The Time Travelers: Volume One

  I changed centuries, I witnessed a murder, I fell in love.

  Right.

  “You better have a good excuse for this,” said her mother, voice raw.

  “There is no excuse good enough for this,” said her father.

  Annie shivered in the white undergown and her mother’s eyes suddenly focused on its hand-sewn pleats and lace. Mom knew Annie’s wardrobe, knew the dress she’d set out in yesterday morning, knew that not only did Annie not own a dress like this, but nobody anywhere owned a dress like this.

  But her mother did not comment on the dress.

  “I just fell asleep on the sand,” said Annie finally. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It was so hot out, and I was exhausted from the end of school, and I went down to the far end of the beach where all the rocks are and you can’t swim, and nobody even picnics, so I could be alone, and I fell asleep. I’m really really sorry. I just didn’t wake up. It’s been a very stressful year and I guess I slept it off.”

  The cop shook his head, then shook hands with her father and left.

  “I’m so sorry,” Annie said once more. And she was sorry; sorry they’d been scared, sorry she wasn’t still with Strat, sorry she couldn’t save Bridget, sorry, sorry, sorry.

  She burst into tears, Mom burst into tears, and they hugged each other. Mom was going to accept this excuse. Perhaps Mom had had so much practice accepting Dad’s thin excuses that thin was good now; she was used to thin. Even when Mom’s fingernails, bitten and broken from the shock of a lost daughter, touched the work-of-art gown, Mom asked no questions.

  Dad, however, was too much of an expert at thin excuses. He recognized thin when he saw it.

  Tod, of course, being her brother, knew perfectly well she was lying like a rug. These, in fact, were the words he mouthed from behind Mom and Dad. Lying like a rug, he shaped.

  “I feel like thrashing you,” yelled her father, circling the furniture to prevent himself from doing just that. “Putting us through last night. Scaring your mother and me like this.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “You are grounded! No boyfriend, no beach, no bike, no car, no nothing. You’ll have a great summer, the way you’ve started off.”

  If there was one thing Annie hadn’t been, it was “grounded.” She’d been airborne. Century-borne. Time-borne.

  And now she was stuck in a conversation they might repeat forever, Dad shrieking, Annie being sorry.

  “Let it go, David,” said Mom finally. “She’s fine. Nothing really happened. Let’s not ruin the weekend.”

  It isn’t so much that she accepts thin excuses, thought Annie. Mom just plain doesn’t want to know the truth. Because what if the truth is ugly? Or immoral? Mom prefers ignorance.

  “I want to know what really happened,” said Dad fiercely. He brushed his wife aside as if she were clothes in a closet.

  It was that brush that did it for Annie. That physical sweep of the arm, getting rid of the annoying female opinion. She could see a whole long century of men brushing their wives aside.

  Annie had never thought of telling her father off. She and Tod, without ever talking about it, had known that they would maintain silence, even between themselves, on the subject of Dad and Miss Bartten.

  But the flight between centuries upset her master plan. The loss of Strat and the failure to save Bridget loosened her defenses. A year of pretending exploded in the Lockwoods’ faces.

  Annie said from between gritted teeth, “You do, huh? You want to tell Mom what really happens when you’re not where you’re supposed to be? You want to tell Mom about Miss Bartten? You want to tell Mom who’s with you when you fall asleep on the sand?”

  Her father’s face drained of color. He ceased to breathe.

  Her brother Tod froze, cake halfway to his mouth. Annie was holding her breath, too, from rage and fright.

  But somebody was breathing, loud, rasping, desperate breathing.

  Mom.

  Mom, who had never wanted to know, never wanted to acknowledge what was happening to her life—Mom knew now.

  For better or for worse, in her wisdom, or in her total lack of wisdom, Annie had made her see.

  Fat white pillars stood beneath a sky-blue ceiling. Trellises supported morning glories bluer than the sky. The remaining houseguests strolled the grounds, eager for a most difficult weekend to close. The boys could not put together a ball game, there were too few of them, and they were worried about Strat. His father had once, at immense cost to himself, shut down a railroad spur forever rather than have union workers tell him what to do. What would Mr. Stratton do to his son?

  Strat had disobeyed, and hardly even knew it. Mind and body clouded by his missing Anna Sophia, he was wandering around the estate stroking things and muttering to himself. Strat was saying even now that he wished he’d thought to bring out the camera. “I have a new tripod,” he said miserably. “I should have taken her photograph.” He frowned a little. “Do you suppose she would have photographed? Would her picture have come out?”

  “Strat!” yelled Devonny. “She was there! She was real! She wore Harriett’s clothes, Bridget brushed her hair, she ate her toast, she existed! Of course she would photograph!”

  Strat sighed hugely.

  “She’s here somewhere,” said Devonny. “She can’t get off the estate without going by the gatehouse. Of course, the woods are deep, and perhaps she crept in there, but I refuse to believe she’s living off berries. She’ll be back, but this time she’ll claim to be a desperate orphan.”

  Harriett wore a hat with heavy veiling, not to ward off the sun but to hide her red eyes and trembling mouth. She slipped away from the topics of murder and missing girls, and walked down the hill and across the golf course to the sand.

  Once Harriett had loved collecting sand jewels. Dry starfish and gold shells and sand-washed mermaids’ tears.

  Behind the veil, real tears washed her face. The mermaids’ tears rested soft and warm in her palm, as if tears, like marriage, lasted forever.

  “You had to say something, didn’t you?” shouted Tod. “You couldn’t just wait for it to end by itself, could you? You had to start things!”

  “I didn’t start anything! Dad started it.”

  “It was going to work out, Annie,” said Tod, “it was going to end, and they would’ve stayed married.”

  Tod and Annie spent a hideous afternoon hiding in the hall, trying to overhear Mom and Dad. The word divorce was not used. Tod was hanging on to that. He wanted his family so much he could have killed his sister for starting this, and had to remind himself that a boy who wanted his family intact could not begin by killing his sister.

  Mom used few words. She used tissues, and kept walking between window and computer, as if a view or a keyboard would supply answers.

  Dad told the truth. He told more of it than even Tod or Annie had dreamed of. But he didn’t want a divorce either. He wanted it all. He wanted them both.

  What is this? thought Tod. A hundred years ago when men had mistresses? It doesn’t work in 1995, Dad. Grow up.

  Eventually their mother invited the children to be part of the discussion. Tod said he was fine, thanks, he didn’t really—

  “Come here,” said Mom, her voice as heavy as Stonehenge.

  They went there.

  “Sit,” said Mom, like a dog trainer.

  They sat.

  “You knew?” she said.

  They nodded.

  “How long?” she said.

  They shrugged.

  “A long time then,” she said. She looked for another long time at her husband and then she got up and went to her room.

  Dad looked mutinously at his daughter, as if he intended to blame her for this, and Annie said, “Dad. Don’t even think for one minute about blaming me.”

  Dad fished in his pocket for his car keys. He would just get into his car and drive away. That was the good thing about 1995: you could always drive away. What would Harriett’s l
ife, or Bridget’s, be like if either girl could just get in her car and drive away?

  I do deserve blame, thought Annie. When in doubt, shut up. That’s the rule. I smashed it. Maybe I smashed the whole family.

  She saw her two worlds at once, then, like transparencies for an overhead projector lying on top of each other.

  She had smashed another family too.

  She had smashed Harriett. Damaged Strat. Interfered with lives that had been fine without her.

  The convenient knock on the door was Sean, interrupting them.

  Dad escaped. “Don’t forget you’re grounded,” he threw over his shoulder. “And you’d better have something nice to say to Sean too. He’s been as worried about you as we were.”

  “Sean? Worried about me?” she said in disbelief, and opened the door.

  Sean stormed in as if he owned Annie Lockwood. “Well?” he yelled. “You better have one good excuse, ASL. Just where were you last night?”

  CHAPTER 10

  “What is the matter with you?” bellowed Mr. Stratton. “I said that the topic of Matthew was closed!” How well he resembled the dark and horrid carvings in his own library.

  “Bridget did not push Matthew, Hiram,” said Florinda. “She was with me in the garden. She was holding my parasol. I am on my way to the village to get her out of that jail.”

  If the trees had walked over to join the conversation, Hiram Stratton could not have been more amazed. Florinda talking back? To him?

  “Oh, Florinda, I’m so glad!” cried Devonny. “I’ll go with you. I should have spoken up for her. I knew it at the time, and I failed her in her hour of need.”

  “No daughter and no wife of mine will approach a jail,” said Mr. Stratton. He positioned himself in front of Devonny and Florinda, but they were outdoors, with room to maneuver, and Florinda simply walked around him to the carriage.

  “We must,” said Florinda. “We have a responsibility to Bridget. I cannot imagine what Mr. Rowwells saw, but it was not Bridget.”

  “Florinda, you know how confused you become in too much sun. You have the time amiss,” said Aunt Ada.

  Way down on the beach, Mr. Rowwells caught up to Harriett. It seemed to Devonny that if Harriett ever needed Ada as a chaperon it was now.

  “Ada, this is my household,” said Florinda. “I do not have the time amiss, and Bridget could not have pushed Matthew.”

  “Do not contradict me,” said Ada.

  Hiram Stratton, Sr., stared back and forth between the two women as if learning tennis by watching the ball. What had happened to his neatly ordered household?

  “It is you, Ada,” said Florinda, “who is daring to contradict me. Whose home is this?”

  Devonny was delighted. Florinda might have a use after all. Mean and nasty Ada would be removed, while Florinda would save people, and even take care of Matthew’s babies.

  Mr. Stratton’s anger smoked once more, and Strat tensed. His father had never struck Devonny or Florinda that Strat knew of, but this was striking posture. A blow from such a man could loosen teeth or break a jaw.

  Strat moved casually between his father and the ladies.

  “We wouldn’t be faced with anything, Devonny,” Mr. Stratton spat out, “except that you interfered where you have no right even to have thoughts.”

  His father brushed Strat aside, and advanced on Devonny.

  “Father, I do have the right to have thoughts,” she said nervously. She did not move back.

  Florinda removed a hat pin from the veiling of her immense hat, and admired the glitter of the diamond tip. Or perhaps the stabbing quality of the steel.

  Both Stratton men were stunned. Was she actually repositioning her hat? Or was she making, so to speak, a veiled threat?

  “Young ladies,” said Mr. Stratton senior, refusing to focus on the gleaming hat pin, “do not talk back to their fathers.”

  Strat forced himself to put Miss Lockwood out of his thoughts. He had to end this scene, whatever it was. Folding his arms over his chest, trying to take up more space against the great space his father’s chest consumed, he said, “Father, perhaps you and I should be the ones to go to the village and discuss Florinda’s evidence with the police.”

  “Florinda’s evidence? You have never cared a whit for Florinda’s word or opinion until now. And you’ve been correct. Florinda rarely gets anything right. She didn’t get this right either.”

  “Why are you so eager to have Bridget be responsible?” cried Devonny.

  “Because nobody else could be! Do you think one of us pushed Matthew?”

  Devonny believed Florinda. Which meant Mr. Rowwells had lied, and since Devonny also believed Bridget, so had Walk lied. Why lie? Did they have two different reasons, or one shared reason? “If Florinda is right—”

  “Devonny,” said her father, pulling his lips back from his teeth like a rabid dog, “go to your room. Florinda, wait for me in my library. The topic of servants is closed.”

  I’ll go into town to collect Bridget, thought Strat. Then what will I do with her? I can’t have her around Devonny. Think how Bridget behaved with Walk! I’ll have to give her money, I guess, to make up for this, and put her on a train, or—

  But Florinda had not moved. “Hiram, I will not have Bridget punished for something she did not do.”

  The sunny day seemed to condense and darken around them. For a moment Strat thought it was time falling; that Annie would come back in such a darkness; but it was his father’s fury that darkened the world.

  “And I will not have a wife who disobeys,” said Hiram Stratton, Sr. “You may do as you were told, Florinda, or you may prepare yourself not to be my wife.”

  “What do you mean, where was I? None of your business, Sean!” shouted Annie. Any ladylike behavior she might have picked up in 1895 was quickly discarded. Ladylike meant people ran over you. Forget that. Annie was in the mood to run over others, not to be run over herself.

  She would have guessed Sean’s reaction and she would have been wrong. Big, tough, old Sean wilted. “I’m sorry, Annie,” he said humbly. “I was so worried. You just disappeared. One minute you were there and the next minute you weren’t. There was no trace of you.” Sean looked at her nervously. “Who were you with?”

  Why was everybody so sure she’d been with somebody? If a person chose to vanish, she could do it all by herself. “I fell asleep on the sand,” she said sharply. This was beginning to sound quite possible, even reasonable. Annie could almost picture the cozy little sun-drenched beach where it had happened.

  “Come on, ASL. Since Friday afternoon? When half the town was looking for you?”

  “Half the town did not look for me,” she said, trying to distract him.

  “The half that knows you went looking,” he said. “Your friends. Your family. Your neighbors. The cops. People on the beach who were sick of getting tans. We were afraid you’d fallen through a floor in the Mansion or gone swimming in a riptide. You scared people.” Sean kicked the carpet with his huge dirty sneaker toe. “You owe me an explanation.”

  I am a century changer, she thought. I have visited both sides of time. People think they own time. They have watches and clocks and digital pulses. But they are wrong. Time owns them. I am the property of Time, just as Harriett will be the property of her husband.

  “Your face changed,” said Sean. “Tell me, Annie. Tell me who you were with and what you were doing.”

  I was with Strat. What if I never see him again, never touch him, never kiss, never have a photograph?

  She was swept up by physical remembrance: the set of his chin, the sparkle in his eyes, the antiqueness of his haircut. Oh Strat! her heart cried.

  How dare Sean exist when Strat did not? But then, how was Sean supposed to know that he didn’t measure up to somebody a hundred years ago?

  I failed Time, which brought me through. I didn’t do my assignment. How easily Time can punish me! All it has to do is not give me Strat again. What if I pull it off, and
change centuries once more, and Time punishes me by sending me to Tutankhamen? Or Marie Antoinette? Or even an empty Stratton Beach before settlement: just me and the seagulls and the piles of oyster shells?

  “I’ll forgive you,” said Sean. “I can get past it.”

  “Pond scum!” shouted Annie. She looked around for something to throw at him. “Forgive me for what? Get past what? You do not own me, Sean, and wherever I was is none of your business. So there. I’m breaking up with you anyway. It’s over. Go home.”

  I am a mean, bad, rotten person, she thought. How could Sean have any idea what I’m talking about? I’m doing this too roughly, too fast. But I have places to go!

  I have to get back, I cannot give Strat up. A minute ago I thought I had to, but I don’t. I can have it all, I’m sure of that. Somehow I can go back, but not upset Mom and Dad. Somehow with or without me around, they’ll keep the marriage alive so that when I do get back …

  I cannot have it all.

  If Mom can’t have it all—career, family, husband, success, happiness, fidelity—how could I possibly think I could have it all? In two separate centuries yet? I can have one or the other, but I cannot have both.

  Sean was trying to argue, but she had lost interest in Sean, exactly as Strat had lost interest in Harriett.

  Oh, Harriett! You were kind to me, and loaned me your gowns, and did what you knew Strat wanted you to do, and where did you end up? Alone. Abandoned. And hurt so badly that you accepted a marriage proposal from a man nobody could like.

  Life interfered yet again. Heather and Kelly stormed in. They were just as mad at Annie as everybody else. Maybe it was true that half the town had been searching for her.

  Heather and Kelly didn’t believe a single syllable of the sleeping-on-the-sand nonsense. “You better tell us what really happened,” said Heather, “or our friendship is sleeping on the sand, too.”

  “I was time traveling,” said Annie, to see how they reacted. “I fell back a hundred years to find out what the Mansion was really like.” A huge lump filled her throat. She could at least have left Harriett and Strat to live happily ever after. But no, Bridget would be hung and Harriett would marry that Rowwells creep.