This was not good. Miss Z’s mind, usually so sharp, was scattered and confused.
Mrs. Vader was upset too. But she wasn’t as personally invested in the Flashback Four, and so she was able to think more clearly.
“Maybe the kids were able to get on one of the lifeboats,” she said hopefully. “What happened to the survivors of the Titanic?”
“A ship called the Carpathia picked them up,” Miss Z said. “They were taken to New York City. So what?”
“Well, what if we used the Board to send Mr. Maloney to the spot where that ship docked in 1912?” suggested Mrs. Vader. “The kids should be there, right? Then couldn’t we use the Board again to bring them back here? I know it’s an outrageous idea, but is it possible?”
Miss Z wrinkled her brow and thought it over. Because of a technological glitch, the Board is unable to send the same people back to the same place or time more than once. But this was a different place and time, with different people. It wasn’t out of the question. A little smile appeared at the corner of her mouth.
“That just might work!” she said excitedly. “What have we got to lose?”
“Let’s try it!” said Mrs. Vader.
They snapped into action. Mrs. Vader turned on the Board to warm it up. Then she took out her smartphone to look up the precise location where the Carpathia had docked in New York City. Miss Z rolled over to her computer and began tapping keys rapidly.
“Mr. Maloney, I would like you to stand in front of that large board over there, please,” she told him.
Thomas Maloney didn’t rush over to fulfill her request. He didn’t get up from the chair.
“Wait one gosh-darned minute,” he said, putting his feet up on the edge of Miss Z’s desk. “Maybe I don’t wanna go to New York. I kinda like it right here. Maybe I’ll stick around awhile.”
“You can’t stick around,” Miss Z said sternly. “You have to go back to your own time.”
“Says who?”
Thomas Maloney leaned back in the chair and clasped his hands behind his head. He was feeling cocky. And wealthy. There were ten hundred-dollar bills in his pocket, a small fortune, to him. He wouldn’t need to get a job for quite a while.
“America’s still a free country, ain’t it?” he asked. “The land of opportunity, right? Looks like you two are livin’ the good life, with your fancy contraptions and such. I could get used to this.”
Thomas Maloney was a big man, but Miss Z had sized him up and decided she could take him. She had negotiated hundreds of deals with politicians and businesspeople around the world. It shouldn’t be that hard to cut a deal with a deckhand who’d never gone to high school.
“Mr. Maloney,” she said. “Do you know how much it costs to rent an apartment here in Boston?”
Maloney thought it over. He had been paying twelve Irish pounds a month for a small flat in Belfast before setting sail on the Titanic.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Twenty pounds a month?”
Miss Z and Mrs. Vader laughed.
“Try two thousand American dollars,” said Miss Z.
“You kiddin’ me?”
That was about as much money as he earned all year working on ships. He calculated that the thousand dollars in his pocket would only pay for two weeks’ worth of rent. No food.
Miss Z noticed that Thomas Maloney was wearing a wedding ring.
“And how much does it cost to take your wife out to dinner, may I ask?”
“About five pounds, give or take,” he replied.
“It will cost you ten times that much money here,” Miss Z told him. “Mr. Maloney, a gallon of gas costs over two dollars now. A gallon of milk is more than twice that.”
Thomas Maloney was doing arithmetic in his head, quickly trying to convert American dollars into Irish pounds. He was starting to sweat.
“What’s your wife’s name, Mr. Maloney?” asked Mrs. Vader.
“Katie.”
“I suppose you miss her.”
Miss Z didn’t say anything for a moment. She wanted to give Maloney time to form a mental image of his wife and realize he would never see her again. He may have had children, too.
“Think about it, Mr. Maloney,” Miss Z finally told him. “You have no place to live here. No job. The thousand dollars in your pocket is not going to last long. And then there’s your family . . .”
Family. There’s something about that word. Everybody wants to go home to their family at some point.
Thomas Maloney looked out the window again. A jet plane flew by, startling him.
While he was thinking it over, Mrs. Vader had done her research and found that the Carpathia had docked at Pier 54 in New York City, at the end of Fourteenth Street. If the Flashback Four had survived the Titanic, that’s where they would be, at least for the time being. She wrote it out on a page of scrap paper for Miss Z.
“Okay, okay, I’ll go back,” Maloney finally agreed. “But I think I deserve some, uh, compensation for the trouble you put me through. I didn’t ask for this mess. And it’s gonna cost me a lot of dough to get back home to Ireland.”
Miss Z sighed. She needed Maloney more than he needed her. Fortunately, she had more money than he could ever imagine. She was used to people asking her for cash. It’s an occupational hazard of being extremely wealthy.
“Would another thousand be helpful?” she asked as she reached into her desk drawer for her checkbook.
Maloney had been hoping for a hundred. This was going to be a big payday.
“That’ll do,” he said quickly. “But in bills, please. You know as well as I do that I ain’t gonna be able to cash your check in 1912.”
“Smart thinking, Mr. Maloney,” Miss Z said with a little smile.
She wheeled herself over to a safe on the wall behind one of her many pictures. She opened it and took
