Timebound(30)

I gave him my own two-minute bio—or at least the version that had been true an hour ago—and we talked music and movies for a few minutes. Or, rather, Trey talked while I listened and nodded.

As we headed up the escalator into the sunlight, I stopped and closed my eyes, taking in a deep breath to steady myself.

“Are you okay?” Trey asked.

I shook my head. “It’s only a few blocks to the townhouse, and I… I don’t think she’ll be there. And I’m scared.” It felt odd saying this to someone I barely knew, but Trey was so friendly that it was hard to stay distant.

“Well,” he said, “we cross that bridge when we come to it, right?”

When we arrived, I didn’t even have to try the key. I stared up at the windows of the house as Trey opened the mailbox and peeked in—all of the mail was addressed to someone named Sudhira Singh. But I had known as soon as we’d rounded the corner that Mom didn’t live there. Pink ruffled curtains with tiebacks would never be in any house where Deborah Pierce lived. If such curtains had come with the place, they would have been down and in the trash before the first box was out of the moving truck.





7





I seemed to have lost every bit of energy I possessed, and it was all I could do to move from the steps in front of the townhouse. Trey took charge and steered us toward Massachusetts Avenue, where we found a coffee shop. He sat me at a booth by the window and came back with two coffees and two blueberry muffins. I promised to pay him back, but he just laughed, saying coffee and muffins made me a cheap date, relatively speaking.

“So why do you think this time-shift thing made your dad and your mom… disappear?” he asked. “You said it happened twice before, and no one vanished. Why this time?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t really stopped to think about that.” I paused for a moment, going over what I knew in my head. “There were two photographs at my grandmother’s house—her friend, Connor, said they used to be identical copies of the same family portrait. One had been kept in a protected area—an area shielded from time shifts by one of these medallions. The other photo wasn’t. When I saw them today, they were portraits of two different families, headed by the same man.”

I took a sip of my coffee before continuing. “Something must have shifted the course of the man in the photograph’s life—two different paths. And yes, Connor and Katherine could be mistaken or lying—one picture might be Photoshopped, or the men could be twin brothers, I don’t know… But I’m pretty sure the man in both of the portraits is the same man I met on the Metro this morning, just after I was mugged. Only this morning, he was about twenty years younger than when the picture was taken in the 1920s.”

“Wait,” Trey said. “You met the guy in the photos? This morning?”

I nodded. “He warned me that something was about to happen. And I watched him disappear while he was holding a medallion just like this one.”

I gave Trey a weak smile. “All of this sounds just as crazy to me as it does to you. But to answer your question about why my mom and dad have vanished, I think something was changed in the past. Something that affected my family.”

I relayed the story my grandmother had told me, realizing as I spoke that there were huge gaps in what I knew. I explained about CHRONOS and how Katherine had escaped into 1969. “If I had to guess,” I concluded, “I’d say that Saul finally caught up to my grandmother in the past. If she never had my mother, then I was never born and my father…” I shrugged. “There would be no reason for him to be at Briar Hill. Or something else changed and my mom and dad, and maybe me…? I have no idea how this works. Maybe we’re all still in Iowa…”

Trey stood up from his side of the booth and motioned for me to slide over. He squeezed his tall frame into the seat next to me and removed a small laptop from his messenger bag. “Then that sounds like the place to start—let’s find your parents. Is it Debra or Deborah? And how do you spell Pierce?”

I looked at him skeptically. “You believe me? You actually believe all of this?”

He took a bite of the muffin, chewing it slowly as he considered his answer. “No,” he said. “Don’t be offended, please. You said yourself, it’s crazy. I don’t believe that reality has shifted and that the medallion around your neck will cause you to disappear. Although I have to admit that it made me nervous when you were holding it in your hand earlier, so maybe I don’t entirely disbelieve you, either.”