Past, Present, Past

“Past, Present, Past”

Charlie hadn’t expected to run into the long stretch of yellow construction tape strung between the trees. There were a few clouds in the sky but there was enough moonlight to see that the tape was wrapped around the entire property. He’d parked his car a block away and it was under a group of trees that hid it from the streetlights. He stood under a large maple tree and scanned the area. He had to find a path to the backdoor of the house that would give him as much cover as possible. It was after midnight and there were no lights on in the two nearby houses. He looked up and down the street and when he was sure there were no cars coming he ducked under the tape, held the box against his chest and half walked, half ran to the house.

The Copley mansion had sat on a hill overlooking the town for as long as Charlie could remember. It had been vacant for about three years and after much discussion the family had agreed to sell it to a developer who planned to tear it down. The County Historical Society had worked closely with the developer and family to identify the items in the house that had historical significance and which had value as architectural salvage. Charlie could see from his vantage point on the back porch that the exterior had already been stripped. There was no lock on the door and he carefully pushed it open. Once he was inside he stepped into the kitchen and turned on the small LED flashlight that would guide him through the interior. He shined the narrow blue-white beam over the floor and across the walls, knowing that he had to get the box in place and then get out fast. He took a deep breath and hurried toward the front of the house.

The locals had said many times that the Copley house looked like something out of a Hitchcock movie: Gothic arched windows, a broad slate roof and a front entrance porch that looked both elegant and intimidating. As he stood in the parlor and looked around, Charlie thought the inside was even spookier than the outside but he didn’t have time to gawk. Part of his plan was to hide the box in what he figured would be the master bedroom and he knew he wouldn’t have much time to do it. Every slow, creaking step up the elegant staircase made him more nervous but at least the narrow beam of light kept him from tripping in the dark.

The demolition contractor had been busy. Most of the doors and casings were gone as were the ceiling light fixtures. It was obvious which bedroom had held Milton and Sarah Copley. The master suite was huge and overlooked what were once beautifully manicured gardens. The bathroom fixtures were gone and most of the tile stripped but it was still clear that the owners had lived a very luxurious life. Now the task was to hide the box in a place where it was sure to be discovered. It took a few minutes with the flashlight but he finally saw that some floorboards had been removed inside a large closet near a dressing room. He focused the beam on the hole and saw a place where he could slide the box between the floor joists. He had to make sure that part of it would be visible. It was a snug fit and he tore his latex gloves but he managed to get it in place. He fought an urge to indulge his love of antiques and look around the still magnificent house but he knew he had to get out so he hurried back down the stairs, across the parlor and kitchen then out the back door. A car was driving by slowly and he hid behind a contractor dumpster until it passed. It took a few minutes but he got back to his car and drove away, keeping his headlights off for a block before turning them on and heading for home. It was a Friday night and he was glad that he could sleep late in the morning.

It was hard for Charlie to get out of bed on Saturday. He’d spent an almost sleepless night filled with thoughts of his scheme, the box and how it had all come about. Back in February, when he’d first heard that the Copley mansion had been acquired by the Historical Society, the story brought back memories that he’d tried for years to forget. They were painful memories, the kind that people try to bury but come back when something triggers them. The name Copley was Charlie’s trigger. The news reports about the mansion included old photographs of Simon and Sarah Copley, their son Arthur Copley and his wife Marion and a television interview with their granddaughter, Sarah Copley Powell. Even after the passage of time she was still beautiful, as beautiful as the day she’d broken Charlie’s heart and embarrassed him in front of half the school.

Charlie Matthews was the epitome of average. Average height, average weight, a C-average student. Even his last name put him right in the middle of the classroom seating chart. He wasn’t part of the small group at the top who were smart or rich or athletic and he wasn’t part of the small group at the bottom who struggled with grades or who had a reputation for getting into trouble. He was part of the large group in the middle who never got much attention from the people outside it. That made him one of the last people who should have had a romantic interest in Sarah Copley. She was the prettiest girl in the school, well dressed, straight A’s and a member of everything from the Student Council to the Drama Club. She was unattainable but Charlie was too smitten with her to see it. And the television interview had brought back every memory and every detail of that day in April, that day when he’d nervously approached her in the school cafeteria and asked, “Excuse me, Sarah, but I was wondering if you’d go with me to the Spring Dance.”

Everyone has heard the old expression, “If looks could kill” and Charlie was almost killed that day. Sarah had looked at him, first as if she was struggling to recognize him and then as if he was something stuck to the bottom of her shoe. When she’d said to him, “Oh, wow, you’ve got to be kidding”, with a dozen people watching and laughing, he was hurt and humiliated. She’d looked at him again and asked, “Are you serious, me go with you?” He’d quickly turned and walked out of the cafeteria, down the hallway and out the back door. He couldn’t bring himself to face anyone and walked home. The sting of her words stayed with him for a long time. If he saw her in the hallway he’d turn and walk the other way. He wasn’t even sure that she knew his name. He’d decided not to ask another girl to the dance because he didn’t want to see Sarah with another guy. It wasn’t until after graduation, when he didn’t have to see her or be anywhere near her, that his humiliation began to fade and turn into quiet anger.

That Saturday morning while Charlie sipped his coffee in his house full of antiques, he thought back to the day his little scheme had been born. Even though it would come in handy on his project, he knew that his near obsession with collecting antiques and memorabilia had been just one of the things that had made Laura leave him after just four years of marriage. In the divorce he got the mortgage payment and his collection of old things and she got everything else. Once again in his life he was lonely and once again he was angry. The news of the Copley mansion and Sarah’s interview had set off something inside him. In just a few days he’d created a plan to balance the scales with Sarah Copley. He’d told himself over and over it would just be a prank but as it developed in his mind he couldn’t deny there was a certain kind of darkness to it.

His plan for giving Sarah her comeuppance was based on the fact that she and her entire family had always felt they were some kind of local royalty. Her grandfather owned several large businesses and tracts of prime land all over town. Her grandmother, for whom she’d been named, was a pillar of local society and a deacon in the Baptist Church, and her holier-than-though attitude toward people seemed to have been passed down to her granddaughter. That attitude became the basis for Charlie’s plan. It would be his own twisted version of a time capsule, a capsule that would give the town a different view of the Copley name.

Hours and hours of online research led to the design of the capsule. He’d focused on the events and attitudes of the mid-1900s when the Copleys had first begun building their little empire. The capsule itself and its contents had to be legitimate products of the era and it turned out that Charlie already had something that would work perfectly; a lidded box made of green Bakelite. Bakelite was the world’s first type of plastic, invented in the early 1900s and had become popular for making all kinds of toys and household items. The contents of the green box took longer to select. He knew that time capsules were meant to keep history alive, to give people of the future a glimpse of people in the past. The contents were meant to give the best and most positive view of the time. Charlie’s idea was exactly the opposite. His idea was to create a box to burst the Copley bubble.

Slowly over the next few weeks the collection of items began to take shape. The Historical Society had a large cache of old black and white photos and he’d found several shots of Milton and Sarah. To maintain the secrecy of his project he’d used his phone to take close-up pictures of the photographs rather than ask permission to use the Society’s photocopier. Online searches turned up photos of people partying in bars and speakeasies. Visits to two of his favorite antique shops provided an old, perfectly intact package of Lucky Strike cigarettes and a small metal whiskey flask. He was even able to find a partial box of old stationery. He had the raw materials for the capsule. Now he had to bring it to life.

As a source of inspiration Charlie took his high school yearbook from the shelf, opened it to young Sarah’s photo and laid it on the desk in front of him. Then he began his little time travel project. The first two items were easy. He poured a very small amount of whiskey into the flask and sealed the cap tightly. He carefully opened the pack of Lucky Strikes and removed half of the cigarettes. Those two items were things that a devout Baptist woman of the era would never have touched, except for Sarah Copley. The third part of the contents took a bit longer. He’d printed out the online photos of life in the bars and speakeasies of the day but they would be meaningless until Sarah showed up in them. After a few hours working in Photoshop he sat back in his chair and looked at the results. There was Sarah Copley, the leader of local high society, wearing a tight, shiny silk dress and hoisting a mug of beer with a group of fellow bar patrons. In another shot she sat demurely at a table, cigarette in hand, smiling for the camera. Sarah Jane Copley, matriarch of the family, was a naughty girl.

The last part of the capsule was the one that Charlie had been uncertain about. The other items in the box were more playful than nasty, and for a moment he’d considered just going with what he’d already put together. Then he looked at the yearbook again, at the picture of the pretty girl who had mocked and embarrassed him in front of a crowd. He stared at her expression, more smirk than smile. He heard again her snotty answer to his invitation. And he felt the same sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Suddenly, his uncertainty faded and he began the last and maybe best part of the time capsule’s content.

The old stationery slowly became letters, love letters from a man named John who’d pledged his love to Sarah Copley. The married Sarah Copley. The Bible-toting teetotaler Sarah Copley. Yes, that Sarah Copley. Charlie chose his words carefully, trying to express John’s longing for a woman he wasn’t sure he could have. There were light moments of fun and laughter. There were confessions of a deep and real passion. And there were pleas for Sarah to leave Milton and escape with John to a life of travel and adventure. The other items in the green box just made a statement but the letters made it a box full of scandal. Small town bubble bursting scandal. Charlie folded them carefully without envelopes and tied them into a bundle with a satin ribbon. It took him a few minutes to arrange everything in the box and it was a snug fit. Before he closed and latched the lid he took out his phone and took a few photos of the contents. Within a few days a new chapter in the Copley family history would begin.

Creating the time capsule had been an emotional time for Charlie, wrestling with old, nearly forgotten pain and new anger that had filled him every day he worked on the project .More than once he’d asked himself if he was being driven by his sense of humor or a desire for some kind of revenge. He hadn’t yet reached that answer.

As he finished his last sip of lukewarm coffee on that Saturday morning he knew that the only thing left to do was wait. Wait for that worker prying up the old floorboards to find a green Bakelite box between the joists. Wait for the box to be opened and examined by someone at the Historical Society. And wait to see if fake memories of people from the past would have any effect on people of the present.

It was on Wednesday, while he sat eating his lunch at his desk and looking over the morning paper, that he saw a small article with the headline COPLEY DEMOLITION REVEALS SURPRISE BOX. He stopped and looked around the office as though he was doing something illegal. Under the headline was a photo of old Sarah looking like the epitome of class and propriety. Charlie began reading. The person who wrote the article referred to the capsule as a small box filled with memories of the home’s prominent owner, Mrs. Sarah M. Copley. There was no description of the contents except to call them “handwritten letters and other items of a personal nature”. Charlie read the paragraph again and thought, “Gee, maybe it won’t go any further than this.” But when he began the second paragraph he realized that the story would be talked about for some time. The reporter wrote that the box seemed to have been deliberately hidden under the loose floorboards of Mrs. Copley’s closet. Charlie smiled when he read that line and he kept smiling when he read that the Director and Chief Curator of the Historical Society were weighing a decision whether or not to release more information. It was clear that they knew they had a historical bombshell on their hands and wanted to handle it with caution. Charlie sat for a moment enjoying a real sense of pride for creating the mystery. The last sentence of the article said that the Director would be meeting on Thursday morning at 10:00 AM with a Copley family representative, Ms. Sarah Copley Powell, to discuss the matter.

That was the moment that hit Charlie the hardest. He had to decide if his little prank was finished, if he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do or if there was one last thing to take care of, the thing that would put a bow on everything. By the time he’d gotten home he had his answer.

As he’d sat in his car in the Historical Society parking lot he scrolled through images on his phone, trying to distract him from his nervousness. Every little movement that he caught from the corner of his eye was like a poke to his stomach. Then, at about five minutes to ten, a silver Mercedes pulled into the lot and parked by the entrance. Even with the glare and reflection on the windows he could tell it was Sarah. It was time to put an end to the time capsule project.

He opened his car door and stood beside it, waiting. When he saw Sarah’s door open he began walking slowly toward her. When he was about ten feet from her she looked at him without expression then closed her door and turned to walk into the building. Charlie called out, “Excuse me, Sarah, can I ask you a question?”

She turned toward him, sighed and answered, “Who are you, what do you want?”

Charlie stopped a few feet from her and raised his phone screen close to her face. She saw a photo of the scandal, the open green Bakelite box. He smiled and asked, “I was wondering if you’d go with me to the Spring Dance.”