Lost in Time(92)

Adeline’s heart beat faster. “You do?”

“Sam and I have been seeing each other.”

Adeline swallowed, relieved that the secret was one she was well aware of.

Nora squinted at her. “You knew.”

“I knew.”

“I guess I should’ve figured that. You don’t miss anything. And I should have informed you. As my employer, you should know about workplace relationships.”

Adeline held up a hand. “First of all, I’m not your employer—”

“You are, Dani. It was different in Palo Alto. Before. When the company was small. Now, with…”—Nora motioned with her hands, all around—“with all this, the city, the machine, what it’s become…”

“It’s different,” Adeline said. “I’ll give you that. But within these walls, at home, what do you say we go back to Palo Alto, to the way things were?”

Nora drank the rest of the wine. “That sounds good to me.”

Adeline refilled the glass, and Nora seemed to relax a bit.

“We’ve been going slow, Sam and me. Like, middle school speed.” Nora laughed and shook her head. “We’re both scared. We’re both still hurt. And lonely. We’re like two porcupines trying to mate.”

Adeline laughed then, but she was crying inside because she knew how it ended. At least, she thought she did.





SIXTY-TWO


In the days leading up to Nora’s death, Adeline grasped for clues as to who would kill her. Try as she might, she couldn’t find any.

Elliott and Hiro spent day and night in the lab. When Hiro wasn’t there, he was in Las Vegas.

Constance was almost always away for medical treatment or to search for people from her past. She had a sense of her own time drawing to a close. She was racing against the clock too.

Nora and Sam were nursing a nascent romance that would soon die with her.

And Adeline couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking about all the clues, all the pieces that never seemed to add up. She sensed that there was still a missing piece here, but try as she might, she couldn’t see it.

It wasn’t just the mystery of Nora’s murder that loomed ahead. It was the loss of her father. As with her mother in Palo Alto, Adeline felt her time with him slipping away, and she couldn’t help but try to hold on.

At a lunch with him the week before Nora’s death, Adeline said, “You should start working out again.”

Sam glanced down at his shirt, feigning insult. “Is the dad bod really that bad?”

“It’s not that—it’s for your health. You never know.”

“What I do know is that at my age, I seem to be almost supernaturally cursed to wear these love handles and flab. I’ve tried dieting. And exercise. The curse of the dad bod resists all earthly countermeasures.”

“Have you tried cutting out alcohol?”

Sam snorted. “I’m a widower with a teen and a pre-teen at home. By the known laws of physics and human biology, I cannot survive without alcohol.”

Adeline shook her head, feeling slightly guilty about her adolescent behavior. “Are they that bad?”

“No. In fact, there have been times when those two kids were the only thing that kept me going. They’re my life. And they’ve given my life meaning that I couldn’t have imagined before. Especially after Sarah passed.”

Those words healed a wound so deep inside of Adeline she hadn’t known it was there.

*

The following night, Nora and Adeline were sitting in her living room, sipping wine and chatting, almost the way they had so many years ago, in another place, in another time. If they were indeed ships in the night, every moment they spent together brought them closer, back to the place they were before.

“Do you know what Hiro and Elliott are doing out in the valley?” Nora asked.

“Not specifically,” Adeline lied.

“Do you know generally?”

“Generally, they’re working on their passion project.”

Nora raised her eyebrows. “Seems like the only passion projects going on in this strange oasis in the desert are obsessing over dead people.”

And Adeline thought: truer words were never spoken.

*

Adeline waited and watched the calendar until Nora’s murder was three days away. Then two.

Knowing it was coming—and that she still didn’t know who the killer was—left her with a sense of impending doom. She searched, and still there were no clues.

Hiro and Elliott had locked themselves in the lab. They were close to their discovery.

Adeline felt the two events racing toward her now, two unstoppable trains powered by the force of time, about to collide.

Constance returned from China. She was so exhausted from her trip that she stayed in bed the entire next day. She was getting sicker. For years, she had been slowly losing her battle with the disease. Now she was losing it quickly.

A black cloud hung over Sam. The anniversary of his wife’s death loomed two days away.

Adeline realized then that Nora was going to die within hours of the anniversary of Adeline’s mother’s passing. She wondered if that was significant.

*

The night before Nora’s death, Adeline barely slept. It was the same as the night Charlie passed away.