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  She passed a slick red Ferrari, which told her that she should probably slow down a bit, then glanced at the clock on her stereo. She was making decent time, and though it honestly wouldn’t have been a big deal if she sauntered into the classroom a couple of minutes late, she didn’t like to do that. Assuming a free-flow of traffic, she’d estimated about 50 minutes from the studio to her parking lot at Stanford. She’d cut it close, even under the assumption that she’d never have time to get out of the film make-up Connie’s show demanded.

  Though she felt a little badly about the hassle she’d caused, she appreciated that Connie was going to change the show’s intro to suit her messaging. And she was right – Erica had brought up the concept before, while they were doing a show about the Oklahoma “Sooners,” those who had crossed the starting line in the famous 1893 Oklahoma Land Rush before the starting gun had sounded. For the show, they’d followed two families – a Sooner family named the Hickoks, who had cheated, and a “Boomer” family, the Flanagans, who had played fairly and waited for the “Boom” of the cannon – through the Land Rush. The Sooner family obviously acquired their land, with the Boomers ending up empty-handed. The mystery was what happened to the Flanagans and many others like them, who had traveled across the growing nation for this important event only to come up short. A mystery that, despite all the research tools available, was unsolved. Erica had told Connie during the filming that they were going to have a tough time bringing that episode to a conclusion, which they finally did by saying something about new opportunity with footage of a dramatic sunset over the Texas panhandle. At the time, she was confident the shot’s aesthetic appeal would restore all of the Flanigan family’s lost hope.

  She started to pass signs for Stanford University and made her way into the right lane to be ready to exit. Even though the school was a bit of a distance from her home, she chose to live in San Francisco. She only had two classes per week, and held office hours on those days. She liked the big city, and appreciated the atmosphere and people. It was a studious, hardworking city that was affluent without having too much pretension, and bustling without East Coast or LA headaches. And she especially liked the evolution of the region, from the historical figures she studied, leading up to the people she passed on the way to the coffee shop. She imagined that while their priorities had changed from hunting for gold to hunting for the most succulent sashimi, their personalities and motivations were at least somewhat the same.

  At least that’s how she thought about herself.

  She took the Sand Hill Road exit from the highway and a few moments later pulled onto campus. She actually parked right on time, but it took her three minutes to speed-walk to her classroom, where her students were sitting in relative silence, waiting for her arrival. A sea of open laptops and readied tablets greeted her as she tossed her bag to the side and switched on the computer. She picked up the stylus while still catching her breath, ready to write on the tablet connected to the overhead projector.

  “How’s everybody?”

  A fairly positive murmur came up from the crowd. There were about 35 in the class, and at a glance they looked to be mostly present.

  “I apologize for being late,” she said. “It’s a nice day, so I’ll try to get through this and get you out of here early. Remember, your two-page paper on Santa Ana is due a week from today – I want you to really delve into the missteps he made as a leader. Some of it we’ll talk about today in relation to the Battle of San Jacinto.”

  She wrote “Battle of San Jacinto” on the pad, and it appeared on the HD monitor behind her.

  “Who can tell me about the ‘Runaway Scrape’?” she asked, looking up at the class. A handful of arms went up. She called on Kellen, a tall, lanky kid with messy hair and goofy t-shirt that hid how smart he actually was, and then she readied herself for another debate on American history.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I don’t know what you expect to find in there,” Jeff said. “I’ll give you three minutes. The flight leaves in two hours and we still have an hour to get to Sacramento.”

  “It’s a chartered flight,” Dexter said, getting out of the passenger side of the van onto a dusty gravel lot in front of a large, wooden barn-like building. “It leaves when we get there. This is important.”

  “Stay here,” Jeff said, instructing Emeka and Abby as though he had the authority to do so. In reality, they’d probably prefer to stay in the car and rest anyway. Especially Emeka, after the massive hunk of Kansas City strip he’d just put down. Jeff hopped out of the van and met Dexter in step. “This is only going to take a second.”

  The main entrance to the building featured an enormous yellow and red sign, “California Gold Rush Museum.” It was a throwback to the 1850s, the kind of roadside respite that the first settlers on the scene might have set up, and the rest of the weary 49ers would’ve utilized. A handful of cars with license plates from various states and one pick-up with a camper trailer dotted the parking lot – Jeff could only assume they were all cross-country travelers following their AAA guide maps through the western end of their trip. Jeff stopped Dexter at the rickety wooden steps leading up to the front door. “Do we really need to take the time to do this?”

  “Just because we’re robbers now doesn’t negate us needing to continue to approach this as scientists,” Dexter said, and with a forcefulness that Jeff hadn’t seen before. “We need to understand all the outcomes of our experiment, and this is a big part of it.”

  “Yeah, but right now I’m not concerned about the philosophy of it all,” Jeff said. “I’m concerned about getting home.” But Dexter was already up the stairs and through the door. Jeff followed.

  The California Gold Rush Museum was well-lit, the walls covered with the types of artifacts you would expect to see in such a place – coonskin caps, miners’ clothing, period vignettes and daguerreotypes. Display cases showed chunks of unrefined gold, with small plaques designating where and when they’d been found. At the register, a kind older woman cashed out a family buying a painting of Sutter’s Mill while the two children lobbied to get a piece of the fool’s gold sitting in a basket on the countertop.

  While this was Jeff’s first time at the museum, Dexter had been a regular visitor while researching the tragic tale of Joe Wilton and his gold in advance of their trip. As a result, he navigated swiftly through the display cases and into a second room Jeff hadn’t noticed. The room was set up as a miner’s home would’ve been during the Gold Rush – simple, with a low table covered with a wool blanket for a bed, a small bench which was probably used for eating, and a wood-burning stove. Having just experienced that time, and having seen Joe Wilton’s entire household carried in a covered wagon, Jeff realized how thankful he was for an in-house toilet and the ability to get a burger less than a half-mile from his apartment in either direction.

  He followed Dexter through the miner’s house to a third room, where a young man worked leaning over his desk like a wolf protecting its food. Unlike the others, the room was not filled with artifacts. It was clearly the Museum’s office area, containing only two old wooden desks covered with papers and a metal filing cabinet. The man looked up when the floorboard under Jeff’s foot squeaked, pulling a thick pair of glasses from his face.

  “Hey – what are you doing back here?”

  Dexter said, “Lionel, it’s me, Dexter Murphy. I was here about three months ago. You helped me with the Wilton diary.”

  Lionel set his glasses on the desk and leaned back in the chair, thinking. “Oh yeah, the Wilton diary. Aren’t you from somewhere out east?”

  Dexter nodded, staying serious. “Would you mind if I took a look at it again?”

  “You think something’s changed?” Jeff took a quick glance at his friend before Lionel laughed and stood; the man had been joking. “I guess that’s not a problem,” he said, then walked past them out to the museum area.

  Following, Jeff didn’t imagine that just anyone could walk into the museu
m and ask to get a closer look at the artifacts. It was one of the most pivotal reasons that the first member of his team he’d recruited was a historian of Dexter’s skill and notoriety. He was able to ask questions that no one else knew to ask, and get into places that no one else was able to enter. For what they were trying to accomplish he was absolutely essential, and for that alone, Jeff was willing to follow him around for a couple minutes and delay their flight home.

  Lionel led them to a display case at the center of the large room and gently lifted the cover off of it. Evidently Joe Wilton’s diary was one of the highlights of the museum, and Jeff gave Dexter even more admiration when he was delicately handed the book.

  “Do you mind if we sit?” Dexter asked, motioning to Jeff, as well.

  Lionel shrugged more with his face than his shoulders and led them to what must’ve been the employee break room. They sat across from each other at an eight-foot table near a vending machine.

  “What are you thinking you’ll find in there?” Jeff asked once Lionel had left them alone.

  Dexter was already flipping carefully through the book, one page at a time. “I just want to see how much we screwed up history with our little escapade.”

  “Escapade? Were you not fully on board?” Jeff struggled to keep his voice low; the last thing he’d expected from Dexter were second thoughts.

  Dexter held up a hand with half his attention, still searching with the other. “No, no, no,” he said, “I was with you. But based on what I find here it may be something I won’t ever consider doing again. Hold on.”

  Jeff sighed and leaned forward for whatever news would come. Having an academic with him did have its drawbacks.

  “Here it is,” Dexter said, turning the book so that Jeff could see it and pointing at a particular passage.

  For the first time since they’d gotten back, Jeff was hit with the magnitude of what they’d done. Seeing Wilton’s own writing on the page after just having come face-to-face with him hours before made the experience suddenly very real. To everyone else in the world, the page that Dexter had turned to was over 150 years old, but for them it had literally been written that same day. He realized that, up until that moment, he’d been an out-of-control cheerleader who wasn’t paying nearly enough attention to what was happening other than to look at the question of whether it could be achieved. Suddenly, he felt much more attuned to Dexter’s line of thinking.

  “Look at this,” Dexter said, reading Wilton’s script aloud. “‘We came across a tight spot, the mountainside rising up on both sides of us. I should have known we were vulnerable and adjusted course, but it looked passable. It was slightly before sundown, and we were to set up camp on the other side. Unfortunately, as we traversed the narrow pass, we were beset by bandits...’“ Dexter looked up at Jeff.

  “Is it different than it was?” Jeff said.

  He nodded.

  The sallow expression on his face sent a chill down Jeff’s spine. He sat up and let out a deep sigh. “Wow.”

  “Oh my...” Dexter said, reading ahead. “This is crazy. ‘To protect our persons, I fought them off before being subdued. I believe I may have mortally wounded the largest of the group, but one, with a grotesque scar on his cheek, was very quick, and overtook me at knifepoint. However, we were blindfolded and the bandits made off with our gold.’”

  Jeff was about to make a comment about Emeka and that stupid bandana, but did a double-take when he comprehended the rest of Wilton’s recount. He burst out laughing. “He’s a liar,” Jeff said. “He’s a bald-faced liar. He ran off into the woods... You’re not laughing.”

  “No, I’m not. Don’t you see the risk we’re taking here? We are making precise calculations based on historical research, and to do so we’re taking the word of people who may or may not have been truthful in their recollections. We’re skating on really thin ice here.” Dexter returned to eyeing the journal.

  “Oh, will you get over it,” Jeff said, slapping him on the shoulder across the table. “This is awesome. We’re the only people in the world that know this guy is full of crap. And we know because we saw it. He ran off into the woods like a rattler was chasin’ him.”

  “We’re not in the Old West anymore,” Dexter said. “You can cut the act.”

  “Old habits.” He closed his eyes to be dramatic. “Can you at least take a moment to enjoy this before we get all serious?”

  Dexter was reading intently, however. “No, I can’t. ‘This morning, we were besieged by another set of bandits, this one led by the infamous Dan Carmichael. It was as if someone had published our whereabouts for the masses. We pleaded with them that our gold had already been stolen. They searched the camp, and by ‘searched’ I mean that they destroyed most everything we had, but left without further incident. Crippled by the attack, we spent the remainder of the day building new shelter.’”

  Jeff stared at him, waiting for him to finish. “What does that mean?”

  “It means Bad Dan Carmichael’s ambush in the morning never happened.”

  “It sounds like it did, though.”

  “No,” Dexter said. “The original diary said that in the ambush five of Wilton’s men were killed. According to this diary, other than them destroying his property looking for the gold, the incident was peaceful. No shots were fired.”

  “So we saved some lives,” Jeff said, noticing the guy, Lionel, coming toward them again and standing impatiently to the side. “Even better.”

  “This is not a game, Jeff,” Dexter said. “You’re treating it like a game.”

  “How are you guys doin’?” Lionel asked, poking his head into the break room. “I can’t have one of my most important exhibits off the floor for too long.”

  Without a word, Dexter took out his smartphone and snapped photos of the page he was currently on, as well as the next page. He folded up the book and handed it to Lionel, thanking him. Dexter walked out of the room before Jeff could even stand.

  When they got back to the van, they found Emeka sleeping sprawled across the back seat and Abby standing outside working on her tablet on the hood. They got into the van silently like a couple who had just had a blow-up fight and didn’t want the kids to know. Abby followed.

  No one said a word until they saw the first sign for the Sacramento Airport, and that was only for Jeff to announce that they’d made good time. Abby gave the perception that she was wrapped up in her tablet, but more likely she could sense the friction in the front seats and wanted to avoid it. Together, they returned the rental van, loaded four suitcases full of gold bricks onto the plane, and then headed back to the East Coast.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  September 16, 2015

  Jeff pulled his Honda Civic against the curb in front of Dexter’s suburban home in Teaneck and hopped up onto the sidewalk. He wrapped his jacket around him a little more and shoved his hands deep in his pockets; a cold front had come through overnight and it was unseasonably chilly for North Jersey in September. The jacket was tight over his sport coat – he didn’t dress up enough to invest in a trench – so he tugged at it while running up the front steps to the doorbell. Waiting, he straightened his tie.

  After thirty seconds, the door opened. Dexter stood in the doorway leaning on the open door with a wholly unamused look on his face. “Last time you came to my house unannounced I ended up robbing a stagecoach,” he said.

  Jeff laughed. “I promise I won’t make you do it again. Can I come in?”

  Dexter stepped aside and held the door open for him to enter. Though they hadn’t spoken, Jeff took the welcome as a sign that their argument was over.

  Dexter’s place wasn’t particularly large, though more than enough for one person, but it was very nice by Jeff’s standards. Everything was dark wood and ornate, with large, bright windows that let in a disproportionate amount of natural light. Of course, each room was filled with historical artifacts – Dexter, when he wasn’t robbing stagecoaches, was a professor of history at Columbia, a
published expert on many historical topics, and an avid collector. His prize possession was a sword that had once belonged to Stonewall Jackson, which hung over the non-working fireplace, presenting it as the first thing anyone would see after walking through his front door. But each piece in his collection was as amazing as the last. When Jeff had visited Dexter’s home for the first time, he’d gotten the tour and immediately suggested that Dexter start charging admission.

  Now, he simply stepped inside, tossed his jacket on his friend’s plush sofa, and sat down. After Dexter got him a Coke from the refrigerator, he took a seat across from him, using the remote to turn down the volume on the television hanging on the far wall. History Channel. What else? “What’s up?”

  “I’ve got the itch again,” Jeff said. “I wanted to talk to you about the next one on our list.”

  He sighed. “My jet lag hasn’t even worn off, and you’re already ready to do this again? Honestly, Jeff, I don’t know if I’m prepared to do this again. We haven’t even dealt with the last one.”

  Something of which Jeff was fully aware. He ignored it for now, though. “Because of the diary?”

  “Because it’s wrong. You’re a scientist. Doesn’t any of this strike you as wrong?”

  Jeff shook his head. “I know what point you’re trying to make about changing history. But if you think about it, changing history is actually impossible. When we intercepted Wilton before his camp was attacked, we didn’t change history. We created a new history. There are four people on this planet that have a story in their minds of Bad Dan Carmichael and his men attacking Joe Wilton’s party and killing five of them. That’s it. To everyone else in the world, things transpired exactly the way Wilton described it in his diary. ‘Changing history’ insinuates that there was something to change. But there wasn’t. It is what it was.”