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Wait.
Myla’s voice jumps into her head: But let’s say there was a big event—
“The blackout,” August says. It comes out high and tight.
“The blackout,” Jerry confirms. “I passed out on a bench, and when I woke up, it was fuckin’ chaos. I mean, I barely made it home. I guess I lost her in the chaos, and her bus was first thing in the morning. So that was it. I never saw her again.”
“You didn’t try to call her? To make sure she made it out?”
“You do know what blackout means, right? I couldn’t even get down the street to see if she was at her apartment. Anyway, she lost my number after that. Can’t say that I blame her, after I almost got us both killed. Whole reason I stopped drinking that year.”
August gulps down a mouthful of air.
“And you never heard from her again?”
“Nope.”
“Can I ask you one more question?”
Jerry grumbles but says, “Sure.”
“The place she was moving… it was California, wasn’t it?”
“You know what… yeah, I think it was. How’d you know?”
August throws her apron over her shoulder, already halfway out the door.
“Lucky guess,” she says. On her way out, she stops in the back office and plucks the postcard off the wall.
At a tiny electronics shop a few blocks over, she buys a handheld blacklight and ducks into an alley. She shines the light over the postmark, the way her mom used to with old documents where the ink had rubbed off, and it reveals the shadow of where the numbers used to be. She didn’t think the exact date would matter, until now.
An Oakland area code at the bottom. Muscadine Dreams. The hometown Jane told him about, passing wine back and forth on the porch. August can picture him and his red shorts and messy hair, cruising down the Panoramic Highway in golden sunshine.
It’s postmarked April 1976.
Augie didn’t die that night in 1973. He went to California.
“This is like an episode of CSI,” Wes says through a mouthful of popcorn.
“I’m taking that as a compliment,” August says.
She finishes taping up the last photo, and she has to admit, it is a little primetime television detective. There’s no yarn yet, though. August is proud of that. Yarn is the one thing separating her from a full-scale conspiracy theorist—also known as the Full Suzette.
(She hasn’t integrated what she figured out about Augie into the timeline yet. There’s not enough dry-erase marker in the world to work that one out, and certainly not enough space in her head. One thing at a time.)
Myla and Niko are out for dinner, but August couldn’t wait, so it’s just Wes and his huge bowl of popcorn watching her pace back and forth in front of the whiteboard in the kitchen. He looks deeply bored, which means he’s having a great time and finding this all very entertaining.
“Okay, so,” she says. She nudges her glasses up her nose with the end of her dry-erase marker. “Here’s what we know.”
“Tell us what we know, August.”
“Thank you for your support, Wesley.”
“My name is Weston.”
“It’s— Jesus, are you a fucking Vanderbilt or something?”
“Focus, August.”
