“The year twenty nineteen.”
“You must understand how difficult that is to believe, Michael.”
He nodded. “I do. There are moments I don’t believe it could be happening either. But it is. You’re real.”
“Aye, I am.”
“You said yourself that I sound different than anyone you’ve ever heard. My clothes are different. How do you explain the zipper on my jeans? Have you ever seen one before?”
“I admit I have never seenjeansbefore, let alone a zipper. But you could have procured them in some far-off land. Perhaps you come someplace far away from here.”
“I do. It’s two hundred and ninety-five years away.”
She studied him as best she could in the lantern light. He seemed so convinced. If her father believed his mad story for any reason, it was because Michael sounded so sincere.
“Okay, tell me about the world two hundred and ninety-five years from now.” She wanted to see how far he would take this.
“Okay, um, there’s something called the internet…we have computers and phones, and now, watches, too, that can—”
“What are all those things?” she asked. “You lost your phone.”
“Yes, that’s right. They are devices that enable you to speak to someone who is far away. You can see them on a screen and talk to them. You can buy things like…I don’t know—anything. Everything you can think of, someone is selling it on the internet. With a phone, you can take pictures. They are still images captured on the screen or printed up on glossy paper. You can find a job, find a husband, a one-night-stand, whatever. The world is at our fingertips.”
“It sounds fascinating,” she said, wide-eyed, suspecting for certain now that he was beyond help and likely had one of the most brilliant minds of anyone she knew. Such a terrible pity. “What is an internest?”
“Internet.The internetis like an enormous spiderweb that connects those devices all over the world. It’s not something you can touch like a phone or a computer. It works inside those devices, kind of. It’s very complicated. Our technology has grown by leaps and bounds. It makes us lazy.
“Some of the other things are lights.” He explained what they were. “And plumbing. Oh, man, I miss plumbing most of all.”
They arrived at Belmair Hill, or at the bottom of it. It wasn’t a steep incline, or an exceptionally high hill. In fact, there was nothing spectacular about it, until the sun came up over the vast horizon. There was nothing around but fields, so there was nothing to mar the view. One could see the light spreading across the earth for hundreds of miles.
She couldn’t wait for him to see.
They sat in the thick grass on top of the hill to wait.
“How long have you been coming here?”
“Since I was thirteen. Preston brought me.”
“I figured.”
Did he sound angry? She decided to find out.
“He wanted to kiss me here once.”
“Charlotte, I’m not really inter—once? Why just once?”
She wished she could see his face. He sounded as if he were scowling. “Because I stopped him the first time. I love it here and if our first kiss would have been here and things went sour with us, this place would be ruined for me. I did not want to take the chance and it angered him.”
“Well then, I guess kissing you here tonight is out of the question.”
Oh, he made her cheeks blaze and her blood boil. The more time she spent with him the worse it was becoming. She had to think with her head, although she never found it so difficult to do in her life! She leaned in, smiling at him.
“Things have more of a chance going sour with you than they do with Preston,” she told him with a teasing smile.
“Why?” He didn’t smile back. He wasn’t angry. He was just earnest.
“I told you. You will eventually cage me, Detective. You will have to. You take your duty very seriously. I think that is also what my father saw in you. But as I told you already, I think you came here to catch me.”
