by Rysa Walker
It takes a second for him to register that I’m as soaked as he is. “What happened?”
“You’re being watched, Kiernan. Every day. Every show.”
∞9∞
I open my eyes in the library. Rain drips down the windows, and I can’t help but feel that dreary weather is chasing me through space and time—first in Boston with Kiernan, then in Port Darwin, Australia, and now here.
Katherine and Connor are right where they were when I jumped to Port Darwin. All things considered, Adrienne took the news that she’s stranded in 1942 fairly well. She was nice. I hope she makes it out before the bombs hit.
I toss the key in Connor’s lap. “One more for the trash heap.”
He smiles. “No problems, then? No crocodile?”
“I think someone may have killed him, actually. Either that or he found something rather large to eat, because there was a big pool of blood on the beach.”
“I still don’t understand why you were determined to go alone,” Katherine says.
“Like I said before, Kiernan’s being watched. Prudence knows he’s up to something, and it’s not going to help either of us if she connects the dots. And this was a snap once Adrienne realized she was stranded. The only shaky point was when she asked whether she survives the bombing, but she didn’t push when I told her I couldn’t say. I do want to see what happened to her, though—”
“Why?” Katherine interjects. “What’s the point, Kate? You’ll just feel bad if you discover she was caught in the attack.”
Katherine’s right, at least on the surface. There’s no concrete purpose served in tracking Adrienne down, other than satisfying my curiosity and the fact that she asked me to. I liked her, and I’ll be tempted to go back and warn her if I find out that there’s a nurse’s assistant on the casualty list now who wasn’t there before. I don’t know if I’d actually do it, but I’d be tempted.
I consider dropping the point, because I’ll run that search later on, whether I admit it to Katherine or not. Either way, I want to know. But this is as good a time as any to raise the issue of the death in 1938. If Other-Katherine knew someone was going to die, I’m pretty sure this Katherine does too. And we might as well thrash it out now.
“So is it Delia, Abel, or this Grant guy who gets killed in 1938?”
She arches an eyebrow at me and looks back at her computer screen. “It’s irrelevant. He died before Saul started changing the timeline.”
He died. Okay, she didn’t answer the question, but at least she narrowed it down to Abel or Grant.
“No, Katherine, he didn’t. Saul started changing the timeline when he stranded the three of them in 1938. If not for that, the man would have made it back to his own time, right?”
Katherine shrugs, still looking at the screen. “Probably. But as I noted earlier, we can’t worry about that timeline. Our priority is to restore this reality, the one in which you exist to stop Saul. Anything else is a luxury, and we cannot afford to experiment.”
We’ve gone over this before, and yes, I know she’s partially right. We have no way of telling how many people are dead in this timeline who weren’t in some other reality or who don’t exist here but did exist there. My mind strays back to Dad’s two kids in the other timeline, and while it’s not exactly the same, never-existed and dead are functional equivalents.
But once again, Katherine’s made herself the sole arbiter of right and wrong and the one who defines what I need to know. I’m not down with that. Based on what Kiernan told me, neither was Other-Kate, and she had the advantage of a Katherine whose brain was fully operational and not hampered by steroids and who knows what else. Even though Katherine thinks the issue should be closed, I know it can’t be.
“For argument’s sake,” I say, “let’s pretend I agree on that point, even though we both know I don’t. I still need to know every single thing you can tell me about those three historians, what they were doing in Georgia and why you think they wouldn’t give up their keys. This is almost certainly the jump that brought everything down around our ears in the last timeline. That Kate no longer exists. And before she disappeared, that Kate was so angry at you that Kiernan thought she needed a chaperone before confronting you. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that if I repeat what she did last time, I won’t exist either, and there’s an excellent chance I’ll discover the same thing that made her want to punch you. So, maybe we should try something different this time?”
That seems to get her attention. Connor’s, too, although he shifts his eyes back down to the book he’s pretending to read.
At first, it seems Katherine’s going to argue the point, but then she says, “I don’t really remember Grant. He was a trainee. This would have been his first or second jump. It’s Abel who dies. I found out when I tracked Delia down, after Prudence began changing things. Delia was alive until about six years ago—taught for most of her life at a women’s college up in Maine. She remarried, and judging from the number of offspring, I’d say she intentionally flaunted CHRONOS protocol about minimizing changes to the timeline.”
“Well, that was before birth control, wasn’t it? It was probably hard to—”
Katherine sniffs. “Before the pill, yes. But there were reasonably effective methods available long before 1938, if you knew where to look. Delia would have known. Seven children, twenty-five grandchildren—that’s bound to ripple the timeline a bit. But, to get back to my point, she told me Abel was killed right after that last jump.”
“Killed how?”
“Murdered,” Connor says, flipping his book shut. “I don’t know if it was the KKK or some other group, but he was lynched.”
Katherine narrows her eyes at him. “We only have Delia’s word on that. There’s no record of a lynching in Athens after 1921.”
“Lynched? Why was he lynched?” I ask.
Connor shrugs. “A man of color involved with a white woman in the 1930s. In Georgia. If I had to guess, I’d say someone saw them together and took offense. And Katherine’s right—there’s no record of a lynching in Athens in the 1930s. But you’ve got a little county just to the south, only seven miles or so down the road, that split off during Reconstruction. A major lynching there in 1905. Another nearby in 1946. And plenty of lynchings were never recorded.”
“What about the third person who was there, Grant? Maybe he could—”
“I was never able to locate him,” Katherine says. “Delia told me she didn’t know where he was, hadn’t seen him since she left Athens, right after Abel died. And then she said she’d see me in hell before she’d give me those keys.” Her blue eyes are troubled. “I understand her being upset, obviously. But it’s not like I had anything to do with his death.”
“Did you tell her it was Saul who sabotaged the jump?”
Katherine nods. “But I made it clear that I knew nothing about what he was going to do. I combed through all of my diaries, Kate, over and over—looking for clues as to why he did this, when he started planning it. And I can’t find anything. There were a few odd events, yes. I think you watched the entry where I was complaining about his taking unapproved medicines on a jump.”
I nod, and she goes on. “And there were a few times he was evasive or secretive, but that was just his nature. He hated anyone knowing about anything that could be perceived as a weakness—never reported sick, even refused to go to CHRONOS Med one time when he burned his arm on a jump. It would never have left a scar if he hadn’t been such a . . .”
She trails off and then adds, “It’s not like I could have stopped him, Kate.”
I don’t say anything. Could she have stopped him? I don’t know. Even if she didn’t know what Saul was planning, she did know he was breaking CHRONOS rules, maybe a lot of them. And she knew he was involved with some questionable people, but she waited to turn him in until it was too late. No, she didn’t know for certain, but she had more to go on than anyone else at CHRONOS.
Katherine is either thinking th
e same thing herself or else she reads my thoughts from my expression, because her face tightens. I brace, afraid she’s about to lose it again, like she did the other night at our meeting, but then I see tears in her eyes.
“You blame me, too, don’t you?”
I glance back over at Connor, who has very conveniently decided to go back to his book, and try to figure out how to tell her the truth without being too harsh.
“No, Katherine. I don’t blame you. I think you made some mistakes, but you were young. People sometimes do stupid things when they’re in love. Although—” I’m about to say I can’t understand why she was in love with Saul. Nothing I’ve seen or heard makes him seem remotely appealing. And even though I catch myself before the words actually come out, she guesses what I’m thinking.
“You didn’t know him then, Kate. He was handsome, suave, smart, and, believe it or not, he could be very nice when he wanted to be. I don’t know how much of that was an act, but I was far from the only one who fell for it.”
“I do have the benefit of hindsight,” I acknowledge, deciding not to mention that Adrienne, the historian I met in Port Darwin, did know Saul, and she found him repulsive, too. “But to get back to the original point, I’m going into Athens with an open mind. I’m not going to assume this guy’s death is unavoidable. For all we know, that assumption is what caused us to fail last time.”
“Because you know best, obviously, based on your many years of experience.” Her voice is dripping with sarcasm, and I’m opening my mouth to snap back when I hear muffled music. It takes me a second to realize it’s a ringtone, coming from inside my swimsuit. It’s the Clash, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” I downloaded that one just before Mom left, when she was having the inevitable second thoughts about leaving her baby girl.
I’m not about to fish it out of my swimsuit in here, so I turn to leave the library. “It’s Mom,” I say as I head down the hall. “We’ll finish this later.”
Mom hasn’t really met anyone to talk to in Italy, since most of her new colleagues speak English as a second language. That means phone calls with her are a bit on the lengthy side, because she has to talk to someone. She’s enjoying Genoa, however—the weather is nice, the food is great, and she’s looking forward to getting started on the research.
And she thinks I should definitely wear the new red sundress to the party. I suspect it’s too dressy for anything billed as a barbecue, but Trey did say that this is more likely to be the grilled-scallops and brisket-on-brioche type of barbecue than burgers and baked beans.
The sundress does seem much more likely to take Trey’s breath away than the denim skirt and silk tee I’d planned to wear, and I really do want to take his breath away tonight. The rain from earlier in the day has cleared up, so it should be warm enough. I finally give in to temptation and take the dress off the hanger, then search around for some shoes that match.
Unfortunately, the sundress doesn’t offer a hiding place for the medallion, and there are far too many Cyrists around who might recognize it for me to wear it openly. I finally pop it into the leather pouch Kiernan gave me and tape it to my abdomen with an oversized bandage, like the one that I wore on my leg after my encounter with the Cyrist Dobermans. And I snag two of the smaller Band-Aids for my knuckles, which I really need to stop chewing when I’m nervous.
I apply a touch of lip gloss, slip into the sandals, and grab my clutch bag and the bandages so that I can return them to the cabinet where Katherine keeps her large supply of medicines, herbals, and mystery teas. I check the hallway and peer over the banister before going downstairs. I’ve managed to avoid Katherine since our argument in the library, and bumping into her right now would spoil my party mood.
Connor is making coffee when I walk in, and I’m surprised to see he’s using the coffee grinder and beans that Dad bought. Maybe there’s hope for him. He turns when I close the cabinet door. A smile spreads across his face. “Wow. There’s a girly-girl inside you after all.”
I blush but return the smile. “I let her out to play every now and then. If she behaves.”
“Oh my God, poor Trey.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s going to walk up to that door in a few minutes thinking he has some degree of control over this evening, only to have that illusion completely shattered the second he lays eyes on you in that dress.”
I glance down. It is a little lower cut than what I usually wear, but I hadn’t really thought I was entering jezebel territory. “It’s too revealing, isn’t it? Maybe I still have time to change.”
“No, no, no.” Connor reaches out and grabs my elbow. “It’s not even close to indecent. I just meant that you look beautiful. Trey won’t be able to take his eyes off of you, and he’ll probably have to fight to defend his turf from the other guys. Well played, Kate, well played.”
I raise an eyebrow, partly because I’m unsure how I feel about being referred to as turf and partly because he’s turned a simple clothing decision into something that sounds very Machiavellian. I mean, I did pick it because I thought Trey would like it, but . . .
“Trust me, Kate. You should definitely wear the dress. And I’m speaking from experience, both as a former teenage boy and as a father.”
“So,” I ask, “you’d have let Andi wear it?”
Andi is his daughter. Or rather, was. Connor didn’t use to talk about his kids, but lately he’ll bring up some little thing he remembers or mention an anniversary or birthday. Andi would have graduated college this year, if she existed in this timeline. His youngest, Christopher, is gone as well, just like Connor will be if he’s ever caught outside of a CHRONOS field.
Connor nods, but his smile turns a little sad. “Yes, I would’ve let Andi wear it. But I’d also have been at the door to make sure that her date remembered she was still my little girl. And on that note, I’m going to go give Harry a heads-up that he needs to get ready to answer the door.”
Dad’s overbearing-father act needs serious work. It doesn’t help that he’s a good four inches shorter than Trey, but the biggest issue is that it’s just not his personality type. He does manage one lame, half-joking comment about getting me home by midnight, but it’s clear from Connor’s expression, as he watches from inside the kitchen doorway, that he is totally unimpressed with Dad’s performance. I’m pretty sure lessons on how to intimidate your daughter’s boyfriend will commence as soon as we’re out of earshot.
Trey’s car is parked out front, half-hidden by the hedge that wraps around the front and sides of Katherine’s yard. Once we’re past the line of parental sight, he turns toward me and takes my hand, pulling me in closer. He’s looking incredibly handsome in navy pants and the same blue shirt he wore when we had breakfast at his house on my birthday, just before our misadventure at the Cyrist temple.
Even if I were the type to fault him for a first-date wardrobe repeat, which I’m most definitely not, I can’t hold Trey accountable for what he can’t remember. I’m much more interested in the other thing that’s the same—the very familiar light in his eyes when I smile up at him.
“Listen,” he says, “I know your Dad and Connor might prefer that the kiss come at the end of the evening, when I’ve returned you safely to your doorstep, but it has been ten entire days. And you look—whoa.” He shakes his head and gives me that grin, the one that just melts me, and then follows up with a long, lingering kiss.
“I missed you,” he says into my hair when we come up for air.
I lean into his chest, breathing him in. “I missed you, too.”
After a moment, Trey reaches over to open the car door for me. Once I’m in, he crouches down and runs his forefinger along the underside of my bottom lip. “Now I see why tradition holds that the kiss comes at the end of the date. How much lipstick am I wearing?”
I laugh and rub his lips with my fingertip, which removes the gloss but not the color. “Hmm,” I say as he gets behind the wheel. “Maybe we should find you a Kleenex
or something before you meet the rest of Briar Hill?” I open the glove compartment, and there’s a small stack of fast-food napkins—I’m pretty sure they’re the same ones that Trey gave me in the other timeline, when I was in tears after my meeting with Other-Dad.
I hand him the napkins, and he scrubs his mouth, but it’s still a little pink.
He flips the mirror back up and smiles as he starts the engine. “Oh, well. I guess I could just kiss you again when we walk in the door so that they have no questions about where the lipstick came from. Or who you’re with.”
Connor’s turf comment echoes briefly in my mind, and I shake my head, laughing. “That would make an interesting first impression. So . . . where is this place?”
“Just off of Falls Road.” He nods toward the holder on the dash, where his phone is displaying a GPS app. I zoom in close to the destination and see huge blocks of green.
“Good thing we didn’t opt for casual dress,” I say. “We’re definitely headed into Estate Territory.”
“Yeah, I noticed. I hate this type of thing,” he says as he merges onto Rockville Pike. “It’s always a game of one-upmanship—who has the fastest car, the biggest house, the most obscure and expensive artwork. There will be at least one truly awful sculpture or painting in an alcove that’s carefully lit to ensure you simply can’t miss it. I think it is written into the contract when you buy a house with more than eight thousand square feet.”
I don’t say anything, mostly because I have zero experience on that front. Katherine’s house is easily the largest I’ve been in, but she decorates with books and Connor’s odd contraptions, designed to boost the CHRONOS field. Trey’s house is probably the second largest, but it felt like a home, not a museum.
“I’m sorry,” he says, squeezing my hand. “I don’t mean to be negative. It’s just that I saw so much of this at the school in Peru. I’d finally managed to find a group of friends who were laid-back, but then we moved. I only agreed to finish up at Briar Hill because Dad said it wasn’t as snooty. But now with this Carrington Day merger, I’m beginning to wonder.”