“Why the upset look?” Dad asked me. “It’s a beautiful day, and we’re at the park together.”
I was four years old, and Dad and I were playing at the “old-fashioned” park that had real grass and rose bushes.
“In a couple of minutes, that man is going to tell that woman that he doesn’t like her anymore, and she’s going to be sad,” I said.
“Are you sure? They’re holding hands.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “He doesn’t even want to hold her hand, but she took his hand and now he doesn’t know what to do.”
The man shook his hand loose, and the couple sat on a bench.
“See how he won’t look at her and how his hands are fidgeting?” I said.
The man turned to the woman and said something.
“That could mean a lot of things,” Daddy said.
The woman slapped the man across the face.
“She acted mad, but she’s mostly sad,” I said. “She’s going to be okay in a couple of days, though.”
“How do you know that?” Dad asked.
“The way she walks.”
I jumped onto the ancient slide and slid to the bottom.
“Daddy? Sometimes it’s not fun to know things before they happen. What do you do when you know something sad is going to happen?”
Daddy looked up at the mountains and got a serious look on his face.
“I’ve never worried much about the things I know are going to happen,” he said. “I worry most when I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“That’s silly,” I said. “You always know what’s going to happen.”
Daddy got that look of bottomless sadness.
“How I wish that was true,” he said.
******
We talk with William for the next hour, while Zera and I devour fried chicken. After Bethany House was destroyed, William and Albert came to Timber Ridge Camp to establish a new Four safe house, and William fell in love with the place. Mom and Dad secretly gave him the money to buy and restore it, then to run it as a church camp. I’m disappointed to learn that neither Mom nor Dad have ever visited publicly to advertise the place. I suppose Dad knew he’d one day need to disappear and that all of his old friends and relatives would be watched; so he couldn’t draw attention to the place.
When we get back to Wendy’s barn, Austin first eats the fried chicken we bring, and then proudly shows us that he’s finished ten of the pieces needed for the new arena cages.
“I’ve also been watching the news as things heat and cool,” he says. “I think we over-estimated Tyrone Bauer and his people. The aerospace division of Chi-One botched a rocket launch this morning.”
He brings a replay onto the screen for us. The launch looks flawless off the pad. Austin skips ahead to about the seventh minute after liftoff, where the thrust ends and the whole thing starts to be pulled back into the atmosphere.
“They didn’t calculate the required thrust correctly,” Austin says. “Honestly, how could they mess up something so simple? The math is over two hundred years old.”
“What happened next?” I ask.
“It took several hours, but it fell. It made a nice explosion, too.”
He calls up more video. The vehicle is already glowing, when an explosion separates it into multiple parts, which then glow individually. The biggest piece is less than six kilometers from the surface when it explodes again.
“At least they waited until they were over the ocean to take care of that last piece,” Austin says. “It was big enough to do some damage if it had come down over land.”
“Can you tell if any of the pieces were made from your composite?” I ask.
“Probably just the payload, which was the last big piece,” he answers. “It wasn’t really burning up like the others, which must be why they equipped it with a secondary explosive.”
“Is there any way to know what it was?”
“The news said it was a communications satellite.”
Why do I doubt that?
Austin finishes the pieces he’s working on, then turns in for the night. Zera offers him the bed in the house and I realize that I’m not going to get a turn on the bed, since leaving Austin and Zera in the barn by themselves would not be appropriate.
We lie on the hay for a long time, before Zera speaks.
“Are we heading back to Ogallala?” she asks.
“Why would you think that?”
“We can’t build a time machine without the missing components. I was thinking that maybe your dad buried them at your grandparents’ tombstone - the one that he cracked in half.”
“How do you know about that?” I ask.
“Really?” she asks. “It’s been in books, documentaries, and a movie about your parents and Four. Everyone knows about it.”
“Oh. Did they find a cute baby to play me in the movie?” I ask.
“Sorry. The movie ends before you’re born.”
“If everyone knows about it, then it’s not the tombstone we need to find,” I say.
We return to silence.
“Zera? Everyone seems to know more about my own father than I do. I understand now why he wanted to shield me and Austin from the spotlight, but to me, he’s just my dad.”
“You want me to tell you things about your own dad?” she asks.
“No, I want to hear about your father,” I reply. “You’re right about how I react when I see the black lines of a former cult hunter. I guess I just want to understand who they are, so that maybe I can learn to open my heart to them more easily.”
“Jocie, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last of The Washed to judge someone based on the black lines on their face. I’ve had to face that simple truth for most of my life. There were even times when I wished I had the black lines, rather than being washed.”
“Really? Why?”
“Just to show my dad how much I loved him, and to make things easier for him.”
“Easier? How so?”
“When you’re a former cult hunter, everyone knows it just by looking at your face. Just being out in public with Mom would draw stares and judgment from people on the street.”
“But your father had left The Corps and accepted Christ as his savior,” I say. “People who really knew him must have seen that.”
Zera takes a long time to respond.
“When I was five, our family visited a church full of washed people,” Zera says. “Do you know what one of the accepting, Christ-loving elders of the church asked my dad, right in front of me? He asked my dad if he raped my mother just so he could have a washed child.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
“So was that man, once Mom was through with him. She left little doubt about her ability to defend herself against any would-be rapist. The funny thing is, I never thought of Dad as the one with more scars. That was always Mom. I think that’s why they were so good for each other: Dad had more scars on the outside, and Mom had more on the inside.”
“I assume you’re talking about the attacks your mom led,” I say.
“Yeah, she killed a lot of cult hunters, and Dad was almost one of them. He was at McIntosh. Everyone knows that Mom was so weak from dehydration that she needed I.V. fluids, but nobody remembers that the Four team that went in to save her got caught. My dad had been watching your dad inside the mountain and disobeyed orders, when he found out the Four team was on a humanitarian mission. He helped the Four team get Mom out, then visited her in the hospital to make sure she was okay, and the next thing you know, they were in love.”
“I bet he had a lot of questions for your mom about faith and Jesus,” I say.
“Questions, yes, but faith was always in his heart. If anything, I think Mom learned more from him. She learned how to truly forgive and to let go of all the anger she was carrying.”
“How did he die?” I ask.
“Response to the Mark of the Beast varies. He had a particularly strong reaction that affected his lungs, and eventually it killed him.”
“Thanks for telling me about him,” I say. “You and your mom must miss him very much.”
“We’ll see him again, someday.”
******
The next day, I leave Austin and Zera working on the puzzle pieces, and sit with Wendy.
“Wendy? Do you know anyone named Hannah?” I ask.
“Just your grandmother.”
“That’s the only Hannah I can think of, too,” I say. “But I don’t think she’s the Hannah I need to find.”
Even though she’s blind, Wendy still tilts her head as if she can see me to indicate that she’s confused by my statement. I take the piece of paper that was under the brown package out of my pocket and read it again.
“I think Dad left this piece of paper where he knew I’d find it,” I say. “It says ‘Hannah holds the key.’ It must have said something more than that, because the writing goes right up to a ripped edge. Dad didn’t write it, it’s not in his handwriting, so I’m not sure who I should be looking for.”
“When it comes to your father dear, I’ve noticed that it’s best to just put the information into the back of your head and wait. When the time comes, his note will make sense.”
When the time comes… I still don’t even know what time I need to travel to… I wonder if Wendy may know something without even realizing it.
“What do you know about the mine that Bethany House was built over?” I ask.
“It’s very old. Nobody even realized that there was coal in this region; but in the mid 2020’s world politics and terrorism got so bad that the West had no choice but to stop funding it by no longer buying oil from the Middle East. The United States began looking for new energy sources, and found coal in all sorts of unexpected places.”
“Do you know when the mine opened?” I ask.
“It opened in 2028, but it wasn’t open for long. The Final Holy War broke out in 2036. With nearly four billion people dead, worldwide energy consumption went way down; so the mine was closed sometime in 2039.
So Dad needs me to travel to sometime after 2039, when the mine is closed. But when?
I think for a long time, and Wendy is content to sit in silence - until something occurs to me.
“When Four started building Bethany House, they didn’t know the mine was there. Why not?”
“People had forgotten about it. It had been buried for nearly two hundred years.”
“Buried? What do you mean? None of the tunnels were filled in.”
“Of course they didn’t fill it in; that would be too much work. They just covered the main shaft with a concrete slab.”
The concrete slab that now sits in the bottom of the hole.
“That’s how my family came to live in this part of the country,” Wendy says. “My great- grandfather was a concrete man. He went all over the country covering old mines to keep people safe. He did so many that he got the nickname ‘The Undertaker.’”
“Why would they call him that?” I ask.
“Well, the work he did was called ‘laying the mine to rest,’ so after a while, the concrete slab came to be known as the tombstone.”
******
“Okay - so now the three of us are going to move a multi-ton hunk of concrete?” Zera asks, as we run to the site of Bethany House. “Do you plan to part the Red Sea, too?”
“I’m definitely hoping for a little divine help, but I’m betting it comes in the form of divine inspiration,” I reply.
“That seems to be something your family has in excess.”
“Maybe some of us, but this time I’m hoping it was Albert who was inspired,” I say. “He’s the one who dropped that slab when he blew up Bethany House. Even if I can’t see it, I’m sure he created a way to get under it.”
Zera stops and sits on a rock.
“Are you tired?” I ask.
“I’m not tired of running …” she says. “… but I’m tired of secrets. I may be the goddaughter of Cephas Paulson, but I don’t have to put up with Paulson family secrets the way the rest of the family does. I want to know why you’re mad.”
“Mad? I’m not mad.”
“Jocie, I’m Zip’s daughter. I know anger when I see it. Now spill it.”
I sit on a rock opposite from her.
“I’m not Cephas Paulson,” I say. “I’m Jocie Paulson.”
“Yeah, the red ponytail pretty much gave that away. What’s your point?”
“The point is, Dad would already know exactly what to do next. He’d already know how to get under the slab; he’d know exactly what year and day to go back to and what to do when he got there. Don’t you see? I’m barely figuring things out as I go along.”
“Oh,” Zera says. “I guess that could be a problem … but what are you mad about?”
I stare at her.
“Really?”
“Jocie, if you’re so sure that your dad has everything figured out, why haven’t you considered that he wanted you to barely figure things out as you go along? Maybe that’s the timing he anticipated all along?”
“I have considered it,” I say, and sigh. “I guess that’s what I’m mad about. I’m mad that assuming I’m slow was always part of the equation for him.”
“Ha! I got you,” she says. “If assuming you’re slow was always a part of the equation, then assuming you’d eventually figure it all out was also part of the equation. He knows that you’re the only person on earth - other than himself - who can actually solve one of his crazy puzzles. Having Cephas Paulson place that much faith in me would make me smile for the rest of my life.”
“Then start smiling,” I say. “It’s not just me. He’s placed his faith in all three of us.”
******
We return to the side tunnel where the arena cave was hidden, and I sit on a ledge, looking down at the “tombstone.”
“Why didn’t Albert just hide the extra time machine pieces in this one tunnel?” Zera asks. “Why risk crushing them by hiding it under tons of concrete?”
He wouldn’t.
I crawl into the tunnel and turn on my flashlight. Zera follows.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
I pick up one of the cans that are stacked neatly against the wall, and find it’s much lighter than expected.
Dad would have seen it right away. Actually, Dad did see it right away.
The seal of the can was cut with a hand laser and then set back into place, so it pops off easily. Inside is a carefully packed piece of electronics.
“Canned time machine,” I say.
We find dozens and dozens of components, all perfectly preserved. If the plan to seal the tunnel hadn’t worked, a Federal drone would have found nothing but piles of ancient cans and scrap metal.
“I don’t believe it,” Zera says. “Your dad got this one wrong. Albert didn’t hide anything under The Tombstone.”
“That’s right,” I say. “The tombstone was never Albert’s hiding spot.”
It was mine all along.