“We’re in the sewer?” I asked, having no idea where to go next.
“We are indeed,” he said, and one brace slipped on a damp stone. “I hate it in here.”
“It smells terrible,” I said. Even the cologne soap was no match for the stench. “Why does the tunnel under the farm house lead to the sewers?”
“This was part of the Underground Railroad.”
“Wait,” I said, interrupting him. “The actual Underground Railroad?”
“Yes, of course that one. You really did not pay attention in Miss Jayme’s class, did you?” In my defense I only was in her class for half a morning, but whatever, I didn’t want to argue with him.
I suddenly felt foolish.
“Anyway,” continued Lucas, “years later, when the township started planning for a plumbing system, they built the storm drain here. Mr. Rushman saw to it that he was on the city council so he could help survey for the sewer and leave the secret tunnel undiscovered.”
“He was a clever man,” I said.
“He certainly is,” he said, correcting me. “Now then, we go this way. We need to be quiet now because our voices will travel from here up to the street.”
I nodded and followed him through the Underground Freaking Railroad, which was way more interesting than anything we’d ever discussed in Miss Peckerman’s class, but I had to pretend not to see the rats, whether they were alive or skeletal. Rats were gross. They seemed to have no problem eating their fallen friends. We hurried along until Lucas came to another part of the wall that I now could tell was another hidden door. Again there was a soft click, but this time the slab only moved a little.
“Give me a hand,” said Lucas. I braced against the door and grimaced because I no longer knew what kind of strength I had. I walked back a few paces and then ran into the wall, expecting to throw my shoulder out of joint. Instead it flew away from me, and we were in another corridor, weak beams from the gas lights flickering down to us from the street above.
Lucas closed the wall behind us that had sprung free of whatever had been impeding it. “Well, you’re as tough as I remembered.”
“Don’t you forget it,” I said.
“I shan’t.”
“You shan’t?” I laughed at him, the sound echoing around the chamber.
Lucas hushed me, and looked at the ladder. I wondered if he would be able to climb up. He must have figured out what I was thinking, because he leaned into me and kissed me on the back of my fingers before telling me that he was pretty strong himself. His lips were just as warm as his hands, and left a spot on my skin that lingered. But I didn’t reach over to touch it. All of those times I’d sat perfectly still for the EEG machine had trained me well.
“Hold these,” he said, handing me his braces. He set his feet onto a step of the ladder and yanked himself up. It was slow going. I worried that at any moment more pursuers would crash into the room, while we were in such a vulnerable position. I calculated that I could use Lucas’s braces like baseball bats; they seemed sturdy enough to take a few hits without breaking, if I needed them for that. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
I followed Lucas up the ladder, gripping both braces in one hand. He had reached the ceiling.
“I dare say, I think you’re gazing at my bottom,” he said from up above.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said. He laughed a little and pushed the metal cover up and over, and more sunlight burst into the hole. I covered my eyes to give them a chance to adjust.
Pulling ourselves out of the sewers we found ourselves on a quiet side street. It looked vaguely familiar. Maybe this was a section of the original town square that I’d seen before. I held him up while he steadied himself on his crutches. He pointed to a building at the end of this block, away from the main street. “We’re almost there.”
“We’re almost where?” I asked. I was no longer clean from my bath. “Somewhere where I won’t notice you smell like rotting trash?”
“I would almost say you’re not appreciative of my efforts.”
I put my hands on my hips and then was distracted by their shape. “I would almost say you just dragged me through a hill for the sport of it.”
He made an expression I couldn’t place, and before I had time to recognize it, he was off toward the wood structure. We ducked inside and I saw it had once been a bank. A long counter ran the length of the room, protected with dark brass bars that every so often were interrupted with sections mounted on hinges so the tellers could open them when needed. Everything was covered in dust, including the tables that customers had used to fill out deposit and withdrawal requests, and which had been pushed up against the teller windows to make room for something large and bulky in the center of the building. Whatever it was, Lucas was pulling off the canvas that covered it. A cloud of dirt flew up into the air, making us cough.
It was an Auburn Beauty, early 1920s, gun metal gray and burgundy, with extra room for the chauffeur and a snappy leather box mounted on the back. I was pretty sure the trunk wasn’t standard. I ran my hand along the body, feeling the slight changes in density that hand-hammering created. Wild. I’d never seen a car from this era in such good shape. On the other hand, someone had removed the roof, probably so it could be used in racing. There wasn’t a safety belt in sight. I looked at the steering wheel and dashboard. There was a lot of empty space, because other than headlights, the gear shift, and the emergency brake, there wasn’t much to this car. The wood paneling was gorgeous. It was a strange mix of luxury and plain.
“Where did you get this?” I asked, running my hands over the dash. I hopped back out and lifted the hood to take a look at the engine.
“It was Mr. Rushman’s. He bought it after his horses got too old to pull the wagon.
It dawned on me that Mr. Rushman was the man who rescued Lucas after he fell out of the tree. I’d met Mr. Rushman. Holy crap.
“It must have cost a ton.”
“A ton of what?”
“Money, Lucas. I’m just asking, was he rich?”
“Of course he was—is—rich. The town is named after his mother’s family.”
“Oh. Right.” I flashed him a smile like I’d been playing with him. I looked under the hood.
The engine was covered in greasy dust. Or dusty grease, it was hard to tell. The fan attached to it was almost larger than the engine itself. I figured the heat coming off of this thing was intense. Continental, six cylinders, probably not more than 100 horse power, but for a man used to a two-horse wagon, it must have felt like aiming a rocket down the street. I looked around at the distributer cap, the hoses, tugged on the belt to see if it held enough tension, checked the leads coming from the battery. Everything seemed to be in order, so why wasn’t it working?
I found the hand crank behind the front bumper and pushed it into the grill, nearly breaking my thumb as the crank sprang back at me.
“Careful,” said Lucas, like a reflex.
“Thanks so much.”
He rolled his eyes at me and I jumped back behind the wheel. I went through my rusty knowledge of early mechanics. I didn’t want to look nervous in front of Lucas. Check that the brake is on. Check that it’s out of gear. Okay. Check that the ignition is on. Press the starter button. The engine cranked two, three, four times and died, even though I pumped the accelerator.
“I told you it was on the fritz,” said Lucas.
“Did you know there are seventeen different kinds of fritz?”
“I beg your pardon? No, I did not.”
I giggled. Maybe it needed gas. I tapped the fuel gauge. The needle had been pointing to a quarter of a tank, but now it dropped to the far left. Ha.
“I see, you’re teasing me again.”
“Just a little. But I can’t figure out what’s wrong if I don’t play around with it.”
He crutched over to the front window and peeked outside at the street.
“Well, try to make your deductions quietly, please.”
&n
bsp; It was a good point. I nodded, and stopped myself from holding up a finger to my lips.
“Do you have a gas can in here?”
“Um, yes. Somewhere.” He walked over behind the old teller counter and brought out a small can. It was also covered in dirt and dust. If this were Dad’s auto body shop he would have fired the staff. I felt his fingers touch mine as he passed the can to me.
“So this is oil, but thank you.”
Lucas glowered at me.
“I mean, are there more cans back there? I can just go look.” More silence. Terrific, now I was pissing off people in the real world and in my own mind.
I found four cans of gas, popular before gas stations popped up everywhere. I felt around on the shelving—what did bank tellers need shelves for, anyway–and came up with a can opener. Two cans of gas and the car seemed close to full, if not pretty stinky from the fuel.
“I think it’ll work now,” I said, full of bravado. This time I was ready for the crank recoil. The engine rumbled to life.
“Jacqueline, help me with the doors,” said Lucas, heading to the rear of the bank as the building filled up with exhaust. I hopped out of the car and helped him unlatch two wide wooden doors that had been bolted into the floorboards. Leaves and other debris twirled into the bank. He headed over to the car’s passenger side and waved at me.
“We have to hurry.”
He wanted me to drive.
My driving knowledge wasn’t as limited as most of my friends’ because my father had put me behind the wheel many times before, starting with go carts when I was seven. But I really hadn’t driven much beyond a flat track or a parking lot. And I hadn’t tried to shift into gear yet, so if there was an issue beyond needing gas, we could be in trouble.
If Lucas worried that a young woman in the 1920s wouldn’t know how to drive a car, he didn’t say anything. I pushed down the clutch and ground the stick into first. The gears inside bucked at me and then I eased off the brake. We popped past the doors and then second and third gears were easier. He pointed to a rutted road and the car bounced along kicking up dust and revving until I’d find a new gear. The ride was hard; I made a mental note to put more air in the tires.
I guessed we had rudimentary shocks but every pothole threw the car and jolted us. It was like having hot popcorn drive a car. Lucas tapped me on the shoulder; in his hand he held a pair of goggles.
“Don’t forget these,” he said, yelling over the noise of the engine. I fumbled with the strap as I kept one hand on the steering wheel.
“Where are we going?” I hoped I would hear his answer over the noise.
“To your mother’s.”
Too bad I didn’t quite know how to get there. I hoped all roads led to Rome. At least I knew she was up the hill from here.
According to Lucas, she needed me. The woman needed me and thought I was dead.
***
Lucas had me take a roundabout route to the farm house to make sure nobody followed us. I guessed people really did think I was dead, or someone would be watching the house for signs of my reappearance.
“What is she going to say when she sees me?” I asked. I didn’t want to give her a heart attack.
“We’ll find out in a few minutes,” he said, scanning the road behind us. So much had been built up between the farm and the town that now most of the city streets were obscured by outlying buildings. What was once a straight shot from the valley to the hill top, was now a series of turns on farm roads. It wound up being a little bit of cover for why I didn’t know how to get to my own house.
I pulled up to the farm house, and at first only a few brown hens were there to greet us, clucking at the ground and scattering to get away from the dust cloud the tires kicked up. The engine cut out roughly as if it didn’t want to stop chugging. We lumbered out of the car and an older woman came out from behind the house with a basket of laundry in her sun-weathered arms. Her mouth fell open, but she refused to drop the garments, instead setting the basket on a tree stump. She brushed her house dress as she walked over to me. I thought I could see a resemblance in her jawline and eyes to my image in the mirror.
She gripped my elbows, holding me in a way that suggested she’d sized me up like this many times before.
“Jacqueline? My Jacqueline?”
“Hello, mother,” I said, because the obvious was clearly the best. Sigh.
Her expression turned sour, and she looked around at the line of trees that had sprouted up on one side of the long driveway. “Get inside,” she said, pushing me toward the house. “You too, Lucas.” As we hurried up the porch steps, I saw her brush aside a tear.
“I knew you weren’t gone,” she said, and followed us in.
In the small foyer, she shut green curtains and wrapped her arms around me, rocking me. This was not something that happened in my family, but I tried not to squirm. She smelled like powder and clothes dried in the sun. There was no stemming the flow of tears now. After some time, I realized I was crying, too, figuring I’d add that to the layers of weirdness of this whole situation. Lucas walked to the back of the house and I heard the clatter of plates and cutlery. My mother pulled away from me, holding my shoulders this time and inspecting me.
“You’re a grown woman now,” she said, and then she laughed a little. “And you still insist on wearing men’s clothes. Tsk.”
“They’re comfortable,” I said, happy to tell her anything that wasn’t a lie. Which is weirder, I wondered, the grown part or the woman part?
“You need to eat something, I’m sure. Your friend has already made it to the kitchen.” With that, she put her arm on my shoulder and we joined Lucas.
The years had not been kind to her, carving deep lines next to her eyes that dove down her cheeks. Her knuckles were knobby and her back slouched. But she still seemed proud. Was it just her in this enormous house? Nobody ever mentioned my father in all of my time here. Oh, those absent dads of the 1920s.
Each room I could see was like a museum. Wallpaper was lined up perfectly, even though the print in the living room was of small diamonds. The floorboards weren’t varnished, but someone had taken care to put up chair railings. In the living room crown molding ringed the walls. I couldn’t spot any nail holes in the finish work. A line of windows with small panes ran along the wall to the end of the house. The trim was painted white, but none of the glass showed any stray paint marks. It was once a very proud house, but it was clearly too much for her to continue to maintain.
Lucas moved a brass lever and opened a square door in a dark wood cabinet on the wall of the kitchen. He grinned, seeing what it contained, and pulled out a small amount of ham. It hit me that this was an ice box, the thing before people had refrigerators. It was like living in a colonial reenactment. If this was all in my head I had super fantastic reading comprehension that I’d never seen in real life.
He made each of us a plate with ham and buttered sourdough bread, and as we sat at a long table in the kitchen, we talked about how life had changed for my mother after Dr. Traver and his associates took control of the town.
She held up her hands and counted on her fingers. “No music allowed, except from the hymn books in church. No hand-holding between unmarried couples. No dancing, celebrating of birthdays, or associating with those deemed outcasts by the prophet. Of course no drinking, but I was never one for the bottle.”
“Associating?” I asked. “How could anyone stop that?”
“Don’t act like I raised you to be a dummy,” she snapped at me. “People shun you like you never lived here your whole life and they don’t know you. It’s so bad now I can’t even get anything at the grocer’s on Main. Lucas and his father bring me food in the middle of the night now.”
“You do?”
Lucas nodded, pretending he couldn’t talk in the middle of his bite.
“But isn’t your money as good as anyone else’s? What do they care?”
She shook her head at me, pulled apart her piece of ham
and started making a pile of little pink strips on her plate.
“They closed my account, girl. Gave me what little I had in a bag and told me to have a nice day. I made a good go of living off my land, for a while, anyway. I still have the three hens, though they don’t lay much anymore. I kept mating the pigs until they were too inbred. When the cow stopped milking I led her to the corner of the pasture over there—” she pointed with one crooked finger, through the wall of the kitchen and toward the back field—“and shot her through the eye with my shotgun. Her meat lasted me for a long time, through the winter mostly, but it was a bitch to make a hole big enough to bury her. Lucas’s father helped me with that, too. That man is going to heaven for damn sure.”
Lucas smiled but said nothing.
“Wow. All of that is awful.”
“Sure was. Not as awful as the July day that Western Union boy pedaled up here, sweat pouring down his face from under his cap. I knew it was bad news if anyone dared venture all the way up here. Like the day the US Army sent two soldier rejects up to tell me your father died in France in the trenches.”
So that’s what happened.
“This telegram boy thought he looked all official with his black boots up to his knees and his full-length trousers instead of his knickers, but I laughed at him. Maybe I’m a mean old lady, I don’t know. He read the note from some sheriff four towns over saying they’d found your body in a creek, and I just couldn’t believe it. My baby. I knew you had a stubborn streak but you’ve always been smart. Your father and I never’d thought we could have children, but you’d come along and then I lost him, but … I just wasn’t ready to give you up.”
I looked at her hands trembling on the table, her fingers interlaced with each other. She must have been devastated. I reached out and took her hand and squeezed it.
“She wasn’t doing well,” said Lucas finally. “Father found her one night when he was bringing over a box of groceries. He says he helped her inside and made her a meal and drew her a bath.”
The Unintentional Time Traveler (Time Guardians Book 1) Page 8