by Rysa Walker
The Midway was much more crowded and noisy than it had been earlier in the day. I had to veer off the sidewalk into the main street in order to avoid a large group lining up to enter the one o’clock showing at Hagenbeck’s Trained Animals exhibit. Colorful banners over the entryway displayed a collection of elephants, lions, and tigers patiently standing on a pyramid of platforms, watched over by a ringmaster cracking his whip. The temperature had increased since the morning and the air around the building now had the stale, fetid odor that I remembered from the one sad little circus I’d attended as a child. That didn’t seem to affect the enthusiasm of the people in the line, but in this era, I supposed that most of them had seen these exotic animals only in paintings and black-and-white photographs.
My eyes scanned both sides of the wide street for any sign of either Simon or Kiernan as I tried to recall everything Katherine had said or that I had read about the earlier jump. We had focused most of our research on the second trip. I’d just skimmed through the first one, mining it for background information about the fair itself. Katherine had said that the jump hadn’t been connected to her own research—she was there to gather general impressions about the last days of the fair and the people’s reaction to the assassination of Mayor Harrison, along with some background work for other CHRONOS agents.
I vaguely remembered her saying something about a camera, an African exhibit, and a beer garden. By African exhibit, she must have meant Dahomey Village, at the far end of the Midway. The beer garden was just ahead in the German Village, but I had no clue which day she’d gone where.
Rather than waste time trying to dredge the pieces up from memory, I paused in the shade of one of the viaducts that intersected the Midway and pulled the copy of the 1893 diary from my bag. After a few minutes of searching, I found the entry for October 28th and quickly scanned it. Katherine had spent most of the morning talking to young women at the International House of Beauty, a sort of global fashion show that was very popular—there was a long line outside both times I walked past, oddly enough with nearly as many men as women, although I suspected most of the guys were there to see pretty girls from around the world rather than to observe the latest trends in global fashion. Around noon, Katherine had walked back to the main Exposition, where she talked to some of the many workers who would be looking for new jobs in a few days when the fair closed its gates for the last time.
The next journal entry was the one I was looking for. It placed her at the German Village around 3 P.M. She didn’t stay long, however, since she was there specifically to speak with the friend of a barmaid who had disappeared a few weeks earlier. The girl wasn’t on duty until six, so Katherine decided to return that evening.
I leaned back against the brick wall of the viaduct and considered my options. Simon was also working with only the info from the diary, so he had no more clue than I did where Katherine would be between noon and three. His best chance of finding her, just like mine, was to stake out the various entrances to the German Village.
I could see one of the entrances from where I stood, but I wasn’t sure if it led into the beer garden. Shoving the diary back into my bag, I decided to head over to the German Village to do a bit of reconnaissance.
Three little girls in native costumes were working their way across the street from the Javanese exhibit, holding hands as they crossed the Midway. I had just stepped toward them, thinking I would ask if they had seen “Little Mick”—he seemed to know everyone else at the Expo—when I saw the expressions on their faces transform all at once. One small brown hand flew up suddenly, as though its owner was trying to warn me.
I realized with a jolt of surprise that they weren’t actually little girls at all but three tiny older women. The startled look on their faces was the last thing I remember clearly before I felt the sharp jab of a needle in my upper arm. The Midway began to melt into a kaleidoscope of random faces and body parts. I caught a brief glimpse of a man with a mustache and a black bowler, the colorful brocade fabrics of the Javanese costumes, and a small scuffed shoe as my knees buckled under me. Then, just shapes and colors. And finally, everything went pitch-black.
For several seconds after I awakened, I thought I was in the small, cozy spare room where I always slept when visiting my dad’s parents in Delaware. There was a slightly musty smell in the air, and as my eyes adjusted I began to pick out the intricate pattern of a crocheted doily on the nightstand next to the bed. I reached over to feel for the bedside lamp, but my hand bumped instead against a candleholder, knocking the stub of wax onto the floor. It rolled a few feet and then stopped, blocked by what I was pretty sure was a chamber pot.
This wasn’t Grandma Keller’s guest room.
I pulled back the thin blanket that someone had tucked in neatly around me. My green dress was missing. I was wearing only the white silk chemise and petticoats that Trey had so admired earlier. My right arm was unusually stiff and there was a small welt about six inches below my shoulder where the needle had punctured the skin. A red scratch marked the inside of my wrist, and the bracelet Katherine had given me was gone.
Everything was strange in the dim light, and I suspected that I was still feeling the effects of whatever drug I’d been given. Only the tiniest bit of sunlight seeped in through a dingy, grime-covered window about the size of my foot near the very top of the wall. A larger window, with closed curtains, was several feet beneath it to the right. I slid to the other side of the narrow bed and reached up to open the drapes, hoping to put a bit more light on my current situation.
But there was no window behind the curtains. The painted brick continued in an unbroken line to the opposite wall, where it was joined at an odd angle. There were no pictures, no decorations of any sort aside from the totally unnecessary curtains and the doily on the nightstand. Three holes had been drilled in the wall above the door, the first two no more than an inch in diameter and the third, the center hole, about twice that size.
I sat back on the bed and pulled my knees up to my chest. The movement triggered a memory of sitting in the same position, back in my room at Katherine’s, watching DVDs with Trey. I glanced back at the non-window and then at the small holes above the door and my heart began to pound. I tried to tell myself that I was jumping to conclusions based on incomplete evidence, but I knew.
I was in the World’s Fair Hotel, which meant that I had now broken two promises to Trey—although that was clearly the least of my worries.
How many women had Holmes killed in this room? How many had died on this very bed while he watched through the peephole?
My skin crawled at the thought and I stood up quickly. I was considering whether to try and open the door when it started to… well, slither toward the floor. I bit back a scream, and then a nervous laugh, as I realized the door was still on its hinges. The slithering was my dress, which had slipped off a coat hook.
I moved cautiously forward and picked it up, nearly tripping over the shoes that were underneath it. I was very glad to see the dress, but I had mixed feelings about those boots.
A movement caught the corner of my eye again, and for a split second I thought that I saw a flash of light in the opposite corner. I had the fleeting sensation of being watched, but when I turned it was still dark and no one was there. All that I could make out was the dim outline of a chair.
Sitting back down on the edge of the bed, I rubbed my eyes, hoping that the effects of the drug would clear soon. I spread the gown out beside me, feeling around for the hidden pocket in the bodice. I didn’t really expect the CHRONOS key to be there, and it wasn’t. That confirmed my suspicion that this hadn’t been a random decision by Holmes to grab a girl who seemed to be traveling alone. That wasn’t his modus operandi, and he was having plenty of luck luring young women here without resorting to abduction in broad daylight.
Somebody had convinced Holmes to take that extra bit of risk, and I was pretty sure that somebody was Simon. Why bother getting rid of me himself when there wa
s a local serial killer who would be more than happy, probably for a ridiculously small fee, to keep me out of his way?
As that cheerful thought percolated in my head, the door opened suddenly. A soft yellow light spilled into the room from the gas lamps that lined the corridor. I tensed and was prepared to fight, but the figure in the doorway wasn’t Holmes. The young woman was tall with wavy, flaxen hair. Her pretty, heart-shaped face creased with concern when she saw me.
“Oh, no!” she said, quickly setting the tray down on the nightstand. “You mustn’t be standing yet. You’re still much too weak. Here, let me help you get back into bed…”
“No,” I said. “Where are my things? What time is it? I have to go…”
“You’re not going anywhere. My name is Minnie. It’s about dinnertime, and I’ve brought you some nice broth.”
Minnie took me by the shoulders and in a very no-nonsense fashion led me back to bed. This had to be one of the wives or mistresses that Holmes had managed to charm, straight up until the moment of their deaths.
“You fainted on the Midway,” she said, propping up the feather pillows and pushing me back against them. “It’s very lucky for you that my husband was there when you passed out. He carried you back here.
“He’s a doctor,” she added, a note of pride in her voice. “And he says you need to rest.
“As for your things,” she said, nodding toward the corner, “your hat is on the chair. That’s all you had when my husband brought you in. I hope nothing was stolen at the fair—crime is really quite awful these days.”
I couldn’t argue with that, although I doubted that she realized how much of the recent crime wave was directly attributable to her spouse.
My first impulse was to tell her to get the hell out of Chicago before she ended up in the basement with the others. That didn’t seem likely to increase my own odds of escape, however. The room was still semidark, but there had been enough light for me to see her expression when she was talking about her husband, the doctor. She was very clearly smitten with him, and I was pretty sure she’d run straight to Holmes, rather than checking for evidence first, if I started talking about lime pits, trapdoors, and skeletons.
“Where is Dr. Holmes?” I asked as she picked my dress up off the bed and returned it to the flimsy coat hook on the door.
Her back stiffened. “My husband is downstairs speaking with one of his business partners, so I decided to come up and check on you. I wasn’t aware that you knew him.” There was a noticeable change in her tone of voice, and she gave me a thorough appraisal as she turned to leave. Her eyes weren’t nearly as friendly as before.
“I don’t,” I said.
“Then how did you know his name?” she asked.
“I didn’t,” I replied. “You said Dr. Holmes carried me back from the Midway, so I assumed…”
“Really?” she said, narrowing her eyes. “I’m pretty sure I never called him by name. You just stay in bed and finish your broth. The two of us will come up to check on you soon.”
Hmm… perhaps she didn’t trust Holmes fully after all. She seemed, at the very least, to be aware that her husband had a wandering eye, and she didn’t like it one little bit.
The door closed firmly and I heard a bolt slide into place. I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would check into a hotel where the bolt was on the outside of the door, but judging from the three little holes at the top of the door, this was one of the “special rooms” where Holmes gassed his victims. It probably wasn’t part of the typical guest tour.
I was once again in near darkness. How did the woman expect me to eat the broth without a lamp or candle? But it really didn’t matter, since I had no intention of touching it.
When Minnie’s footsteps had faded down the hallway, I pulled the covers back and ran my fingers along the inside of my petticoat. There was a brief, scary moment when I didn’t feel anything—and then my fingers brushed against the thin metal inside the hidden pocket.
The spare CHRONOS key was there, on a thin silver chain, along with the extra bit of cash I had tucked away. Minnie was correct that I had been lucky. Not so much that Holmes had been at the Midway—I was pretty sure that luck had nothing to do with that—but rather that she had been here as chaperone. Having a jealous wife standing over him would certainly make even a total deviant like Holmes less likely to do a thorough check of an unconscious girl’s undergarments.
Yanking my dress off the hook, I tossed it over my arm and, after a brief hesitation, grabbed the shoes as well. I wasn’t going to bother putting everything on—Connor had seen me in less—but I would need the costume when I came back to fix this mess. Right now, however, I was going home. It would have been nice to get to a stable point, but given the way that Simon and Prudence had been blinking in and out like fireflies, it was pretty clear that Katherine’s concerns were unwarranted. And either way, being captive in a hotel room with dozens of dead bodies in the basement had to qualify as good reason to invoke the emergency exit rule.
Holding the CHRONOS key in one hand, I pressed my fingers against the center. I’d pulled up the interface and focused on the stable point in the library and was just about to make the jump when the sound of footsteps running down the hallway broke my focus. The interface wavered and then disappeared.
The footsteps paused and I heard the bolt being drawn back. There wasn’t enough time to pull the display up again, so I dropped the dress onto the bed, slipped the medallion down the front of my chemise, and moved to a defensive position behind the door. From the photographs I had seen, Holmes wasn’t an especially large man, and I was pretty sure I could take him if he wasn’t armed. And even if he was, I planned to put up a fight.
I came within about an inch of kicking my grandmother in the stomach. I pulled the kick at the very last second when the skirt clued me in that it wasn’t Holmes. She swung her arm upward to ward off my foot with her handbag—the same bag that I had been carrying earlier.
It still took me a couple of seconds, however, to realize it was actually Katherine. She hadn’t been joking when she said that the costuming department at CHRONOS did incredible work. If she had walked past me on the Midway, I don’t think I would have recognized her. She had been aged about twenty-five years and my first thought was that it was my mom—which was odd because I’d never really noticed a resemblance between them before.
We both started to speak at the same time, and I stopped to let her go first. “Who are you?” she said in a hushed voice. Her eyes dropped to my chest, where the light from the medallion was shining faintly through the fabric. “Did HQ send you?”
I decided the truth was probably the quickest alternative. “Not exactly,” I said. “I’m Kate—your granddaughter. We need to get out of here. But how did you find me? How did you get past Holmes?”
Her eyes scanned my face, confused. I don’t know what she saw, but something there convinced her that I might be telling the truth. “I’ve been here on research twice before. There are only two rooms where Holmes could close someone in,” she said. “I arranged a bit of a distraction—I tipped off one of his multitude of creditors to his current alias—and then sneaked in during the chaos.” She turned to cast a nervous glance over her shoulder and then held out her right hand. “How did you get this?” she asked.
In her open palm was the bracelet. The chain was now broken, but the charm was the exact twin of the one that dangled from her left wrist. “You gave it to me,” I said. “For my birthday. And yes, I know how it got chipped. Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth. You were watching them instead of paying attention to a carriage door. In 1860-something.”
There was a pause and then Katherine gave me a small, pained smile. “Okay, I believe you. I never even told that to Saul.” She stared at me closely again. I suspect she was wondering if I was Saul’s granddaughter as well, but she didn’t ask.
“When I saw that woman come out—is it Minnie or Georgiana? Minnie, I think. He
went through companions very quickly,” she said. “At any rate, I assumed it was me locked in here, that there had been some accident on a future jump or that Holmes had gotten wind that I’ve been asking questions about a few of the women he killed.”
“But how did you know Holmes had—” I began.
“Some kid found me on the Midway and said that a lady wearing this bracelet had been taken to the World’s Fair Hotel. He said he followed you here and that I needed to help you.”
Kiernan. I had a sudden memory of the small, scuffed-up shoe I’d seen just before I fell. He must have snatched the bracelet when the crowd gathered around me. If I managed to get out, I resolved to give him every last penny I had and cover his little face with kisses.
“I could have gone back to HQ, gotten help, and come back in the easy way,” she said. “There’s a stable point on the third floor. But I couldn’t shake that kid. I was afraid I was going to have to tie him up or knock him out or something, and then I remembered the financial dispute between Mudgett—Holmes, that is—and one of the gentlemen on the Board of Managers for the Expo.”
Her mouth twisted. “It was all I could do to convince the boy to let me stop off to arrange the distraction, and then I wasted a good five minutes trying to get him to go back home. He finally agreed to wait in the alley. He wanted to storm straight in and see if you were okay, and I couldn’t really tell him why that would be dangerous.
“He gave me this,” she said, holding the bag out, “and a rather dirty parasol, which I ditched. This bag is mine, but with the exception of the key and the diary inside here, the rest of the stuff isn’t exactly CHRONOS-issue is it? A pink plastic toothbrush?”