Timebound

by Rysa Walker

  If it hadn’t been for anxiety about the rapidly approaching trial jumps and a hollow ache whenever I thought about my parents, I would have been happy. And there was also the gnawing fear each time I watched Trey drive away—the fear that he wouldn’t be back, that another time shift would occur and he wouldn’t even remember my name.

  All of this—the happiness, the fear, everything—made me miss Charlayne. In my previous life, she would have been texting me five times a day to find out how things were going with Trey and filling me in on which guy she was dating, considering dating, and/or planning to dump. I had gotten very used to using her as a sounding board for my ideas. Talking to her always made me feel stronger and more capable, and with so much on the line, I really needed that kind of support.

  One night after Trey left, I brought the laptop over to the bed and stretched out, pulling up Facebook so that I could look at Charlayne’s page. I knew that only “friends” could view some sections but some of her photos were public. I thought it might make me feel better just to see her smile.

  Charlayne’s page wasn’t there, however, and that had me puzzled. She’d joined Facebook about a year before I transferred to Roosevelt, and had been the one who’d convinced me to start posting. If this latest time shift was fairly localized, as Connor had said, then the only thing that should have changed in Charlayne’s life was that she and I never met—meaning her page should still be active.

  I Googled Charlayne Singleton and her address. Nothing. I removed the address and typed in Roosevelt High School. Still nothing, so I decided to try her brother, Joseph. He had played three sports last year, when he was a senior, and his parents had a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings on a table all by itself in the living room. Charlayne referred to it scathingly as the Joseph Shrine, but her dad said that she’d been the loudest voice cheering him on from the stands.

  Several hits popped up for Joseph Singleton in the DC area—mostly sports-related, but not at Roosevelt. It was the second link from the bottom, however, that caught my eye—a wedding announcement in the Washington Post “Style” section. “Joseph Singleton, Felicia Castor.” The wedding had been held in February at the Cyrist temple on Sixteenth Street, the same church I’d attended with Charlayne a few months before. I scanned the article and read that Felicia’s parents had been members of the Temple since they were children—not a big surprise—but the next sentence was a shocker. “Parents of the groom, Mary and Bernard Singleton, have been members of the Temple since 1981.”

  A picture of the bridal party appeared below the text. Joseph, tall and handsome in a resplendent white tux, beamed happily at the camera, his arm around his new bride. There were three bridesmaids, each clutching a small bouquet of flowers against her chest. The face at the end caught my eye and I clicked to enlarge the photo. Her smile was more subdued than the wild, exuberant grin I’d hoped to see on her website, but it was definitely Charlayne—with the pink petals of the lotus flower clear and distinct on her left hand.

  12

  My first test jumps went smoothly, despite the fact that I was terrified. I set two stable points within the house—one in the library, which was my departure point, and one in the kitchen, which was my destination. I had planned to do my first jump from the library to the kitchen at around noon, when I had been down there eating lunch, but Katherine suggested avoiding situations where I might encounter myself.

  “Why?” I asked. “What will happen if I see myself? Does it disrupt the space-time continuum or something like that?”

  Katherine laughed. “No, dear,” she said. “It’s just very tough on your brain. I’d wait a bit, until you’re more accustomed to the process. It’s not something you want to do regularly, anyway, and never for more than a minute or so. You have to reconcile two conflicting sets of memories and it always gave me the most awful headache. Saul claimed that he had no problem with it, but everyone else I knew dreaded the test where we had to go backward and engage a past self in conversation. We’d been warned that we would be totally useless for hours afterward and they were correct—it’s a real sensory overload. I heard some lurid stories about the early days of CHRONOS, when they were testing the limits of the system. A few people became rather… unhinged, if you will, trying to reconcile several hours’ worth of conflicting memories. One girl had to be institutionalized. Really unpleasant.”

  That sounded almost as bad as disrupting the space-time continuum, so I discarded any ideas I might have had about sitting down for a long chat with myself. I decided to jump backward about three hours, to a quarter after twelve, when Connor had gone down to the kitchen to fix a sandwich. I was so nervous that it took nearly a minute for me to pull up the visual of the kitchen and another thirty seconds or so to set the arrival time. Once I had it locked in, I followed Katherine’s advice and blinked my eyes, holding the image of the kitchen in my mind. When I opened my eyes again, I was in the kitchen. Connor was by the fridge, stacking ham on a slice of wheat bread. The kitchen clock read a quarter after noon.

  “And what are you staring at?” he asked, glancing down at his shirt as though looking for spilled mustard or mayo.

  I smiled at him and then focused again on the medallion, pulling up the image of the stable point that I’d set near one of the library windows. The image was clear enough that I could see Katherine’s reflection in the window, looking toward the spot from which I had just embarked. I concentrated to pull up the time display, which was stamped with my departure time, plus five seconds. I blinked, as before, and opened my eyes to find Katherine a few steps in front of me, with an elated smile on her face.

  “I didn’t think I would ever see anyone do that again.” There were tears in her eyes as she hugged me. “You know, Kate—we might just have a shot at this.”

  The next morning, as I was reading through more of Katherine’s diary entries, I realized we were taking the wrong track in trying to pin down the murder date. “Why don’t I just watch the jump sites around that time for a few minutes just before Katherine’s scheduled arrival? We start with the last jumps, and the first one where she appears—that would have to be the trip during which she was murdered, right? Because she wouldn’t have been alive to make any jumps after that.”

  Connor and Katherine gave each other an amused look. “Now that we have someone who can make the CHRONOS equipment work, that’s an excellent idea,” Katherine said. “This time, we were the ones thinking too linearly, I guess.”

  Katherine hadn’t included the arrival time in the list of dates she had printed, so Connor went back through the diaries to pull out that information, pausing every few minutes to pull another pretzel rod from the clear plastic tub by his keyboard. I wasn’t sure which was more amazing—that Connor was thin despite the constant munching, or that his keyboard continued to function despite the variety of crumbs that were collected between the keys.

  When he finished the list, I scanned through and noticed that several of the dates were repeated or overlapped. “Why are the same dates here twice?”

  Katherine shrugged. “There were a lot of different events going on. Sometimes a meeting held at one end of the fairgrounds conflicted with something else we needed to observe—especially on jumps where Saul and I traveled as a team or where we were gathering some information for another historian. We did that a lot in Chicago, because we were the resident ‘Expo Experts’ and almost anyone who studied American history—politics, literature, music, science, you name it—had someone or something they wanted us to observe. For example—you’ve heard of Scott Joplin?”

  I nodded. “A piano player, right? Ragtime?”

  “Correct,” she said. “Richard—you remember, the friend who swapped places with me on that last jump? Well, he had information that Joplin led a band at a Chicago nightclub during the time of the fair, but there were no specifics. He would have had to spend a lot of time preparing for an 1890s trip, but it was a pretty simple matter for Saul and me to ask around, make
a side trip to hear Joplin, and take back a recording for Richard to analyze. I also picked up some data for a colleague studying serial killers—there was a rather nasty one preying on young women during the Expo. And I got a brochure announcing Colored American Day at the fair for someone studying race relations.”

  She made a face. “That was an interesting one—the leaders of the Expo decided it would be a good idea to give away watermelons to commemorate the occasion. Frederick Douglass was there representing Haiti—he was consul general to Haiti at the time. Let’s just say he was not amused.”

  I laughed. “I would imagine not. But wasn’t it kind of risky to have several versions of yourself wandering around the same place?”

  “Not really,” she said. “There were thousands of visitors each day, so as long as we kept away from the area where our earlier selves were working, there really wasn’t much chance of anyone spotting both sets of us. The CHRONOS costume and makeup department was also incredible. I saw myself on one occasion crossing the street, and I didn’t even realize it was me until I was halfway down the block. And we generally kept a pretty low profile, observing but not really interacting much—well, I did, at any rate. Saul clearly had different ideas near the end.”

  The last jump before Saul sabotaged the system was to Boston 1873, when he and Katherine had quarreled. There were one or two other jumps to Boston, but most of the twenty-two jumps prior to that were all to Chicago, at various points during the year 1893.

  “The Expo was in 1893, right?” I picked up the Log of Stable Points and began scrolling backward, beginning with the last entries on the list. “I really think it’s going to be one of those dates. After all, it was the 1890s diary that was stolen on the Metro.”

  I started with Boston, however, since those jumps were the last two that they had taken together. There were seventeen stable point locations listed in the Boston area, but Katherine said that she and Saul had only used the one a few blocks from Faneuil Hall on their trips. The location, like many others, was a narrow alley. I pulled up the stable point and set the time for one minute prior to Katherine’s scheduled arrival: 04181873_06:47—April 18th, 1873, at 6:47 A.M.

  A large rat ran into view after a few minutes, which kind of creeped me out, and I nearly lost focus. A few seconds later, however, a man appeared—so close that I could have counted individual threads in the weave of his black coat. As he moved away, and his face came partially into view, it was clear that this was Saul Rand—above-average height, with dark brown hair, pale skin, and the same intense expression I had seen in the two images in Katherine’s diaries. His beard was trimmed closely with no mustache, and my first impression was that my grandfather had been a slightly shorter, more handsome, but not very pleasant Abraham Lincoln, although that impression was at least partly due to the tall, black stovepipe hat on his head. Katherine was not with him.

  Saul turned abruptly in my direction and I drew in a sharp breath as his eyes, narrowed and piercing, stared almost directly into mine, as though he knew I was watching him. I finally exhaled when I realized that he was just scanning the alleyway to make sure he’d arrived unobserved.

  I tried the next-to-last jump and drew a total blank. The jump was either rescheduled or Saul skipped it, because although I waited several minutes, no one showed up, not even my good friend, the rat.

  Since Katherine hadn’t appeared at either of the Boston jumps, I crossed that city from the list and focused on Chicago. There were four stable point locations listed within the fairgrounds, and the one used for most of the jumps was labeled as the Wooded Island—a secluded, shady area, with floral vines and lush foliage. I could see a cabin of some sort about twenty yards away, with large animal horns scattered about the exterior and a few park benches along the pathway. No one appeared on the first date I tried, although I observed, through the cover of the leaves surrounding my vantage point, a few people strolling along the sidewalk in the morning light.

  On the next attempt, however, I hit pay dirt. About fifteen seconds into the surveillance, my view was suddenly obstructed by two figures. As they moved away from the stable point, I could see that one of them was Katherine. I immediately felt two strong, conflicting emotions—relief that we’d found the correct time and dismay that I would soon have to dress in something like the ornate period costume that she was wearing.

  The tall man from the 1873 jump was next to her. His beard was gone, replaced by a long handlebar mustache. He gave the surroundings another quick scan, as he had done on the Boston jump, and then grabbed Katherine’s elbow to help her up the slight incline to the walkway. She held up the skirt of her gray dress. It was trimmed in dark purple and the outfit was topped off by a small hat with a ridiculously large lavender feather. As the two of them walked past the wooden cabin, a dark-haired boy of about eight or nine emerged from inside, a broom in his hand, and began to sweep away the leaves that had accumulated on the walkway.

  I pulled my gaze sharply to the left to turn off the log display. The abrupt visual change from an autumn morning in the park to the interior scene of the library, where Connor was hunched over a computer and Katherine was replacing books on a shelf, was a bit disconcerting.

  I carried the list over and put it on the table beside Connor, tapping the target date with my fingernail. “Found it. Chicago. A jump from April 3rd, 2305, to October 28th, 1893. Looks like it was the only jump to that date.”

  Connor nodded at first, and then shook his head, pointing to an entry near the top of the log with one of the pretzel rods he was munching. “Yeah, the only jump specifically to the 28th—but look, here’s a two-day solo trip, October 27th to 29th, from February 2305.”

  “Great,” I replied, rolling my eyes as I sank down into Katherine’s desk chair. “So there will be two Katherines strolling around the fair to confuse me.”

  “Don’t know what you’re complaining about,” he said, taking another bite of pretzel. “At least you’ll get out of the house for a while.”

  Katherine took the list from Connor. “I remember those trips—there was a lot going on. The fair was scheduled to close at the end of October, and it was horribly crowded with visitors who had procrastinated but didn’t want to miss out. There was a huge celebration planned for the last day, with fireworks and speeches, but the murder meant that everything was canceled.”

  “Murder?” I asked. “Oh, yeah—you mentioned something about a string of killings at the fair…”

  “No, no. This was separate. An assassination, actually.”

  “McKinley?”

  She shook her head. “President McKinley was killed at the next World’s Fair, in New York, in 1901. This time, the target was the mayor of Chicago. Carter Harrison. A very nice man… good sense of humor. Saul and I spent most of the day with him on the second jump and I was sad to think that he would be dead before the day was over.” She paused for a moment and then began to thumb through the stack of diaries on the desk. “Oh, right. That’s the diary Kate had on the subway. Hold on, it will just take a second to access the backup file.”

  She grabbed the top diary and flipped it open, clicking a few buttons to locate what she needed. “Okay, here we go. The February jump was to view the reaction to the assassination and the final days of the fair—more general research for CHRONOS than part of my individual research agenda. Cultural research on the Midway, mostly. It was a nice little microcosm, with workers imported from around the world mixing with people from around the United States who had come to Chicago in search of work—the Expo took place in the middle of a major economic depression, you know.”

  She chuckled. “I was posing as a writer for a travel magazine—complete with a huge, heavy Kodak camera around my neck. They called it a portable camera, but I was always very happy to take it off at the end of the day. Cameras were the latest fad, especially among the younger fairgoers—the older folks called them ‘Kodak fiends’ because they would jump out and snap pictures without asking.

>   “It was a fun trip,” she added, “but not very eventful, as I recall. I interviewed several people from the Dahomey Village and picked up a bit of information for a crime historian on a waitress at the German beer garden who had just disappeared. He thought she might have been one of the victims of the serial killer, but I never found any evidence one way or the other.

  “The jump from April,” she said, tapping the screen again, “was triggered by an event that caught my attention during an earlier trip—American Cities’ Day, when about five thousand mayors from around the country visited the Expo. Mayor Harrison was scheduled to show a delegation of about fifty mayors and their spouses around the fair, prior to his big speech before the full assembly of mayors that afternoon. One of the individuals in this select group was the first female mayor in the nation, Dora Salter, also a leader in the WCTU—Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Prohibition? Anti-alcohol?”

  I had a vague recollection of someone’s ninth-grade history project about Carry Nation bashing up a bar with her ax, so I nodded.

  “Salter was no longer an active mayor at the time, and I suspect that someone with a twisted sense of humor added her to that invitation list,” Katherine continued. “Carter Harrison was well known for his gallantry toward the ladies, but he was a hard drinker and most definitely not in favor of the WCTU’s anti-vice agenda. I thought there might be some interesting conversations between the two, so Saul and I blended into the group, with him claiming to be the mayor of a little town in Oregon and me as his wife. But it was really a waste of time—Salter turned out to be this meek little mouse of a woman and the two of them never even spoke after they were introduced.”