One Lane Bridge: A Novel Read online

J. D. went out the back door and thought how strange it was that neither of them said good-bye.

  Chapter Thirteen

  J. D. knew he would need to spend only about forty minutes at each restaurant. He hoped Karlie would expect him to take much longer because he had found no good time today to tell her that he and Jack were going out to Route 814 tonight. “Route 814” had become the euphemism in his conscience for going to the Clem house. It sounded saner inside his head. He could live with that. “Route 814” kept him from actually admitting to himself that he was visiting a family that was living sixty-five years ago. He knew he was only fooling himself to say he had not found a good time to tell Karlie what he and Jack were up to. He examined his rationalization for not telling her: It had been a full and eventful day beginning with the morning confession to Jack; then confronting Katherine and Lottie and Crystal this afternoon; and then being surprised by Angela’s return and her announcement that she was quitting school. Still, he knew he should have told Karlie. The nerve ends in his stomach were jumping, and he was beginning to feel sick as he backed out of his driveway.

  And then there was Lavern Justice. What did she want? What did she have to offer? He knew there would be no time to meet with her before he had to pick Jack up at six forty-five, but he could call her and make an appointment for tomorrow. No matter what they found tonight on Route 814, he still wanted all the information he could gather on the history of the Justice property.

  All the employees at the downtown Dining Club were quiet and seemed to keep their distance as he asked normal questions about the day’s business. They answered, but no one lingered to talk. It was all business, and he could feel the tension and discomfort in the air. He used the phone in the office to return Lavern Justice’s call and got her answering machine. He told her tomorrow morning at ten would be a good time for him and if that didn’t suit for her to let him know.

  The crew at the west-end restaurant seemed less distracted, but he thought he could detect a little bit of distance in them also. Or maybe it was just his feelings of discomfort and not theirs. But all in all, things were moving along as expected in both restaurants and it was rapidly nearing six forty-five. He needed to check on Angela before he left, and he had two ways of doing that. He could call Angela directly and listen to all her one-sided gripes about life and how it was treating her and how unfair her mother was, or he could call Karlie and see if she had heard from Angela and risk having Karlie ask him if he was going to be at one of the restaurants the rest of the evening. It took him a moment to decide which corner he wanted to be caught in.

  “Hello?”

  “Angela? Where did I catch you?”

  “I’m at home.”

  “Is your mother there?”

  “Yeah, she’s in the kitchen. Do you want her?”

  “No, silly. I called you. If I had wanted her, I’d have called the house. Did you go see Grandma?”

  “Yeah, I did. We had a good time. She said to tell you hi.”

  “Well, good. What are you going to do tonight?”

  “Just stay at home, I guess. That is, if Mom is talking to me.”

  “I’m sure she’s talking to you. Has she ever let you down when you really needed her?”

  “No.”

  And it wasn’t until this one simple word that J. D. could detect tears in her voice. It broke his heart every time she cried, but he was glad she was showing the right emotion toward her mother. He decided to do the talking so she wouldn’t feel embarrassed.

  “Angela, you don’t have to say another word. Just hang up and go in the kitchen and talk to your mother. Everything is going to be all right. I’ll be home a little later, but if you two talk, I know things will work out.”

  “Daddy.”

  “Yes, honey.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Ask me anything you want. You know you can.”

  “Is something wrong? Grandma says there is.”

  “Wrong with who?”

  “Wrong with you. She says she can tell when something’s bothering you. She can see it in your eyes, and she knows you’re worried sick about something.”

  There was silence on J. D.’s end of the line this time. His little girl had taken him by surprise—thanks to his mother and that old thing she always told everybody about his eyes drooping. He knew what was coming. He had to decide how to play it with her. He certainly wasn’t going to tell her about Route 814. Now he was wishing he had taken his chances and called Karlie.

  “Nothing for you to worry about, honey. Your mother and I have had some problems at the downtown restaurant we had to take care of today. You can ask her about it if you want to. Other than that, everything’s fine.”

  “You sure, Daddy? You’re not sick or anything, are you?”

  “No, I’m not sick. Why don’t you go talk to your mother and fix something to eat? I promise everything will be okay, and I’ll see you later tonight.”

  “Okay, if you promise and say so.”

  “I promise and say so. And I love you.”

  “Love you, too, Daddy. Bye.”

  J. D. held the phone a long time before he placed it on the cradle. A lot of things were racing through his mind. But they were all mixed up. Angela and Lizzie and Crystal. Karlie and his mother and Jack. Paul and Ada Clem and Katherine Kimball and Lottie Arello. He wasn’t sure what was real and what was a dream anymore. And what if all of it was real? Had the world changed from what he had always known it to be? And if some of it was a dream, then he just might be as crazy as Karlie and Jack thought.

  He looked at his watch. He had five minutes to get to Jack’s house.

  Jack’s house was a small two-story brick home in the middle of a block of similar houses. He had owned other large, sprawling houses through the years—two others, to be exact—but this one was the final product of two marriages, two divorces, and too many alimony payments. He lived alone. There were no kids involved in any of the marriages—only money—and Jack always seemed to end up on the short end. He left his first wife for what the courts called “incompatibility,” and that was a pretty accurate description. They had met at a Christmas party shortly after he went to work at Alden’s drugstore. She, Alma Lee, was an X-ray technician, and they shared all the right interests. They loved to ski in the winter, sail in the summer, and catch all the latest movies at the Cineplex or little art theaters. But sometimes where that sameness can strengthen a relationship, it can also bore one or both of the parties to death. The latter prevailed, and in less than ten years, she got the house, and he got the sailboat.

  Next came Florence, a virtual look-alike to Alma Lee. They both had auburn hair and long necks, and they could have been body doubles for one another. Jack and Flo shared none of the same interests, and this seemed to intrigue him to no end. He loved all the newness she brought to the relationship. He liked the fact that she knew more about football than he did, that she played the violin even though he couldn’t stand the sound of it, and that she taught a yoga class he couldn’t get the knack of. Their differences made the coupling interesting to him, but contentious for her. Again, in less than ten years, she got the house, and he got to sleep in the back of Alden’s for nearly three months before he found the little house he now stood in front of, waiting for J. D. to pull up to the curb.

  Jack got in the car, and neither of them spoke until they were well out of the city limits.

  “Did you bring the penicillin?”

  “I have it in my pocket.”

  Three more miles passed before either of them said another word. Jack couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I feel like a complete idiot after that story you told me this morning. I mean, we have done some crazy things in our time, but this one borders on serious mental illness.”

  “Well, thank you. I appreciate those words of encouragement,” J. D. shot back as sarcastically as possible.

  “Come on, J. D. What do y
ou expect? You’ve found the time machine? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? And who are we going to see? A sixteen year-old girl in bed with septicemia?”

  “If that means blood poisoning, yes.”

  “And who made you a doctor? What if there really is a kid out here who ran a nail through her foot? How do you know it’s blood poisoning?”

  “How do you know it’s not until you look at her?”

  “And that’s something else. I told you I could lose my license giving you pills under the counter. Well, I could lose it just as easily prescribing medicine, you know. I can fill prescriptions, but I can’t write ’em. And here you’ve got me going to hell and back with the intention of giving some girl illegal pills for her foot. How did I get into this anyway?”

  “You can get out anytime you want. Just say the word, and I’ll stop. But you leave the pills.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. You leave the pills.”

  “J. D., I do believe you’re ready to fight me over this little matter. And I haven’t seen you fightin’ mad since our senior year in high school, at the homecoming football game when Gary Snead tried to kiss Karlie while everybody was cheering that final touchdown. You took him apart behind the bleachers and then”—Jack started to laugh—“and then he said”—laughing more—“he said, ‘Don’t hit me, and I’ll give you ten dollars.’ And you said, ‘I already got ten dollars,’ and you pulled back on him, and he ran like a monkey eatin’ tacos.”

  They both laughed.

  “And he was a head taller than you, and I know he outweighed you by thirty pounds. He was on the wrestling team, wasn’t he?”

  Their laughter turned into reminiscing, and it seemed like the old J. D. and Jack for the next fifteen minutes—until J. D. suddenly said, “It’s less than a mile. What time you got?”

  “Oh, seven fifteen. Seven seventeen to be exact.”

  “I’m going to slow down. If I’ve got this thing figured right, we need to hit the corner at precisely seven twenty. I know how that sounds, but I think it’s important.”

  The car was quiet. J. D. kept a watch in his rearview mirror to make sure no car was coming up behind him. If it did, he was prepared to pull over and let it pass. He wanted to be the only vehicle on the road when they rounded the bend just before the one lane bridge.

  “We’re almost there, buddy,” J. D. said, looking at his watch and seeing it hit 7:20 p.m. “It’s just around this curve.”

  Jack was on the edge of his seat. J. D.’s jaw tightened, and beads of sweat formed on his brow. As they came out of the curve, the already slow-moving sports car came to a complete stop in the center of the road. Jack looked ahead and then to J. D.

  “Is that it? Is that the bridge?”

  J. D. was silent. After a long moment, he finally turned and looked his friend in the eyes. “That’s a bridge, yes. But it’s the two lane bridge. And that’s Stan’s One Stop on the other side of it.”

  Jack simply said, “What do we do now?”

  “We go home.”

  “No,” Jack protested. “Show me where the house was.”

  “It was right over there beyond that store.”

  “Let’s go talk to the store owner.”

  “I already have. He doesn’t know anything.”

  “Drive over there anyway. I want to see something.”

  J. D. drove slowly across the low-sided bridge and pulled into Stan’s parking lot. Jack got out and walked around the car. J. D. got out and stood with him and rubbed his forehead with both hands.

  “Is this the exact spot where the house was?”

  J. D. looked behind him and said, “The lane came right up through there and the house was back where those cars are parked, and the front yard was here where the store is.”

  “Didn’t you tell me when you broke down out here at their house that you didn’t have any signal on your cell phone?”

  “It was completely dead.”

  They pulled out their cell phones simultaneously, looked at them, and then looked at each other.

  “Four bars,” Jack said.

  “Me too. I checked it before. I’ve checked everything you can possibly think of, and I can’t figure out why I can come out here one time and that bridge is there and then come back and it’s gone.”

  “Now don’t take offense to this, J. D., but have you considered you might have suffered some kind of psychological lapse, or maybe you were in a dream state or a self-imposed trance or something of that sort?”

  J. D. looked at his friend as if he had smacked him upside the head with a piece of wood. “Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?”

  “Well, no,” Jack admitted, “but it makes as much sense as what you’re spouting off at the mouth about. Look, I want to believe every word you’re saying, but you have to give me something here. You have to give Karlie something too.”

  “Has she called you? Have you two talked about this?”

  “No, but every time the phone rang today I was expecting it to be her. And it will be, I know for sure. And when she calls, I honestly don’t know what I’m going to say. I’ll cover for you in any way you want. You know that. But I don’t know what I’m going to say.”

  “I know what she’s going to say to you. She’s going to ask you to talk me into seeing a doctor. I’ll save you the call. I’m not going.”

  An old man in a sweatshirt and straw hat came out of Stan’s One Stop and got in his truck. As he was about to pull off, he leaned out his window and said, “That a TR3?”

  “Sure is,” J. D. answered absently.

  “What year? ’62?”

  “’61,” J. D. said, this time with a friendlier smile.

  “I used to have one almost exactly like that back when I was a young man. I lived down in Charlotte then. I had some good times in it. I ripped the roads and run through those gears slick as water through a funnel.”

  “It’s a pretty good car,” J. D. agreed.

  “Brings back a lot of memories,” the old man said, looking lovingly at the little machine from end to end. “Yesterdays are what keeps me alive. But you boys are too young to know what I’m talkin’ about. You get to be my age, and you just live one day at a time. Yesterdays are sweet. Tomorrow—well, I figure I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.”

  The two friends got back in the car and rode into Hanson in silence.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The house was quiet and dark except for a light in Angela’s room and one in his and Karlie’s room. It was after ten. He knew neither of them was asleep, but he came in quietly and took his cell phone off and plugged it into the charger on the kitchen counter. He got a Diet Coke from the refrigerator and walked upstairs. He found Karlie on the bed leafing through a People magazine from back to front, the way she always read it.

  “How was everything at the restaurants?”

  “Okay. A little strained, but okay.”

  “Have you been there all this time?”

  He could lie to her and say yes or tell her the truth and say no and open up the whole subject all over again. For all he knew, she had talked to someone at both restaurants earlier in the evening and already knew he wasn’t there the entire time. He had gone back to each after he dropped Jack at his house to lock up, but there certainly was a window from about six forty-five to eight fifteen he couldn’t account for unless he told her the truth. And frankly, whether she had called the restaurants and checked on him didn’t really matter at the moment. He simply needed her right now—her support, her understanding, and her help.

  “I’ll talk about that in a minute. How’s Angela?”

  “She’s Angela. She’ll be fine.” Karlie smiled, still looking at her People.

  “I called her this evening. Did she tell you?”

  “Oh, yeah. She and your mother are worried there’s something wrong with you.” Now she looked up from her magazine. “Is there?”

  “Nothing more than usual.”


  “You’ve been back out to that bridge, haven’t you?”

  “And I took Jack with me.”

  “So, what did he think?”

  “The same thing you do. He thinks I’m loony and in need of a shrink. A ‘psychological lapse,’ I think he called it.”

  J. D. sat on the bed as if he were about to take his shoes off but didn’t. Karlie reached over and rubbed the back of his neck.

  “I know how you feel about all this,” he said, “but I need a sounding board. I need to say out loud some of what’s on my mind.”

  He turned and looked at her for a response, but all he saw was a concerned smile. Then finally she said, “Try me.”

  “Okay. I go for a ride in the country, and I come upon this family. I won’t go into the details again because I know they upset you. But I run into this family, and then I come home and tell you about it. At your suggestion, we go back out there the next morning, and they and the bridge are gone. I’ve been thinking, ‘What changed?’ The first thing that hit me was the time of day. The first time was about seven twenty in the evening, and they were there. The next time was around eleven, eleven thirty the next morning. I even thought it might be the car. I was in the TR the first time, and we were in the van the next. So I thought the key had to be the time of day or the car. So I went back that same night, Tuesday night, at seven twenty in the van and I was able to cross over. So that told me it was the time of day and not the car. Do you follow me?”

  “Don’t ask me to agree with you or even understand. I’m your sounding board. Just talk.”

  “Okay. So now that I think I’ve figured out the key, Jack and I went back out tonight at exactly seven twenty and zip, nothing. So it’s not the car or the time of day. And, honey, it’s the time that has me concerned. One day passed on this side while two years passed on that side, and by the time I figure out how to cross over again, she may be dead.”

  “Who may be dead?”

  “The girl. Haven’t I told you about the nail in her foot and the blood poisoning?”

  There was a long, chilling pause.