A Twist in Time (45 page)

Now the familiar echo of what the woman would say reverberated in Diana’s mind. “I don’t mean to interrupt your hour of mourning.” People in the funeral business used those formal phrases to mask the fact that they no longer gave death any but the most cursory attention.

“Perhaps you’d like to continue your meditation in the comfort of our reception lounge while our associates put the final touches on your father’s resting place?”

Diana tore her eyes from the redwoods, now enveloped in mist. “No, thank you. I’d better go.”

She put her head down and squished away over the damp grass inset with flat headstones.

Thank goodness I wore flat shoes.

Diana turned before the woman could call after her. “You don’t have to send the flowers to my apartment.” The woman looked shocked. Diana usually didn’t reveal herself that way, but she couldn’t stand any more formal sympathy. The tractor engine ground to life. “You just . . . do whatever you do with them usually.” A big dumpster crouched in back of the reception building.

She stumbled down the gentle slope. Her car looked lonely in the visitors’ parking lot because the employees parked around back by the dumpster.

Fitting. She’d always felt . . . separate. Not only because she lived in an echo chamber but because she had had no childhood. At least until she was thirteen. That was about how old she was when they found her wandering around the suburbs of Chicago, dressed strangely and speaking in tongues, with a big gash in her scalp and a king-sized knot, unable to remember anything about where she came from or where she belonged. No one came forward to claim her. After some disastrous foster care, she’d been adopted by a wonderful older couple. Her adoptive mother died in a car accident a couple of years after the family moved to San Francisco. Now her father was gone, too.

She had no one.

She sloshed across the gravel parking lot to the old Honda Accord that had been her father’s.

She slid into the driver’s seat and closed her eyes, hugging the shoulder bag that held her treasured antique book. Maybe the book was all she had now.

She couldn’t even write anymore. She had only twenty-five pages done on the novel that was due next month. She dreaded telling Jen, her editor. The whole thing made her want to rip her
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hair out. Much as she loved the setting of Camelot and her hero, Gawain, the romance just wouldn’t come to life. She’d give back the advance and call it a day, but the money had gone to pay the deductible on Dad’s insurance this year. Happy endings seemed to be in short supply right now, even fictional ones.

She put her bag on the passenger’s seat beside her. The priceless book inside had been taking up more and more of her thoughts. That was just because she needed an escape. It was hard to visit her father every day and wonder whether he’d recognize her or not. But the obsession had really ramped up since her father’s death. She knew why. She just didn’t want to admit it. At least she wasn’t imagining the book. It was real. And it was by Leonardo da Vinci.

Yeah.
That
da Vinci. She’d have enough to set her up for life if she sold it, let alone enough to give back her advance, but the horror at even the
thought
of selling the book made the word

“obsession” seem inadequate.

Whoa. Probably imagined stalker, obsession over a precious book, writer’s block, all on top of her little natural proclivities . . . Maybe she needed a therapist. As if she could afford one.

She took two deep breaths and started the car. Okay. It wasn’t crazy to feel bereft on the day your father was buried. Adopted father, but still. . . .

She headed west on Waller, to hit Delores south. Time to go home to her little apartment just east of the Mission District. Unable to help herself, she reached over to touch the book. The way it had come into her life was a little surreal . . .

Diana had been coming out of the office at the Exploratorium, the children’s science museum
where she supervised docents to make ends meet when she practically ran into the family. The
woman had very green eyes and very red hair and that translucent, perfect skin that goes with
them. Her baby bump was just beginning to show. The little girl was a paler version of her
mother. The father was a looker. Anything in range with a female hormone was casting
surreptitious looks at him. He ought to be standing at the prow of a Viking ship, preferably
stripped to the waist.

“Closing time,” Diana announced. The Viking’s next words echoed in her mind.

“Okay.” He gathered the little girl into one big arm. “We’ll just stop at the restrooms before I
take my two girls home.” He took his wife’s elbow protectively.

The woman took one look at Diana, gasped, and slumped against her husband.

“Lucy, are you all right?” The Viking hauled her in against his free hip with one massive arm.

“
You need to sit down.” He looked around, frowning.

“Over here, sir.” Diana guided them to a bench beside the door marked with a large sign that
said “Danger. Keep out.” The little girl was worried.

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“What’s wrong with Mommy?” she asked in a small voice.

“Nothing, honey,” the woman called Lucy managed as she eased down on the bench. “Mommy
didn’t eat enough at lunchtime.” She laid her large shoulder bag down beside her.

The Viking’s gaze swept the area. “Can you look after Pony?” he asked Diana, setting the little
girl on her feet. “I’ll buy a mug at the gift shop and bring some water.”

Diana grabbed Pony’s hand, and the Viking strode away. Pony. Odd name, but cute.

The woman grabbed her shoulder bag again and clutched it to her chest, her green gaze fixed
on Diana’s face. “Have . . . have you been a docent long?” she asked.

Diana glanced up from the little girl to the woman her husband called Lucy and . . . and a
connection sparked between them. Did Diana know her? “I’m actually a supervisor. It pays the
bills while I wait for my ship to come in.” She never told anyone about her father’s illness.

“And what exactly would your ship look like?”

Diana mustered a smile “Well . . . I write books.” She looked up to see the woman’s expression
of sympathy. Everybody and their brother was a failed writer these days. “Oh, I’m published,”

she assured the woman. “But it doesn’t come with health insurance or a 401K. City of San
Francisco provides those.” That was her standard line. People always thought you were rich if
you were published. Only a few, like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling and Nora Roberts made
millions at writing. Almost everybody else just survived.

“What do you write?”

Diana sighed. Now she’d see the flash of derision or the uneasy shifting of the eyes. “Romances.

They aren’t the usual romances.” Did she sound defensive? “They’re very carefully researched.

They’re well-reviewed, too.”

“Historical?”

She nodded. “Premedieval. The origin of courtly love.” Not even a hint of eye-rolling.

Emboldened, Diana continued. “That was the time to live.” She couldn’t help the longing that
drenched her voice. “Right now I’m researching Camelot. I think that was the start of
everything.”

Diana watched as Lucy gave a sharp intake of breath and examined Diana’s face as though
she’d just had a revelation. The Viking strode toward them with his cup of water, a worried
frown creasing his brow. The woman smiled, first at him, and then at Diana. A look Diana could
only describe as sureness suffused her expression. “I have a gift for you.” She hauled a very large
leather-bound book from her bag and handed it to Diana.

“This . . . this is old. I . . . I couldn’t take this.” The tooled leather binding was beautiful.

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“Of course you can. I’m giving it to you just as it was given to me.” The woman glanced to her
husband and stilled what Diana was sure was an incipient protest with a look.

Diana opened the book gingerly, scanning the pages. “It’s written backwards.”

“
Yes. It’s in archaic Italian and Latin.”

Diana frowned. “I have some Latin but I’m afraid I don’t read Italian.”

“A professor over at Berkeley, Dr. Dent, translated it. He’ll confirm its authenticity.”

Authentic what? The woman rose, looking strangely serene. “I’m feeling fine. We can go.” Diana
caught her husband’s pointed look at the “Danger” door. “I’ve done what I came to do,” his wife
assured him. To Diana she said, “What’s your name? I’d like to read your books.”

Diana blushed. “Diana Dearborn.”

“That’s a great name for a romance writer.”

They always thought it was a pseudonym, “That’s what my mother named me.” In a way it
was
a pseudonym, since it certainly wasn’t the name she’d been born with.

“Lucky you.” The woman pressed her hands. “Use the book. It will change your life. And when
you’re ready . . .” She leaned forward to whisper in Diana’s ear. “Look behind the door.”

Diana drew back in shock, then glanced to the door marked “Danger.”

“Yes. That one.” The woman smiled. And then she and her family strolled out into the San
Francisco fog. The whole scene looked like the fade-out happy ending to a movie.

Diana jerked her head around as a car honked at her and sped by on her left. She felt a little shaky. Maybe she’d just pull over. Dolores Park loomed to her right. It was easy to find a parking place at this time of night. The park was cool and black. She’d just get her breath.

But the feeling of anxiety in her chest was ramping up into panic.

The red-haired woman called Lucy thought there was something behind the door marked danger that would change Diana’s life, apparently for the better. Once she’d read Dr. Dent’s translation, Diana knew what Lucy thought was behind that door.

Ultimate craziness. The very fact that Diana could half-believe it was a sign that she was going a little round the bend. The book was a hoax, even if it was a hoax by Leonardo da Vinci. The manuscript recorded Leonardo’s effort to build a time machine. It said he succeeded.

There was a picture on the last pages, after all the diagrams and calculations, and all the scientific stuff she didn’t have a hope of understanding. In the illustration the machine seemed
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to be just a bunch of gears. Appropriate for 1508 when the book was written, but not exactly the kind of thing that could manipulate the time/space continuum.

It would be easy to check it out. As a supervisor she had a set of master keys. But in the five months she’d had the book, she’d never used them on the door. Opening it, thinking there might be a time machine behind it, seemed like crossing some line toward insanity.

Like it wasn’t crazy to carry the book around all the time. Or to sleep with it.

Okay. A little crazy.
And it had gotten so much worse in the three days since her father had died. It was like the book was shouting at her now, where before it had only whispered. But you had to draw a line somewhere. She wouldn’t believe there was a time machine hidden in a children’s museum. Bad enough that she thought she had a stalker. The fact that she’d been researching Camelot was research for the novel she couldn’t seem to write. She’d brushed up on her Latin because it gave her something to do as she sat with her father.

Oh, hell.
She brushed up on Latin because that was what they’d spoken in Camelot as a second language to Brythonic Proto-Celtic. Because she
wanted
there to be a time machine behind that door and she wanted it to take her back to Camelot, far from this stark reality. She’d always had an affinity for Camelot. She wanted to live in a time when things were simpler, when anything could happen, and people believed in love and magic and honor. She felt like she belonged there, and she, who had no childhood, wanted so
much
to know where she belonged.

Her chest heaved and she couldn’t seem to get air. She glanced over at the book. It exuded hope. It almost seemed to be pushing at her. Like maybe it could make her happy, like the red-haired Lucy said it could, like maybe stalkers and deadlines and obsession and grief were what was unreal and there was some new reality just waiting for her.

That was dangerous. Sanity was knowing reality for what it was, no matter how stark, and learning to cope with it. If there was no machine that could change your life behind that door, then she’d be able to go home to her empty apartment, make an appointment with a therapist at some free clinic, and face her future. So she knew what she had to do.

She was going to the Exploratorium tonight and look behind that door marked “Danger.”