“You said you were a witness? When Jaybee came?” Her mouth was tight, but her eyes were avid.
I had to make it up as I went along. “Dorothy and I had planned to have New Year’s dinner together. I had just arrived, and I’d asked to use the bathroom. I was inside, with the door ajar, when I heard the man come in. I heard it all, but I was afraid if he saw me, he’d kill me. There was nothing I could do. Afterwards, he picked up Bill’s body and went, and I helped Dorothy get herself together, then she decided to go away where he couldn’t find her. I don’t even know where she is.” I had to say that. Otherwise Janice would be at me to get the address. Her mouth was still downturned. Was she angry that Dorothy herself hadn’t told her? Or was she angry that Dorothy had gotten away?
“She should have called me,” she said bitterly. “I’m terribly fond of Dorothy.” Her tone belied the words.
“I don’t think she was thinking about that.” Besides, I didn’t believe her. Janice had never approved of me enough to be fond of me. I equivocated, “I’m sure she’ll call you. Before she went, she suggested I come here, that you might like the company, that you might not want to be alone.”
“Where were you living before?” she asked suspiciously. I knew she was suspecting me of having invented the tragedy for the sake of free rent.
“In an apartment downtown,” I extemporized. “The building has been sold, and all the tenants have to move.”
It was evidently explanation enough. Janice forgot to be suspicious of me and returned to her grief. “That bastard,” she whispered, tears coming again. “Oh, that horrible man. What will I do when he comes back?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing, please. Dorothy said not to do anything.”
“I couldn’t do anything now anyhow,” she said. “I have to get out of town for a while. The team I used to work with is coming from the twenty-first to photograph whales. They’ll be—we’ll be coming here, to this very town. I was with them. I can’t be here when I come. Not this near or it might make a loop.”
When I asked for details, she told me the team had come from the twenty-first on January 12, 1993, and had rented a boat named the Sally Ann, with its owner as crew. They had gone out into the ocean and photographed migrating whales. She remembered it clearly, almost yearningly. Her expression softened, as though something wonderful had been connected with that trip. “Martin’s coming,” she whispered.
“And Bill?” I whispered. “Bill’s coming?”
“Oh, yes. Bill. And the others.” She got up and went into the bathroom, closing the door. I heard her weeping, making loud gulping noises. I didn’t think she was weeping over Bill. Something else grieved her.
Alice had talked about staying away from places that had previously been visited through time-travel. None of the team would want to be in this town when their former selves came back. None of them could be, but I could. They hadn’t even known I existed on January 12, 1993.
January 8, 1993
Janice trusted me enough to leave me with the keys to the house, money to buy groceries, and the names of some comebacks I’m supposed to call and ask about jobs. She said she’d be back on the eighteenth.
“When you came this time, when the team comes back this time, will they know about comebacks?” I asked her.
“Oh yes,” she said, disapprovingly. “We even talked to one. Or rather, Bill did. I hardly saw her, but I remember, she gave Bill some clothes.” She sniffed. Even with Bill dead, she still disapproves of his clothes.
January 12, 1993: Evening
I saw them all. Jaybee, of course. Younger, but with that same red light of destruction burning in his eyes. Janice and Alice. Martin, the director. He and Janice were obviously in love, and that’s what she had remembered so longingly. The two of them had no eyes for anyone else. Janice was lovely, too, with a winsome fragility that could age very quickly and lose itself. Perhaps that evanescent beauty was all Martin had cared about.
Bill was there. Young Bill. Much younger than when I first saw him.
It had taken me most of the past several days to find the clothes I remembered Bill having. The sheepskin was the easiest part. I got that at a place they make sheepskin jackets. I finally found the skirt at the Salvation Army store. I took the tags off everything, put them in a paper bag and carried it with me when I went down to the dock, very early this morning, before it was even light. I found the Sally Ann. When the owner came along, he unlocked it, then went up on top, toward the front. While he was up there, I went down inside. A stowaway, I guess I was. Like Constanzia.
I heard their voices on the dock, heard their feet as they came aboard, felt the surging as the boat left the dock, the heaving of the ocean. I prayed I wouldn’t be sick. After a while, when we were well out on the sea, I came up from inside. I pretended it was an accident. I’d gotten a migraine while fishing on the pier, I told them, so I’d borrowed the boat to lie down in for a moment, and fallen asleep. I apologized profusely and said I wouldn’t get in their way.
Bill and Martin exchanged a look and shrugged. Their twenty-first cameras looked enough like twentieth cameras that they assumed I wouldn’t know the difference. They were doing shots to be used early in the whale documentary, shots of healthy creatures. The starving mother and calf that appeared in the final shots
