“Oh God.”
“You didn’t try to swallow your tongue, so my guess was orgasm.”
“Oh God.”
Meghan looked at me, uneasy smile on her face. “Quit it with the Oh Gods, or I’ll think you’re doing it again.”
“I’m sorry. Oh God.”
“So let me ask you again: What were you doing with the mother of your father’s killer?”
This was too much. She’d kissed me, she’d merged with me—or whatever the hell had happened. I didn’t remember it being necessarily sexual. I remember it being extremely disorienting.
Finally I stood up and went to the bathroom and cleaned myself up with the three fingers I had left. Meghan hadn’t been lying.
When I returned to the main room we seemed to have this unspoken agreement not to speak about whatever had just happened. Maybe it was a side effect of the pill. Hell, maybe they weren’t time-traveling pills after all. Maybe Grandpop Henry had a secret stash of Cialis in that Tylenol bottle and I was a sick bastard imagining this whole thing.
But I knew that wasn’t the case. Meghan knew it, too.
“So to recap, we’re out of witnesses. Your mother doesn’t know anything. Your grandmother gave us a little. And Erna can do wonders with her lips.”
Meghan was wrong. We had another witness.
“There’s someone else.”
“Who?”
“Billy Derace.”
Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up. I listened to Meghan’s breathing for a while, then realized she was awake, too. I reached out and touched her hand lightly.
“You awake?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.”
We lay there in the dark together. I was genuinely surprised when she suggested crashing again. She told me it was late, she didn’t feel like making the drive back downtown this time of night—making it not a big deal. But still: she stayed. She didn’t have to. Even my pill-popping wet dream hadn’t scared her away. Even me, making out with a woman who was probably seventy years old by now. It made me wonder. Finally, I asked her.
“Why are you doing all of this?”
“All of what?”
“You know. Everything. Helping me trying to figure this out. Hanging out so much. Not calling the lunatic asylum to have me carted away.”
She was silent for a moment.
“You want the truth?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t get me wrong—you’re a great guy, and I cherish our friendship.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I was really concerned when I thought you were slipping into some kind of
Somehow it was honest and warm and heartbreaking at the same time.
We slept most of the next day away. The rain was pelting down when we pulled up to the Adams Institute in the early evening. There was a frightening rumble in the distance. It was one of those good down-and-dirty early summer storms you get every so often in Philadelphia.
“And here we are, sneaking into a mental hospital,” Meghan said.
“We’re not sneaking in. We’re just going to walk.”
“Easy for you to say. You must have done this all the time at the
“Uh, not exactly.”
“You didn’t sneak into government buildings? Secretly tape meetings? Spend endless nights taping together shredded documents?”
“There were reporters who loved that kind of thing. But I wasn’t one of those reporters. I preferred the phone—or even better, an e-mail exchange. To tell you the truth, I even hated that—it always felt like I was bothering people.”
“You’re a regular Bob Woodward.”
“I’m not even a Carl Bernstein. Lock me in a room with piles of documents and I’m a happy man.”
“You live in a room with piles of documents, and you’re miserable.”
“Oh shut up.”
All I wanted was thirty seconds with Billy Derace. That’s all. If he recognized me, then it was proof that all of this was real, that I was speaking to him in the past. That I was the kindly ghost from upstairs who tried to stop his mother from beating him. Of course, I was also the kindly ghost who’d kissed his mother. But I wouldn’t bring that up.
The front gate was just off Roosevelt Boulevard. Even the tall, black, wrought-iron fence surrounding the neatly manicured estate seemed to hold up a hand and say and just where do you think you’re going.
The plan was this: Meghan would pretend to be a lawyer from a nonexistent firm (she’d even printed up fake letterhead) with documents for an inmate (William Allen Derace) about an estate matter. Meghan was attractive, confident and knew how to lay down some lawyerspeak after years of watching her father.
The front receptionist desk shot her down completely. Meghan was told that the lead attorney would have to call to make an appointment.
She came back out to the car, sat down in the driver’s seat, dripping wet. She fumed so hard, I swear I saw raindrops on her forehead sizzle and evaporate into steam. Meghan was not used to being shut out of anything.
I had no choice but to say:
“Okay, let me try.”
She looked at me.
“I thought you didn’t do this kind of thing.”
“I’m thinking it’ll look good on my resume.”
I was wearing my one jacket and a pair of ill-fitting trousers from my grandfather’s closet, as well as one of his dress shirts. We had been roughly the same size at some point, but the man had shrunk in his old age, leaving everything a little tight. If only I had a skinny tie, I could join a new wave power pop boy band.
“Let me borrow your clipboard.”
“Why?” Meghan asked.
“If you wear the right suit and carry a clipboard, you can pretty much walk into any building and nobody will bother you.”
“Is that the right suit?”
“I’ll walk fast so they don’t notice.”
I reached over with my three good fingers and started to pull on the door handle.
“Wish me luck.”
“Good luck. By the way, if you’re caught by the guards, wet your pants and start barking like a dog.”
“You think this is a riot, don’t you.”
“No, I’m serious. That’s the one thing that can get you out of pretty much any situation. Or at least, give you
