Chapter 3: Linda Finds a Secret

There is a secret about people who always want to be the center of attention: They can’t keep fucking secrets.

Sappers is an attention whore. Loves to be at the center of attention.

Yeah, sure, when we first found him, he was “hiding,” but he was hiding in a fucking frat party.

The dude also has a fucking ego bigger than the moon he blew up. He thought he could not get caught; he felt he could not get found out.

What I am trying to say here is that it was very fucking easy to find the fucker.

The dude was reckless. He did it way too obviously.

He got his money the crooked time-traveling way: he bought super-cheap stock before they went big. You know, IBM, Sears, oil, that kind of shit.

Then, depending on the time, he would hide them in a safe, book, or computer.

It was just a matter of finding where all that stuff was. It was not too difficult.

It was that fucking frat house.

Of course it was the fucking frat house.

The damn place had been around for decades, built with the rest of the campus in the 1840s. It belonged to one of the special big frats that had been around since the beginning of time, a secure, safe spot-on campus forever and forever for the rich kids whose daddies gave the university a bunch of money.

The thing is Sapper’s dad was not rich. No, the money came from Sappers. So, Sappers would go into the past, buy stuff up, cash it out, slide the cash into the accounts of his mother and father, and there you go, they became a wealthy family from their son, who was not even born yet.

But he needed to be richer, which is where those stocks originated.

Like I said, the guy was not bright.

During the summer, the campus and that frat house were usually empty. Sure, somebody would come in and clean the dust away once a week, but it was empty the rest of the time.

Getting a key was pretty easy, all I had to do was blow some frat dude from the 1960s, and he handed one over “for just a moment” very readily so I could “use the bathroom.”

He did get it back after just a moment and a quick bathroom break for me, but that was a moment of his time. In my time, I popped into our time, went to the hardware store, made a few copies of the key, then popped back into his time.

Now I had a way in.

I returned to the summer of ‘77, broke in, and searched around the house. Naturally, this was before the time of PCs, so I was looking for a safe.

I am not afraid to admit that it took several days. Finally, I found something behind a vast, framed picture of the frat logo hanging on the wall in one of the basement utility rooms. I should have been suspicious about that in the first place, because who hangs something like that in a utility room?

Behind the picture was a small crawl space, big enough for me to wiggle through – and indeed for Sappers to get through. I was slightly concerned about coming face-to-face with him, but what were the odds?

Fortunately, the odds were in my favor. No Sappers.

When I built a police case, I had all the evidence there: papers, reports, even some newspaper clippings. I made copies of them all. I am sure you can guess how exactly I went to get copies. Hey, I love to fucking cum, OK? Sue me, bitch.

After reviewing all that stuff, I still had not found any stocks or bonds.

On the wall hung a picture of the moon. I was sure that was an obvious clue, so I moved the picture and found a wall safe.

Did I mention Sappers was pretty fucking predictable? The safe combination was his fucking birthday. It was pretty easy to get in there, take every stock and bond I could find, and replace them with worthless forgeries.