“I returned to the stable point—the barn—several times over the next few weeks and tried to contact headquarters. But I could see nothing—just a black void with occasional bursts of static. I tried to correspond using one of the diaries that I had packed, but it vanished. It was as though everything from my time no longer existed.”
“So why didn’t you go back to the day before you left?”
Connor nodded. “I asked that, too.”
“You’ve both seen too many movies, I’m afraid. I couldn’t just zip from one location to any other point in time. The CHRONOS key allowed me to emerge at one preprogrammed stable point and then return to CHRONOS headquarters when my work was done. No side trips allowed.
“Fortunately,” she continued, “CHRONOS historians followed the Boy Scout motto: ‘Be Prepared.’ If we could not contact headquarters, we were to find a way to blend in and lie low for a year or two. And, after that point, if we still had no contact with home, we were to give up and try to create normal lives in our new time and place.”
Using a safe-deposit key stitched into her undergarments, Katherine had retrieved the contents of a box initially set up in 1823 with the Bank of New York. She selected the best option from the array of identities inside, invented a husband who had died in the war in Vietnam, and over the next few months secured a university research position.
She had tried to find information about a few of the other historians whose destinations had been the relatively recent past, including Richard, the friend who swapped places with her and landed in 1853. “I would love to know how he managed to blend in after arriving in the bell-bottom jeans and rather loud shirt he was wearing at the time. He would have been perfectly dressed for Woodstock—but I’m sure that he looked rather ridiculous for 1853. Richard was always clever, however. I eventually learned that he edited a newspaper in Ohio for the next forty years, married, had children and grandchildren. That wasn’t protocol—we were told to avoid having children at all costs—but I would imagine that was a bit hard if you were stranded in the 1850s and wanted a normal life.”
She sighed. “He died in 1913. It was strange to read that he had grown old and died so long ago when I’d seen him just a few weeks before. He was a good friend, although I think he’d have liked to be more than that. If I hadn’t been so fixated on Saul…
“Anyway,” she continued, shaking her head as if to clear it, “I sent a letter to the granddaughter who was Richard’s caregiver before he died. I told her I was writing a history on nineteenth-century journalists and her grandfather was one of the people I was researching, and I was surprised when she asked me to visit in person. When I arrived, she went straight to her china cabinet and pulled out a CHRONOS key.
“She said that her grandfather had always been a bit psychic and he told her that one day when she was in her seventies, a woman named Katherine might come asking questions. If that happened, Richard said that she should give me that old medallion and his diary, because I’d know what to do with them.
“I packed Richard’s key away with my other belongings when I married Jimmy, a few months later. He was a young history professor, and I was a newly widowed research assistant, six months pregnant with your mother and Prudence.”
She smiled softly. “Jim should have been born in an era where knights-errant rescued damsels in distress—when he met me, he became a man with a mission. I was reluctant to marry so quickly. CHRONOS members were told to wait at least a year before making the decision on how to best assimilate. But I knew better than the others that this was, in all likelihood, something worse than a mere technical glitch. Jim and I were married before the girls were born and they were, in every sense other than biological, truly his girls. I could not have asked for a more devoted husband and father.”
“So Mom doesn’t know?” I asked. “I mean, even after the accident, you didn’t tell her that Jim wasn’t her father?”
Katherine looked a bit surprised at the suggestion. “Do you really think that I should have told her? She was angry enough at me as it was—telling her a different lie about a father killed in Vietnam was pointless. And telling the truth would just have convinced her that I was insane. I did the only thing I could do after Jim died—I tried to get her sister back from Saul. And I failed.”
Her comment explained so many other things that I found myself unsurprised that Prudence was alive—or at least, that Katherine believed Prudence had survived the crash.
“It never occurred to me that either of the girls might be able to activate the key,” Katherine continued. “There had only been a few generations of CHRONOS historians and… well, it’s not as though we carried CHRONOS equipment around in public. If the children of historians had ever shown an ability to activate the equipment, it wasn’t something I’d been told.
“I kept my key in my jewelry box. I’m not sure why. I wouldn’t have left my family if it had suddenly become active, but I guess it was just a memento—a reminder of a world that seemed almost unreal to me by that time.” She paused for a moment. “And I knew that Saul had made a jump. He was stranded, too. He thought that destroying the stable point on the CHRONOS end would mean that he had free rein—that it would allow him to go from one stable point to the next, from one time to the next, without limits. And it might have worked, but… I still don’t know what happened that day. Wherever, whenever Saul landed, however, I’m quite sure he blames me for wrecking his plans.”
Katherine toyed with the chain around her neck. “I never imagined that the key would be dangerous to the girls. Prudence found it a few months before she disappeared. She and Deborah were looking for old items to use as costumes for a school play. I don’t know how long Prudence held it or what she saw. I do know that she and your mother got into a rather nasty fight because Prudence insisted the medallion was glowing green and your mother couldn’t see it—she was convinced it was another of her sister’s little jokes.”
She was quiet for several seconds. “So what did you do?” I prodded.
“I did what most mothers would have done—I took it away, yelled at both of them, and said I was tired of their silly arguments. I refused to take either side or to discuss the issue when Prudence raised it later.” Katherine’s blue eyes dimmed a bit and she looked down at her hands. “That was a mistake. I know that now. I think she saw something that… troubled her. Maybe it was the same black void that I still see when I try to activate it—but I don’t think so. She started having nightmares and was moody. Well, she was always a bit moody, but… more so… after.”
A tear slid down Katherine’s face, dropping onto her sleeve. “I thought she was getting past it. Then, a few weeks later, I was going to walk into Georgetown with Deborah to buy her some new shoes. It was a Saturday and Jim was taking Prudence to her violin lesson, which was on campus. Prudence had this sneaky look on her face as she got into the car, but I assumed that was because she was wearing a lot more makeup than I usually allowed—Deborah said she had a crush on her violin instructor. As they pulled out of the drive, Prudence gave me a sassy grin and held up something that looked like my CHRONOS key, glowing a soft orange…
“We only had the one car—so following them was out of the question. If it had been a decade later, we would have had cell phones. I could have called and told him to come right back so that I could take the damned thing away from her.
“Instead, I ran to my bedroom and dug through the dresser drawer where I’d hidden the key, and to my surprise, the key was right where I’d left it. I decided that Prudence must have found a similar piece of costume jewelry, and Deborah and I headed downtown as planned. But something kept nagging at me—hadn’t Prudence said the medallion glowed green for her? So why would she have bought costume jewelry that was orange? Still, I couldn’t think of any other explanation.
“And then I remembered the box in the attic,” she said. “We ran back to the house—Deborah was furious, of course, that I had changed my mind after a half-mile walk. Anyway, I found the old trunk with my items from before Jim and I were married—and sure enough, it was open and Richard’s key, the one his granddaughter had given me, was gone.”
Katherine heaved a sigh, then stood and walked into the kitchen. After a few minutes, I heard her let Daphne in. The dog was apparently sensitive to her owner’s mood, because she was far more subdued than I had ever seen her. She padded softly over to the couch and sniffed around in Connor’s lap, looking for gingersnap crumbs, apparently. He fished a cookie from the bottom of the box and tossed it into the air. Daphne caught it with a snap of her jaws and stretched out at my feet, anchoring the prize between her paws and nibbling at the edges.
I was about to follow Katherine into the kitchen, but Connor shook his head. “She’ll be back soon,” he said. “It’s difficult for her to talk about this.”
I nodded. “My mom, too. But I think I know the rest, anyway. Mom said Prudence was never found, and her dad died that evening at the hospital. They don’t know why he lost control of the car. I don’t think Mom even got to talk to him, so I guess he never woke up?”
“He spoke to Katherine. He was in and out of consciousness, and—”
He cut off the sentence as Katherine appeared in the doorway, looking frail and tired. “Jim only spoke for a few seconds. He said, ‘She was there and then she was just gone. The car… I lost control.’ And then he grabbed my hand so tightly and said, ‘Where did she go, Katherine?’ And then Jimmy was gone, too. Not literally, like Prudence, but…”
She ran one hand across her short gray hair and leaned against the wall. “The nurse and Deborah were both in the room. I’m sure they assumed he meant that the river had pulled Prudence away—that he was confused about the order of events. But I saw the look of disbelief in his eyes, Kate. I knew what he meant. She disappeared—and seeing someone vanish from the seat next to you when you’ve never seen anything of the sort… well, I’m not too surprised that Jim forgot about the road.”
Katherine fell silent after that. I didn’t know what to say, and I was relieved when Connor shifted the conversation. “Maybe we should focus on what happened to Kate this morning. Can you tell us any more about the guy who took your bag?”
“My age, maybe a bit older? Kiernan said his name was Simon. He had a black shirt, with something like a band logo on the front, but I didn’t recognize the band. A bit on the chubby side… looked like a hard-core gamer.”
“A gamer?” Katherine asked.
“Out of shape, pale, rarely sees sunlight,” Connor said.
“Yeah,” I said. “He was writing something—kept looking down at his notes. I got a better look at the other guy, actually. Kiernan. Tall…”