Timebound(16)

“Where is Katherine? Let me in.”

“Yes, of course!”

“Can you pay the cab? He stole my bag.”

Connor looked confused. “The driver?”

“No—a guy on the Metro.” Daphne was barking loudly, and Connor held her collar to keep her from dashing out the door.

“Yes, yes, I’ll pay him. Take Daphne.” He grabbed shoes from the hall closet. The driver began honking, inciting Daphne to ratchet up her noise level as well. “Katherine! Come down!” Connor called as he headed out the door. “Kate is here.”

Katherine appeared at the top of the stairs a few moments later, pulling a robe over her nightgown as she hurried down to greet me. “Kate! Why aren’t you at school, dear? You look frightened. What on earth? Sit down, please.” She motioned toward the sofa and slapped her hand against her thigh. “Daphne! Outside!”

She led Daphne to the kitchen door and I sat down, trying to catch my breath. I peeled off my shoe to inspect the toes that had been crushed by… Simon, Kiernan had called him, although I still thought of him as Pudgy. Two of the toes were a deep angry red, and one toenail had been squished so badly that it was ripped down to the quick. I gritted my teeth and pulled off the nail fragment to keep it from snagging on my sock.

Connor reentered the house just as Katherine came back in from the kitchen. I saw a soft blue glow through the threads of his jeans pocket and was relieved to know that he had a medallion. It hadn’t occurred to me that he, too, might be in danger.

He sat down in the armchair across from the sofa. “Did you find out who robbed her?”

“Robbed?” Katherine exclaimed. “Kate, what happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, pulling my sock back on carefully. I slipped off my other shoe and slid them both under the coffee table. “Some guy on the Metro now has your diary, however—and my iPod and textbooks. I’m sorry, Katherine. I would have tried to fight him off, but the Metro was crowded and… he had a gun. Or something that felt like a gun, poking into my side.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You did the right thing. I have several other diaries here and that volume is backed up in the computer system.”

Connor nodded. “We can track the original, too—so we may be able to get it back. I doubt a mugger will be too concerned with looking at an old diary, anyway. And he won’t be able to activate it.”

“Does this happen often on the Metro?” Katherine asked.

“What?” I shook my head. “No—I mean yes, people get mugged occasionally. I never have—the Metro’s safe, really. But this wasn’t just somebody grabbing a random backpack. He knew what he was doing. He wanted the diary. He saw me with it yesterday. And I think he had a medallion—like yours.”

Katherine looked at Connor skeptically, then back at me. “Are you sure? I don’t think—”

“No, I’m not sure about the mugger. But he did vanish into thin air—twice. And I saw a medallion under Kiernan’s shirt—” I stopped as Connor and Katherine simultaneously drew in sharp, startled breaths.

“His name was Kiernan?” asked Connor. “How do you know that?”

“Yes. Kiernan… Dunn or Duncan, I think. But he was not the mugger. He’s the one who told me to run. Dark eyes, dark hair, tall, and…” I trailed off, sure that I was blushing. “Why? Do you know him? He wanted to know why I wasn’t wearing a medallion. He told me to get here, to your house, as fast as I could, that something was about to happen, but he would stall them if he could, to give me time.”

Connor and Katherine exchanged another look. “Kiernan Dunne was my great-grandfather,” Connor said after a moment. “And I find it unlikely that he would be doing anything to help us.”

I had forgotten that Connor’s last name was Dunne, and I can’t say that there’s much resemblance between the two of them, except perhaps around the nose. And Connor was at least thirty years older than Kiernan—or, at any rate, at least thirty years older than the Kiernan who kissed me on the Metro. I sank farther into the couch.

“Maybe you should start from the beginning,” Katherine suggested.

I recounted my steps from the time I left Katherine’s house on Monday morning until the cab brought me back to her doorstep. I glossed over a few bits—I wasn’t sure how she would feel about Charlayne reading the diary and our experimental efforts to determine its composition, and I most definitely was not ready to share the kiss. It wasn’t something I wanted to discuss in front of my grandmother, or for that matter, in front of someone who claimed to be the great-grandson of the guy who had kissed me. Things were weird enough without complicating matters further.