“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?”