Chapter 48

Beatrice listened to her daughter ramble on about Annie finding clippings in Cookie’s scrapbook of shadows and then about seeing Luther at the hospital and calling the police on him. By the time they arrived, he was gone. So they were heading to Jenkins Hollow to try to find him tomorrow, just for questioning.

“He may be perfectly innocent, but I swear, that day he gave me the creeps, when I saw him standing there at the hospital. And Bryant did tell us, if we saw anything out of place, to let him know. And yesterday Annie found all these clippings about him. I think he’s certifiable.”

“Good work,” Beatrice said. “Let’s hope it means something. Let’s hope it gets Cookie out of jail and that justice is served.” She smacked her lips.

“Mother, are you eating? You know I hate it when you eat on the phone,” Vera said.

“Land sakes, can’t a woman have a bite while her daughter’s mouth goes a mile a minute?”

“Oh, Mom,” Vera said. “You can be so rude.”

“I’m old, and you’re my daughter. Why do I need to be polite? Besides, these peanut butter cookies are to die for. I love them warm out of the oven,” she said.

“We’ll be right over,” Vera said. “Don’t you dare eat them all.”

Beatrice smiled and sat back in her rocker. Vera was easy. It was so joyous to see her daughter eat after all these years of dieting. A few years back, she just stopped and gained about twenty pounds—and she filled out beautifully. Beatrice would never understand the desire for extreme thinness. Ed used to say that he liked to have something to hold on to.

But when she thought of thinness, she thought immediately of Cookie, who had said she ate as she pleased, but never seemed to gain an ounce. She wondered how she was faring with jail food, given that she didn’t eat meat and liked only local, organically grown food. She and all the other townsfolk had been eating locally for years. Now it was a movement. That always made Beatrice snicker. Still, it was a good movement.

She rocked and looked out on the gray skies. Thank goodness for the fall. The summer was way too hot. Very little enjoyment in that. Before she knew it, it would be Thanksgiving. She couldn’t believe how fast time was moving.

Time. Ah yes, Beatrice had pondered the issue of time her whole life, but the older she became and the less of it she had, the more she thought about Richard Feynman’s theory of time reversibility. Quantum electrodynamics. Oh, let it roll around in your head, Beatrice thought. She loved those words.

Richard’s assistant, Jewel, had called her one night to discuss his “diagram,” which represented the interaction of two particles as the exchange of a third particle.

“Let me run this by you, Bea,” Jewel had said.

She remembered the day perfectly. Vera was sitting on her lap. She had the flu and was burning up with fever. Ed was making a few house calls and would be home shortly.

“Time is on one axis and space on the other, and the interaction is viewed as happening both in forward and in reverse time,” she’d said to Beatrice. “Do you have it pictured?”

“Hold on,” Beatrice said, reaching around Vera for a tablet on the phone stand. She drew the diagram as Jewel spoke.

“An electron on its way from point A to point B can bump into a photon, right? You can see that it can be drawn as sending it backward not just in space, but also in time. Then it bumps into another photon, which sends it forward in time again, but in a different direction in space. In this way, it can be in two places at once.”

She hadn’t understood it right away. Then she’d seen the paper on it, and it clicked.

So theoretically, if photons behaved this way, one had to wonder about bigger objects. Like people. Ah, if she could go back in time, would she? There was no doubt in her mind that if she could figure out a way, she would go back to when she had just married Ed. Just to experience the newness of their love once again. She’d always love the man—even if she was attracted to another man. Love was love.

And would she go forward in time? Hmm. She didn’t think so. If she had to be without Ed for the rest of her life, she’d choose here and now and Vera and Elizabeth.