Read The Bellbottom Incident for Free Online

current events and campus happenings. One called on supporters of Jimmy Carter’s presidential run to gather for a rally tomorrow evening, a second urged everyone to get vaccinated for the swine flu, and a third spread the news of a Halloween party at a dorm whose name I didn’t recognize, St. Olaf’s.
    I cupped my hands so I could see into the sunlit cafeteria window—one of the students eating lunch inside gave me a startled look back—then turned to face the others. “Let’s split up and check the nearest buildings. Abigail, why don’t you check inside the cafeteria? Dr. Little, do you want to take the computer science building? Of the three of us, you’ll probably blend in the best there.” This was the closest of the science buildings. “And I’ll poke my head into the Registrar’s Office next door.”
    We headed in three different directions.

    “Over here.”
    It was Abigail, waving at me from around the back of the cafeteria.  
    I joined her, with Dr. Little right on my heels. He reported, “Nothing at the computer science building—I checked all around and even in the back parking lot, in case Sabina was forced to stay out of sight by History. Obviously I couldn’t go into every office and classroom.”
    My story was similar. “I went into the Registrar’s Office—it’s hardly changed at all. I even looked in the nonpublic areas where the student records are kept, but she was not there…Did you have any luck, Abigail?”
    “I did. Look.”  
    She opened her palm. In it lay Sabina’s lunula. The orange-brown amber, crafted into a crescent-moon shape, sparkled in the sunlight. It was Sabina’s one link to home, and she always wore it as a lucky charm. In Pompeii it had hung around her neck on a leather strap, but she’d switched to a silver chain after a few snide comments from the other girls at the Thornberg high school.  
    Abigail explained that she had poked her head around in every corner of the cafeteria. There hadn’t been anything of interest until she checked the restroom. “It was on the floor of the women’s restroom, by the couch. The clasp is loose. I’ve been meaning to get it fixed for her.”
    “So she must have spent at least one night, maybe both, there,” I said. “I’m so glad that she was able to get out of the cold and find shelter. Hopefully she managed to get some food, too, after they locked up the cafeteria for the night.”
    “There’s a couch in the women’s restroom?” Dr. Little asked, his brow slightly furrowed. “Why?”
    “There are two, as a matter of fact,” Abigail said. “The restroom is roomier than it is in the present. I think part of it will be converted into a kitchen freezer or something.”  
    “Women’s restrooms often do have them…or at least, they used to,” I explained absentmindedly. “For nursing mothers mostly, or if you’re pregnant or have bad menstrual cramps and need to sit down for a bit—well, not you , Dr. Little, but you get the idea. I wonder if that’s where the term restroom comes from.”
    Abigail carefully slid the lunula into her pocket. Dr. Little watched her do it and said, “If Sabina was here last night, she can’t have gone far.”
    “I hope so,” I said, remembering the odd tone of Dr. Mooney’s voice when he’d said that finding her should be straightforward.
    “Why do you say it like that?” Dr. Little challenged me. “Obviously she must have immediately understood that she wasn’t back in 76 AD. She should have known that we would come get her. The prudent thing to do would have been to stick close to the Open Book.”
    He didn’t know Sabina as well as Abigail and I did. She was not one to sit around and wait, not when there was a new place to be explored. She had much of her father’s personality. Secundus had opted to stay in Pompeii to look for his mother and try to protect his shop rather than flee town on foot, as many of Pompeii’s inhabitants did. We had never found out