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“Well, Lynn, you live in a cause-and-effect world. You have to effect the cause to cause the effect. So start brewing so we can chat before you leave for school.”
She didn’t want to spend her usual quiet coffee time with a dead aunt. This was her time in the mornings, time to sit on her back porch and sip her coffee, taking in the fragrance of bougainvillea and dew before they evaporated and left behind only the tang of salt air. However, she had no choice in the matter, so reluctantly she walked out to the porch and sat with Delphine. Besides, she didn’t really want Delphine to go.
“That’s so much better,” Delphine said approvingly.
“So are you going to tell me the mysteries of the universe?”
“Don’t be silly. You have to find them out for yourself.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I can’t tell you that,” Delphine said. “I just have to finish something.”
“Oh, lovely.” Lynn put her chin in her hand, her elbow on the table, and stared at her favorite aunt. “You know you could cost me my job.”
Delphine appeared appalled. “I wouldn’t do that!”
“You will if I keep talking to empty air.”
Delphine pursed her lips. “I hadn’t considered that. I was only thinking of my mission.”
“I’d appreciate it if you would keep that in mind.”
“Of course I will.”
“Thank you.” Bargaining with the dead. Lynn closed her eyes, surrendering briefly to a sense of surrealism that Dali and Kafka might have conspired to create.
She lifted her coffee and sipped, considering how bizarre it felt to look across at a dead person. Common sense said this could not be happening, but then again what was reality? When she considered her former colleagues at Princeton investigating the effect of consciousness on the underlying quantum field of the universe, reality became a tenuous thing.
But there was nothing at all tenuous about Delphine’s appearance. She looked solid enough to touch. A thought occurred to her. “You’re not cold.”
Delphine arched a brow. “Why would I be cold?”
“Ghosts are supposed to create cold spots. You draw energy from the matter around me in order to materialize. I should experience that energy drop as coldness.”
Delphine laughed. “That old tale. Well, I suppose some do. But I’m not exactly a ghost.”
“Then what are you?”
“A non-physical manifestation of my consciousness.”
“A ghost.”
“Not the same thing at all, Lynn. Not at all. A ghost is merely an imprint left on the quantum field. Like a footprint left in the dirt. The footprint is there, but the person who left that footprint has passed on.”
“Really.”
“Don’t sound so dubious. Remember, I’ve graduated ahead of you.”
Lynn had the worst urge to roll her eyes. “Graduated what ahead of me? Death? Yes, I’ll give you that much. But physics? Oh Auntie, let me assure you that physicists are working on things you only imagined when you were still teaching.”
“You think I don’t know that? My point is—I have the answers now. You don’t.” Delphine sipped her latte then frowned. “Which reminds me. Why in the world did you leave Princeton and your research to come to this place and teach youngsters, of all things?”
“Do you really want an answer?”
“Yes.”
“Because I got sick of the underhanded competition,” Lynn said. “Not with my peers, but with my students. I’m sure you heard about it. Students were stealing books and papers from the library to prevent other students from reading them. Buying their term papers on the Internet. Fudging their experimental results. I felt as if I were teaching a generation of cheats. Not that I should have been surprised, given how some of my colleagues behaved.”
“Your work was stolen.”
“Yes.” Lynn scowled. “And I hope Donald Farthing enjoys his new-found fame.”
“He was that professor you were dating, right?”
“Unfortunately.”
“And he’s the one who stole your work?”
“Two years of research on 11-dimensional Calabi-Yau shapes, trying to prove my theory of quantum space-time. I had to develop a new mathematic to solve it, Auntie, just as Newton had to develop calculus to fashion the equations of classical mechanics. Then one morning I wake up and find he’s published my research on the Internet, under his name. He’d copied my files to his computer and even backdated them. And since he was a tenured professor and I was just a Ph.D candidate…”
Delphine nodded and took another sip of her drink. She sucked loudly at the straw just as she sometimes had in life. “I never really cared for Donald,” she said finally. “I’m so sorry he proved me right.”
“You’re not the only one.”
“Well,” Delphine said, suddenly brisk, “this is a nice spot for a change of pace. Almost like a vacation. Is that why you chose this place?”
“Yes, it is. Just let me get on with it, will you?” But a vacation was not the reason she had chosen this island. A vacation had been the last thing on her mind. She’d needed to escape, yes—especially from the academic world that was looking at her like a bug under the microscope—but Treasure Island had been an accidental discovery on the Internet.
She’d been browsing around, looking for various teaching jobs, when this one had popped up. She might have passed it by, except that her mathematical mind had immediately calculated the thousands of miles this job would put between her and Donald.
The lure had been irresistible.
“But of course!” Delphine arched a brow as if surprised. “I’m not here to hinder you.”
“No?” Lynn felt entirely dubious, with good reason. Delphine’s help had often caused more problems than it had cured. “But, um, I really should handle my own life on my own.”
Delphine smiled benevolently. “You only think it’s your own life.”
Lynn didn’t know how to react to that. She wanted to throw something, but that wasn’t her nature. She could have told her aunt to stop playing the sphinx, but she’d never told Delphine to do anything except butt out. Which she had just tried to do.
“Look, dear,” Delphine said kindly, “you know you’re part of the Unity. Nothing affects only you. Others are involved. But, I promise to stay in the background as long as my work here if unfinished.”
At that, she dissipated. Lynn felt anything but reassured. Delphine in the background could be as every bit as disastrous as Delphine front and center.
Groaning, she sat on the back porch, drank coffee and watched the remainder of the sunrise. Before long, despite everything, peace began to fill her again. That was why she had come to this island, and the sun’s early rays seemed to bathe her with it.
Forget Delphine, she told herself. The worst she could be was a nuisance. The best….
Well, the best that could be said was that Delphine had just confirmed a lot of current theories in physics. She smiled at that and raised her coffee in a toast to the sun. The world was an amazing place.
It even included an alligator staring at her from beneath a shrub.
She blinked and peered more intently. God, it was an alligator. It must be Buster, she realized. He was the only crocodilian on the island and more a celebrity than any of the human inhabitants, even World Series of Poker champion Bill Anstin. Buster was not quite wild, not quite a pet, not dangerous but neither to be trifled with when he set his mind to something.
Rather like Aunt Delphine.
“Tell me you’re not in league with her,” Lynn said.
Alligator physiology made it impossible to shrug, but somehow Buster conveyed a shrug regardless.
“Aren’t you supposed to be with Hannah?” Lynn asked. Buster was smitten with Hannah Lamont, a pilot who lived with Buck Shanahan up at the airport. Island legend said that Buster had played a prominent role in getting Hannah and Buck together and thus ensuring that Hannah stayed on Treasure Island.
“Mmmhhhhmmm.” It was a wordless groan and yet Lynn had no doubt what Buster meant.
“She’ll be back soon, I’m sure.”
“Mmmmmhmmmmm.”
“So you’re lonely and hanging around with me?”
“Mmmmmhmmmmm.”
“Delphine’s going to make trouble for me, isn’t she?”
“Mmmmmhmmmmm.”
Lynn sighed. “You have to understand, Buster. She was the stereotypical spinster schoolmarm. When she was a girl, guys didn’t like girls who were too smart. And she was way, way too smart. She never found anyone who could put up with that, and for as long as I can remember, she’s been bound and determined that I should not end up alone.”
“Mmmmmhmmmmm.”
“What she can’t understand,” Lynn said, “is that I would rather be alone for the right reasons than be with someone for the wrong reasons.”
“Mmmmmm?”
“I don’t want to be with someone just for the sake of being with someone. I’d rather be alone than be with the wrong person again.”
“Mmmmmhmmmmm.”
“You think I’m crazy, right?”
“Uhmmmuhmmmm.”
“No?”
“Uhmmmuhmmmm.”
“Will you do me a favor, Buster?” Lynn asked, looking into his saurian eyes.
“Mmmmmm?”
“When Delphine makes things nuts—and we both know she will—will you remind me I’m not crazy?”
Buster blinked and seemed to be assembling the parts of the thought before he replied.
“Mmmmmhmmmmm.”
So okay, Lynn thought. At least she had an ally. An ally-gator. She laughed at the thought as she rose to get ready to leave for school. Maybe Buster was wrong. Maybe she was crazy.
But she could still laugh at herself. She laughed even harder when she realized her aunt had done it again: she had her niece talking to alligators.
Delphine tended to have that effect.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, just as he was about to set out for his daily jog on the beach, Jack stepped out of his house to find Buster waiting in the now-dry wallow they’d made together yesterday.
Jack stared at the gator, wondering why he was hanging around here when lately he’d preferred to be up at the airport. But the obvious plea was just too much to ignore, especially since he couldn’t see even the smallest puff of cloud in the sky.
“Okay, Buster,” he said. “I’ll get the hose.”
“Mmmmmmmhhhhhh.”
This gator talked. Of that Jack had not the least doubt. Admittedly the beast was limited by lack of lips and proper vocal chords, but somewhere during his long gator-solitary life on this island, he seemed to have learned English.
Jack turned the hose on Buster, and a stream of water ran over the rough hide, causing the gator to groan ecstatically.
“It might,” Jack said to Buster, “be ecologically more sound to put you in my bathtub.”
Umum, Buster answered, shaking his head.
“No, I guess not. I’d have to change the water anyway to keep it clean.”
Buster groaned happily, wiggling in the dirt until it mixed with the water and became mud.
An amused voice came from next door. “Does watering him make him grow?”
Jack looked up to see Lynn standing in front of her house, backpack slung over one shoulder, a stack of file folders in her arms.
“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “But since the drought it sure makes him happy.”
She laughed. “I agree. A happy gator is desirable. Do you feed him, too?”
“That’s one thing we avoid. We don’t want him too comfortable around us.”
“So what does he eat?”
“Well, he was eating fish and birds at the pool but now…” Jack shrugged. “I suspect it may be time to dump a few dead chickens and fish waste somewhere near the pool. He can’t be catching a whole lot right now.”
