31

Chapter Thirty

Both girls were exhausted from the experience and journey to Sicily and back. Amanda rolled onto her side and looked at herself in the closet door mirror. "I wonder if we run into Carlo walking down the street, if he'll know us, or is he just a character in a book manufactured somehow by the library?" she said aloud.

Sylvia moved behind her and spooned her naked body to her friends and put her hand on her friends hip, "I have no idea." She resettled her head on her pillow and said, "Whatever it was, the food was real because I'm still not hungry, and I'm still feeling the effects of the wine."

"Well, we both know it wasn't a dream. We were in Sicily. My pussy is sore from all the sex lately, both in and out of the library. The sights we saw on the way from the restaurant to his apartment are things I've not ever seen before, and the strange way the words blurred into something readable for me isn't quite a normal occurrence for me outside of the library either, how about you?"

"Nope, not normal for me! So either we were speaking Italian fluently or we made everyone speak English. I'm betting we were speaking Italian."

Amanda moved her hand under the cover and slightly behind her began lightly stroking the hip of her friend laying behind her, "The book we were in said the restaurant was real. So, that isn't a question."

"Hey, how did you know what to order?"

"I have no idea!"

"You're no help! It was good, whatever it was, do you remember what it was?"

Amanda thought for a second and forced the words to her lips, "Arancini Ai Gamberetti is what we had first and dinner was Farsumagru. The wine was Nero D'Avola."

"When did you become a wine expert?"

"Sylvia, I've never heard of any of those things before! It's like those words were planted in my brain!"

"Are you sure that you just didn't pick something off of the menu?"

Amanda rolled over onto her back and looked at the ceiling, "Then why did it come out in foreign words?"

"Oh! Good point!"

"What is it that's down there Sylvia?"

"A time machine?"

"That and more."

Sylvia said, "Let's get some rest and go try it again when we get up, this time we don't wear shoes and see what happens. You said that you always have the same footwear."

"Any idea what kind of destination this time?"

"How about an amusement park?"

Amanda nodded with her head on her pillow, "That could be interesting, considering I'm supposed to sexually 'please someone and be pleased.' "

"The next thing we need to find out is, the time factor."

"Huh?"

Sylvia continued, "You know, if we're gone for an hour, does an hour elapse on this side of the library."

"Oh! I think it does."

"Then maybe I'd better call work and take a few days off, unless you want to do this stuff on your own."

Amanda gave Sylvia her million dollar smile and said in a singsong manner, "I'm already on vacation and you're not!"

"I will be in a few minutes," and Sylvia flipped the covers off of herself and got out of bed. She didn't bother to put a robe on and walked out of the bedroom naked and into the front room where she retrieved her cell phone and placed her call to the station.

Amanda could hear her talking in the front room and right around five minutes later she came padding back into the bedroom all smiles and sang back to Amanda, "I'm on vacation too!"

Amanda's million dollar smile flashed again and said, "Do you have any idea how freaky this whole thing is? I mean think about this! How is this happening?"

Sylvia pulled the covers up and said to her friend, "I'm too tired to go there, let's go to sleep."

Chapter Thirty-One

Detectives Clark and Jones reported to work the next morning and found a stack of files and paper in the center of their desks with a note from the lieutenant, "See me first thing!"

Clark grabbed the note and headed, with his partner, to the office of their boss. Clark gave a tap on the glass of the lieutenant's door and saw him wave for both of them to enter. "What's up boss?"

"Sit down, both of you."

The pair looked at each other and raised their eyebrows at each other and did as they were directed. Detective Jones asked, "Trouble?"

"No, not for you guys. News is probably what I'd call it."

"Go on," Clark said patiently.

"Did either of you see the stack of paperwork on your desks?"

They both nodded and Clark said, "Yeah, we put a request in for records last night before we clocked out."

"I had to pull a double shift last night," the Lieutenant said. "I got to watch that stack slowly grow into the mountain that it became. Brief me on what you know."

Clark, being the senior detective figured it was his job to fill their superior in to what they had in regards to the three missing persons making up two separate cases. Admittedly, it wasn't much.

The Lieutenant said, "You have a lot more than that now! It was slow last night, so I started going through the stack and seeing what you were getting. Guys, you have a property that seems to have a real rich and deep history."

Jones looked at Clark and then back to her boss, "I don't understand. I thought this was just a coincidence."

"That property was the site of a high-tech, at the time, experiment in sea water power conversion back when the Navy had it during the last world war. Back in the late 60's the government closed the facility and tore it down and sold the plots for housing, like we see it now.

"Sometime in the 80's the waterfront there was converted to sailing vessel parking for the celebrities and the well-to-do. According to the records, part of that same house is sitting on the former foundation of the research facility."

Both of the detectives were nodding as this info was fed to them. Eventually, Jones had pulled out her notepad and was jotting things down that seemed of interest to her.

The Lieutenant continued, "Now, not much info is available about why the Navy was so interested in sea water conversion, but here's an interesting fact of the matter. I sent a request for a memo from the power company asking about the energy usage of that particular house, I got it about an hour ago, and found it's almost nothing compared with the other houses in the neighborhood. When I say almost nothing, I mean in the past, the power company was buying the excess energy that house produced.

"Now, in later years, since everyone has computers, and TV's in each room, the energy draw from that house has evened out and even gone to something of a monthly bill. But the Waters monthly payment was at best two bucks! The Garvey's bill was right about flatline. But guess what?"

Both detectives shrugged their shoulders and said almost simultaneously, "What?"

"We have a fourth missing person from the same location. This guy was a hotshot computer programmer back when the home computer boom began back in the early 80's. He was the third owner of the property after it was built. Prior to him, the power company issued his account a credit or a check for several hundred dollars a month."

"In 70's and 80's dollars that's a lot of energy for them to be buying!" Clark said.

The Lieutenant nodded and said, "That's right! Get this, that house powered the whole neighborhood until this computer whiz named, let's see," a paper was taken off the desk so it could be read, "Randy Mara, yeah that's what it was Randall E. Mara bought the house, and within six weeks the surplus energy stopped happening."

"How long before he went missing," Jones asked.

Another glance at the paper and the Lieutenant said, "Looks like right around a year and a month, March of 1982. In that time, he went from earning decent wages to being a multimillionaire. The Garvey's, when they moved in around July of '86, had the same type of income, but when they went missing, they were super wealthy as well, and they were in the house for quite a few years, it was almost close to twenty years they were there. The Waters guy, he didn't have the luck the others had, he got rich after he disappeared."

Clark sat back in his chair and gave his boss a stunned look, "This is really bizarre! Where's all the money from these previous people? We know where the Waters money went, but what about the others?"

"Mara was unmarried, didn't have a girlfriend, and his will left everything he had to his surviving family, split evenly. They all walked away like lottery winners. The Garvey's money is mostly still sitting in trust. They willed a lot of it to their family and to this oddball enterprise that gets a subsidy from the trust annually. Those funds are electronically diverted into a Swiss bank, and we have no idea what happens after that."

Jones stood up and said, "Whoa, no ones followed up on that? That could be our missing person or people!"

Her boss looked at her and shrugged, "We don't have access to numbered account information, but I'm betting my bank account that you're right."

Clark said, "Any tax issues for any of these guys?"

"Not that I saw."

Clark took a deep sigh, "Something in that house makes people rich and then want to disappear." He looked up at his partner and his boss and shook his head as he spoke, "I think that's what we have here! That's my gut feeling."

"You think they're all alive?" Jones asked.

"I'm not too sure of the Waters guy, but the other ones, got rich and then flew the coop. Waters didn't. The builders of that house seemed to have tapped into a leftover energy supply from whatever 'reactor' or 'turbine' the Navy was using as an energy generator. Mara's the third owner, hey what happened to the first two owners?"

The Lieutenant said, "Standard everyday real estate transaction. They lived there for a few years and moved, both of them."

"Okay, so this Mara guy gets the house, sees the house payment being paid by the power company, and modifies the house somehow to what? Use that energy? Use it how? He stopped getting his house payment made. So it had to be worth it for him to use that energy in some other way! And that way made him a million bucks."

"Steve, it also made the Garvey's money and Waters money. So it's the gift that keeps on giving," Jones summarized.

"How does this new girl fit in?" Clark asked.

"I'm guessing she's going to go missing too in a short time," his boss said.

"I think she's prime to be our next victim too. I mean, it continues to happen. Each owner since Mara has eventually gone shadow on us. What do we do? Warn her? What?" Jones asked.

"Boss, I don't think the Navy stuff is that important. I think we all agree that the house has a free ride on the energy they developed there. But what do we know about Mara? He seems to be the key to this whole thing. What kind of programming could he have done back in the early days of the home computer craze?" Clark paused for a second and asked, "Does he have any surviving relatives? They've got to be able to tell us something about him that we don't know already."

The Lieutenant stretched and yawned and said, "I'm heading home, it's been a long shift. As for the relatives, that paperwork in there must have something. Keep me informed if anything happens."

LaShay Jones nodded and said, "You got it boss. Thanks for all this, you saved us a days worth of work here!"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was glad to help. See you tomorrow."

They watched their boss leave the small offices the detectives unit uses for the Driftwood Police Department. After seeing the door close, the two attacked the stack of paperwork after agreeing to a sorting system for all of the information they had piled on their desk and got to work making sense of the data. Two hours later, they had a list of known relatives of Randall E. Mara still living in the Driftwood area, a whole three of them, which they both thought was a gold mine!

The huge elephant in the room with them was completely ignored while they went about their business, that elephant being the night they had spent in each others arms, naked in bed together and the night of passion they shared there.