Brewster caught a glimpse of something else, lettering above the headline, but the print was small, and the paper took off before whatever he’d seen could register, except in his stomach. He shrugged off the tingle as one of those random, unaccountable fits of foreboding. They come out of nowhere and leave just as quickly without ever revealing their cause.
He shoved one hand into his pocket and used the other to fumble with his credit card until he got it into the payment slot the right way. Then he punched his zip code twice into a touchpad before it registered and started the pump. Next came the hard part, waiting in the cold. Rather than heighten his misery by watching the gas dribble into his tank one grudging tenth gallon at a time, he stared into space and tried to zone out. Another gust of wind tore into him. He glanced down at his appallingly thin clothing. Light jeans? A flannel shirt? A windbreaker? How could he have done this to himself?
Gas pumps worked fine on their own. He abandoned this one in favor of the dilapidated building, thinking hot chocolate but willing to settle for a donut or candy bar and a minute or two in the warmth. He tried the door. Locked. He stepped back and looked around. Somebody had used a blue marker to scribble a message on a cardboard sign taped to the window. We’re hiding from the butterflies. Back in thirty minutes!
“There’s no one here.” A girl’s voice came from behind.
Heart attack time. He’d been alone, hadn’t he? He spun and came face-to-face with some twelve-year-old kid who must have crept up on him from around the corner of the building. The girl could have passed for an ice skater in a Courier and Ives print, bundled up in a white down jacket, with hands kept warm by blue wool mittens. Her matching snow hat hid most of her blonde hair except for a couple loose bangs in front and the lower portion of a ponytail in back.
She smiled like a portrait. “I’m Gabriella.”
That name. Where had he heard it recently? He tried to return the smile, but the entire situation had gone from weird to creepy. “I’m Brewster.”
“I’m keeping an eye on the pump for them.”
Brewster wrapped his arms around himself. He looked over the girl’s shoulder at the locked door. “Geez, couldn’t they have let you watch from inside?”
She shifted from one foot to the other. “I like standing out here.”
“No, you don’t.” But what could he do about it? Thirty-year-old guys weren’t supposed to pal around with somebody’s teenage kid. Still, the poor girl was freezing. “Why not wait in my car until they get back?”
She shook her head. “You know the rule about staying away from strangers.”
“Rules don’t apply in cases of frostbite.”
“If I get too cold, I’ll just head home.”
He looked across the road at a boarded-up, ramshackle house.
“See? It isn’t far,” she added.
The wind gusted harder, chilling him to the bone. The slow-motion pump had probably gassed up his car by then. “Okay. Nice meeting you, Gabriella.”
“Thank you.”
Brewster started to head away but stopped when he saw that window sign again. “Hey, what’s with that message?”
“The one about butterflies?”
“Yeah.”
Gabriella gazed up at Brewster with an intense, Children-of-the-Corn expression, bubbling a wave of foreboding straight through his stomach. The wizened look in her eyes didn’t fit the mold of any twelve-year-old girl he’d ever met.
“That refers to the butterfly effect,” she said.
“Huh?”
She glanced around with a furtive expression before leaning toward him. “A single butterfly can flap its wings and change the course of weather forever.”
“Okay, I guess I’ve heard of that.” But the sign’s weird, out-of-context message and the girl’s odd behavior raised the hair on his arms.
She pointed to a newspaper holding its own against the wind, somehow still in the stand although the door had blown open. “You’re the butterfly, Brewster. I can’t let anyone see you flapping your wings here.”
“You can’t let…?”
He could almost see electricity crackling out of her eyes.
He tore his gaze from the scary kid and turned to the paper. The date made his skin crawl. October 2012?
He hadn’t seen any traffic on the interstate. He didn’t belong in Upstate New York. And he certainly had no business falling backward in time. “I’m… I’m dreaming, aren’t I?”
“Yes, but you’ve stepped out of your dream into the real world. There’s a difference.”
“I don’t get it.”
“No matter. You were driving in the wrong direction. I can’t seem to get things to happen the way they should anymore. You’ll find Carla down there.” She pointed to a side road heading south.
The girl started fading.
And he remembered. Gabriella. Igor Tesfaye’s girlfriend nearly spat the name out just before hurrying out of the restaurant. “Wait! Tell me what’s going on.”
She shimmered like a mirage. “This isn’t the right time for the telling.”
“What about Carla? Where is she?”
“Just down the road.” Gabriella motioned with a barely visible hand. “Go spread your wings.”
Two blinks later, she disappeared.
* * *
Brewster put about five miles’ distance between him and the station before the shock wore off. At that point, a dozen questions popped into his head, none very lucid and most along the lines of the one he finally shouted aloud. “What the hell is going on?”
He reached down and pinched his leg, hard, but that didn’t wake him up. It didn’t bring him back home, either. He still sat behind the wheel of a car that had no business being in Upstate New York let alone a year earlier than the night he’d fallen asleep. He tried to open his eyes wider. Nothing changed.
Clearly, he’d be stuck in this hiding-from-the-butterflies scene for however long he was meant to stay. He almost followed the urge to turn around and head toward something he’d be sure to enjoy—the snow squall still looming in the
