“And what are you staring at?” he asked, glancing down at his shirt as though looking for spilled mustard or mayo.
I smiled at him and then focused again on the medallion, pulling up the image of the stable point that I’d set near one of the library windows. The image was clear enough that I could see Katherine’s reflection in the window, looking toward the spot from which I had just embarked. I concentrated to pull up the time display, which was stamped with my departure time, plus five seconds. I blinked, as before, and opened my eyes to find Katherine a few steps in front of me, with an elated smile on her face.
“I didn’t think I would ever see anyone do that again.” There were tears in her eyes as she hugged me. “You know, Kate—we might just have a shot at this.”
The next morning, as I was reading through more of Katherine’s diary entries, I realized we were taking the wrong track in trying to pin down the murder date. “Why don’t I just watch the jump sites around that time for a few minutes just before Katherine’s scheduled arrival? We start with the last jumps, and the first one where she appears—that would have to be the trip during which she was murdered, right? Because she wouldn’t have been alive to make any jumps after that.”
Connor and Katherine gave each other an amused look. “Now that we have someone who can make the CHRONOS equipment work, that’s an excellent idea,” Katherine said. “This time, we were the ones thinking too linearly, I guess.”
Katherine hadn’t included the arrival time in the list of dates she had printed, so Connor went back through the diaries to pull out that information, pausing every few minutes to pull another pretzel rod from the clear plastic tub by his keyboard. I wasn’t sure which was more amazing—that Connor was thin despite the constant munching, or that his keyboard continued to function despite the variety of crumbs that were collected between the keys.
When he finished the list, I scanned through and noticed that several of the dates were repeated or overlapped. “Why are the same dates here twice?”
Katherine shrugged. “There were a lot of different events going on. Sometimes a meeting held at one end of the fairgrounds conflicted with something else we needed to observe—especially on jumps where Saul and I traveled as a team or where we were gathering some information for another historian. We did that a lot in Chicago, because we were the resident ‘Expo Experts’ and almost anyone who studied American history—politics, literature, music, science, you name it—had someone or something they wanted us to observe. For example—you’ve heard of Scott Joplin?”
I nodded. “A piano player, right? Ragtime?”
“Correct,” she said. “Richard—you remember, the friend who swapped places with me on that last jump? Well, he had information that Joplin led a band at a Chicago nightclub during the time of the fair, but there were no specifics. He would have had to spend a lot of time preparing for an 1890s trip, but it was a pretty simple matter for Saul and me to ask around, make a side trip to hear Joplin, and take back a recording for Richard to analyze. I also picked up some data for a colleague studying serial killers—there was a rather nasty one preying on young women during the Expo. And I got a brochure announcing Colored American Day at the fair for someone studying race relations.”
She made a face. “That was an interesting one—the leaders of the Expo decided it would be a good idea to give away watermelons to commemorate the occasion. Frederick Douglass was there representing Haiti—he was consul general to Haiti at the time. Let’s just say he was not amused.”
I laughed. “I would imagine not. But wasn’t it kind of risky to have several versions of yourself wandering around the same place?”
“Not really,” she said. “There were thousands of visitors each day, so as long as we kept away from the area where our earlier selves were working, there really wasn’t much chance of anyone spotting both sets of us. The CHRONOS costume and makeup department was also incredible. I saw myself on one occasion crossing the street, and I didn’t even realize it was me until I was halfway down the block. And we generally kept a pretty low profile, observing but not really interacting much—well, I did, at any rate. Saul clearly had different ideas near the end.”
The last jump before Saul sabotaged the system was to Boston 1873, when he and Katherine had quarreled. There were one or two other jumps to Boston, but most of the twenty-two jumps prior to that were all to Chicago, at various points during the year 1893.