Prudence reached into the bodice of her dress and tugged out a thick gold chain with a CHRONOS key at the end. She quickly scanned the area around us and then activated it. “Stay away from Kiernan and stay out of my way. If you can remember those two little things, you should be okay.
“Oh, and be nice to your mother,” she added. Her eyes twitched down to the CHRONOS key and then she was gone.
20
The wooden bench was empty. Kiernan had been watching us intently, and I turned around immediately to see how he would react to Prudence’s disappearing act. But he was no longer there. It seemed strange that he would have waited patiently for so long and then simply run off without saying anything.
The only person who had been there the entire time was the groundskeeper, who was putting his push broom back into a tiny alcove on the outside of the booth.
“Excuse me,” I said. “There was a boy, waiting for me on the bench here. Did you by any chance see where he went?”
“Yes’m,” he said, glancing up briefly, and then back down at the ground. “You mean Li’l Mick, right?”
I nodded, wondering exactly how many people at the Expo the kid knew.
“He took off that way mebbe a minute ago, miss,” the old man said, tilting his head toward the Midway Plaisance. “He looked to be followin’ a gen’l’man who come runnin’ through from across the way—from over where the state buildins are.”
My breath caught in my throat. “Do you remember what the man looked like? It’s important.”
“Well, I din look real close, miss—I was sweepin’,” he said, his forehead creasing as he tried to remember. “But he looked young t’me, ’bout your age mebbe. Di’n’ look like he worked outside much, kinda pasty-lookin’. And di’n’ look like he missed too many meals either, if y’know what I mean,” he added with a low chuckle. “Mick’ll be able to keep up with ’im, no doubt there. He’s a smart li’l cricket.”
“Thank you,” I said, giving him a shaky smile over my shoulder as I ran toward the Midway entrance.
The description was too much like Simon to be a coincidence. Was Kiernan working with him? His older self and Simon had been on the Metro together. And they’d apparently been friends or at least compatriots at some point, based on what Simon had said when he attacked me in Katherine’s front yard.
I had a hard time believing Kiernan was in on this, however. It seemed more likely that the boy had realized Simon was the one I’d pointed toward when yelling, “He has a gun!” Maybe he was still acting as my assistant, and trying to keep tabs on Simon for me.
Either way, his absence worried me. But what really baffled me was why Simon would be going to the Midway. If he’d come back to make a second attempt on Katherine’s life, which was the only reason I could think of that he’d be back at all, why was he going in the opposite direction from the stable point on the Wooded Island?
And then I remembered—there were two Katherines wandering around the Expo today. That first trip was also in the diary that Simon grabbed when he took my backpack. Having been thwarted in his attempt to kill Katherine at the station, he had just moved on to the next logical target.
Connor’s voice in my head was telling me to go back to the stable point, head home, and have another go at this after we’d had a bit of time to plan. But the idea of trying to tail Simon and, at the same time, avoid running into myself or anyone I’d seen that day, seemed fraught with even more problems than trying to find him here and now on the Midway. And he couldn’t be too far away—I was only a minute or so behind him.
I just prayed that Kiernan wasn’t with him. I really didn’t think the boy would be helping Simon—it seemed too out of character—but I had to admit that I hadn’t known Kiernan long enough to be completely certain. And if he was simply following Simon, I just hoped he would be careful, because I was pretty sure that Simon wouldn’t hesitate to hurt him. Or use him as bait.
The Midway was much more crowded and noisy than it had been earlier in the day. I had to veer off the sidewalk into the main street in order to avoid a large group lining up to enter the one o’clock showing at Hagenbeck’s Trained Animals exhibit. Colorful banners over the entryway displayed a collection of elephants, lions, and tigers patiently standing on a pyramid of platforms, watched over by a ringmaster cracking his whip. The temperature had increased since the morning and the air around the building now had the stale, fetid odor that I remembered from the one sad little circus I’d attended as a child. That didn’t seem to affect the enthusiasm of the people in the line, but in this era, I supposed that most of them had seen these exotic animals only in paintings and black-and-white photographs.