Timebound(59)

With the date and general location of Katherine’s murder nailed down, we shifted the focus over the next few days to getting me ready—both mentally and physically—to attend the Exposition. The physical side of the preparations involved yards and yards of silk and lace and a corset that I loathed from the first moment it arrived via UPS. Katherine still had her clothes from the planned 1853 jump, but they were forty years out of date. That would hardly do in an era where fashions shifted with the whim of Parisian designers, even though it took several months for news of those changes to reach America from across the ocean.

“So why can’t we just forget all this and let me go dressed as a barmaid?” I asked. “Or one of those Egyptian dancers I saw in the photographs? They looked pretty comfortable…”

Katherine sniffed disdainfully as she sat down at the computer and opened a browser window. “You’ve read enough about this era that you should understand their perceptions of class, Kate. You have no idea where you’ll need to go and whom you’ll need to speak with. A barmaid could never approach the group I was with that day without drawing unnecessary attention. If you’re dressed as a lady, you can ask a question of anyone, regardless of their social class. The proper attire opens doors…”

Katherine ran a search for historical images of dresses from the 1890s and I was surprised to see that there were actual fashion magazines from that era available online. A publication called The Delineator even included tips on how to create the dresses, accessories, and hairstyles.

A local bridal designer came to the house the next day to help design my costume. She raised a well-manicured eyebrow at Katherine’s insistence that the dress be reversible, with a different color fabric on the inside, and that it have two hidden pockets, one in the bodice of the dress and another in the undergarments.

This made sense from our perspective, since I might have to stay an extra day and couldn’t easily walk around the Expo with luggage. I also needed quick access to the CHRONOS key, and Katherine was determined that I have a place to hide a spare medallion and some extra cash, just in case. However, a reversible dress with hidden pockets—heavily lined to contain the light from the medallion—made little sense for a costume party, which was our cover story. After a brief hesitation, the designer simply nodded, showing she was savvy enough not to question eccentric requests by someone willing to pay her outrageous prices.

My role in all this was to stand impatiently as the assistant took my measurements and then to endure repeated fittings, pin sticks, and admonitions to stand straight and stop slumping. The end result was an outfit that, while admittedly the height of 1893 fashion, was going to be hot, stiff, and a royal pain to wear.

When we weren’t engaged in fittings, I read and reread Katherine’s diary entries for the target dates, memorized maps of the Exposition, and combed through dozens of historical accounts of the exhibits and of 1890s Chicago. In addition to the accounts in Katherine’s library, I pulled up documents from the internet.

On two different occasions, Trey rented documentaries about the Exposition and Chicago in the late 1800s. Several were about the Exposition itself, and they really brought the images and stories I’d been reading to life.

One of them gave me the creeps, however. It was filmed like a horror movie, but it was actually a documentary about Herman Mudgett, the sociopathic killer Katherine had mentioned. Posing as Dr. H. H. Holmes, a physician and pharmacist, Mudgett had killed dozens, maybe even hundreds, of young women during the time he lived in Chicago. Several of them were women he had married or simply charmed out of their money, but most were total strangers. He had the perfect setup—a building he owned near the Expo was transformed into the World’s Fair Hotel, catering to female visitors. Some of the rooms had been specifically equipped for torture; in other cases, he piped gas into tightly sealed, windowless rooms through small holes he drilled into the wall, and watched through a peephole as the women asphyxiated. Then he dumped their remains into lime pits in the basement and, in many cases, sold their perfectly articulated skeletons to medical schools for a bit of extra cash.

We didn’t make it all the way through that show. I’m not a big fan of horror movies, even of the true-crime variety, so I ejected the DVD when it became clear that the three little kids Mudgett had been watching for a business partner weren’t going to survive, either. We spent the next hour watching a much more pleasant documentary about Jane Addams and her efforts to help Chicago’s poor. I was still on edge, so we rewatched The Princess Bride to get my mind off the murders. And despite all of that, I had to sleep with the bathroom light on that night.