“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?”
“No, those are not CHRONOS-issue.” I sighed. “I was in a hurry, Katherine.”
“Why? If you’re not from CHRONOS, how can you use that key? And why do you have two keys? No one gets two keys.”
“It’s kind of complicated,” I said.
That had been true from the beginning, but now it was even more difficult to know how much I should tell Katherine. I had no way of knowing whether Simon coming back to kill her meant that Prudence had failed in her promise to stop the attacks. He might simply have shown back up before she had time to force the issue. Things would have been so much simpler if I believed that Prudence would (or even could) keep her word, but I really didn’t—there were just too many variables.
Given that her jump had originated from CHRONOS headquarters, Katherine couldn’t leave from anywhere other than the stable point at which she’d arrived, and I couldn’t leave until I was certain she was on her way back to her own time. That meant my safe, quick, semidressed exit was out of the question. Resigned, I dropped the dress to the floor and stepped into the middle, pulling it up over my shoulders, and then turned my back toward Katherine. “Would you mind?” I asked, pointing to the laces.
She yanked the laces as I sucked in my breath. “We have to get you out of here,” I said. “Holmes isn’t after you, but someone else is—someone with a CHRONOS key. You need to go straight back to HQ. But—you can’t tell them about me, Katherine. Believe me. Nothing is more important than this. Don’t put this in your diary and don’t discuss it with anyone, not even Saul. Convince Angelo to cancel your jumps for a few months. Take a vacation, or a sabbatical—whatever you have to do.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible,” Katherine said as she started buttoning up the dress. “I don’t run CHRONOS—Angelo doesn’t even run CHRONOS. And I can’t control other people’s actions, only my own. Believe me. I’ve tried a few times.”