Race to World's End (Rowan and Ella Book 3)

by Kiernan-Lewis, Susan

  “What if you leave and Effendi returns?”

  “We’ve discussed this. Effendi can’t return on his own.” Ella scooted up in her lounge chair and pulled the wool blanket from her knees. Suddenly it felt confining, not comforting. “Remember? You need a talisman to pull off the travel between the years. Something of personal importance to you.”

  “Like your mother’s necklace.”

  “Yes, exactly. And whatever Rowan had on him that helped push him over to 1825, maybe his wedding ring…well, he won’t have it anymore.”

  “Because…the men who have him will have taken it,” Halima said quietly.

  Ella knew Halima didn’t like to think of what Rowan might be going through—or had gone through. God knows she didn’t either. But the fact was Rowan was not going to be able to travel back to 1925 without help. Without Ella.

  “That’s right.”

  Halima smoothed out the crease in her long skirt and put her teacup down. Ella couldn’t help notice the woman’s precise, delicate movements. She had the heart of bull elephant, Ella knew. And the will to do whatever was necessary for the ones she loved.

  “When will you go back?”

  “As soon as I can do it without ending up in an 1825 hospital ward. The clinic in Casablanca was appalling. I can’t imagine being in a hospital in 1825 in a frontier town like Key West.”

  “And your…this Olna…believes that the more time between travels will lessen the likelihood of that?”

  “She said every time I do it, I’m going to lose a little something,” Ella admitted. She rubbed her temples as she felt her afternoon headache forming. “Memory loss, vision, bad headaches, even possibly insanity if I do it too frequently.”

  Ella watched Halima and she saw her hand shake as she reached for her teacup.

  “It can’t be helped, Halima. I have to risk it.”

  “I know.”

  “So I’ll wait another month and that should be enough.”

  “Is that what she said?”

  “No, that’s what I said. I need to go get him, Halima. I called the consulate and bought us more time in Egypt. Another month will be enough. It’ll have to be.”

  Halima stood up and re-draped the blanket on Ella’s lap. “Rest now, dear one. So that you will be ready for your visit to the market this afternoon.”

  “Thanks, Halima,” Ella said, closing her eyes again. “Just a little nap, and if you could have Mohammed bring me in a couple of aspirin? Is Tater still napping?”

  “Sleep now. All is well. All will be well.”

  That afternoon, Ella walked into Olna’s shop. Her mind felt alert and her energy had at least momentarily returned. While the headache bubbled just beneath the surface, it wasn’t an impasse to clear thinking. In fact, it was the first day she had felt almost normal since returning from Casablanca.

  “May I help you?”

  A young woman dressed in traditional Egyptian robes smiled at her from behind the counter.

  “Yes, I’m here to see Olna? My name is Mrs. Pierce.”

  The smile fell from the woman’s face and she glanced down at the small clutch bag in Ella’s hands. “I am sorry, Madame,” she said. “My grandmother has recently passed away.”

  Ella felt her hands grow cold. She took two steps toward the curtained back room before stopping herself, as if she could find the old woman back there sipping tea if she would just look. Olna, dead?

  “I need her,” Ella said, mostly to herself.

  “Excuse me, Madame?”

  Ella shook her head as if to clear it. “I am so sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you. Is there something I can help you with?”

  Ella looked into the young woman’s eyes. “No. Your grandmother was a very special woman.”

  “I know.”

  On the drive back to the townhouse, Ella tried to sort out what it meant.

  I’m really on my own now.

  Olna had said Ella could become more adept at the details of traveling. She just never said how.

  When Ella arrived back at the townhouse, Tater ran to greet her and she scooped him up and squeezed him tight. This, she thought as she buried her face in his neck and kissed him as he giggled. This.

  As soon as she released him, he scampered back toward the kitchen. Ella could smell something baking. She went to the salon and sat heavily in one of the formal chairs. It wasn’t good for relaxing, but worked very well for thinking.

  “Was your afternoon profitable?”

  Ella turned to see her friend come into the room. “Hey, Halima, come in and sit with me unless our favorite little tyrant has you on a short leash.”

  “He’s having dinner in the kitchen. Cook spoils him terribly.”

  “Good for him. No, it wasn’t profitable.”

  Halima sat down and her brow furrowed.

  “Olna is dead,” Ella said.

  “Oh! That is indeed worrisome.”

  “Yeah, especially for Olna.”

  “I did not mean to be insensitive.”

  “No, no, you’re right. It is worrisome. I mean, she was my guide and without her…I’m winging it here.”

  “Can I help in any way?”

  “I don’t think so. I may go to the American University Library tomorrow.”

  “You think there is something written about…your traveling abilities?”

  “I don’t know but it’s more than I have now.”

  Halima sighed. “A letter came for you today.”

  Ella felt her stomach turn painfully. One of the first things she had done upon returning from Casablanca was to send to the State of Florida Health Department for a copy of a death certificate.

  Rowan’s death certificate.

  “I didn’t tell you,” Ella said as Halima handed her the official looking letter from the United States, “because it was…morbid and there was no point. I knew it would take forever for them to get back to me. If I just had five minutes with an Internet connection and a smartphone I could’ve found it out for myself.”

  “You want to know if he survived the voyage.”

  Ella held the envelope in her hand and brushed the tips of her fingers across the postal mark. The paper felt so much heavier than it did in 2013. “Well there’s really no point in my going to Florida if he doesn’t. Bottom line. I mean, if he doesn’t survive the trip there won’t be a death certificate,” Ella said. “And we’ll never know what happened to him. But if this envelope contains a death certificate for Rowan, as gruesome as that sounds, it means he made it.”

  “Open it.” Halima handed her a thin letter opener from a pocket in her day dress.

  Ella nodded grimly and ripped open the envelope. She extricated a single piece of paper and recognized that her fingers were trembling. She was sure Halima could see too. She read the letter and looked up at Halima, her eyes full of emotion.

  “Dearest?” Halima asked.

  “It…it’s his death certificate.” She swallowed hard and read out loud, “Rowan Pierce, birthdate unknown. Thompson Island. Date of death…November 1, 1825.” Ella’s face flushed with emotion to read the words and she fanned herself to bring herself back in hand.

  Halima shook her head in confusion. “November first? What does that mean?”

  “It means, Halima, that Rowan did survive the trip from Casablanca, but depending on when his ship reached Florida, he died approximately two weeks later.”

  Halima took the sheet from Ella. “It doesn’t say how? Illness? Murder?”

  “No.”

  Halima looked at her. Ella knew she was putting it together as fast as she was. She reached for her drink but it was already empty.

  “I need to get to Key West now,” Ella said looking at Halima and trying to keep a calmness in her voice she did not feel. “And I need to pray I recover quickly because if I don’t, I’m not going to prevent him from dying on the first of November.”

  Halima reached over and gripped her hand. “You’re strong en
ough to do this, Ella.”

  “I know.” Ella took a long breath and let it out. “But this time, I’m going to need a few things.”

  Halima stood up and held out her hand. “Come. Let’s go have dessert with the young man, and then later I’ll help you pack.”

  14

  “Well, naturally, the monster was incensed at having to ride on the wing of the airplane—”

  “Tell us again, mkubwa, what’s a hairplane?”

  “Oy, ye git! He’s already told ye twice! It’s a machine what flies in the air.”

  “Without horses?”

  “Kin horses fly, ye idiot?”

  “Go on with the story, mkubwa.”

  “Right. So the monster is hunched on the wing and the only person who can see him is this one passenger who already has a history of mental illness.”

  “Cor blimey, that sounds desperate bad.”

  “And the monster begins to rip apart the wing—”

  “The wing what keeps ‘em in the sky?” The pirates looked at Rowan with horror.

  “Exactly right, so—”

  Two pirates stood up in agitation, one slamming his fist into his hand as if imagining the monster right in front of him. It took all of Rowan’s powers of self-restraint not to laugh.

  One of the pirates spoke, shaking his head and looking away as if seeing the whole story being performed in his mind. “God’s blood! And nobody believes him! They’re all to die because no one believes he’s seeing it!”

  “So then the pilot says over the intercom that they’re having mechanical difficulties and the passenger feels the airplane drop in altitude—”

  “Hell and furies, man! Whatever that is sounds powerful bad!”

  “The monster’s killing the hairplane! Then what, mkubwa?”

  “Well, there’s this mighty gust of wind—”

  “The hand of God Almighty!”

  “Very likely. And this wind blows the monster off the wing and the hair, er airplane sorts itself out and the captain comes on the intercom again and says, basically, no worries, we’re fine so the passenger begins to wonder, naturally—”

  “Whether he’s really mad or no? He doesn’t know if it really happened?”

  “That’s it. He thinks it was all in his head.”

  “Well, was it?”

  “You tell me. The story ends with the passenger falling peacefully asleep for the rest of the trip, but if you were to look closely at the airplane as it flew through the night sky, you would see panels of metal twisted and ripped as if a powerful being—a monster from another world—had attempted to destroy the airplane wing.”

  “I’ll be sworn, mkubwa, I got chills when ye said that. Fecking chills!”

  “Aye, me, too,” the little cabin boy, Kip, said. “I’m not be sleeping tonight, I’ll be bound.”

  Rowan grinned at his shipmates. They were all young, none yet thirty, and he found them, for the most part, friendly and simple. There were times when he found it difficult to differentiate them from some of the friendships he’d developed at Quantico. The fact that he’d seen this lot in action—attacking a ship and stealing what wasn’t theirs—strangely didn’t, as the months went by, seem to matter as much as he knew it probably should.

  The fact was that the months of life aboard the Die Hard had fallen into a nearly comfortable monotony for Rowan. His dreams always included Ella at night, and by day he plotted how to retrieve his property from the captain when he was close enough to land to make it worth the risk. The second beating had been severe, but the terror of coming so close to losing his hand had initially mitigated it—that is, until he spent the next five days recovering from the thrashing.

  He cursed himself for his stupidity, his clumsiness in getting caught—he’d been too eager to get the lighter—but his fierce intention to try again wasn’t dampened for a minute by what might have happened, by what nearly did happen.

  Rowan thought it odd Sully didn’t ask him about the lighter.

  Was it possible the bastard knew what it was?

  More than once Rowan wondered if Sully was a fellow time traveler. He had nothing to go on to think that except for the lighter—and the fact Sully seemed to regard him in a particularly guarded way.

  It’s as if he knows. And he wonders if I know, too.

  The morning that the Dry Tortugas came into view was a hot one, with the sky cerulean blue and cloudless. Rowan had snorkeled around the islands that made up the Dry Tortugas during college spring break many years ago. Now, as he stood at the deck railing of an 1825 pirate’s schooner, he found it impossible to believe that a glass bottom boat or catamaran complete with blaring rap music and bikini-clad tourists wouldn’t intrude on the scene at any moment.

  What he wouldn’t give to see that right now.

  “Oy, mkubwa, ye feeling alright? Ye look sick, like.” Ansel peered around a man between them to look at Rowan.

  Rowan smiled. “Just looking forward to getting on dry land.”

  “Nay, mate. The cap’n won’t let ye off tonight, nor any of us, to be sure.”

  The man between them snarled. “We ain’t his to be ordered about,” he said. But Rowan knew they’d obey just the same.

  By the time the Die Hard dropped anchor in the cove, Rowan saw no fewer than three other sloops already moored.

  Every one a pirate ship.

  Rowan watched a bonfire on the beach, and as night fell he heard the sounds of the other pirates as they drank and danced and fought with each other.

  Sully kept everyone on Die Hard on board.

  “Cor, it ain’t half bad,” Ansel said after dinner as he and Rowan sat, smoking and playing cards in the galley. “The Dry Tortugas is a bog of mosquitoes, sea snakes and hungry crocs. Wait’ll we get to Cayo Hueso.”

  Whether they went ashore or not mattered little to Rowan. Sully out of his cabin was another opportunity to search it for the lighter. And now that he was at the end of his journey, once he got his hands on it, he could escape with it into the throngs and crowds of Key West.

  That was, of course, assuming he survived the four-hour sail from the Dry Tortugas to Key West with the lighter’s theft undiscovered. He drummed his fingers against his knee. Perhaps it would be smarter to look for it once they arrived in Key West?

  “Oy, mkubwa, it’s your draw. What’s on your mind, lad?”

  Rowan had to grin. Ansel was easily ten years his junior, but half the time he treated Rowan like an addled younger brother. Probably because in this world, Ansel definitely had the advantage.

  “Well, if you really want to know,” Rowan said impulsively, the thought of Ella and the imminent prospect of his return to her after so long spinning in his head, “I asked the Dutchman to post a letter to my wife from Casablanca. I have hopes of a response from her waiting for me in Key West.”

  Ansel’s face fell. “But she wouldn’t know to write to ye there, would she?”

  He had a point of course, but it wasn’t really a response that Rowan was waiting for. Now that the long journey was nearly done, he would be with her soon.

  “I mean, ye didn’t even know we were heading this way ‘til the Dutchman left the ship.”

  Rowan shrugged. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “The letter told her I was alive and that I’ll find my way back to her. That’s all that matters.”

  They played another hand in silence, which Rowan thought very odd for Ansel who was usually as chatty as Kip’s captured Rosella parrot.

  “Something on your mind, Ansel?” Rowan prompted. Even from below decks, he could hear the shouts as the pirates on the beach took their drinking and dancing to the next level.

  “Look, lad,” Ansel said, tossing down the hand he held and rubbing his long, filthy fingers on the worn knees of his trousers. “I know ye were mates with him so I didn’t want to say nothing before now, but I heard it from someone who knows that Sully murdered the poor bastard in a field outside of Casablanca. I’m that sorry fer ye, lad.”
<
br />   ***

  Sully knew he was going to have a fight on his hands. But he’d had four months to figure out how to handle it.

  Thanks to good weather and few storms of consequence they’d made the trip faster than they ever had before. The crew was convinced the giant had brought them good luck.

  Sully needed to go ashore alone in order to hide what the Dutchman had given him. He knew that was strange behavior no matter how anyone looked at it, and in his case he had a crew of thirty-five men desperate for shore leave and a very suspicious quartermaster looking at it from every angle.

  It couldn’t be helped.

  Just having the thing on board was a risk, and he certainly couldn’t carry it into Key West.

  A harsh knock on his door as he was tugging on his jacket could only be that idiot Toad. If he wasn’t so good at handling the men, it wouldn’t be worth putting up with everything else about him.

  Sully opened the door. “I was just leaving,” he said, pushing past his quartermaster.

  “I’ve arranged a small detail of men to accompany ye, Cap’n,” Toad said.

  “As I said, Toad. That won’t be necessary.”

  “The crew from the Craven Monkey is wound up. There’s been pistol shots.”

  “I heard.”

  “And the crocs? Ye move very far from the fire on the beach—”

  “I appreciate your concern, Edward,” Sully said, motioning for the sailor at the gangway to lower the rope ladder to the waiting dinghy in the water next to the ship. “I’m armed. Double the guard on board, but otherwise, let the men sleep. I’ll want to lift anchor the minute I’m back.”

  “When will that be if I may make so bold?”

  Sully grabbed the handle on the rope ladder and swung his legs over the side to begin his descent. He could feel the boxy shape of the treasure box snug inside his vest. If Toad looked closely enough, he could probably make it out.

  “At dusk or slightly after. Four hours.”

  “And why exactly are ye going ashore at all, Cap’n?”

  Sully had to give the little bastard credit. He didn’t think he had the stones for the direct approach.

  “I am meeting my lover, if you must know, Toad,” Sully said, fighting to keep his face straight.