Timebound

  I took two of the Tylenol, hoping they would help to relax my head. Although I’m usually a shower person, I ran a hot bath, pouring a few capfuls of the shampoo under the tap to make bubbles. Slowly and somewhat painfully, I removed the cheap rubber band from my hair, again remembering the image of Kiernan with my green hair band on his wrist.

  I slipped into the big tub, wincing at first when the hot water hit my smashed toenail. Closing my eyes, I slid under the water and allowed my hair to float out around me. I’ve loved that sensation since I was a small child—the feeling of weightlessness, of being surrounded by warmth. I stayed under for as long as I could, and then floated to the surface. Each time a thought about my mother or father appeared, I resolutely pushed it aside and submerged myself again to clear my mind. I refused to think of Mom as dead. If Katherine said that I could fix this, then I would make it happen.

  I tried to focus instead on the few pleasurable aspects of the day. In the past, I had generally avoided guys at school, preferring to concentrate on my books. The two boys I’d been on dates with were nice enough, but I had few common interests with either of them. With one guy, the feeling was clearly mutual after our first evening out, and I found a polite excuse when the other boy asked me for a second date.

  In the space of this single traumatic day, I had gone from a girl who had never been kissed at all to one who had been thoroughly and passionately kissed by Kiernan—I still felt a bit dizzy thinking about it—and who had been given just enough of a kiss by Trey that I was now very curious about how it might feel if we really and truly kissed.

  Twenty minutes later, I dried off with a fluffy blue towel. I then wrapped another towel around my hair and pulled on the new pajamas. The big bed looked plush and comfortable—far nicer than my twin bed at home or the sofa at Dad’s. I would, however, have gladly traded it for either of the other options. After drying my hair for a few minutes with the towel, I crawled under the covers, turned out the lamp, and curled up on my side. And much, much later, I slept.

  9

  I was awakened by a light tap at my bedroom door. “Kate? Are you awake?” I opened my eyes to unfamiliar surroundings, and it took a moment before I realized where I was.

  The clock on the nightstand indicated that I had slept away the better part of the morning. “I’ll be down in a minute, Katherine.”

  “No rush, dear. I just wanted to be sure that you were okay.”

  “I’m fine. I was just really tired, I guess. I’ll be down in a few.”

  I splashed some water on my face and pulled on the jeans and shirt Connor had bought the day before. My hair was a chaotic mess. Usually I would have just pulled it back, but I only had the rubber band and I shuddered at the thought of trying to get that out of my hair again. So I spent several minutes trying to work out the assorted tangles that always developed when I went to bed with wet hair.

  A few minutes later, I walked down the stairs. Katherine and Connor were apparently in the library. I heard a whimper and a tap on the screen door in the kitchen and went to let Daphne in. There was a new addition to Daphne’s collar—one of the CHRONOS keys had been sewn onto the top. I was confused for a moment, but then it occurred to me that, in this timeline, Katherine wouldn’t be around to own a dog, and Daphne would belong to someone else.

  “I guess you’d just disappear in the backyard without this, wouldn’t you, girl? Or is another version of your tail wagging in someone else’s kitchen?”

  After several minutes of hugs (from me) and kisses (big wet ones from Daphne), the dog was calm enough for me to scavenge around the kitchen for some breakfast. I was glad to find Cheerios, a banana, some milk, and a half-full pot of coffee. Katherine must have made it, since it was far more palatable than the stuff Connor had produced the day before.

  I had almost finished the cereal when Connor walked in. “Thanks for making a department store run for me yesterday, Connor. You chose well.”

  Connor nodded curtly, pouring more coffee into his mug. “You scared Katherine half to death. And she doesn’t need the extra stress.”

  I took the last bite of Cheerios and looked at him for a moment. “I’m sorry. I was preoccupied with the discovery that my parents no longer exist.”

  He caught the sarcastic tone and turned to face me. “All the more reason to get yourself back here to safety, rather than driving all over the countryside with your boyfriend. I’m not sure of the range on that medallion, you know. If you trip over a gap in the sidewalk, and it swings away from you, you’ll like as not be just as gone as your mother. Finish your food and get up to the library. There’s work to do.”

  I fought a childish urge to stick out my tongue at his retreating back.

  Reluctant to give Connor the satisfaction of following him quickly, I took my time with the last bit of coffee and then stopped by my room to brush my teeth. I sat down at the desk chair and looked at the new laptop. I thought of checking my email before remembering that the account I had would no longer be active. Daphne rested her auburn head on my knee. “I guess we should go see what the grump wants us to do, right, Daphne?” The setter waved her tail back and forth and I gave her another hug.

  I looked up to see Katherine in the doorway of the bedroom. Her skin had a bit more color than the evening before; like me, she had apparently managed to get some sleep. “I take it you slept okay?” she said.

  I shrugged. “It took a while. But I seem to have made up for it this morning.”

  “Connor was worried about you as well, Kate. If he was a bit gruff, it’s understandable.”

  “He’s always a bit gruff. I think it’s just his nature.”

  Katherine nodded slightly. “I suspect that wasn’t always true, but he has as much at stake as any of us here.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s not easy to lose your entire identity…”

  “It’s more than just his identity, Kate. He also lost his family—and I don’t just mean that his sister is different or that he has a brother now. Those are minor details for him. His wife—she died about ten years ago, a brain aneurism totally unrelated to all of this. But his children disappeared during the time shift last May. He was already working with me, and… they were both off at college. His son and daughter—they both ceased to exist, just like your mom. For whatever reason, when we trace the records back, Connor never met his wife in this timeline.”

  I was silent. I glanced down at my outfit and realized that Connor’s taste in clothes was probably attributable to experience—he knew firsthand what teenage girls needed, because he’d shopped with one as a single dad, not that long ago.

  We left my room and walked around the curved hallway overlooking the living room until we reached the library on the opposite side of the second floor. Daphne, who was loyally padding along behind us, gave a whimper as she realized where we were going, and she reversed course, heading to the stairway.

  “Poor Daphne,” Katherine said. “She really doesn’t like the library. We’re not sure why—she shouldn’t be able to see the lights from the CHRONOS equipment. Connor thinks maybe the medallions make a sound that bothers her when they’re active.”

  Connor was at the far side of the room, engrossed in his work. Katherine sat down at one of the terminals and I grabbed a nearby chair, pulling my bare feet onto the edge and resting my chin on my knees. “So what are you doing and how can I help?”

  Connor glanced in my direction, then came over and handed me three diaries. They were similar in size to the one that had been in my backpack, although the color and condition of the covers varied. “You can start going through these. We’re trying to pinpoint exactly when Katherine is killed. While we’re doing that, you need to become familiar with each of the expeditions. I assume you have a basic familiarity with the history of rights movements in America?”

  He walked away without waiting for an answer, so I spoke instead to Katherine, placing the diaries on the desk beside me. “Civil rights? Like Martin Luther King???
?

  “Yes,” said Katherine, “and women’s rights. There are other categories as well, of course, but my research career focused on abolition—anti-slavery, that is—and women’s rights. I studied the movements in a broad sense, looking at changes over the course of several centuries. My very first research trip was to a Quaker village in the early 1700s. Are you familiar with the Quakers?”

  “A little. I knew someone in Iowa who was a Quaker. He was in my karate class. One of the guys in the class thought it was funny that someone who was supposed to be a pacifist was into martial arts, but he explained that there was no contradiction, since karate is about trying to avoid violence, not about using violence to solve problems.”

  Katherine nodded. “The Religious Society of Friends, often called Quakers, was the earliest religious group in America to both oppose slavery and to promote equality for women. The fact that women often traveled as ministers of that religion made it fairly easy for me to observe a community without being too conspicuous. During my first two jumps—one to 1732 and a later one to 1794—I was paired with the senior historian whose place I was taking at CHRONOS. After that, I did a solo trip to the 1838 meeting where the Declaration of Sentiments was signed. Many of those who signed it were Quakers.”

  “That’s the document you showed me that now has Prudence’s signature, right?”

  Katherine nodded. “I took a few other solo jumps as well, but CHRONOS generally found that expeditions went more smoothly when historians traveled in pairs. The logical person to group me with was Saul Rand, since his specialty was religious movements. There were frequently overlaps between religious organizations and rights movements—not just among the Quakers but with many other denominations, too. Saul was only eight years older, so our traveling as a young married couple provided an effective cover. And eventually, the cover became very natural, because we were a couple.

  “So” she continued, turning back to the computer screen, “we had twenty-seven jumps together, total.” She tapped the mouse and pulled up a list of cities with a date printed next to each. “These twelve seem to be the most likely candidates for when my murder might have taken place. We can’t really rule out my solo jumps either, although I’m not certain how much information Saul had about those.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Not why these specific trips—we can discuss that later. Why is Saul doing this? Why does he want to change the past? Why does he want to kill you?”

  “Why did he kill me is the more correct question—or, technically, why did he have someone else kill me,” said Katherine. “As I explained earlier, Saul is stuck in whatever time he landed and I’d wager a great deal that it’s a point in the future, not the past. He’s using someone else—or, I’m beginning to suspect, several individuals—to change history for him. We know that there are two—the young men you encountered yesterday—but I don’t think we can safely assume those are the only ones. I suspect that Prudence is one of them as well. We have evidence that she has, at least, made small changes to the historical record.”

  “I still don’t understand Saul’s personal motives. What does he hope to gain?” I could see Connor shaking his head in annoyance out of the corner of my eye and decided to address him directly. “You have to admit, Connor, if I’m supposed to help track down a murderer, it might be important to understand his reasoning.”

  Connor turned his swivel chair to face me. “Take any psychopath, sociopath, whatever label you choose. Scrape off the details and the motivation is always the same, Kate. Power. As much power as they can get.”

  “But why kill Katherine? Why didn’t he just have Pudgy kill me on the Metro? Katherine can’t use the medallion and she hasn’t exactly hidden the fact that she has a terminal illness.”

  “That’s a good point, Kate. I suspect it’s personal,” Katherine added. “The first time Saul planned to kill me—the time I escaped to 1969—it was because I was in his way. And, equally important, because I had ceased to find him fascinating, attractive, brilliant—all of the things I foolishly believed him to be for the four years we were partners. He failed to kill me then, and Saul never accepted failure lightly. If he has the means now to finish what he started back at CHRONOS, I suspect that he would do it simply on principle.”

  It was hard to picture Katherine as young and impetuous, and I still felt that we were missing some part of the overall picture, but I nodded. “What exactly made you change your mind about Saul?”

  “I began to discover some… inconsistencies in his reports, and I observed several actions that were contrary to CHRONOS protocol. This was about the same time I learned I was pregnant. Many of our colleagues assumed that Saul studied the history of religion because he was a devout believer. He was certainly capable of giving that impression to people of a wide array of faiths. I knew him a bit better than most, and I thought he was attracted to religious history because he was a religious skeptic. Neither was true.”

  Katherine looked carefully at me. “Saul is a devout believer only in himself, and he was convinced that the religious faith of others, if manipulated skillfully, was an excellent path to the power he sought. He was studying religions of the world in order to pick up tips on how to build his own.”

  “How do you ‘build’ a religion?” I asked.

  “Many others have done it with less,” Katherine said with a wry smile. “Saul had an excellent tool at his disposal. I think his plan was to personally go back to various places and times in history and lay a trail of appearances, miracles, and prophecy—blending a variety of religions. Just as Christianity pulled in elements of pagan religions in order to attract followers, he would incorporate elements of Christianity, Islam, and other religions, laying the path for the reign of the prophet Cyrus… who would, of course, be Saul.”

  “Wait… you aren’t saying he founded the Cyrists? That’s crazy. I went to a service at one of the temples a few months back. I mean, I really didn’t get into it, but they seem okay. Charlayne goes occasionally with Joseph, her brother. He’s dating a girl who’s a Cyrist.”

  I didn’t add that Charlayne’s parents were a bit nervous about how serious the relationship had become. Joseph would be required to convert if they decided to marry, and most Cyrists married pretty early. From the age of twelve, Cyrists wore a small lotus flower tattoo on their left hand as the outward symbol of chastity. Members took a vow of abstinence—total abstinence—until their twentieth birthday or marriage, whichever came first, and all marriages had to be approved by the temple elders.

  I remembered a conversation with Charlayne’s mom after we’d attended the temple’s Sunday service. Her feelings were very mixed—she was suspicious of the Cyrists in general, but Joseph had always been her wild child, and after meeting Felicia he had totally straightened up his act. No alcohol, no drugs, and as far as she knew, no sex. His life revolved around work, college, and carefully supervised visits with Felicia, who at eighteen had two more years of abstinence to go. They had been dating for about six months and Joseph was ecstatic that he was finally allowed to hold her hand. Charlayne said Joseph’s transformation was creepy, in a romantic kind of way. I didn’t see how creepy and romantic could go together, but then Charlayne’s mind sometimes worked in mysterious ways.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “I mean, they do have some odd beliefs, but that’s true of a lot of religions. Isn’t the vice president a Cyrist? I remember Charlayne talking about how Joseph had seen her at the temple pretty much every week in the months leading up to the election. This isn’t some new cult that just appeared. The Cyrists have been around for centuries. Why would you think—”

  Katherine gave me an exasperated look. “I don’t just think this, Kate. I know it for a fact. Saul created the Cyrists. And whether they’ve been around for centuries depends on your perspective. To those—including yourself, Kate—who have not been under continuous protection of a medallion for the past two years, the Cyrists were founded in the mid-fifteenth century.”
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  “Fourteen seventy-eight, to be precise,” said Connor.

  Katherine walked over to one of the shelves and scanned the contents for a moment, eventually pulling out a fat book. “Your textbooks probably devote pages to the history of the Cyrists and their role in various eras. Pull any book from these shelves, however, and you’ll find no mention of Cyrists, their beliefs or their history.”

  She handed the book to me. It was a survey of American history written in the 1980s. I thumbed through the index and saw no mention of the Cyrist colony at Providence, which every history class I could recall studied along with the Puritans of Salem and the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock.

  “This is the correct history, then?” I asked.

  “Correct is a relative term, but yes—that book gives a generally accurate depiction of the timeline before Saul started mucking about. We were very lucky to be able to preserve these books. If I hadn’t found Connor when I did, the entire library would have been corrupted. And while you’ll find no mention of the Cyrists in any of these volumes, Connor and I can give you a precise date for the actual founding of Cyrist International: May 2nd of last year.”

  “Ah,” I said, comprehension dawning. “That’s when…”

  “Exactly. That was the date of the first temporal distortion you felt, when you were still in Iowa.”

  “That’s so hard to imagine, though. I mean, I can remember seeing Cyrist temples since I was a kid. They’re what, maybe ten percent of the population?”