After a quick meal in the hotel restaurant of bacon, eggs, potatoes, and orange juice (that cost a whopping thirty- two cents) she went looking for Dodger, the bellhop. She found him at his same post, standing outside the hotel, greeting guests. When Dodger spotted her, his eyes lit up. Courtney wasn’t sure if he was happy to see her, or terrified that she’d start yelling at him again.
“G’mornin’,” he said cautiously. “Everything okeydokey?”
“It’s all good,” Courtney answered. “But I need a favor.”
“Name it.”
“I need to buy some clothes. Are there any shops nearby?”
“You kiddin’?” Dodger chuckled. “We got the greatest shops in the world just steps away. Pendragon knows that.”
Uh-oh. Courtney hadn’t thought of a plausible story about why Bobby was gone.
“Right, she said, trying to buy time to think. “He went home to Stony Brook. A family thing.”
Dodger nodded. “Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. Could you tell me where the shops are?”
“I’ll do better than that. I’ll take you there myself. I got a break comin’ up.”
“That’s okay. Just tell me where to go.”
“Tut-tut,” Dodger said, trying to be gallant. “Pendragon and I go way back. I gotta give the red carpet treatment to his sister.”
“Sister?” Courtney asked a little too quickly. “How do you know Shannon-” Oops, she stopped herself. She’d forgotten about the setup. “Right! Sister. I’m his sister. For a second I thought you meant his other sister, Shannon. Who of course is my sister too. We’re all sisters. And brothers. Bobby is our brother. Right?” She giggled nervously.
Dodger gave her a strange look. Courtney smiled innocently. A few minutes later they were walking along Fifty-seventh Street headed for the shops on Madison Avenue.
“Here’s a swell place,” Dodger suggested as they walked by a small boutique with posed mannequins wearing flowered dresses like the one Courtney was wearing.
Courtney kept walking.
They came upon another storefront that displayed lacy clothes and large, straw hats with oversize flowers on them. “Lots of gals like this place and-“
Courtney kept walking. Dodger shrugged and followed. They passed by several other stores that catered to women and girls. Courtney didn’t want anything to do with them.
“What exactly are you looking for?” Dodger finally asked.
“I don’t know,” Courtney admitted. “Something less… Barbie.”
Dodger frowned. “I got no idea what that means, but maybe you should go someplace that’s got a little bit of everything.”
“Is there a place like that?” Courtney asked.
Fifteen minutes and a short subway ride later, Courtney stepped up to the entrance of “the World’s Largest Department Store” on Thirty-fourth Street. Macy’s. The same Macy’s she knew from home, that had all sorts of everything, including a parade on Thanksgiving. Dodger didn’t make the trip because his break was over. That was fine by Courtney. He asked too many questions. She felt that he meant well, in an old-fashioned, “I’m a smart guy who knows best how to take care of a helpless little gal” sort of way, but she didn’t need that. Her plan was to avoid Dodger like the plague.
Walking through Macy’s was an alien experience. It looked nothing like the Macy’s of Second Earth. The clothes were heavy and dark. There was no music. The lighting was dim. The floors were made of wood. Even the escalators had wooden steps. But it was still Macy’s, and Courtney knew she’d find what she needed.
She walked past the ladies’ and girls’ departments and headed straight to menswear. There, as a perplexed salesman wearing a neat suit with a white carnation in the lapel watched in wonder, Courtney bought two pairs of men’s woolen pants and a few white, cotton shirts. She also bought socks, a pair of brown leather shoes that were much more comfortable than the ones from the flume, and a pair of green striped suspenders to hold the pants up. She found a gray woolen cap with a short, soft brim that was big enough to tuck all of her long brown hair under. Courtney put her hands in her pockets and admired herself in the mirror.
The salesman scowled. “Halloween was two days ago, young lady.”
Courtney smiled. “I think I look pretty good.”
She did. Courtney may have been wearing men’s clothes, but there was no hiding the fact that she was a girl. The final piece was an oversize, dark green turtleneck sweater that she knew she’d need once the weather got cold. Satisfied, she paid the salesman and headed out.
“What do I do with this?” the salesman called to her. He was holding up the flowered dress that Courtney had worn into the store.
“I don’t need it anymore,” she said brightly. “Halloween was two days ago.”
The salesman gave her a disapproving frown and Courtney went on her way. She had one more chore before beginning her search for Mark in earnest. She traveled a route she had taken many times before, in another era. From Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan she took a subway train to Grand Central Terminal. The ride cost a nickel. From there, she got on a New Haven Line train, headed for her hometown of Stony Brook, Connecticut. The hour- long trip was familiar yet alien. The train wasn’t anywhere near as comfortable as the sleek, shock-absorbed cars of Second Earth. She felt herself bouncing around as if she were on a freight train. There was an incessant squeak and rattle that didn’t seem to bother anybody else but her. The constant bouncing was especially annoying because she was trying to read the newspaper.
If she had been tracking Mark on Second Earth, her first stop would have been the Internet. On First Earth all she had were newspapers and the occasional radio news broadcast. At Grand Central Station she bought five different daily papers: the New York Advocate, the Manhattan Gazette, the New York Daily Mirror, the New York Post and the New York Times. She quickly searched through every paper, desperate to find a mention of Mark Dimond, Andy Mitchell, the Dimond Alpha Digital Organization, or KEM Limited. Her thinking was that if Mark’s presentation of the Forge technology was so important, it would have to hit the news, even if it was a small blurb.
She found nothing. The big news item of the day was the mysterious subway derailment in the Bronx. Courtney read that the engineer swore he saw a man jump in front of the speeding train, but no body was recovered. It would forever remain a mystery.
Finding no news of Mark was frustrating and reassuring at the same time. With nothing in the papers, Courtney hoped the news about Mark’s Forge technology hadn’t been released yet. She brightened. Maybe there was still hope of pulling it back before the damage was done.
The train pulled into Stony Brook Station. Courtney stepped onto a wooden platform that had been torn down three decades before she was born. She was tempted to take a tour around Stony Brook to see what her hometown looked like so many years before, but decided she didn’t have the time. She was there for a very specific purpose. The quicker she got back to New York, the better. It was a short walk from the train station to the main street of Stony Brook, which years later would come to be known as “the Ave” to all the kids. Courtney actually recognized some of the older buildings that no longer looked that old. There was an ice-cream soda fountain that on Second Earth would become a bicycle shop; a barbershop that in her day would become an art gallery; and a vegetable market that one day would be the Apple store where Courtney’s parents would buy her an iPod. It was a fascinating and odd trip through the past.
Her destination was the National Bank of Stony Brook. It was the bank where Bobby set up a safe-deposit box to keep the journals he wrote on First Earth. Sixty-some years later on Second Earth, Mark and Courtney would open up that vault to find them. It became the place where Mark kept all Bobby’s journals. Now they were entrusted to her, and she wasn’t going to do any less of a job than Mark. She had the key on a chain around her neck and she had memorized the account and box number. With absolute confidence she presented the information to the stuffy bank manager, who led her into the vault and left her alone. Inside the safe-deposit box were Bobby’s journals from his earlier adventure on First Earth, waiting for her and Mark to discover them on Second Earth.
She had been carrying around a large cloth purse since she left the hotel. In it was Bobby’s Journal #28. Courtney added it to the earlier ones and locked the box back up. For a moment she wondered if she and Mark would find this new journal when they opened up the box for the first time on Second Earth. Was that possible? She
