what the problem was. He had envisioned being taken off to jail, being the subject of a
Cops
episode, and the song
Bad Boys
had come on as if his brain had been a jukebox. “Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you…”

“Yes, sir?” Victor said, hoping there was no fear in his voice.

“Did you see four young people, two lads and two wenches?

“Yes, sir, I believe I did. Two lasses and two lads?” Victor couldn’t refer to Bette and Minerva as “wenches.”

“Yes, which way did they go?”

Mrs. Beard whispered to Victor that he should lie. Victor pointed south, in the opposite direction in which his four friends had gone. “Down Front Street that way,” he said.

“Thank you, citizen.”

“Are they important, officer?”

“They are spies, sir. Spies, spies for the tyrant King George. We are going to catch them and hang them,” he said.

Victor swallowed hard. “Hang them?” He gulped.

“For escaping,” the commander of the troop said. “Not the wenches of course, we’ll just lash those tarts when we catch them. Attention,” he called to his men, who snapped to attention in two files of six each. “Left face,” he ordered, and when his troops had complied, he said, “At the quick time, forward, march!”

Victor watched them go. Eighteenth century, Victor, he reminded himself. They had whipping posts, and hanged spies. The British hanged Nathan Hale, who regretted he only had one life to give for his country. If only I had Hale’s courage. “Thanks for the advice, Mrs. Beard,” he said.

“My pleasure young man, although considering what those boys have done today, a little stretch on the hemp might do them a bit of good.”

“The commander even threatened to whip the girls, Mrs. Beard.”