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CHAPTER 28
1
11/22/63 (Friday)
I sat up and embraced her without even thinking about it. She hugged me back, as hard as she
could. Then I kissed her, tasting her reality—the mingled flavors of tobacco and Avon. The lipstick
was fainter; in her nervousness, she had nibbled most of it away. I smelled her shampoo, her
deodorant, and the oily funk of tension-sweat beneath it. Most of all I touched her: hip and breast and
the scarred furrow of her cheek. She was there.
“What time is it?” My trusty Timex had stopped.
“Quarter past eight.”
“Are you kidding? It can’t be!”
“It is. And I’m not surprised, even if you are. How long has it been since you got anything but the
kind of sleep where you just pass out for a couple of hours?”
I was still trying to deal with the idea that Sadie was here, in the Fort Worth house where Lee and
Marina had lived. How could it be? In God’s name, how? And that wasn’t the only thing. Kennedy was
also in Fort Worth, at this very minute giving a breakfast speech to the local Chamber of Commerce
at the Texas Hotel.
“My suitcase is in my car,” she said. “Will we take the Beetle to wherever we’re going, or your
Chevy? The Beetle might be better. It’s easier to park. We may have to pay a lot for a space, even so, if
we don’t go right now. The scalpers are already out, waving their flags. I saw them.”
“Sadie . . .” I shook my head in an effort to clear it and grabbed my shoes. I had thoughts in my
head, plenty of them, but they were whirling around like paper in a cyclone, and I couldn’t catch a
single one.
“I’m here,” she said.
Yes. That was the problem. “You can’t come with me. It’s too dangerous. I thought I explained
that, but maybe I wasn’t clear enough. When you try to change the past, it bites. It’ll tear your throat
out if you give it the chance.”
“You were clear. But you can’t do this alone. Face reality, Jake. You’ve put on a few pounds, but
you’re still a scarecrow. You limp when you walk, and it’s a bad limp. You have to stop and rest your
knee every two or three hundred steps. What would you do if you had to run?”
I said nothing. I was listening, though. I wound and set my watch as I did it.
“And that’s not the worst of it. You—yikes! What are you doing?” I had grabbed her thigh.
“Making sure you’re real. I still can’t quite believe it.” Air Force One was going to touch down at
Love Field in a little over three hours. And someone was going to give Jackie Kennedy roses. At her
other Texas stops, she’d been given yellow ones, but the Dallas bouquet was going to be red.
“I’m real and I’m here. Listen to me, Jake. The worst thing isn’t how badly you’re still banged up.
The worst thing is the way you have of falling suddenly asleep. Haven’t you thought of that?”
I’d thought of it a lot.
“If the past is as malevolent as you say it is, what do you think is going to happen if you do succeed
in getting close to the man you’re hunting before he can pull the trigger?”
The past wasn’t exactly malevolent, that was the wrong word, but I saw what she was saying and
had no argument against it.
“You really don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”