Chapter Text
Sam ran out of the water, the drowning boy in his arms, and then threw him down on the sand. Then he pumped on the boy’s chest before breathing into the boy’s mouth. After a few rounds of this, the boy jerked and started coughing up water.
The boy’s mother rushed over, thanking Sam profusely. Sam looked over at Al, who was eyeing a group of young women in bikinis playing volleyball.
Sam parted ways with the mother and said, “Al, what about Tina? Or Beth? Which timeline is it?”
Al nearly flinched, looked over and said, “Beth? Why worry about her? I was just appreciating the game those girls have going on.”
Sam chuckled and shook his head.
“Besides, isn’t it time for you to leap?”
At that moment, Sam disappeared in a crackle of blue light.
Instead of a beach, he found himself sitting in a darkened room, with the only light coming from three monitors. On each of the monitors, there was a chatroom, each with a different man!
“Oh boy,” Sam sighed. He skimmed each of the conversations quickly, answering the man who seemed most impatient. From what he could tell, these men assumed he was an attractive young woman and they were talking about what they were getting her.
Hungryhowie: Do you have anything next in mind, beautiful? You did say one more gift, then I’d get a new picture from you.
Sam’s fingers froze. He had no idea what the leapee would be asking for from this man. He typed back, “I’m sorry” then considered. It was suspicious that this woman was popular, wasn’t it? He doubted any of these men knew she was talking to others as well. For now, he’d keep the peace until Al showed up and told him what to do. And what would these men want to hear?
blondebb1972: I can’t decide right now! I think I’ll know by tomorrow.
The man, thankfully, agreed to this, then launched into an extremely detailed fantasy that involved ropes, honey, and a whip. Sam groaned and only skimmed that one, saying as little as possible while he focused on the other two conversations. The man apparently didn’t need much of Sam’s input and signed off after his fantasy was complete.
The remaining two conversations wrapped up soon after, and Sam logged out. Then he turned on the lights and winced.
He was standing in a pigsty. The desk with the computers was the only neat place in the room. A faint smell emerged that Sam hadn’t been aware of before, emanating from the takeout boxes stacked a dozen deep along the walls.
Sam shook his head in disgust then followed the cleared path to the door. With some investigation, after looking outside and all around, he determined that he was in a two-bedroom apartment. One bedroom was the leapee’s office. The kitchen was mostly empty save for condiment packets, a few takeout boxes and bottles of soda and juice. In the living room, there was a black leather sofa behind a plain wooden coffee table, and a pile of purses in one corner. There was a stack of flattened boxes near the purses with a roll of packing tape on top. A list was on the coffee table. Sam sat down on the sofa and read the list.
In a curlicued handwriting, the list detailed various items, like clothes, purses and giftcards. So the leapee had been honest about her gender, at least. But from how these men had talked, Sam was expecting to see a beautiful blonde young woman in her twenties when he looked in the bathroom mirror.
Not so much. Sam stared back at a white woman in her late thirties. She had frizzy brown hair, dull blue eyes and a very plain-looking face. No matter what expressions Sam made, the woman’s face never quite seemed to come alive. Perhaps this woman had trouble attracting men in the real world, so she had turned to the online world instead?
“Huh. She looks nothing like the picture Ziggy has on file.”
Sam yelped. “Al! You have to warn- Wait a minute. Sammy Jo? What are you doing here?”
The hazel-eyed young woman behind him said, “Sorry, Doctor Beckett. Admiral Calavicci is away on vacation, and I sync better with you than Gooshie does. Remember, I had to substitute a few times before, for short times? So he asked me to-”
“Al? On vacation? What?” Sam turned around to squint at Sammy Jo.
She shrugged apologetically. “He had a fight with Beth and said he needed to take some time off. I’m sure he’s going to be back soon, but he expected me to Observe this whole Leap.”
“Where’d he go?”
“I’m not privy to that information, Doctor Beckett.”
“Please call me Sam.” He sighed. “So what information do you have?” He realized that he had no idea where this woman’s identification was.
“You’ve leaped into Mary Beth Harrington, age thirty-nine. She was married to a professor for a brief time in college before they divorced a year later. That was twenty years ago for her. She lives in Trenton, New Jersey. It’s April ninth, 1997.”
“And does she work from home?”
Sammy Jo frowned at the handlink. “Mary Beth has some kind of data entry job, but it’s part time.”
Sam looked around at the apartment. Despite the mess, it was a nice place- very up-to-date appliances, counters and wooden floors. “Part time? Come look with me.”
He walked Sammy Jo through the apartment to the kitchen. Sam started rummaging through the cabinets. Sammy Jo looked around the place. “You’re right, but maybe this is an apartment priced for affordable living?”
Sam scoffed, his head deep into a cabinet. “No. I think what Mary Beth does, is she fishes for men, seduces them and gets them to buy things for her or give her money. That’s how she affords this place.”
Sammy Jo looked at her handlink. “That makes sense, considering what Ziggy’s telling me. Let’s see. Ah yes! There was a case- it made it onto the national news. Mary Beth was killed by one of her victims, an angry Manhattan lawyer named Edward Hughes. She had scammed him out of thousands and he wanted his money back.”
“And when does this Hughes show up?” Sam stood up, hands on his hips. He hadn’t had any luck finding any trash bags. He started searching the kitchen counters, then elsewhere in the apartment for keys. He needed to clean that mess out of the office! “I’m sorry, Sammy Jo, but Mary Beth doesn’t seem very nice. Any good reason why I should help her out?”
“The problem is, by killing her, Hughes also gets disbarred. He loses his chance to defend an innocent man from getting arrested- his firm received his case and he would have been first choice had he not been disbarred. Ziggy estimates that if you save Mary Beth, you’ll also save the life of that innocent man.”
Sam sighed. This wouldn’t be an easy Leap. He found the car keys hanging from a hook on a pegboard and Mary Beth’s purse hanging from the back of a chair. “Can you help me find her car? There’s a mess I gotta clean.”