Timekeeper (16 page)

“I’m afraid it all adds up,” Millicent says. “Especially since she wouldn’t tell me who gave her the key. She feigned ignorance, but I know she stole it. I could see it written across her face.”

My hands ball into fists as I feel an unfamiliar rage burn through me. “So you’re saying that all this time she was boasting to me about time travel, telling me that I could only experience it through her,
if
I married her—was all a lie? The power was really meant to be mine all along?”

“Yes,” Millicent says intently. “We always knew you would be the next Timekeeper in the Henry family. After Byron died, the only time traveler living in the Windsor Mansion should have been
you
.”

I can’t sit still anymore as the anger inside me escalates. I jump up furiously. “I have to get the key back. I have to get it away from Rebecca!”

“That’s right,” Millicent agrees. “I have invited her to the opening of the Time Society headquarters today. She will walk straight into our path, wearing your key.” Millicent holds out her arm. “Are you ready?”

“I am.”

“We aren’t traveling very far, only to this afternoon, so the journey will be brief.” Millicent unties her shawl, revealing a glittering gold chain tied around her neck, from which a large skeleton key dangles. A diamond punctuates the center of the key’s surface.

“Hold on to the key,” Millicent instructs me, and I nervously reach out my hand to touch it.

“The Aura Hotel. Five p.m. on February the second, 1888,” Millicent commands. Suddenly, an invisible hand yanks me by my collar, pulling me into the air with breathtaking force. I feel my body rise higher and higher, then begin to spin at the speed of light, until before I know it, I am on the ground again, doubled over and gasping for breath.

“Here you are. You did very well.”

I look up and see Millicent holding out a glass of water. I gulp it down, and then, catching my breath, I glance around at my surroundings. We are in a formal drawing room, complete with gilded ceilings and Louis XVI furnishings. Millicent approaches a large bronze clock framing the wall, and presses her hand against it. The clock chimes loudly, the sound seeming to reverberate throughout the space.

“They’ll be bringing Rebecca in any moment now,” Millicent says nonchalantly. “You’d best wait in the next room—we don’t want her to see you too soon and make an escape. You’ll be able to hear us through the wall and will know when to come in.”

I nod, the anticipation of what lies ahead filling my body with renewed energy. I step into the adjacent room, Millicent’s study, and glance at the books lining the shelves. I’m startled to see Millicent’s own name on the spine of many of the titles, from
The Art of Age Shifting
to
The Gift of Sight
.

I soon hear footsteps and then Rebecca’s excited voice as she greets Millicent. The sound sends a wave of nausea flooding through me.

“Hello, Rebecca,” I hear Millicent say coldly. “Hiram and Ida, thank you for your help. You may go now.” A moment later, after the drawing room door has opened and closed, I hear Millicent’s voice again. “There’s someone here to see you, Rebecca.”

My cue. I turn the door handle that leads from Millicent’s office into her drawing room and stare accusingly upon my former friend.

“
You
!” she gasps.

As Rebecca stands frozen in shock, Millicent reaches over and rips something off her neck. Rebecca cries out, but it’s too late. Millicent presses the key into my hands, and I gaze at it in awe.

The golden key looks like an ancient talisman. It is carved in the same ankh shape as Millicent’s, only instead of a diamond at the center, my key has a sundial etched on its surface.

“My father
drew
this for me,” I tell Millicent, unable to take my eyes off the key in my hand. “He made me a drawing of this very key when I was a boy. I always thought it was just another one of his funny little sketches. But he was giving me a clue.” I look up, glaring at Rebecca with hatred. “Perhaps he knew you would steal it, that one day I would be called upon to recognize it.”

“I didn’t—I didn’t steal,” Rebecca stammers, looking flustered for the very first time in all the years I’ve known her. “He left it in
my
house.”

Her words make me tremble with fury.

“When did you take it from him?” I demand, stalking toward her. “He would have said or done something if he knew it was
missing. So when did you take it? As soon as they buried him in the ground?” My voice rises and I find myself shouting at her, wishing my words could inflict the pain of physical blows.

Rebecca doesn’t deny it, and I have to hold on to the back of a chair to keep from striking her. “So it’s true, then. While you knew I was crying for my dead father, you were stealing from him. Stealing what was most precious.”

“I wanted to feel closer to you, Irving!” Rebecca wailed. “You must know I’ve always fancied you. I knew how much you loved your father, and I wanted something to remember him by.”

“That’s a lie, and you know it!” I roar. “If that were true, you would have told me about the key,
shared
it with me, instead of boasting about your sudden time-traveling powers and bribing me into marrying you so that I could experience what was rightfully mine all along—what you had stolen from me!”

“Bribe you into marrying me?” Rebecca echoes, as if she didn’t hear the rest of what I’d said. “Is that how you took it?”

“Of course. I have no more romantic feeling for you than I do for a teaspoon,” I spit. “I never desired you, never! But I was your friend, a true friend. Far more than you ever were to me.”

Rebecca’s face turns a deadly white. She blinks quickly, and I’m astonished to see actual tears in her eyes. Rebecca never cries. But I turn away from her, knowing they are just the crocodile tears of an actress trying to extract what she wants.

A buzz sounds in the room, and a moment later two guards appear in the doorway.

“Thank you for your prompt arrival, gentlemen. Please search Miss Windsor’s purse and pockets, and then escort her
back to New York,” Millicent instructs them. “Take her home by train. She is a thief and a fraud.”

Rebecca’s face turns monstrous with anger. “You have no right to do this! I am Rebecca
Windsor
! My father could—”

“Your name means nothing here,” Millicent firmly interrupts her.

One of the guards pulls a leather-bound book out of Rebecca’s handbag and hands it to Millicent. She smiles as she gives it to me. “I believe this belongs to you.”

It is
The Handbook of the Time Society
. By now Rebecca is kicking and punching her fists at the guards as they hoist her out.

“You’ll regret this!” Rebecca screams at me. “You’ll regret making an enemy of me. I swear I’ll destroy you!”

“Go on and try,” I seethe. “There is nothing more you can do to me.”

The guards drag Rebecca away and her cries grow fainter, until they are all but gone. I sink into a chair, suddenly exhausted.

“Thank you,” I tell Millicent. “Thank you for rescuing my father’s legacy. I wish I had known sooner who he really was. Now … I just hope to do him proud.”

Millicent places a hand on my shoulder. “I believe you will. You are one of us. You are a Timekeeper.”

W
hile most time travelers are thrilled to discover their power, soon cherishing it above everything else, a small few shrink from the gift. To be different from the majority is often thought to be “wrong,” and some misguided Timekeepers look upon their ability as proof that they are an aberration. This couldn’t be further from the truth. We Timekeepers are gifted and chosen. You reading this are gifted and chosen. Always remember
.

—THE HANDBOOK OF THE TIME SOCIETY

9

Michele gaped at the journal in her hands, unable to believe the words written on its pages. Just as Irving’s life had forever changed on the day he met Millicent August and learned the truth, so too had his story now altered Michele’s world. She could barely comprehend all the facts, from Rebecca’s ugly deeds to the knowledge that she and her father were a part of something so much larger than she’d ever guessed. There was a whole
world
of time travelers out there, others who’d experienced what she had! Her heart raced as she imagined taking a trip to the Aura Hotel and meeting the other Timekeepers. And to think that all along, the Time Society headquarters had been so close to her former home in Los Angeles.

The Timekeepers can tell me what happened to my dad
, Michele realized.
They can help me find him!
But then she felt a
wave of despair come over her, remembering that her key was gone. She’d lost the only ticket to reaching her father, misplaced his most precious possession.

What about the fact that I went back in time tonight at the dance?
she wondered, jumping to her feet in the tunnel and pacing hopefully. But as she thought about it, Michele realized there had to be another explanation—like the shared-vision theory Caissie brought up. If she really
could
travel without the key, then she would have been transported to 1888 while reading her father’s journal, just as the key had sent her to Clara Windsor’s time of 1910 while reading her great-great-aunt’s diary months ago, and then to Lily Windsor’s time of 1925 when she discovered her great-grandmother’s lyrics from the era. No … the power to time travel was within the key. And she had lost it.

“I’m so sorry, Dad,” she whispered into the silence. Her stomach churned at the thought of Rebecca taking her revenge and stealing the key yet again. Although Philip said the creature hadn’t touched Michele in the choir room, she knew it was no coincidence that someone stole her key right when Rebecca appeared. The thief must have been working for her.

Yet a huge piece of the puzzle was missing. If Rebecca had been cast out of the Society, with no key to bring back her power—then
how
did she ultimately end up a traveler? By what means could she have tormented Walter and Dorothy from beyond the grave and stalked Michele and Philip? How could she look like a teenager, how was she able to do
anything
when she should be powerless and dead in the ground?

Michele reached for the
Handbook of the Time Society
, wondering if this manual of magic held some answers. She closed her eyes, realizing this book had been right there at the Aura Hotel, in the center of the confrontation among Irving, Millicent, and Rebecca. So much had come and gone in the one hundred and twenty years since. It was incredible to look at this book and know that it had survived everything and was now here in her hands. She flipped it open and began skimming the words, too eager and impatient to read it properly, though she knew she would need to soon.

Her eyes lit on certain phrases as she thumbed through. “Age Shifting” was the title of one of the chapters, and her jaw dropped as she read the first sentence.
“Age Shifting is the art of traveling through time in the body of your younger or older self.”
She read the sentence over again, wondering if it
really
meant that people in their forties or fifties could travel through time in their twenty-year-old bodies—and vice versa.

The following chapter was titled “The Visibility Paradigm,” and revealed that
“in order to appear as a solid, visible human being and effect change in another time, you must spend seven straight days in the alternate time period before your body leaves its true present and joins you in the past or the future. Until then you are invisible, appearing only to those who possess the Gift of Sight. However, in our Society, remaining in another time past the seven days is forbidden. See the Four Cardinal Laws.”

Her adrenaline spiking, Michele quickly looked through the book until she found a definition of the Gift of Sight:
“The ability of ordinary human beings to see spirits and time travelers
.
This is generally an inherited gift. The Gift of Sight flourishes among the young with a broad imagination, and can occasionally falter and fade as one grows older.”

Michele gasped. Now she had the answer to the question she’d been wondering about for weeks: why she had appeared invisible in the past, unseen by everyone except the Windsor girls and Philip. The Gift of Sight clearly ran in the Windsor family, and Dorothy and Philip possessed it as well.

The heading of the last page caught Michele’s eye: T
HE
F
OUR
C
ARDINAL
L
AWS OF
T
IME
T
RAVEL
.

Timekeepers are not to interfere in Life or Death. Terrible consequences have followed when this warning has gone ignored. Your signature on the membership papers indicates your understanding of the Four Cardinal Laws below. You agree that failure to comply with these Laws will result in your immediate removal from the Time Society and forfeiture of your Key
.

1. You shall never commit murder
.

2. You shall never attempt to bring deceased persons back from the dead. This includes traveling to the past to stop a death from occurring
.

3. You shall never conceive a child when in the past or future, NOR conceive with someone from another Time. This results in time-crossed children who cannot fully belong to any true Present, and who will go on being split between their father’s and mother’s Times
.

4. To avoid these catastrophic outcomes, and to keep from tampering with the Natural Timeline, you
shall never stay in any Time besides your true Present for longer than seven straight days. You shall not reach full Visibility in any time other than your own
.

Michele felt her heart jump into her throat as she read the third and fourth laws—both broken by her father. The words seemed to swim together on the page, blurring before her eyes, and a cold wave of fear gripped her insides.
I wasn’t supposed to be born
, she thought, panicking. What did Millicent August mean when she wrote that time-crossed children “go on being split between their father’s and mother’s Times?” What was the
catastrophic outcome
that lay ahead for her?