A Question Of Time, Fred Saberhagen [best fiction books to read .TXT] 📗

door open, looking out, Jake could see a steady glow of electric light from the direction of the quarry. Faintly he could hear the metallic sounds of the workman at his unceasing labor.

      Despite Jake’s weariness, hours passed before he was able to sleep soundly.

* * *

      On waking to broad daylight, with a sharp start, from some dream that vanished even as he tried to grasp it, he found himself alone in the neat little bedroom. The sun was coming in around the edges of a flowered window curtain. Now he could see more plainly the colors and the kinds of decoration in the room, and now he was no longer too stunned and tired to think about them. This was a woman’s room, all right. There were no man’s clothes or things about.

      Sitting naked on the edge of the bed and doing his best to take stock of his surroundings, Jake confirmed last night’s impression that the little house boasted real glass windows. There were even window screens, though they fit poorly. The interior walls were formed of the flat sides of split logs, neatly smoothed and whitewashed. There were two pictures hanging on the walls, one was of flowers in a basket, another small boats in a harbor. They were in the same style as sketches he had seen Camilla make. Small shelves attached to the walls held knickknacks. There was even a good carpet, looking practically new, on the plank floor. But the clothing Camilla had dropped on the floor last night was gone. Jake opened the door of a small closet. Some men’s clothes here, shirts and pants, but he recognized one of the shirts; Camilla had worn it on their second meeting. There was also a single dress, light blue, hanging by itself. The shelves and the floor in the closet were dusty. On one shelf stood an alarm clock, hands stuck at five minutes to twelve. Jake picked up and shook the timepiece, but it remained silent.

      Somebody had put in a hell of a lot of work, building this place and fixing it up. But now Jake had the impression that it was starting to run down.

      Hoping to find a bathroom, Jake tried the unopened door in the bedroom wall. Instead, to his surprise, he found an even smaller bedroom, as neatly fixed up as the room where he had slept, but furnished with a child’s bed instead of a regular sized one. There was a child-sized rocking chair as well. This room was even wallpapered, in a pattern of teddy bears and clowns, and a lone, forlorn toy animal sat on a shelf. The stuffed rabbit looked as if it might have been there for a long time.

      On a small table stood the child’s lunchbox that had so aroused Edgar’s anger.

* * *

      Jake found the bathroom just off the main room, the logical site from the point of view of whoever had done the plumbing, where pipes could be economically coupled to those of the sink in the kitchen area. Water had been piped in from the creek. And someone must have gone to the trouble of putting in some kind of septic tank.

      On coming back into the main room he also took note of the small electric refrigerator and even a tiny electric stove. Neat. But on the wall, as Jake now noticed for the first time, hung a calendar, just three years wrong, informing him that this was June of 1932.

      Camilla wasn’t here, or anywhere in the house.

      Jake got into his clothes and went exploring outdoors, taking note in passing of how a couple of cottonwoods had been strategically planted where they would shade the house on summer afternoons. There was still no sign of Camilla. Fortunately or not, there was no sign of the old man either.

      Jake walked closer to the mouth of the cave. He had to duck his head a little to see inside, but past the entrance the height opened up. The space inside, or what Jake could see of it, was now silent and dark except for what sunlight got in past the overhang. Evidently old Edgar had tired himself out at last and gone to his rest somewhere. He certainly wasn’t anywhere in the house.

      Standing just inside the entrance to the cave, confronted by invisible depths of shadow, Jake thought of calling for Edgar, but decided against that course for the time being. Peering into the dimness, he was unable to see anything that gave him any help.

      He didn’t know where else to look for either Camilla or Edgar. But he swore to himself that he was going to demand some answers from the old man as soon as he got the opportunity.

      Returning to the little house, Jake noticed something he must have somehow missed the first time through this morning. A note was lying on the large table in the main room.

      The message was very short, printed in pencil on the back of an old envelope:

Jake: I’ve gone fishing.

Love,

Cammy

      Love, huh? Jake thought about that word, and then he thought about all the other words of the message individually. Then he let the paper fall back on the table. Suddenly he was hungry. He opened the door of the electric refrigerator and was glad to find some food available.

      There were tired-looking apples and a couple of oranges, and some other less interesting things wrapped up in wax paper. Two unopened quart bottles of beer, and a few six-ounce nickel bottles of Coke. Cheese and ham and bread, leftovers from the making of yesterday’s sandwiches. There were also some eggs in a cardboard carton, but Jake didn’t feel like trying to cook.

      He made himself a breakfast sandwich of ham and cheese, adding a little mustard, and continued to look around. So far this morning he was quite successfully keeping his big problem, the fact that he was lost, in the back of his mind. Without thinking very much about the problem