By the time I finished, Hosty was on his third glass of bubbly. He had taken a number of items from his briefcase and placed them on the coffee table. I handed him the pad and he began reading over what I’d written. Outside the thunder rumbled again, and lightning briefly lit the night sky, but I thought the storm was still distant.

While he read, I examined the stuff on the coffee table. There was my Timex, the one item that for some reason hadn’t been returned with the rest of my personal effects when we left the cop-shop. There was a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. I picked them up and tried them on. The lenses were plain glass. There was a key with a hollow barrel instead of notches. An envelope containing what looked like about a thousand bucks in used twenties and fifties. A hairnet. And a white uniform in two pieces—pants and tunic. The cotton cloth looked as thin as Hosty had claimed my story to be.

“This letter’s good,” Hosty said, putting the pad down. “You come across kind of sad, like Richard Kimball on The Fugitive. You watch that one?” I’d seen the movie version with Tommy Lee Jones, but this hardly seemed the time to bring it up. “No.”

“You’ll be a fugitive, all right, but only from the press and an American public that’s going to want to know all about you, from what kind of juice you drink in the morning to the waist size of your skivvies. You’re a human interest story, Amberson, but you’re not police business. You didn’t shoot your girlfriend; you didn’t even shoot Oswald.”

“I tried. If I hadn’t missed, she’d still be alive.”

“I wouldn’t blame yourself too much on that score. That’s a big room up there, and a .38

doesn’t have much accuracy from a distance.”

True. You had to get within fifteen yards. So I had been told, and more than once. But I didn’t say so. I thought my brief acquaintanship with Special Agent James Hosty was almost over.

Basically I couldn’t wait.

“You’re clean. All you need to do is to get to someplace where your people can pick you up and fly you away to spook neverland. Can you manage that?” Neverland in my case was a rabbit-hole that would transport me forty-eight years into the future. Assuming the rabbit-hole was still there.

“I believe I’ll be okay.”

“You better be, because if you try to hurt us, it’ll come back on you double. Mr. Hoover . . .

let’s just say that the director is not a forgiving man.”

“Tell me how I’m getting out of the hotel.”

“You’ll put on those kitchen whites, the glasses, and the hairnet. The key runs the service elevator. It’ll take you to B-1. You walk straight through the kitchen and out the back door. With me so far?”

“Yes.”

“There’ll be a Bureau car waiting for you. Get in the backseat. You don’t talk to the driver.

This ain’t no limousine service. Off you go to the bus station. Your driver can offer you one of three tickets: Tampa at eleven-forty, Little Rock at eleven-fifty, or Albuquerque at twenty past midnight. I don’t want to know which one. All you need to know is that’s where our association ends. Your responsibility to stay out of sight becomes all your own. And whoever it is you work for, of course.”

“Of course.”

The telephone rang. “If it’s some smartass reporter who found a way to ring through, get rid of him,” Hosty said. “And if you say a word about me being here, I’ll cut your throat.” I thought he was joking about that, but wasn’t entirely sure. I picked up the phone. “I don’t know who this is, but I’m pretty tired right now, so—”

The breathy voice on the other end said she wouldn’t keep me long. To Hosty I mouthed Jackie Kennedy. He nodded and poured a little more of my champagne. I turned away, as if by presenting Hosty with my back I could keep him from overhearing the conversation.

“Mrs. Kennedy, you really didn’t have to call,” I said, “but I’m honored to hear from you, just the same.”

“I wanted to thank you for what you did,” she said. “I know that my husband has already thanked you on our behalf, but . . . Mr. Amberson . . .” The first lady began to cry. “I wanted to thank you on behalf of our children, who were able to say goodnight to their mother and dad on the phone tonight.”

Carolyn and John-John. They’d never crossed my mind until that moment.

“Mrs. Kennedy, you’re more than welcome.”

“I understand the young woman who died was to become your wife.”

“That’s right.”

“You must be heartbroken. Please accept my condolences—they aren’t enough, I know that, but they are all I have to offer.”

“Thank you.”

“If I could change it . . . if in any way I could turn back the clock . . .” No, I thought. That’s my job, Miz Jackie.

“I understand. Thank you.”

We talked a little longer. This call was much more difficult than the one with Kennedy at the police station. Partly because that one had felt like a dream and this one didn’t, but mostly I think it was the residual fear I heard in Jacqueline Kennedy’s voice. She truly seemed to understand what a narrow escape they’d had. I’d gotten no sense of that from the man himself. He seemed to believe he was providentially lucky, blessed, maybe even immortal. Toward the end of the conversation I remember asking her to make sure her husband quit riding in open cars for the duration of his presidency.

She said I could count on that, then thanked me one more time. I told her she was welcome one more time, then hung up the phone. When I turned around, I saw I had the room to myself. At some point while I’d been talking to Jacqueline Kennedy, Hosty had left. All that remained of him were two butts in the ashtray, a half-finished glass of champagne, and another scribbled note, lying beside the yellow legal pad with my to-whom-it-may-concern letter on it.

Get rid of the bug before you go into the bus station, it read. And below that: Good luck, Amberson. Very sorry for your loss. H.

Maybe he was, but sorry is cheap, isn’t it? Sorry is so cheap.

11

I put on my kitchen potboy disguise and rode down to B-1 in an elevator that smelled like chicken soup, barbecue sauce, and Jack Daniel’s. When the doors opened, I walked briskly through the steamy, fragrant kitchen. I don’t think anyone so much as looked at me.

I came out in an alley where a couple of winos were picking through a trash bin. They didn’t look at me, either, although they glanced up when sheet lightning momentarily brightened the sky.

A nondescript Ford sedan was idling at the mouth of the alley. I got into the backseat and off we went. The man behind the wheel said only one thing before pulling up to the Greyhound station:

“Looks like rain.”

He offered me the three tickets like a poor man’s poker hand. I took the one for Little Rock. I had about an hour. I went into the gift shop and bought a cheap suitcase. If all went well, I’d eventually have something to put in it. I wouldn’t need much; I had all sorts of clothes at my house in Sabattus, and although that particular domicile was almost fifty years in the future, I hoped to be there in less than a week. A paradox Einstein could love, and it never crossed my tired, grieving mind that—given the butterfly effect—it almost certainly would no longer be mine. If it was there at all.