Andy couldn’t afford the dollshouse, but he was far more fascinated with the fact that he had learned the earliest address of Bonnie Kay, at a point in time when the secret was of no more importance to anyone.

He had once read her autobiography, which he’d found in an earlier garage sale, and seen how pretty her pictures looked in the several pages of photographs reproduced in the middle of the book. In every one of them, she had been wearing lovely long femine dresses of an era gone by. Her eyes always contained a sweet laughing sense of mischief, and her smile had motivated him to work tirelessly on inventing a time machine. Consistently coming top of the class in science at school seemed a hollow achievement, as long as he had still not finished designing the one invention that he most wanted to complete.

He realised then, that it was lack of sufficient motivation, that had been holding him back. Even a time machine could not have helped him to locate Bonnie Kay back in her own era. Now he didn’t need to.

Andy put everything else on hold, except his schoolwork, and the purchase of any retrospective boys clothes from other garage sales, and devoted the rest of his spare time to the time machine. When he’d finished, he knew that its operation would be unstable at best. However, he felt that he’d done all that he could to get the prototype up and running. He’d built all of the circuitry into a cupboard in his own bedroom, after removing the shelves, so that he could stand in it. Now all that remained was to give it the test. He would aim for the time when Bonnie Kay was 15, and if the geographic displacement function worked as well, he would end up, not in his own bedroom, which would have belonged to somebody else’s family six decades earlier. Instead he would appear in the bushes near one of the courtyards of the school that Bonnie had attended, according to the diary. If he arrived on a weekend, there would be nobody there, and he could then easily walk out of the school grounds and off to Bonnie’s house.

Then it occurred to him that he would not know what to say to her.

“Hi Bonnie, pleased to meet you. I’m from around 60 years into your future, where I read your older self’s autobiography and went to a garage sale owned by the new owner of your mother’s house,” he mused out loud, and then dismissed this approach in favour of a better one.

He took the autobiography with him and concealed it in his backpack. It would not do to be found with a book that was written by an elderly Bonnie Kay several decades into teenage Bonnie Kay’s future. When he came to a newsagent, he quickly glanced at the date on top of the newspaper.

Then he sat down alone on the seat of an otherwise empty bus shelter and looked through the book until he came to the chapter that dealt with that day, and the days that surrounded it. At this time, she was working on what she had titled the chapter as “The Mystery of the Nocturnal Noises”.

Andy couldn’t afford the dollshouse, but he was far more fascinated with the fact that he had learned the earliest address of Bonnie Kay, at a point in time when the secret was of no more importance to anyone.

He had once read her autobiography, which he’d found in an earlier garage sale, and seen how pretty her pictures looked in the several pages of photographs reproduced in the middle of the book. In every one of them, she had been wearing lovely long femine dresses of an era gone by. Her eyes always contained a sweet laughing sense of mischief, and her smile had motivated him to work tirelessly on inventing a time machine. Consistently coming top of the class in science at school seemed a hollow achievement, as long as he had still not finished designing the one invention that he most wanted to complete.

He realised then, that it was lack of sufficient motivation, that had been holding him back. Even a time machine could not have helped him to locate Bonnie Kay back in her own era. Now he didn’t need to.

Andy put everything else on hold, except his schoolwork, and the purchase of any retrospective boys clothes from other garage sales, and devoted the rest of his spare time to the time machine. When he’d finished, he knew that its operation would be unstable at best. However, he felt that he’d done all that he could to get the prototype up and running. He’d built all of the circuitry into a cupboard in his own bedroom, after removing the shelves, so that he could stand in it. Now all that remained was to give it the test. He would aim for the time when Bonnie Kay was 15, and if the geographic displacement function worked as well, he would end up, not in his own bedroom, which would have belonged to somebody else’s family six decades earlier. Instead he would appear in the bushes near one of the courtyards of the school that Bonnie had attended, according to the diary. If he arrived on a weekend, there would be nobody there, and he could then easily walk out of the school grounds and off to Bonnie’s house.

Then it occurred to him that he would not know what to say to her.

“Hi Bonnie, pleased to meet you. I’m from around 60 years into your future, where I read your older self’s autobiography and went to a garage sale owned by the new owner of your mother’s house,” he mused out loud, and then dismissed this approach in favour of a better one.

He took the autobiography with him and concealed it in his backpack. It would not do to be found with a book that was written by an elderly Bonnie Kay several decades into teenage Bonnie Kay’s future. When he came to a newsagent, he quickly glanced at the date on top of the newspaper.

Then he sat down alone on the seat of an otherwise empty bus shelter and looked through the book until he came to the chapter that dealt with that day, and the days that surrounded it. At this time, she was working on what she had titled the chapter as “The Mystery of the Nocturnal Noises”.