Timebound(113)
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.”