So Close to You (So Close to You - Trilogy) (10 page)

He smiles a little and raises his face to mine. I notice that his pale blue eyes have flecks of gray in them, the exact color of the ocean in the early morning when the fog is still hovering over the water.

The door bangs open. I jump and break our eye contact. Mary is standing just inside the room, practically quivering with excitement.

“Lydia! I have the best news.” She sees Lucas and stops. “Oh, hi, Lucas. I didn’t know you were in here.” She blushes slightly.

“Lucas is the soldier who found me yesterday.” I smile at her, but she doesn’t notice; her eyes are trained on Lucas. He breaks her gaze and stares down at the floor. I glance between them, not sure what to make of the odd undercurrent in the room.

Lucas must feel it too, because he starts to back out of the room. “I’ll leave you girls alone,” he says.

“No, it’s all right.” Mary steps forward and puts her hand on his arm. “Stay, I have wonderful news.” She turns to me. “It took some finagling, and Dean is still worried you’re a secret German spy, but I finally convinced Daddy to let you come home with us! We called Ma on the telephone and she’s getting Dean’s old room ready for you. Isn’t it so exciting?” She hops up and down a little, shaking Lucas’s arm.

“I don’t know....” I let go of the blanket, smoothing it out as I consider my options. If I stay with the Bentleys, it’s a guaranteed roof over my head tonight. But unless I find the time machine again, I won’t be able to go home tonight.

I need to get back to my own time. But I’m not eager to face those underground tunnels again, and I’m more than a little curious about my family and what they were like during World War II. I could meet my grandfather as a little boy. I could meet Dean.

A small idea starts to spark inside of me. I’m in 1944, the same year my great-grandfather disappeared. Today is May 31. Dean vanishes on June 5, less than one week from now. If I stay with Mary, I might be able to find out why.

Now that I know time travel is real, it’s entirely possible that
everything
my grandpa believed about Camp Hero is real. Dean might be connected to the Montauk Project. It could have led to his disappearance. I don’t know how I’ll find out the truth—maybe he
did
die in a simple training accident—but I won’t know unless I go to the Bentleys’ house. Don’t I owe it to my grandfather to at least try to solve his life’s mystery: What really happened to his father on June 5, 1944?

“Oh please, you have to stay!” Mary rushes over and bounces down next to me. “Please, please! It will be killer-diller, like having a sister! We’ll go to the movies, and to the beach, and you can meet all my friends. Suze—she’s my best friend—she’ll just love you, I know it.”

Lucas smiles at me. “I don’t think you have much of a choice, Lydia.”

I picture Wes’s face, his eyes intent on mine as he told me we needed to return to the underground labs. Now I know why he wanted to take me back immediately. I wonder what he would think of me staying in the past for a little while. Nothing good, probably.

Then I stop and shake my head. Why am I even considering his opinion? I can’t make my decision based on a relative stranger, even if he did save my life yesterday. I need to do this for me and for my family.

“Okay.” I smile at them both. “I’ll stay.”

A
few
hours later, Mary and I are pressed together in the backseat of Dr. Bentley’s car. It’s straight out of an old gangster movie: rounded body, pointed hood, gleaming black finish. I run my hand over the soft leather seat. “What kind of car is this?” The motor is louder than I’m used to, causing the seat to vibrate.

“Nineteen-forty Plymouth,” Dr. Bentley says as he pulls away from the hospital. “One of the last models you could buy before they stopped making them.”

“They stopped making this car?”

“They stopped making all cars,” Mary says. “You must know that.” She giggles at my confused expression. “They needed the factories for the war effort? You do remember there’s a war happening, right, Lydia?”

“Of course I remember.” I turn to look out the window, running my hands nervously over my jean-covered legs. I’m wearing my own clothes again, a black-and-white checked button-down shirt that I tucked into cuffed jeans. Dr. Bentley found me a pair of castoff black leather shoes to wear. They’re too tight and they pinch my toes.

I pay close attention as we drive out of Camp Hero. There are two checkpoints. The first one is at a small gate that leads into the clearing where the barracks and hospital are. The one soldier at the gate waves us through as he recognizes Dr. Bentley. The second checkpoint is at a large gate near the camp’s entrance. Two soldiers step out of a small gatehouse, guns slung over their shoulders. They speak quietly with Dr. Bentley before letting us pass.

We drive out onto a bigger road and I turn to look back at Camp Hero. There’s a tall fence around the outside of the camp, and I can see a huge stone lookout tower near the lighthouse. It’s all so different from the welcoming state park I’m used to.

“Is it always this heavily guarded?” I ask.

“Usually. They patrol the perimeter, too,” Dr. Bentley answers. “We’re all a little puzzled as to how you managed to get in here without being noticed.”

“I think I walked through the woods a lot.” I hedge.

“You must have come up through the forest on the west side. The main base is in the eastern area. There are only a few bunkers with long-range guns, and storage facilities farther west. It’s much more heavily wooded.”

Except, of course, for a secret underground compound.

We turn onto the main highway, and I’m surprised to see that it looks like it does in my time—uneven pavement framed by the forest and the sand dunes. I see the beach out the window on Mary’s side, a constant stretch of blue.

Mary chatters next to me about a USO dance and soldiers stationed in town. I nod along, but I’m glued to the window as we start to approach the center of town. Even in my time, Montauk is considered small, with just one main drag of restaurants and shops. Now, it’s even smaller—a general store with a wide porch, a taller brick building that appears to serve as a post office and a town hall, a feed store, a few blue-gray shingled fishing huts.

“The town is so tiny.” I interrupt something Mary’s saying about a dance.

“We’re simple folk,” Dr. Bentley replies. “A lot different from your city slicker life. You might find it a bit dull out here.”

“You’d be surprised,” I say drily. “Still, I guess I was expecting something else.”

Dr. Bentley turns right at the fork in front of the pond and starts to drive around it. The late afternoon sun reflects on the water. There are almost no houses, just a small wooden cabin tucked here and there.

“There are more buildings on the north side of town,” Mary explains. “Though the navy is stationed up there now. They even test torpedoes on Lake Montauk!”

“And then I fix the soldiers up afterward.” Dr. Bentley chuckles.

“I thought you were a doctor in the army?”

He shakes his head. “I’m not an army man. I just volunteer where I’m needed. Sometimes it’s for the army, sometimes the navy.”

“Are you a volunteer too?” I ask Mary.

“With the Red Cross. I’ve had nurse’s training and everything. As soon as I graduate, I’m going to enlist into the Army Nurse Corps.”

“Oh.” I try to follow the conversation, but I grow more distracted as I turn to watch the town recede through the back window. This
is
my hometown. I can see the structure of it in the way the land dips and curves, but it has become something new entirely. Gone are the neatly paved roads, the tourist restaurants, the bars, and the knickknack shops. There isn’t even a town green.

Mary follows my gaze. “The town was bigger before the Depression. This man Fisher came in and built a bunch of fancy buildings—the Yacht Club, the Tennis Auditorium. He wanted to make it a high-class resort town. But he lost all his money when the stock market crashed and everyone stopped coming. We don’t even have a soda fountain anymore.”

I nod. The story, about how the industrialist Carl Fisher bought up land in the late 1920s to try to turn the town into the “Miami Beach of the North,” is a local legend. He had to abandon everything when he lost his fortune.

I see Montauk Manor rising over Signal Hill. It looks mostly the same as it does in my time—a grand Tudor-style castle, with its massive white stone body and brown wooden framework edged against the large gables. It has been a resort for as long as I can remember, but my dad likes to tell stories about how he and his friends would sneak in when it was empty and abandoned, wandering through the dusty ballroom, the long empty pools, the vacant rooms.

We turn right onto a road not far from my own house, then pull into a dirt driveway. My great-great-grandparents’ house is two stories, painted white. It feels private—trees isolate it from the few neighbors down the street, and I can see that the backyard is surrounded by forest. The Bentleys must be fairly wealthy, especially in the small fishing community of Montauk in 1944.

I’ve never seen this house before, and I remember my grandfather telling me that it burns down in the ’60s. It’s a strange feeling, knowing the future. I find myself staring through the trees in the direction of my own home. My grandfather lives there now, with his family. I try to picture my grandfather as a little boy but I can’t. Everything is so different in this time. I wonder if I would even recognize my bedroom, painted in another color and decorated differently. Perhaps it would be like the town—a ghostly outline, a shadow of a place I’ve always taken for granted.

Mary tugs me toward the bright red front door. Before we reach it, it opens to reveal a petite woman with dark red hair, identical to mine and Mary’s. She’s wearing a green button-down dress, with a short cardigan perched around her shoulders.

“This must be Lydia.” Her face is soft, with small lines around her eyes and mouth. She looks genuinely welcoming, not at all suspicious, and I am instantly at ease. “I’m Harriet Bentley.” My great-great-grandmother.

“It’s nice to meet you.”

She smiles. I notice that we have the same curve to our upper lip, the same high cheekbones. And now I know where I got my red hair from.

“Come in, dear, you must be exhausted.” She steps back and I walk into the entryway. It’s a long hallway, with hardwood stairs that lead up to a shadowy second floor. There’s a formal parlor to the left, with stuffy-looking couches and an antique wooden coffee table. A grand piano sits near the front windows, which are covered in heavy black fabric.

“You have to see my room!” Mary grabs my arm. “And I bet you want to take a bath. You can borrow one of my dresses. We need to get you out of those strange clothes.”

I glance helplessly at Mrs. Bentley, but she just smiles as Mary tugs me up the stairs.

A half hour later I am clean again and holding up what looks like a corset with straps attached to the bottom. We’re in Mary’s small bedroom, which is nothing like my neat, simple room at home. There are two twin ruffled pink beds and framed pictures of flowers on the walls. Clothes and shoes and makeup cover every available surface.

Mary is stretched out on one of the beds, flipping through a magazine. She catches my expression and laughs. “Have you never seen a girdle before?”

“I guess … but what are the straps for?”

She rolls her eyes at the question. “To hold up your stockings, though lord knows I have none of those left. When Ma gave her old bras to the war effort, she made me give up almost all of my nylon stockings. Can you believe that? What are the boys gonna do, wear bras into combat? I know we’re not supposed to complain and all, but sometimes this war makes life so hard.” She swings her legs in the air behind her as she flips through the pages of her magazine.

“Handing over your underwear? That sounds rough.” The girdle is lower than a corset, and it’s supposed to pull across my stomach and hips. It reminds me of the shapewear my mom is always buying.

“Do I really have to wear this?”

Her eyes go wide and her mouth falls open. “Lydia, what kind of question is that? What would people think?”

I sigh and pull on the girdle. It sucks in my stomach and creates a smooth line over my hips. I turn in the mirror, inspecting my new hourglass shape.

“Where’d you get that scar?” Mary points at my right shoulder. I glance down at the white, raised circle, noticeably bright against my pale skin.