Timebound(58)
Katherine took the list from Connor. “I remember those trips—there was a lot going on. The fair was scheduled to close at the end of October, and it was horribly crowded with visitors who had procrastinated but didn’t want to miss out. There was a huge celebration planned for the last day, with fireworks and speeches, but the murder meant that everything was canceled.”
“Murder?” I asked. “Oh, yeah—you mentioned something about a string of killings at the fair…”
“No, no. This was separate. An assassination, actually.”
“McKinley?”
She shook her head. “President McKinley was killed at the next World’s Fair, in New York, in 1901. This time, the target was the mayor of Chicago. Carter Harrison. A very nice man… good sense of humor. Saul and I spent most of the day with him on the second jump and I was sad to think that he would be dead before the day was over.” She paused for a moment and then began to thumb through the stack of diaries on the desk. “Oh, right. That’s the diary Kate had on the subway. Hold on, it will just take a second to access the backup file.”
She grabbed the top diary and flipped it open, clicking a few buttons to locate what she needed. “Okay, here we go. The February jump was to view the reaction to the assassination and the final days of the fair—more general research for CHRONOS than part of my individual research agenda. Cultural research on the Midway, mostly. It was a nice little microcosm, with workers imported from around the world mixing with people from around the United States who had come to Chicago in search of work—the Expo took place in the middle of a major economic depression, you know.”
She chuckled. “I was posing as a writer for a travel magazine—complete with a huge, heavy Kodak camera around my neck. They called it a portable camera, but I was always very happy to take it off at the end of the day. Cameras were the latest fad, especially among the younger fairgoers—the older folks called them ‘Kodak fiends’ because they would jump out and snap pictures without asking.
“It was a fun trip,” she added, “but not very eventful, as I recall. I interviewed several people from the Dahomey Village and picked up a bit of information for a crime historian on a waitress at the German beer garden who had just disappeared. He thought she might have been one of the victims of the serial killer, but I never found any evidence one way or the other.
“The jump from April,” she said, tapping the screen again, “was triggered by an event that caught my attention during an earlier trip—American Cities’ Day, when about five thousand mayors from around the country visited the Expo. Mayor Harrison was scheduled to show a delegation of about fifty mayors and their spouses around the fair, prior to his big speech before the full assembly of mayors that afternoon. One of the individuals in this select group was the first female mayor in the nation, Dora Salter, also a leader in the WCTU—Woman’s Christian Temperance union . Prohibition? Anti-alcohol?”
I had a vague recollection of someone’s ninth-grade history project about Carry Nation bashing up a bar with her ax, so I nodded.
“Salter was no longer an active mayor at the time, and I suspect that someone with a twisted sense of humor added her to that invitation list,” Katherine continued. “Carter Harrison was well known for his gallantry toward the ladies, but he was a hard drinker and most definitely not in favor of the WCTU’s anti-vice agenda. I thought there might be some interesting conversations between the two, so Saul and I blended into the group, with him claiming to be the mayor of a little town in Oregon and me as his wife. But it was really a waste of time—Salter turned out to be this meek little mouse of a woman and the two of them never even spoke after they were introduced.”
“You have to wonder why she ran for political office if she was shy. Especially back then,” I added, “when most women couldn’t even vote.”
Katherine nodded. “Women could vote in local elections in Salter’s state—Kansas—but she didn’t actually choose to run. Some of the men in the town added her name to the ballot as a joke, and they were very surprised to discover that most of the women and quite a few of the men preferred her to the other candidate. I do have to admire her for turning the tables on them and actually taking the job when she was elected, but that was apparently the extent of her activism for women’s rights.
“A very disappointing trip overall,” Katherine said. “Although I did finally manage a ride on the Ferris wheel. The line was always too long when I went on my few solo jumps, and Saul was never willing to wait for me when we went together—he is terribly afraid of heights. This time we were in the group with the mayor, however, so we were moved straight to the front of the line. A lot of people decided to wait on the ground, but Saul didn’t want to look like he was a coward. So he was green the entire time and nearly hurled on the peanut vendor when we got off,” she added, with a very satisfied smile.