Timebound(106)

“Just be sure that you don’t let him know the reason why…”

“I won’t,” Katherine said. “I’m going to follow your instructions to the letter. Skip the next jump, keep the gyno appointment, and avoid discussing my suspicions about Saul’s actions—and that’s all they are, I would remind you, suspicions—until the 26th. I’ll make the jump on the 27th. I just hope you—or maybe I should say we—are doing the correct thing here.”

I thought back to Connor’s comments a few weeks earlier. “So do I. But as a good friend of mine—of ours, actually—recently told me, I’m pretty sure that what we’re doing is right. Sometimes, right and correct aren’t the same thing.”

She didn’t look entirely convinced, but she nodded and took a few steps toward the exit, before turning back. “Just in case we run into the ersatz Mrs. Salter, perhaps we should leave separately? She seems to have taken a rather intense dislike to you and your young friend.”

I agreed, and Katherine headed toward the door. I don’t know if it was a premonition or just that I was feeling nervous, but I only gave her about a twenty-second lead and then I headed toward the same exit that she had taken. As luck would have it, a large group burst through the door and I shoved my way against the tide of the crowd, which was almost entirely over the age of sixty. I muttered apologies and stood on tiptoe to look for Katherine over their shoulders as I pushed through the last few people and began to make my way down the steps in front of the building. One old woman rapped me on the leg with her walking cane. I really couldn’t blame her, since I’d nearly knocked her down.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t—” I began, and then stopped short as someone shoved the woman directly into me. I stumbled on the first step and just barely caught her before she fell. I was busy trying to set her back on her now very shaky feet when her assailant put his palm against my chest and pushed hard.

I fell down the last two steps and landed ungracefully on my backside. The man’s suit threw me off for a moment, since I’d previously seen him only in a ratty T-shirt and jeans. The jagged scar near his right temple was new, and it looked a bit like something that one might get if he were whacked very hard with a tire iron. He had added a truly pathetic little mustache, but there was no mistaking the face. I’d seen it too recently and much too closely for my liking.

“Hi, Katie,” Simon said with a glint in his eye. “Imagine meeting you here. Catch you later, okay?”

And with that, he began walking at a rapid clip toward the Sixtieth Street station. Several members of the crowd I’d just pushed my way through came over to help me up, and one rather gallant gentleman, who was eighty if he was a day, tottered a few steps after Simon, shouting and shaking a fist in the air.

By the time I was on my feet, Simon was halfway to the station. A bit farther ahead I saw Katherine, who hadn’t managed to shake Prudence. The two of them were approaching the platform where the mayor’s group had assembled to await the train, which was chugging toward the stop. I raised my skirt and managed a weak imitation of a run, but it was clear that I wouldn’t reach them before Simon did.

The only thing I could hope was that my voice would travel better than I could. I pulled in a deep breath and shouted, pointing directly at Simon, “He’s got a gun! Stop him—he’s got a gun!”

I’m not sure if the group at the station heard me, or if they heard one of the many fairgoers who screamed and repeated “a gun” in the chaos of the next few seconds. But the mayor’s party all looked in our direction. Simon glanced over his shoulder once and then turned back toward the platform, his hand still in his pocket, as Prudence, with a maneuver worthy of a defensive lineman, tackled Katherine to the ground.

They both fell forward, Katherine’s sleeve snagging against the wooden railing, ripping the cloth from shoulder to elbow, just before her head smacked the edge of the platform. The screams of the crowd were now mingling with the roar of the train as it pulled to a stop. Saul knelt beside Katherine, and Prudence jumped to her feet, scanning the faces in the station.

I rammed my way through the mass of people, trying to get closer to Simon, but I couldn’t find him in the crowd. I didn’t think that he would have been brazen enough to make a temporal jump in broad daylight with hundreds of people nearby, but then he had been perfectly willing to make a jump in a crowded Metro station after snatching the diary, so who knew?

Two men in matching suits were walking purposefully toward the mayor. A Columbian Exposition security badge was visible on one of their shoulders. “False alarm, everyone. False alarm—the young lady was mistaken. We have everything in hand.”