One of my biggest priorities in coming back, beyond trying to save my parents, was to get to know my grandmother. I know that she only has two years left, which means I’m at the halfway point of my time with her. There is a big part of me that wants to see her, but I also think that my face will show too much, and I suspect she’ll understand that it’s something to do with the countdown to her death.
I haven’t told Melanie, and she randomly decided that she would get lunch with my grandmother today. When she asked me about going, I told her that I had some Ruby Pegg research to do with GUE, that’s what we’ ve started calling Grown Up Elliot, between the two of us.
GUE is actually down in Hackensack, where Ruby grew up. He’s pulling every yearbook and newspaper archive that he can, making photocopies, and bringing them back up. We’ll all look over them together, see what we can piece together, and then burn them.
Melanie and Judy don’t quite understand that us knowing who is committing the crimes, especially ahead of time, and not doing something would look very suspicious to investigators in a couple years when she finally gets caught. GUE told me privately, that he knows one of us is going to slip up and leave some DNA at a crime scene. When he was researching before traveling, he hit one of our names in the records, and stopped there, in order to not fuck things up. Apparently, his theory is, if he saw it in the future, it’s going to happen. If we try to stop it, we could cause additional complications that we don’t know about.
He quickly reassured me that me being told my parents are dead, when I didn’t see the bodies, could be an exception. Sam’s presence here a year and a half ago would certainly ensure that it is. His theory is that if I save my parents in a way that still shows them dead in the newspaper, that still has the local New Hampshire and Maine Police think that they’re dead, but they don’t die, that it was always the case. This has been the kind of time travel rules I’ve been hoping for.
He then made a joke about having to find some cadavers for just such an occasion, which I hadn’t really thought about. Someone’s dead bodies will get scooped out of my parent’s car at the bottom of that river.
With my mind fully consumed by the death of all of my loved ones, and the killings of a few new Ruby Pegg victims that I won’t be able to save, I decided to get my mind off of it all. I wanted to go see Chariots of Fire.
I watched it once when I was a kid, and I don’t remember much beyond the music, but I also know that tomorrow they’re going to announce the Oscar nominees, and it will win. The movies tend to help me clear my mind.
Michael Christopher Cole 
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