Distant Waves

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Authors: Suzanne Weyn
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find out." He turned to leave, but I found it hard to let him go. "You never told me what's in the parcel," I reminded him. He glanced at it, then back at me. "You're right. I didn't."
    ***
    In exactly one hour, Mimi and I were standing by the stairs on the sixth floor waiting for Thad. "He's not coming," I fretted.
    "He'll be here," Mimi insisted optimistically, but I noticed she was twirling a curl at her neck that had fallen from her thick, upswept hair.
    Just when I was despairing of Thad's ever arriving, the elevator door opened and he stepped out. He spied us and, with a quick wave of acknowledgment, headed our way.
    "He's handsome, isn't he?" I quickly whispered to Mimi.
    With a sly smile she pinched my waist. "Jane's in love." I pinched her back. "No!"
    In the next moment Thad was standing in front of us. I introduced Mimi and then asked the burning question: "Will he see us?"
    "Yes. I'll bring you to him but you can't say a word until his meeting is over."
    At the same time, Mimi and I both put our index fingers over our lips in a gesture of assured silence.
    "Come on," Thad said, waving for us to follow him. We went into the elevator and Thad directed the operator -- no longer Charles -- to take us to the private floor. Mimi  and I exchanged darting, thrilled glances -- the private floor!
    We got out at the very top of the Waldorf-Astoria. There were many fewer doors -- only about four -- than in the hallways of the lower floors, and the ceiling was easily three times the height. I clutched Mimi's wrist as we followed Thad down to the farthest of the doors. "Is this where Tesla lives?" I whispered to Thad.
    Thad shook his head. "It's Astor's guest suite. He uses it for meetings," he answered quietly.
    My heart bounced with excitement the moment I spied Tesla sitting at the end of a long dining room table in the spectacularly lavish suite. The two-story-tall windows beside the table framed Tesla in a field of blue sky that made him seem to be sitting in some heavenly realm. After so many years of seeing him frozen in newspaper photos, it hardly seemed possible that he was a real, moving, living person. But there he was.
    Tesla was deep in quiet conversation with an elegantly dressed, middle-aged man in a suit. The man's hair and beard were close-cropped. Frameless pince-nez glasses were propped on his straight nose, attached with a black silk cord. "That's George Boldt," Thad whispered to us. "He runs this place for the Astors."
    We couldn't hear their low-pitched conversation, but I deduced it wasn't going well from all the head shaking  going on. After another terse exchange, Tesla rose abruptly and headed straight for us.
    My mind went blank. This was the moment I'd waited so many years for... and I hadn't prepared anything to say! What had I been thinking -- or not thinking?
    I stood there smiling eagerly like an empty-headed fool, but Tesla did not seem to even notice Mimi or me. Instead, he spoke only to Thad. "I am having one of my flashes," he stated in a dull, lifeless voice, not at all the animated man I remembered from so long ago. With that, he returned to the suite.
    "What was he talking about?" Mimi asked Thad.
    "He gets these flashes, where everything kind of overloads. He feels like he hears smells and sees sounds," Thad explained, keeping one eye on Tesla as he disappeared into one of the bedrooms. "This day has probably been very stressful for him. Astor was supposed to be here to talk to him, but he hasn't shown up yet."
    "Will he be all right?" I asked.
    Thad nodded. "He'll lie down in one of the guest rooms until the flashes pass. When they're over, most likely he'll have a brilliant idea."
    "How long does that usually take?" I asked.
    "As long as it takes," Thad said with a shrug.
    "Hours, days, months?" I pressed him for some kind of parameter. "Should we return home and come back in two years?"
    "He's usually knocked out for two to four hours," Thad estimated, which was a bit more

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