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1
THE SHOCK OF SEEING the night sky transform was nothing compared to the shock of the freezing water. I floundered and splashed in the lake. My clothes were heavy and they tugged me down, threatening to submerge me in the icy depths. I righted myself as quickly as possible and swam toward shore. The dock was larger than the one I had just jumped from. I pulled myself onto the wooden surface. While the smaller dock had been covered in goose droppings, this one was almost completely clean. I rolled onto my back and caught my breath, shivering in the cold as steamy air poured from my open mouth.
I gave myself a minute to get it together, then I got up and walked away from the lake. The water dripped from my clothes onto the frosty grass as I went. In the dark it was hard to see the buildings in the distance but as I drew near I saw that several of the familiar camp landmarks were gone. There were a few more bunks than there had been previously. I was disoriented but it didn’t take me too long to understand that I was back in the present day. This was once again Shady Pines as it looked following Uncle Arthur and his partner selling to the township and retiring, laughing at all of us from their vacation destination.
Though I’d never really memorized how many bunks existed in the new camp or how everything was laid out, it seemed the way I remembered it should be. My adventure in 1993 hadn’t modified the landscape in any noticeable way. I arrived at the parking lot, passing by a large expanse of grass where the main house had once stood. The blank slate of ground set off a range of emotions that I couldn’t have anticipated. I looked up, fixing my eyes on a piece of sky where the window of my computer attic had once been. The fresh memory of my time there in a long gone summer brought tears to my eyes which stung as the cold wind flicked them away. In the parking lot, I wasn’t exactly surprised to see that the Taurus was gone. Hauled off by a tow truck long ago, I imagined. It didn’t matter. I had left the keys in the lake in 1993 along with my wallet and all its contents.
I was a long way from home with no easy way to get there and with chilly winds whipping around me. I walked through the night, not seeing anything out of place. I couldn’t feel my feet inside my wet loafers. I wasn’t sure if it was a lucky thing or not that they had stayed with me. A mile down the road I saw a gas station and ran to the little store behind the pumps. I was so happy to get out of the cold.
“What happened to you, buddy?” asked the Indian man behind the counter. “You fall into a lake?”
“Actually, yeah,” I said. “I lost everything. My wallet, my money...everything. Can I just hang out here and dry off before I freeze to death?”
“Yeah, man, yeah. I’ll get you a blanket. You go sit there.” He pointed to the middle aisle with snacks on one side and jugs of antifreeze and squeegees on the other. I sat down, trying to will my body to stop shaking. He returned quickly with a big, heavy blanket like the kind I’d seen in the trucks moving companies use. I wrapped it around me. It wasn’t comfortable but it absorbed the remaining water from my clothes and made me feel warm. Even so, it took almost a half hour before I stopped shivering.
The store clerk waited patiently while I dried up and warmed myself. No other customers came into the store. When I pulled off the blanket and examined my extremities searching for signs of frostbite, he left the counter and walked over to me. “So, you tell me why you went swimming tonight?”
“It’s kind of a long story. I had a fight with my girlfriend and went for a walk at the campground down the street. Slipped on some ice by the dock and fell right in.”
He considered my story and laughed. “That’s not smart, buddy!”
“Tell me about it.”
“So, where you live, my man?”
“Down in Waldorf.”
He looked stunned. “That’s far! Your girlfriend took your car?”
Reasonable enough. “Yeah, she did. She was pretty mad.”
“Well, I tell you what. I call cab for you. My treat.” He smiled at me.
“Seriously? That’s...wow. I really appreciate it.”
“Yeah, buddy, sure. You pay it forward, right?”
“Absolutely,” I said. Then I noticed his laptop on the counter. “Hey...would it be too much to ask to use your computer for a minute?”
He thought for a second. “No big deal, buddy. Glad to have company, you know?”
I got up and walked to the counter. I turned the laptop around to face me and loaded up the white pages. I searched for my name and immediately the tightness in my chest returned. The address was wrong. The only Daniel Wells was my age, and he lived somewhere in Mifflin. Helena was not listed as my wife. It appeared I lived alone.Well, I thought, at least I wasn’t living with my parents. I checked my dad’s name and found that they were right where they should be.
My guardian angel store clerk—his name tag identified him as Ranjit—called the cab while I continued my online exploits. I fell right back into using modern technology despite my hiatus. I wanted to look into Suzy’s whereabouts but I couldn’t bring myself to cross that bridge just yet. Instead, I turned to Google and searched the news archives for Justin Bieber. Of course, even the local papers mentioned the pop star. Once I searched far back enough though, the name held a different significance. The Ambler Gazette had a small article from August 23rd, 1993. The headline read, “Mystery Man Goes Missing.”
The search is on for a man using the name “Justin Bieber” following his apparent disappearance from the Shady Pines Day Camp in Doylestown where he was employed as the camp’s computer specialist. Mr. Bieber’s car was found abandoned in the parking lot and campers discovered his wallet in the camp’s lake. According to the camps’ owners, Arthur Rosenberg and Tom Carter, Mr. Bieber is being investigated for alleged forgery of credentials used to obtain his position at the camp.
“It appears to me that this man, whoever he is, fled to avoid what he knew was coming,” said Rosenberg.
Others disagree. Bieber’s girlfriend, Suzy Bailey, is convinced he met with foul play. “He’s a good man,” Bailey said. “I’m incredibly worried about him.”
This reporter was unable to find any evidence of a Justin Bieber at Waldorf High School where Bieber claimed to be a computer teacher. There is no record of Bieber, thought to be in his late twenties, in any directories and he does not appear to live at the address he gave Shady Pines. Police are investigating both the claims against Bieber and his disappearance.
I advanced the timeframe of the search and found a later blurb, this one in the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was from October 10th, 1993.
Search For Unknown Waldorf Man Ends
A man known only by the alias “Justin Bieber” disappeared in August under intense scrutiny and questions about his identity. Authorities say there has been no sign of the man, nor have they been able to determine his true identity as his claimed ties to the Waldorf community proved to be false.
“This man is a complete mystery from beginning to end and we have no choice but to close the case and assume that he simply went back wherever it is he came from,” said Doylestown Chief of Police Adam DeGeorge.
That was it. I couldn’t find any further reference to my vanishing. It hurt me to think that Suzy had stood up for me—covered for me, even, considering the name Daniel Wells had never popped up in the investigation—and had been forced to answer questions. I should never have put her in that position. I started to type in her name, knowing I might have some difficulty finding her if she was married.
“Hey, buddy,” called Ranjit, “Cabbie’s here.”
I decided it was a sign from above that I shouldn’t investigate Suzy, at least not yet. I sighed and closed the laptop. “Thanks so much for all your help,” I told him.
“No worries. You stay out of lakes!” he said with a laugh.
I stepped back out into the cold, realizing that Ranjit had never questioned my out-of-season attire. When I had left on my original quest the weather had just been turning chilly. When I had come back to the unfortunate version of the present caused by the murder of Jeff Berger, the weather hadn’t changed. Now, winter had fully arrived. I realized I was lucky the lake hadn’t been frozen solid. I could have materialized in the middle of an ice sheet and cut myself in half. I wondered how much later in the year I had returned. Certainly enough time had passed for Helena to think I was dead, if this was the normal timeline. It clearly was not.
To my relief, the taxi driver did not ask any questions besides an address. I gave him the one my Internet search had revealed. Fifteen minutes later, give or take, we pulled up in front of a house twice the size of the home Helena and I had shared.