2

The Journalist

O’Hara drove back to downtown Tango, where the Gazette office occupied the first floor of a building that faced the Tango Key Marina. It had stood here for nearly fifty years until a category five hurricane in 2005 had wiped out the lower half of the island, the power grid, most of the twelve-mile bridge to Key West, and plunged Tango Key into the dark ages for months.

In the aftermath, the land had been raised, the building had been reconstructed on a thirty-foot hill, and his office had a picture window that overlooked the marina. He sat in front of his computer for a while, staring through the window, watching boats enter and leave the marina, and tried to find an entry into the story of the stone woman. He kept comparing the video of what she looked like as a human to the photos of her as stone. He never got beyond the word the.

In the nine years he’d worked here, starting straight out of college, he’d written about so many kind of anomalies that he’d believed he was well-prepared for almost any kind of experience—an encounter with aliens, Big Foot lumbering out of the wilderness preserve, dogs and cats who spoke English. But this? A woman who had turned to stone as she died? And who asked for him by name before it happened?

Around ten, his editor hurried into his office. “Hey, Jon. I heard about some…”

“Yeah.” He swiveled around in his chair, facing her, Kay Helm with the big, puffy dark hair from the 1980s, the small round glasses that John Lennon had popularized, and disheveled, urban chic clothing. Jeans faded and cut at the knees, a colorful Gazette t-shirt, old sandals. She epitomized a woman pushing fifty who was conflicted about who she was. Where am I going? Who the fuck am I? What am I doing? That was what she radiated, at least to him. “It’s true, it’s all true,” and he blurted out the story. “How much should I tell, Kay?” he asked.

“You have photos, right?”

“Sure. And a video.”

He brought everything up on his phone. She watched the video, scrolled through the photos. “My God, Jon, this is totally bizarre. I think we should run your piece as a feature on our website, with the video. A jogger in the preserve was nearly assaulted by a woman—and use the photo of her as a, uh, human—and when she defended herself, the perpetrator died and turned to stone. We’ll run some of the X-rays, too, and photos of the statue, knife in the eye and all.”

“It’ll read like something out of the National Enquirer,” he remarked.

“Probably. Who else was there? Anyone we can quote? Anyone who would add some wallop to the story?”

“Coroner, detective, a small business owner.”

“Name of small business owner?”

“Mira Morales.”

“One World Books?” Now she looked interested. “Shit, Jon. A quote from her would be great. Until she quit reading crime scenes several years ago, she was the state’s most famous psychic.”

“I’ll text her.”

“And make sure you mention that sliver or chip or whatever it is, with the word and numbers on it. And get a quote from Doc Rincon.”

“He, Carlos and I want to be on the same page with this. Okay with you?”

“Even better. Any idea why this woman asked how to find you and Mira?”

“None. But when I leave work today, I’m heading over to the gun shop to buy a weapon.”

“Smart. I’d do the same.”

He spent the rest of the morning writing the piece, emailing back and forth with Delgado and the doc until they agreed on the basics. Then he texted Mira, asking her for a quote. She responded quickly. “Say this: The stone woman is a complete anomaly. Why is there a chip in her shoulder with words and numbers on it? White Crow1404, June ‘44. Is that a date?” And FYI, am headed over to Rincon’s to read the statue.

Perfect. Thanks! I’ll upload this.

He ran the column past Kay, she loved it. “Upload it, Jon. What’s your headline?”

“The Stone Woman in the Preserve.”

“Good.”

He uploaded the piece with the video and five photos: the human woman, her stone counterpart, and three X-rays. He knew that his ex-wife, a local attorney, would explode with laughter when she saw it and that her current live-in, a shrink, would make some snide remark about O’Hara’s mental instability. But he’d long since gotten over giving a shit what other people thought about his interests.

He gathered up his stuff and left, eager to see Mira do what she was known for—psychically reading crime scenes.

2

Mira thought the forensics building in downtown Tango Key looked like something out of Miami’s Art Deco era—pale blue, with decorative white shutters at the sides of the windows, a facade that whispered, I may be something other than what I appear to be. It had stood on this same cobbled road since it was built fifty or sixty years ago and was one of the few buildings that hadn’t flooded in Hurricane Danielle in 2005. It supposedly had been spared because it sat on a slight rise of land. But Mira figured the spirits of the dead who had passed through that office might have had something to do with it.

Inside, she found Rincon at the front desk, typing madly away at the computer. “Is she in cold storage, Ian?”

“Had to find the largest drawer because of the way her hand is positioned.” He got up. “I’ll take you back there. I really appreciate your doing this, mi amor.”

“I was pretty much convinced when I left the preserve, but Annie twisted my arm.”

He snickered. “Guilty. She and I had lunch some months back. She told me how worried she was about you.”

Yeah, Mira remembered that period. “That probably was around the time she was advising me to go to a counselor. So I went. It was a joke, Ian. The counselor didn’t know what to do with my peculiar dilemma, a psychic who couldn’t read crime scenes anymore. But the counselor’s life was in the pits, so I ended up reading for her.”

Rincon chuckled. “Figures.” He opened the door to the cold storage area.

It felt excessive—too cold, too large, too silent, too strange. Mira thought of it as a miniature cemetery, a first stop after death. She zipped up her jacket, blew into her hands to warm them. Rincon pulled out the storage drawer where the stone woman was being kept.

“Should I move her, Mira? It’s warmer in the autopsy room.”

“No, this is fine. I can’t guarantee anything, Ian.”

“I know. No problem.”

Suddenly the door opened and Delgado rushed in with Annie. Behind them was O’Hara.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” said Annie. “The manager is in charge. I wanted to be here.”

“Me, too,” Delgado added.

O’Hara shrugged. “I was afraid I’d be late and wasn’t even sure if I was invited.”

Mira laughed. “So much for no audience. But hey, maybe an audience will help.” She glanced at O’Hara and Annie. “Have you two met?”

“Carlos just introduced us.” Annie glanced at O’Hara. “My favorite column anywhere. Mom, how can we help?”

“Video and record, let me talk. I just hope I can do this.”

Mira slipped off her shoes, twisted her bare feet against the concrete floor. She inhaled noisily, deeply, then exhaled. She walked from one side of the body drawer to the other, twisted her feet again, then brought her hands to the statue’s feet. The stone felt cold against her skin and the structure of the statue’s shoes was discernible—the way they fit tightly at the heels, like cloth, and extended above the ankles. She couldn’t tell how they were fastened because the statue’s pants covered that part of her legs.

Nothing happened—no impressions, not even an inkling. She adjusted her breathing, shut her eyes.

Nothing.

Then she suddenly gasped. Images raced through her head and words tumbled out.

“I’m running, I’m scared, they’re after me, after us, all of us. We scatter throughout the dome, but there are more of them than of us, we’re always outnumbered, and they’ve activated our chips so we can’t defend ourselves, can’t fight back. I stumble, pitch forward, land hard on the ground and am swept up. The dome is falling apart, I think that’s what I’m hearing…”

Mira jerked her hands away from the statue’s feet.

“Dios mio.” Rincon made a hasty sign of the cross on his forehead. “A dome? She lived in a dome? What kind of dome? Where? When?”

Mira brushed her hands together, took the bottle of water Annie handed her, sipped. The inside of her mouth felt bone dry and tasted like dust. “A domed city. In the future. There may be several domes, I’m not sure.”

“How far into the future?” Delgado asked.

“I don’t know.” Mira set the bottle of water next to her, twisted her bare feet against the floor again, brought her hands to the statue’s face. “C’mon,” she whispered. “Talk to me.”

Then it came to her, a rush of words. “I… don’t know how long I’ve been here. I’m given a choice. If I work for the government, I’ll live well, freely, and they need my skill to… I don’t know… It all changes so fast.” Her hands moved to the statue’s shoulders, arms, torso. “Trying to find my way in again.”

“Into where?” O’Hara asked.

“Into her.”

“Do you pick up a year, Mira?” Rincon asked. “A date?

“Like the chip said, ’44. I think… 2144.”

“My God,” Annie exclaimed. “More than a century from now. How’d she get here?”

“And what’s outside the dome?” Delgado wanted to know.

Mira knuckled her eyes. “Outside, it’s a wasteland. The environment is ruined, the air is toxic. Don’t know yet how she got here.” She shed her jacket, paced from one side of the drawer to the other, vigilant for the right spot to enter. She finally cupped the sides of the stone woman’s head, ran her palms over it, leaned in close. “Give it to me. The rest of it.”

And after a moment, she was in.

 

She stands at the southern wall with the dome president, a Normal, a cruel man she despises. Fissures run through the dome here, cracks at the base as visible as veins. He demands that she turns those fissures to stone.

She drops her head back and peers upward, eyes following other, smaller fissures, some of them hastily patched, others widening. The wall seems impossibly high to her; she can’t even see where it curves, has no idea how large it is.

 

“Mom? You aren’t saying anything.”

Mira’s consciousness seemed to split apart. She was in the dome and yet heard Annie’s voice—distant, like something in a dream—and spoke to that. “I don’t know if I can turn the fissures to stone. I don’t want to destabilize everything. I try over and over again. The dome prez gets really agitated. I’m terrified he’ll hit me or have one of his men grab me and haul me back to that windowless place where they’ll flood my body with drugs. But right now, I’m free of drugs. Right now, if the fucker comes near me, if he hits me, I’ll turn him to stone.”

“My God,” Rincon said softly. Then: “What’s the dome made of? Who built it?”

Mira hears his question, but if she answers him right now, she’ll lose her connection with Stoner—the name this woman went by—and she needed to hold onto her for a bit. “Okay, I’m trying, I’m trying this.” Her arms flapped around wildly, she felt it, knew her arms were also the arms of Stoner, struggling to patch the fissures by turning them to stone. “I did it! But… just above the largest patched fissure, an eight-foot-square piece of the wall blows out.”

Mira stumbled back, just as Stoner did, arms pinwheeling for balance, and the outside air rushed in. “The president throws up his arms to protect his face from flying sand and debris, I’m coughing, I can barely breathe, my eyes are tearing… I quickly turn the southern wall to stone.”

Breathing hard, Mira kicked the drawer shut, hurried over to the sink, and scrubbed her hands and arms free of that toxic dust.

“Mira, what’s the dome made of?” Rincon trotted after her. “Who built it?”

“Don’t know.” She shut off the water, yanked paper towels from the dispenser, then sank to the floor, legs clutched against her chest. She felt dizzy, nauseated. She wiped her arm over her face. Annie pressed a bottle of water into her hands and she drank.

“There’s more?” Delgado asked.

“There’s always more,” Annie remarked.

Mira, still sitting on the floor in front of a sink, nodded. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets and she watched events as they transpired. “There’re hundreds of White Crows. As a group, they’re able to pull the past around them and… and move into it. That’s how they get here. That’s what I saw them doing. They steep themselves in what they know of this time and conjure it somehow through their collective intensity. Hal came up with the idea after he read Jack Finney’s novel, Time and Again, from the dome archive. He’s their leader. But the travel is dangerous. It broke Stoner’s mind. More are coming. The dolphins will know. They intend to seize Tango Key. Shit, this changes everything.”

Her eyes rolled back into place and she thought, Shut up, Mira, just shut up. You sound like a fucking nutcase.

“Mom, how will the dolphins know? What do you mean? What the hell are you talking about?

She felt herself seeking out the remnants of that part of the story. “They’ll sense it. They freak out. You have security cams, right?”

“Sure. I can keep track with a cell app.”

“Seizing Tango?” Rincon asked. “Who? When?”

“Soon. Those like Stoner. She was the recent first. There was another in the mid-eighties.”

“One who came here? To Tango?” Rincon asked.

Mira explained what she saw—a dead man on a narrow cobbled street, and a tourist map of Key West.

“Mid-eighties, okay,” Rincon murmured. “The coroner then was Risa Griffin. I’ll give her a call.”

“How did Hal get a copy of Time and Again?” Annie asked.

Mira knuckled her eyes. “They have some sort of archive of books and newspapers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”

“How do we defend ourselves?” Delgado asked.

“I don’t know. Look, Carlos. It sounds nuts. Demented. Wacko. No one is going to believe any of this until something big happens. Maybe not even then.”

3

As O’Hara left the gun shop, he turned his cell back on. Before he reached the Gazette parking lot to pick up his car, he had more than fifty new emails and his article had gotten several hundred comments and 2,122 likes. Every newspaper in South Florida had picked up the piece and he suspected that in the next several days, the weirdos would arrive on Tango in droves. That was what had happened several years ago, after the discovery of an alien body at the lighthouse. Every alien and UFO hunter and their respective TV shows had shown up on the island.

And because his name was on the piece and both Delgado and Rincon had been quoted, he expected they would be besieged with questions and requests for interviews. He was tempted to just turn off his phone for the next few days, a noble idea except that he lived on his cell. It was his conduit to the world.

He stopped by his office first to pick up his iPad and was surprised that Kay was still at her desk. He stuck his head through the door. “Bought my gun.”

She glanced up. “What kind?”

“Glock 19. And a dozen boxes of cartridges. The owner let me do some practice shooting.”

“Let’s hope none of this comes to guns. Listen, I’ve been getting calls nearly nonstop about the stone woman, Jon. Good work.” She rifled through the papers on her desk, tore a sheet off a yellow pad. “I’d like you to call this woman back. She’s a TV producer who’s vacationing on Tango and…”

“I really don’t want to talk to TV producers, Kay.”

“Are you kidding?” She sat back, genuinely surprised. “Any mention of the Gazette could boost our circulation significantly.”

He knew that tone of hers. It wasn’t exactly a line drawn in the sand, but it was close. Even though they had a good professional relationship, he’d seen how brutal she could be when a journalist crossed her about something she considered significant. Suspended. Fired. “What TV show?”

“New show on the History Channel called The Unknown.”

“I’ll call her. Beyond that, I’m not committing to anything.”

“Fine, that’s fine. If she’s a nut, forget it.”

He took the piece of paper from her, ducked into his office for his iPad, and called the woman on the way to his car.

4

He and Pam Gibbons agreed to meet at Island Grill, a popular fish place on Tango Boulevard, the main street through downtown Tango. Its open deck faced the water and it served the best fish in the keys. O’Hara had been eating here more frequently since he and his ex had split up eight months ago. He hated cooking for himself. Even if the information this Gibbons woman claimed she had turned out to be bullshit, it didn’t matter. He would enjoy his fish tacos.

When he went up to the bar, Gibbons spotted him immediately and introduced herself. Late forties, early fifties, he guessed. An attractive blonde in jeans and a touristy Tango Fritter t-shirt, a large handbag hanging from her shoulder. “Thanks so much for agreeing to meet with me, Jon. I bet you’ve been inundated with media requests.”

Well, not exactly, but it was nice she thought so. “It’s been nuts.”

They ordered drinks, a table opened up at the far corner of the deck, and they sat down. Water view. Nice breeze. He was hungry. Just beyond the railing, in the encroaching dusk, stood a wishing fountain filled with loose change. In the past, he had tossed pennies into that stupid fountain. They had some privacy due to the tall flower boxes on two sides of their table.

They both ordered fish tacos and iced tea and when the waitress had left, Pam said, “I gather from your article that you were in the preserve when this stone woman was found.”

He nodded. “Detective Delgado called me. Because my name was, uh, mentioned, along with Mira’s.”

“I’m intrigued by the object found in her arm.” Pam removed an iPad from her bag, set it on the table. “It’s not the first. In our research for this initial episode of The Unknown, we came across an identical object in a museum in Key West.” She turned the iPad so he could see it and O’Hara sat forward, fascinated by the photos she scrolled through.

The object lay on a little bed of white silk, inside a metal box with a transparent lid. It looked to be metallic and slightly longer than the object on the X-rays that Rincon had taken, maybe three inches long. The word and numbers on it were clearly visible. White Crow 919, 2120. “Wow.” He enlarged the image. “Where was it found? When?”

“It was extracted from the leg of a dead man in 1985.”

“Mira mentioned that when she read the statue.” Confirmation one, he thought, surprised that at some level he’d been keeping track.

“He was found in an alley in old town Key West. They ran his fingerprints—nothing came up. The autopsy revealed that he’d died of an apparent heart attack. He had an injury on the back of his leg that prompted the coroner to take X-rays and that’s how she found the object.”

“Who was the coroner?”

“Dr. Griffin. Risa Griffin.”

“Is she still around?”

“Retired. She didn’t answer my calls,” Pam added.

“Too bad. Maybe she could have told us what a White Crow is. I mean, I know what William James was referring to but…” He shrugged. “And the dates—more than a hundred years in the future. What the fuck’s going on?”

Even to himself, he sounded a little panicked and was grateful the server arrived with their drinks. “Do you think we should evacuate, Mr. O’Hara?” she asked. “I hear some snowbirds are leaving because of your column.”

“I live and work here. I can’t afford to evacuate.”

She shrugged in an endearing way. “Yeah, me too. But… I would if you recommended it.”

“I don’t.”

She looked relieved. “If you need a refill on those drinks, let me know. On the house. And the tacos will be out in a couple minutes.

When the server left, Pam said, “That’s the power of your column, Jon. We’d like to hire you as a consultant on the show.” She slid a sheet of paper toward him. “We’ve approached Ms. Morales, too.”

O’Hara glanced at the contract, pushed it back across the table. “Look, I’m glad to help you in any way I can, Pam. But I’m not signing any contract. I have a job.”

“You’d be an outsourced consultant.”

“I’ll think about it.”

She wisely changed the subject and after senseless conversations about the columns he’d written over the years, their fish tacos arrived. Eat and run, he thought. He wolfed down two of the tacos and just as Pam brought up the contracts again, O’Hara dropped a twenty on the table and stood. “I’ll be in touch. Thanks for your insights, Pam.”

He nearly ran out of Island Grill and as soon as he was outside, tore across the parking lot to his car. He had trouble getting the remote to unlock the door, but once it worked he hurled himself inside, then sat there, arms clutched against him, shaking as if from a high fever. His head churned with thoughts, all of them bonkers.

He was being stalked by someone from the future. The woman in the preserve was a time traveler. The dead man found in Key West in 1985 was from that same future, both of them White Crows, whatever the fuck that meant. And who could he talk to about any of it? Mira, but they’d just met. His parents were dead, he was an only child, and for most of his thirty-two years, he’d cut himself off from a lot of people because they made fun of his obsession with the weird and the strange.

O’Hara knew he could call Delgado or Rincon and they would gladly sit and talk with him. But they had families, lives. He didn’t even have a goddamn pet. He lived alone in a small house in the hills, the place he and his ex had shared for three years until she’d told him she’d fallen in love with someone else. The Freudian shrink.

Why not a Jungian shrink? At least that would be positive.

He turned on his car and raced away from the Island Grill, tears running down his cheeks. He would make it clear to Kay that he wasn’t writing any sequels. He would get a dog. He and the dog would take off on an extended road trip. He had the leave time to do it. He would get the hell outta here.

But first, he wanted to know more about the dolphin early warning system Mira had mentioned when reading the statue. And he intended to check in with Annie at the Dolphin Research Center for another facet to the evolving story.

Then he would get his dog and leave town.