1
Seventy-seven-year-old former president John Fitzgerald Kennedy awoke sweaty and anxious. Bolt upright in bed, hyper alert and aware, he stared out across the darkness of his Hyannis Port bedroom. Looked to the empty space in bed beside him.
Jackie.
Good Lord, he missed her.
Jackie’s long gone, a little voice inside reminded, gone of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. 1980. Gone after twenty-seven years of marriage.
Yet he was still going strong.
Fourteen years, and every so often it just hit him wrong. Usually during the wee hours of the night.
Kennedy closed his eyes, opened them, shook his head, and looked to the bedside clock.
One-seventeen a.m.
He again shook his head. Didn’t quite feel “all there.” Like he was still dreaming — in a dream.
What was his last memory?
All he remembered was an intense feeling of anxiety — nothing else, just the feeling of the dream… its intensity…
He lifted his hands in the darkness and looked to them. He felt electrified… tingling… he actually felt as if he didn’t belong here… now… in this bed — this time.
Again, looked to the clock.
One-eighteen.
Okay, Time was ticking away.
But, something was wrong, dreadfully wrong. Out of place.
Kennedy brought both hands to his face and pressed; rubbed. Tossing the blankets off, he got up and made his way along the wood floor to the bathroom to relieve himself. Upon his return, he diverted to a window and pushed aside the curtains. Looked out over the dark expanse of sea. Cracked open the window… listened to the roar of its crashing breakers.
Alone… he was alone.
No Jackie and a confused sense of identity… place.
Turning around, he wrinkled his brow as he desperately tried to sense something, anything, about this room, his place in it, his loss of Jackie… life in general.
He returned to the window… inhaled the sea air and allowed the crash of the ocean to wash over him. All anxiety slowly began to drain away, as he listened to the most comforting sound in the world… a sound that had defined his very existence… from learning to swim at thirteen in New Milford, to his time as the swim-team captain at Harvard… his Navy years… his design and creation of the Navy’s swiftest, stealthiest Littoral Combat Ship…
But it was that night in 1943 when his PT boat had been rammed by the Japanese in Blackett Straight that he thought about most (was he sure about this?).
He shuddered.
Had that really been him all those years ago?
It seemed so distant, now, and in more than just years. That twenty-six year old seemed like an entirely different person — an entirely different life.
Had he and all those other men really been dumped out into the black, open ocean, as the Amagiri plowed right on through them?
Had they really swum all those miles across open, South Pacific Ocean, or had it, too, been just another dream?
He closed his eyes and leaned into the window sill, desperately trying to discern fact from fiction.
Had that really been something he — the him who now stood before this late-night window — would do? Could do?
Of course not, he was no longer that young, tough, twenty-six year old. Those had been different times and extraordinary circumstances. But still, he had done it, he couldn’t shake that memory, but he couldn’t quite believe something about it…
Wasn’t it odd — heinous even — how healthy, strong bodies changed and deteriorated over the course of a lifetime? A short lifetime, really; just how long was seventy-seven years, anyway? Seventy-seven was nothing to the entire timespan of history or geology.
And he was so safe and secure now, and, yes, still relatively healthy at his age. Excellent genes from a long-lived family, from a father who had lived to be ninety-six, to a mother who was still kicking it up at one-hundred-and-four. He swam every day, took one-to-two hour-long walks, and even worked out with weights. He remained active in the global community and world politics, had written many books, and organized many charities, his favorite being the Children Are Our World, or CHOW.
He was engaged in life.
Yes, he’d lived a full life, but still had something out there he had yet to accomplish… needed to do. There was still something he couldn’t quite put his finger on before he’d had enough and called it quits from this existence. No regrets. He believed in more than one life, and had had the dreams and psychic experiences over his lifetime to prove it enough to himself (or at least had the feeling he had, the strongest of which being dual-Civil War personalities of being a soldier in a Federal brigade and a direct connection with Lincoln himself, which totally confused him, and the other about being an impoverished kid in India or somewhere…), even if no one else believed it. He wasn’t afraid of dying. He just wanted to make sure he’d done all he was supposed to have done before moving on. Never let it be said a Kennedy never completed what he or she’d set out to do. Enough power, money, or influence, and you could do just about anything.
He didn’t ask for much.
He just wanted to change the world.
2
Shit, what the hell am I supposed to do, now?
Lizzie’d been asking herself this question all night.
Two a.m., and she’d had a busy night. The activity had helped keep her mind off her problems and on other peoples’ problems instead, but now she found dead air between phone calls, and her predicament filtered back.
Christ, show a little psychic ability, and the whole world wanted your soul.
What was she going to do?
She sure as hell didn’t want to work for that man, FBI, national security, or otherwise, but felt inexplicably tied to him, and that caused her great distress. How could she be tied to so evil an individual? It actually upset her stomach, and she felt the onset of a headache. And, in dealing with the headache, she kept losing focus and returning to that evil feeling back at the Waffle House. That feeling of deepest darkest blackness.
His name totally fit him.
She couldn’t stand it any longer. Removing her headset, she went to the bathroom, where she spilled out a couple gelcaps, and greedily gulped them down with mouthfuls of water straight from the tap. She splashed water onto her face, shut off the faucet, and grabbed a towel. As she looked in the mirror, drying off, she noticed a pimple forming on her forehead.
“No!”
Lizzie re-racked the towel and examined the pimple closer in the mirror. She always got these things whenever she worried too much about something. Of course they never formed on some hidden part of her body, like her butt. Always the face.
Grumbling, she opened a drawer to pull out some Clearasil — when she heard a light metallic tinkling sound, as something fell to the linoleum. Unscrewing the tube, she looked down.
Her engagement ring sat on the floor beside her bare feet.
Emitting a joyous shriek, she snatched it up. She looked inside the drawer, replaced the Clearasil — and found the wedding band. She again shrieked as she lifted the rings into the light for better inspection. They were, indeed, her rings. She slid them back onto her finger and examined them in their rightful place.
“That’s more like it!”
She’d searched those drawers inside and out.
They had not been there.
Lizzie caught a flash of a reflection in the mirror, and looked out the bathroom door.
Heard distant laughter.
All she’d caught was the briefest glimpse of bare feet.
Nothing like the pitter-patter of—
Her phone rang and Lizzie realized she’d all-but-forgotten she was still on duty. Rushing back into the kitchen, she kicked aside another stray toy.
* * *
It was slightly after four a.m. when Lizzie finally hung up the headset for the night, brushed her teeth, and got herself to bed, Lucy following her around the house. Lizzie fingered her wedding bands.
In sickness or in health.
Til death do us part.
Maybe that last line was good enough for most people, but what about those like her? What about those more sensitive to the afterlife?
She still felt Joe out there.
No, she wasn’t pining away for him, hoping to meet him as soon as possible in some glowing, revolving tunnel of hereafter light, but she still felt him. Aspects of him. She knew he was fine, carrying on with the rest of his soul’s journey in whatever way he was — but she also knew that he wasn’t pining away for her, either. And that didn’t bother her.
In sickness or in health…
Lizzie closed her eyes.
It had been an accident.
That was what bothered her — that she’d never seen it coming.
That she’d never seen it coming. He’d been the owner of his own construction company, and had been talking with his foremen. It had been a local job, a no-brainer he’d called it, just throw up another apartment complex, get in get out, collect a tidy sum, then move on to bigger fish: an industrial office complex on the outskirts of Parker, southeast of Denver. About halfway into the apartment project, he’d given his foremen their marching orders for the day, when, out of nowhere, it came. A one-ton I-beam soaring through the bright blue sky like a terrain-hugging cruise missile.
And Joe had just happened to be in its way.
There had been shouts, sure, even some of his foremen rushing in his direction, but with all the heavy machinery, their shouted conversation — and the use of ear protection — it was just another business day in the scheme of things. Joe’s number had simply come up, was all, and that I-beam smashed into him like no tomorrow. He’d never looked up, never heard a sound, nor spied any peripheral movement. One moment he was alive and thinking… considering plans for the day, whether or not the project would be complete within the next year, whether or not to have a child, what to bring home for her as a surprise for-no-particular-reason gift, and how life was going so great for the both of them. And behind those thoughts had been the other ones, the thoughts that always seemed to quickly drift in and out, barely making themselves known before splitting, but leaving a backburnered portion of his mind always working on them… bills, and what to do about that Jeff Skopchek, whose wife had just left him and was suing him for everything he had… or his upcoming vacation time he’d been promising Lizzie, since he’d been working like a dog the past two years without a serious — more than three days off at a time — break…
Yes, one moment he’d been alive and functioning, and the next he was crumpled up in the dirt, his head… gone.
At least he hadn’t seen it coming.
Jeff Skopchek, however, had not been so lucky. He’d been at the crane’s controls that had swiveled that I-beam into Joe’s direction; swiveled a little too fast for practice. Unfortunately for Joe, Jeff had just talked with his wife that previous night. His soon-to-be-ex-wife had told him just how much she was going to screw his ever-loving ass — and he better not have that little slut there with him now. And — by the way — did he think that little bitch would stay with him once he was living under a bridge? She’d better love booze and the great outdoors, cause after the loss of his money, house, and that classic red-hot Vette of his, that was all they were going to have in common.
So, good old Jeff came to work late in a less-than-optimal state of mind, and when he’d been told to move that pile of steel from here to there, Jeff Skopchek was only a quarter there in the Focus Department, and said steel I-beam took up its weighty trajectory through Joe Gordon’s noggin.
What’s the last thing to go through a bug’s head when it hits a windshield?
Its asshole.
What was the last thing to go through Joe Gordon’s head one sunny workday?
A one-ton steel girder.
Needless to say, Joe, who signed Jeff’s check, didn’t sign Jeff’s — nor anyone else’s — check that day, and Jeff found himself criminally liable, and, in one respect, no longer having to worry about living under a bridge anymore.
3
Lizzie stirred, groggily. Good Lord, just fall asleep only to immediately wake back up?
She looked to the clock, but all she saw was that it read four something. The rest of the display was hidden behind a silhouette—
Of a head.
Someone tugged at Lizzie’s elbow.
“C’mon, Mommy, it’s time to go!” the little boy whispered urgently, tugging at her nightshirt sleeve. “C’mon.”
The boy darted to the doorway, where he turned back to her and waited.
Lizzie wiped her eyes and sat up. The boy stood against a nightlight-backlit doorway.
“Okay, okay… I’m coming.”
Lizzie got out of bed and went to the boy.
“C’mon… everyone’s waiting!”
Lizzie went to the boy, who took her hand, then excitedly rushed her out into the living room. She noticed Lucy curled up on the couch, watching the two of them as they walked past to the front door, which the boy opened. Lizzie stepped outside. She found herself standing on a wide-open plain, and as far as the eye could see…
Children.
“It’s okay, Mommy, this is what you wanted.”
“I know, I know, honey,” Lizzie said, trying to swallow and finding it hard to do so.
“It’s just kind of… overwhelming!” Lizzie brought a hand to her chest.
Gentle laughter bubbled around her. As Lizzie looked from face to face, she realized she knew each and every child. Their names didn’t matter… but they were names that were so much more meaningful and full of depth that to utter them would never do them justice. It was the sense about them, the feeling that led her through various inner journeys of each individual that mattered. Like a buoy marker, it was used to identify each boy or girl, but it was so much more than that… there was an inner importance. A flowering of identities. She found she could get lost in trying to sort it all out, but the identifications had already been made, and additional focuses were already shifting in and out of awareness…
The children’s laughter washed over her, like a warm, gentle rain.
“Wow. I’ve never been with all of you at once before.”
“You have, Mommy, you just don’t remember,” her son said.
“I miss you,” Lizzie said. She went to her knees and hugged him.
“We all miss you!” the boy exclaimed. Tears ran down his face.
Lizzie backed away, wiping away her son’s tears. She looked to the mass of children and saw they all cried tears of joy, each pair of eyes brimming with love and understanding.
“Don’t cry,” Lizzie said, “there’s no reason to cr—”
But she was already well into her own bout of weeping.
“When can we come home?” the boy asked.
“Soon,” Lizzie answered, wiping away tears, “soon! Mommy still has a lot of work to do, you know that.”
The boy looked down. “I know. We just miss you. We miss you so much, Mommy. It’s that bad man, isn’t it.”
Lizzie shot him a surprised look. She grabbed him firmly by his diminutive shoulders.
“You know him?”
He nodded.
“How do you know him? Tell me — how do you know this man?”
The boy looked behind her and pointed. Lizzie turned.
There stood the Smiling Man, cradling an infant that babbled contentedly to herself.
“Who are you?”
The man smiled.
When Lizzie got to her feet, the man no longer held the infant. She stared at him for a moment before turning back to the sea of children — but they were all gone.
“They’re still there. We’re inextricably linked,” the man said, smiling. He took a sip of iced tea, then sat in a chair. Lizzie found she now stood on the nighttime porch of a small, cozy clapboard dwelling. The Smiling Man leaned back in his chair until it rested against the outside wall of the house.
“So… what can you tell me?” Lizzie asked.
“What do you want t’know?” the man replied, taking another sip of tea. “This is good stuff, you really oughta try it.”
“Okay.”
“Great!” The Smiling Man all but leapt out of his chair and disappeared into the interior of his house. While she waited, Lizzie went to the porch railing and looked out into the night; inhaled the fresh, cool air, and listened to chirping crickets.
“Don’t you just love it?” the man asked, back with another glass of iced tea in hand, his glass refreshed.
Lizzie turned to him. “I do.” Inhaling deeply, she smiled and sighed, then casually crossed her arms. “I really do. I always wanted to live out in the country like this.”
“But, you already do.”
“Yeah, but not now.”
“Have a seat.”
Lizzie took up the chair next to the Smiling Man, who again leaned back against the house. “Go on,” he chided playfully, “there’s no carpet to dig chair legs into, here.”
Smiling, Lizzie tipped her chair back against the outside of the house.
“So, why have we met?”
“You know. You’re just clouded by all that guilt.”
Lizzie took a sip of iced tea.
“You know what I’m talking about — don’t pretend otherwise,” Smiling Man said.
“You smile too much, don’t have a name, and cop an attitude.”
“Most of what’s occurring is in the journey, not the destination, and were I to give you blanket answers they’d take away from your journey, and you’d learn nothing. Just because you’re so-called psychic doesn’t mean you’re perfect. To learn, you need to experience not only your answers, but the questions. Sometimes questions are more important than answers.”
Lizzie took another sip of tea. “I’m not sure I want to find out.”
The Man with No Name suddenly leapt off his chair and the porch.
“Hey — let’s do some weedin — and I’ll tell you a story!”
Lizzie awoke, eyes wide and alert. Though tired, she felt good. She looked to her clock, but the display was partially obscured by a corner of pillow. She packed it down and saw that it was only four-forty-one. She lay back on her pillow, closed her eyes, and quickly fell back to sleep…
4
Victor Black opened the safe by the light of a penlight clutched between clenched teeth. He removed a specific handful of sealed envelopes, found the ones needed, and separated them from those he placed back into the safe. Then he took out identical envelopes hidden inside his jacket and held them side by side to the ones pulled. The type-written control numbers were identical. It was their contents that differed.
Black inserted the switched envelopes into the safe and closed the drawer, spinning the S&G combination dial. He yanked on the steel drawers to ensure the safe was, indeed, locked, then pocketed the replaced documents. He briefly worked his left shoulder when done.
Black left the office and walked down the empty hallways like a well-practiced rat in a well-worn maze. He came to the dimly lit cafeteria, and continued through it until he came to the large plate window at the opposite end. He stared out past his reflection at the few lights that showed through the black cherry, maple, and sweetgum trees. He sat down at the end of a table, then leaned over onto it with an elbow, as if in thought. Continuing to stare out the window, Black used his free hand to stealthily reach under the table… careful that the ceiling-mounted “bubble cameras” wouldn’t see his actions. He felt around until he found the compact package that had been taped there moments ago.
The digital disk of his intrusion into the “control safe” and office, where he’d just switched out documents…