“Miss Peabody…”

“Helena, please. You can call me Helena, Professor.”

“Yes, Helena, what you have told me seems to be so unprecedented. I can see the possibility of the time travel just based on my research and experience with electro-magnetic fields but the existence of an actual time traveller…I can’t even comprehend the ramifications of such discovery. I’ve heard so many crazy stories from people in all my years of working on this theory. One story crazier than the other…anything from alien abduction to going to past centuries and mingling with locals like they belonged there.“ He sighed heavily. “Oh how I wish some of them were true. If you insist though, I can make some arrangements to get this Porter woman isolated and interrogated.”

“No,” Helena said quickly. “Not yet. I have a plan in place for that and believe me, as soon as I get what I want, she is all yours. But for now, just keep everything going as usual. Do your announcement and get geared up to travel to the Orange County.”

Professor Kroll nodded and Alice saw him looking at Helena with a frown. “While I do appreciate your donation to my project, Ms. Peabody, and the extraordinary information you revealed to me, I can’t help but wonder…what’s in it for you?”

Helena shrugged and smiled, “You probably won’t believe me but it’s all about a woman. Someone I can’t have, which makes her even more desirable and I stop at nothing to have her.”

Alice shivered at Helena’s announcement. She knew right away their nemesis was talking about Tina and that made her uneasy. It wasn’t hard to guess what Helena told Professor Kroll but she couldn’t figure out why would he believe anything Helena offered without a proof, especially after he announced about all the crazies he met over the years. She was pretty sure now that he put her in the same category of crazy people and didn’t believe her story at all.

Sure, money talked but from what she knew about the Professor, he wasn’t just some gullible amateur. He was the ultimate scientist where experiments and research were substantiated by evidence that was proven by facts, not just by a hypothesis or a crazy story. He didn’t ask her for any proof when she told him about her time travel, thinking she was probably a crazy lunatic. Maybe, Alice wondered, if he didn’t ask Helena for proof, then he was just indulging her story and making her think he believed her, so he could get all the financial support that he needed.