“I know it,” I said.
“Our Lord loves and forgives, if you attempt to set it right.”
“I know,” I said, but I didn’t mean it.
This priest didn’t understand. Immortality wasn’t something that I could ever “set right.”
And yet here I was, trying to get water from the Fountain of Youth to subject Henley to the same fate I had been subjected to by Miss Hatfield.
It was all a twisted mess, but there was no getting out of it.
“You’re right,” I told the priest. “I need to set it right.”
I left the confessional before he could say anything.
When I came out of the tent, lunch was being served. Everyone was there apart from me and the priest—the men and, of course, Juana.
“Soup,” a man grunted to me in his heavy accent. He handed me a bowl of stew much like breakfast.
“Thank you.”
Juana’s eyes met mine. She looked like she wanted to talk to me, but I figured if I didn’t let myself be alone with her, she couldn’t say anything about immortality or try anything—like kill me.
I tried to stay in front of as many people as possible. The men were taking seats around the fire. I waited till Juana got her soup and sat down before taking the farthest seat across from her.
From there I could watch her and make sure she didn’t come anywhere near me.
I looked at the men to keep my mind off Juana. They came in all shapes and sizes—some were broad and square, while others were tall and lean. There didn’t seem to be any extra fat on any of them. I supposed that was what expeditions like this did to you.
The men looked back in my direction too. I was a new face, and they looked curious. Most of them, surprisingly, had kind faces—suspicious, but still gentle at the core. There was a man with the bushiest eyebrows I had ever seen. One of the men I recognized from the altercation yesterday had a pointy beard that kept dipping into his soup as he tried to drink it. I also saw José there. He glowered at me when our eyes met, but I supposed that was normal for him—he hadn’t seemed too friendly in the first place.
The priest even walked out from his tent to join us for lunch. He looked surprised when he saw me amid the men.
He had a familiar, neatly kept goatee. Maybe I recognized it because it was the way my—Cynthia’s—father had kept his facial hair. Even with the facial hair, the priest looked young and surprisingly handsome. He was probably twenty-five at most—too young to be wearing that solemn black. But his age fitted with most of the men there.
This was a younger group; there were few gray hairs. I guessed they needed the younger, stronger men for hard voyages like this. It made sense.
As the men were finishing their soup, some of them brought metal flasks out. One was passed around. The men were taking swigs of whatever was in it. The flask passed me once, but on the second time around, I decided to try it.
I took a sip, and the liquid burned my throat. I coughed and simultaneously tried to swallow and get the taste out of my mouth.
The men guffawed as I sputtered.
More flasks came out. Some belonged to individuals and weren’t passed around. I guessed that these were the men who were sick of the expedition and just wanted to get drunk.
The men started to clear their plates and go back into their tents for what I assumed was siesta time.
I saw a flask that had been left behind and quickly picked it up, checking that no one was about to claim it. I’d had enough of whatever that drink had been, but I could use the flask to get water from the lake . . . once I found it. Finding the lake was another issue.
The area around the fire was almost empty. Most of the remaining men were done clearing their bowls. Only Juana, the priest, and a couple of others stayed behind. I had to move quickly. Juana looked like she wanted to talk to me.
I headed into the woods. Let the men think that I was emptying my bladder. Juana probably knew I was trying to get away from her. I had to tell Henley that I was sure I had found the killer—I mean she tried to strangle me in my sleep.
The tree that bent at the waist and fifty-four steps from that. I mentally counted all of them, until I made it to the tree I had marked.
“Rebecca?”
Juana had followed me into the woods. Her voice didn’t sound that far off. I dug frantically.
“Rebecca! I know you’re here.”
My fingers hit metal, and I scooped up the clock. I was turning the hands when the trees parted.
I looked up and the scenery was already dissolving around me. Juana’s face had drained of blood, and her hand was frozen in midair, as if she was about to say something.
It was too late.
She had seen me time travel.
“Henley!” I burst into our room with the clock and the metal flask in my arms.
I must have looked a sight, but Henley wasn’t there to see it.
Damn it. Where was he?
I ran back through the lobby. Al at the front desk looked confused, but there was no one else around.
The pool looked full. I could see it from the back windows of the lobby. Maybe Henley was there.
I ran out, unconcerned what the tourists thought of me in my yellowed, dirt-stained antique dress.
“Henley!”
He was sitting at the edge of the pool with his feet in the water.
Henley was wearing the swim shorts we had bought him. It must have been the most modern outfit I had ever seen him wear. I would have commented on it, if I hadn’t been frantic to talk to him about other more pressing issues.
“Juana’s immortal,” I blurted out.
“What?” Henley managed to say once he’d gotten over the shock of suddenly seeing me there. “And lower your voice. There are people here.”
I crouched down next to him. “Juana’s looking for the lake. Well, actually, it seems she knows its exact location.” I told Henley of the maps I had seen and of Juana’s reaction to me finding them. I told him of the pain Juana felt in her stomach and how she had let slip that it was worsening. I also told him of what she’d said to me: “I know exactly what you are.”
“There are too many matching pieces for this all to be a coincidence,” I said.
Henley looked away from me to think for a moment. “You’re right. There are too many points that align. You think she’s the killer?” His eyes met mine.
“She tried to kill me.”
Henley froze. “What? You couldn’t have started with that? And you’re all right now?”
I told him of her trying to strangle me last night. “That has to prove it . . . But there was something off about it. As if she didn’t know what she was doing . . . The whole thing felt like a manic episode of some sort. But there’s no other suspect. Who else could it be? No one else is immortal. There’s José, who doesn’t seem to like dogs and doesn’t seem to like me either, but I doubt he has any reason to want me dead. There are the rest of the men, but they barely acknowledge my existence, let alone talk to me. There’s the priest—”
Looking at Henley’s face, I suddenly understood why I had found his face and the way he conducted the confessional so familiar. That face. That voice.
“My God.”
“Rebecca?”
“It’s the priest,” I said. “It’s the priest. He was there at your father’s funeral. He was there at your house. He was at Henry’s court.”
“Father Gabriel?”
“He’s the killer.”
We both sat, stunned into silence.
All those attempts at my life. He killed Miss Hatfield. He must have been there in her house. He was there when I first met Henley. I saw him. He was there at Richard’s deathbed. My God.
My mind was whirling uncontrollably, but I struggled to vocalize my thoughts. “H-he was there. In each time period.”
“Each time someone tried to kill you,” Henley said.
I should have seen it earlier, somehow. I thought back to my conve
rsation with him in the confessional. He hadn’t even had an accent like the rest of the men or Juana. I should have noticed it. He’d done so much damage over the years.
“He murdered Miss Hatfield.”
There was silence between us. We could hear the splashing of children playing in the pool.
“Do you think he killed my father?”
The priest—Father Gabriel, if that was even his name—had been there for months as Mr. Beauford deteriorated. Mr. Beauford had developed a fascination with immortality toward the end of his life and had collected artifacts with any connection with it. Was that reason enough to kill him?
“He was there in Tudor England. He was the priest in the confessional. He performed Richard’s last rites.” I tried to take a breath, but it felt like my lungs were being crushed.
“He tried to smother you there. Not to mention he tried to kill you before that, in the Heathrow airport.”
“He ransacked Miss Hatfield’s house before killing her. He sent me the text to meet at the same location where Miss Hatfield was killed. He must have been trying to kill us both at the same time.”
Henley’s body shook as he sucked in a breath.
“He was also in England with us in 2016. He was in the room. He wrapped the plastic beads around your hands.”
“Prayer beads,” Henley said softly. His face was devoid of color, and I knew I looked the same.
“He was everywhere. He’s been tracking our every move,” I said.
Henley bit his lip. “He must have his own way of traveling in time. His own clock or something.”
“That means we can’t run from him for long.” I forced myself to breathe. “I need to go after him.”
“Rebecca. He wants to kill you. You’d just make it easy for him.”
I snapped at Henley. “What choice do I have?”
“Turn me immortal first, so I can at least help you,” Henley said.
I knew he felt helpless, but would turning Henley immortal really help me? I didn’t know the answer, but I did know that turning Henley immortal would at least keep him safer. Immortality meant Henley would be able to travel in time far away from the killer’s grasp, as long as he had the clock. I was willing to do anything to keep him safe.
I nodded and held up the flask, which was still in my lap. “I’ll go back to get the water. I know exactly where it is now that I’ve seen Juana’s map.”
Henley’s forehead was creased with worry lines. I knew he didn’t want me to go back with the killer there, but we were out of options.
“It’s safer now that we’ve identified who the killer is,” I promised.
“Be careful. Please.”
TWENTY
I RAN OUT of the woods, around the perimeter of the camp, and straight into Juana’s tent.
It was dark outside, and I made sure not to run through the center of camp, where the man who was supposed to be on watch tonight was fast asleep by the fire.
Juana woke up as soon as I entered the tent. “I was worried that you—”
“I know everything,” I said.
“What—”
I walked up to her hammock to better see her face in the dark. “I know that you’re Juana Ruíz. I know you’ve found the Fountain of Youth. I know that you’re immortal.”
Juana’s face grew so pale I was worried she wasn’t breathing.
“And I’m just like you,” I said. “I know you suspected it.”
“The sudden appearance,” she whispered, sitting up. “The disappearances—sometimes for hours. The curiosity about my maps . . .”
“So you’ve been reading me as well as I’ve been reading you?”
Juana rubbed her temples. She looked like she was still trying to process everything.
“You can do that later,” I said. “Right now, grab the maps and we’re going to go.”
I had already buried the clock in its hiding spot. I didn’t know what would happen. I needed to keep it safe and in a place where I knew I could find it. I held the flask. I was all ready.
“Where?”
“To the lake—”
“Why are you trying to find the lake if you’re already immortal?”
Her voice didn’t sound accusing. She sounded genuinely curious. But I knew I couldn’t tell her I was planning on taking water from the Fountain of Youth to turn another person immortal—she wouldn’t approve of that.
“I want to make sure no one ever finds it again,” I said. The words almost came out on their own. “I don’t know what I’ll have to do to accomplish that, but first I need to find it.”
Juana clasped her hands solemnly. She seemed to believe my answer.
“Now hurry,” I said. “We should be back before daybreak, or people will notice that you’re missing.”
“No, no. It’s much too far from here. Maybe two hours away, if you walk very quickly. Give it a few days. We’re moving camp much closer—”
“I don’t have a few days.” I thought it best to be blunt with her. “And neither do you. Do you know why you’re experiencing that pain?”
Juana looked confused. “My disease? You know something about it?”
“It’s not a disease, and yes, I know a lot about it. You don’t have a few days.” I pulled her out of the hammock. “I’ll tell you what I know on the way.”
I opened the chest, grabbed all the maps I could see, and handed them to Juana.
“The night watch looks like he’s asleep. Which way do we go?”
Juana pointed the way I had come. “But let’s go around the camp, so as to not wake him or the others.”
I felt something cold against my bare calf. I looked down, but it was just Alma, half under my skirt.
“I know you don’t want to be left behind, but you can’t come with us,” I whispered.
We walked out of our tent, and Alma followed us.
I took Alma and walked her back in. “You need to stay here.”
She started whining.
Juana peeked her head back into the tent. “She might wake someone if she barks.”
“I know, I’m trying to quiet her down,” I said.
“Just bring her along. It’ll be quicker.”
I looked at Alma. “All right, you win. You can come.”
I swear she stuck her tongue out at me.
We trod lightly, trying not to step on any twigs or dry leaves near the tents. Alma quietly trotted behind us. Soon we were in the forest from which I had come just a few minutes before.
There was a crackle of twigs next to us, and Juana jumped.
“That was probably just Alma,” I said, calming her down. To say that Juana was having a complicated day would be the understatement of the century—any century. “I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you earlier.”
“How long did you know?” she asked, staring straight ahead as we walked briskly through the woods.
“I suspected almost right away.”
“Just like I suspected you,” she said. “But how did you know my name?”
I smiled to myself, wondering if she’d believe me when I told her. “I’m from another time. The future.”
Juana briefly closed her eyes. Upon opening them, she shook her head. She didn’t say anything. Just kept walking.
“Have you ever sat for a painting?” I asked, changing my tactic.
“Yes . . .” Juana glanced at me, trying to judge where I was going with the question.
“There’s one of you in a dark-red dress. And you’re sitting in a dark-blue armchair.”
“My mother’s favorite chair,” she said automatically. “I had that painted a year before my mother’s death. It hung in the parlor. How do you know about it?”
I could recall every detail of that painting from memory. “Because I’ve seen it. I knew the man who owned the painting in the future.”
I thought of Miss Hatfield, who had instructed me to steal the painting from Mr. Beauford as my first task. I originally hadn’t known why that
painting was of such great importance to her. I had thought that the painting had been a random first test of some sort, but I soon found out Henley’s father had an obsession with immortality and I also later found out Miss Hatfield’s connection with the Beaufords.
“What? A hundred years from now?” She sounded like she was joking.
“More like four hundred.”
There was silence in which all we could hear was our own footsteps.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Juana said.
“Yes, I am.”
“How did you get here?”
“Now that’s tied to your so-called disease.”
She was asking all the right questions, and I was afraid of telling her too much. I didn’t know what she wanted from me yet. What if she was the one after my life?
But I felt I had to take a chance. There was an equal probability that she wasn’t the killer at all. Just someone who didn’t know what she had become.
“When you were turned immortal by drinking from the Fountain of Youth, it was as if your body was taken out of the loop of time,” I started. I tried to explain it the way Miss Hatfield had explained it to me a long time before. “Because of that, you don’t belong in any time. You can’t belong. Every time period you live in will slowly reject your body as something unnatural it cannot keep. That’s why you feel the pain and the sickness.”
“So you feel this too?”
I nodded. “When I stay in one time period too long. Which brings me to the clock.”
“A clock?”
“A time-traveling device. It helps me move to different times when I start feeling ill.”
Juana indicated we should turn left. I followed her.
“And where did you find such a thing?” she asked.
“It was given to me by my . . . mentor.”
She grew quiet. “So there are others like us? People who are not meant to be?”
“Yes . . . Well, there were. There were seven, including me, but all at different times. Only two at most were alive—existed—at any given point.”
“I don’t understand,” Juana said. “If they were immortal like us, doesn’t that mean they couldn’t die?”
“They can’t die of sickness or old age,” I corrected. “Physical harm—murder—can still happen.”
The Day Before Forever Page 28