“Are you okay?” the woman asked.
I wasn’t. The dizzy sensation was much the same as it had been during the previous two time shifts, although it seemed more subdued this time. Perhaps that was due to the CHRONOS key? The wrenching sensation in my gut was worse, however, and that was definitely due to the fact that Dad had just vanished in front of my eyes.
“Wrong class. I’m okay—really. Sorry for the interruption.”
But… what if Dad was sick today? And she was a substitute? Even though I knew it was probably wishful thinking, I needed to go to the cottage and check it out.
I pushed myself upward and the blond guy helped me to my feet. “I’m Trey. You’re new here, right? Careful… you still look a bit unsteady. Maybe you should sit down.”
“Sorry,” I repeated. “I need to go.” I was still feeling a bit dizzy, but I pulled away and headed out of the classroom.
“Wait,” the teacher called. “You shouldn’t be up so quickly. Trey, follow her. Make her see the nurse.”
And so, as I hurried down the hall, Mr. Tall Blond and Handsome followed, only a few steps behind. “Wait, where are you going? The nurse’s office is this way.”
“I’m fine.”
I continued out the building exit, with the guy still following me. He grabbed my arm. “Hey, be careful. You don’t want to faint again on these stairs.”
“Look, it’s Trey, right? You seem nice enough, but please, go away. I have to find my dad.”
“Your dad?”
We continued across the parking lot, toward the soccer fields. “He’s a teacher here,” I said. “Harry Keller? We live across the campus, near the edge. In one of the faculty cottages. That’s where I’m headed. Please, just let me go.”
He released my arm. “Okay, we can go to the cottage if you want, but then we go see the nurse.”
“No—I’ll just lie down. I’m fine. I should have eaten lunch…”
I kept walking, and so did he.
“Sorry, no can do. I told Mrs. Dees you would see the nurse. I can’t go back to class until…” I turned to glare at him and saw that he was smiling—a wide, friendly grin. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t know what game you’re playing, but unless you enrolled today, you’re not a student here. I would definitely have remembered you. I haven’t been here long myself, so I keep an eye out for newbies—it’s a bit hard to fit in with those who have been here since seventh grade. And I’m pretty sure there’s no Harry Keller on the faculty.”
I shook my head. “He has to be… and if you think I’m not who I say I am, why don’t you trot back to teacher and tell her to alert security?” I picked up my pace. “If I’m not a student, I shouldn’t be here.”
“Right,” he said. “But where’s the fun in that? You don’t appear to be a dangerous terrorist and, besides, you did faint back there. So why don’t you tell me what’s wrong? Maybe I can help.”
“You can’t. Go back to class.”
“I don’t think so. Come on—I have the choice of going back to trigonometry or walking across the school with a beautiful girl on a warm spring day. Which do you honestly think I’m going to choose?”
I looked at him in amazement. He was actually trying to flirt with me when I was right on the very edge of losing it. For no reason I could explain, tears rushed to my eyes and I was caught between laughing hysterically and crying. I sat down in the middle of the soccer field and put my head in my hands.
“Oh, hey! No, I’m sorry,” he said. “Don’t… don’t cry. Really…”
I kept my head down for a moment to pull myself together, taking deep breaths. “I’m okay,” I said. “It’s just been a bad, bad day.” When I looked up, he was sitting on the field in front of me, his face level with mine. His gray eyes, which had little flecks of blue, were full of concern and he gave me a tentative, sympathetic smile. He reminded me of a big friendly puppy and I wasn’t sure how I was going to shake him.
I remembered my school ID and tugged the cord out of my shirt. It was there, beneath my Metro card. I pulled it out, holding it up for him to see. “I really am a student, see? I have proof.”
He leaned forward to read the ID. “Prudence Katherine Pierce-Keller. Cool monogram—PKPK. Hi, Prudence. I’m Trey.”
I grimaced. “It’s Kate, please.”
Laughing, he pulled his own ID out of the gray messenger bag that was slung over his shoulder and handed it to me.
“Lawrence A. Coleman the Third,” I read. “What’s the A for?”
“Alma. My great-grandmother’s maiden name.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah—granddad is Larry; dad is Lars. No good versions left—not that I really like the first two—so Mom went with Trey.” He held up three fingers. “You know, for being number three.”
I nodded and got to my feet, handing him back his ID. I put my own ID back into the holder and took out one of the keys. There was a small white tag attached, on which someone in the school administration had written the number 117 and the name Keller. “This key, Trey, fits the front door to that last little house over there. My dad, Harry Keller, lives in that house, and so do I for the better part of each week.”
He was walking beside me again. “If this key fits,” I continued, “you can go back and tell Mrs… Dees?” Trey nodded. “You can tell Mrs. Dees that I’m fine. Just a silly girl who should have eaten her lunch. Deal?”
“Deal. But not until you’re inside.”
“Fine,” I agreed. “I’m going to open the door, heat up some leftover jambalaya that’s in the fridge, and take a very long nap.”
I sighed, aware as I walked up the front steps of the cottage that I was saying all of this as much to reassure myself as to convince Trey. I really needed to open the door and see that Dad was there, that Mrs. Dees was a substitute because he’d come down with a cold or something else, and that I’d just imagined him being in the classroom. I kept telling myself that Katherine and Connor were crazy, or maybe the past few days were just one extended bad dream. I held the key out with shaky hands and, with Trey watching, finally managed to insert it in the doorknob.
To my immense relief, it opened. I turned back toward Trey and gave him a huge smile. “See! I told you this was my—” I stopped suddenly as I saw his face, then followed his gaze inside the open door.
Everything in the cottage was wrong. The couch where I slept had been replaced by two overstuffed chairs. A braided rug was on the floor. And then I saw what Trey was staring at—a framed photograph of Mrs. Dees with two small children, next to a large white mug that held pens and pencils. The red letters on the mug read #1 Grandma.
“No!” I backed out of the doorway. “The key fit! You saw it, didn’t you? It fit!”
Trey closed the door, making sure it locked. I sank onto the front steps, and after a moment he sat down beside me. “So… you want to tell me what you think is going on?”
I looked at him. What difference would it make? It wasn’t like he would believe me. I tugged the CHRONOS key out of my blouse. “What color is this?”
His gaze shifted from me to the medallion. “Brown, bronze—not sure what you’d call it. It looks old.”
“Well, it’s bright blue for me. There’s an hourglass in the middle.”
“Blue. Really? I can see the hourglass, but…”
I raised my eyebrows. “You see an hourglass in the middle, and the sand is moving back and forth?” Trey shook his head. “I didn’t think so. If I hold this in my hand for too long, my grandmother says that I’ll vanish to some point back in time. Or forward, maybe. It nearly happened to me yesterday.”
His expression didn’t change, so I went on. “Someone is altering reality… changing things. When I first looked in at the classroom this morning, my father, Harry Keller, was standing at the Smart Board. My desk—your desk now—was empty, because I was just arriving at school. And then, in an instant, I saw all of that change.”
There was sympathy in his gray ey
es, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. Of course he didn’t. He would have to be crazy to believe what I was saying. He probably thought that I was mentally unbalanced, and I wasn’t sure I could argue against that theory successfully. “Someone—apparently my grandfather—is changing history. My grandmother says I’m the only one who can stop it, because I inherited the ability to work this piece of equipment. Some other people inherited the ability, too, but apparently they’re all on the Dark Side.” I put the house keys back in the holder and then tucked both that and the medallion back inside my shirt. “I was coming back here, to school, to pull my dad into this nightmare… I don’t want to make decisions about how to handle this alone. I’ve felt these time shifts twice before, but it was just… a bad feeling. No one ever disappeared.”
I sighed, staring down at my shoes. “And the key fit, damn it. I was so sure…”
“But… wouldn’t the key fit either way?” Trey spoke softly, the way you might around someone who was unstable. I recognized the slightly condescending tone, and resented it, but I couldn’t really blame him. “I mean, even if everything you’ve said is somehow true, if they hired Mrs. Dees instead of your dad, it… would be the same key to the cottage. Right?”
I closed my eyes but didn’t answer. Duh—of course it would be the same key.
After a few minutes I stood up and gave Trey a weak smile. “I know you need to alert security now, but would you give me a few minutes’ head start to the Metro? Please?”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to try and find my mom—she’s in DC. And then…”
“Okay.” He stood and brushed off his pants. “Let’s go.”
“What? No!” I said, beginning to walk away. “No, no, and no. I’m going, Trey. You go back to class.”
He shook his head firmly. “That would be very irresponsible of me. You’re either in trouble, in which case I might be able to help, or else you’re crazy, in which case someone needs to keep an eye on you. I’m volunteering, at least for the rest of the afternoon.”
I headed across campus in the straightest path to the Metro station. “You have school. You can’t just ditch. Don’t you have parents?”
He shrugged, matching his stride to mine. “My dad would—probably—say I’m making the right choice. He’s not going to complain either way. My mom might disagree, but she’s on assignment in Haiti for the next few months, and I don’t think the school will be giving her a call. Estella—she lives with us—will chew me out for ditching class, but the school won’t leave messages with anyone but parents. So you’re stuck with me.”
I was torn between angry and amused. Trey was nice and, I had to admit, very cute, but I needed to focus on the problems at hand. Maybe I could lose him in the crowds at the station?
Thinking about the Metro, however, brought a wave of anxiety. Suddenly the idea of having someone along, after the experience I’d had that morning, didn’t sound so bad.
“Okay,” I said, “you can come. But in the interest of full disclosure, you should know that I was mugged on the Metro this morning.”
He gave me his crooked grin again. “Damn, girl, you have had a bad day.”
We had to wait about fifteen minutes for a train, but the ride into DC was short. Trey attempted to make conversation. My brain was on autopilot; I managed to nod in the right places, though. His mother worked with the State Department, and she traveled a lot. His father worked for some international firm—something that sounded vaguely financial to me—and they had just returned from two years in Peru, where he had attended a school for the children of diplomats. When I asked about siblings, Trey laughed and said his parents hadn’t been on the same continent often enough to manage a second child. They had decided that he and his dad would stay in DC so that he could finish up high school at Briar Hill, which his dad and grandfather had both attended. Estella, who had worked for his family since Trey’s dad was a kid, kept them organized and fed.
When they returned from Peru in December, Briar Hill told his dad that Trey would be admitted into the senior class in the fall, so he had been studying at home through a correspondence course in the interim. But a space opened up unexpectedly in January and he was able to start during the spring semester. It sounded like the same slot I’d taken when Dad accepted the job.
I gave him my own two-minute bio—or at least the version that had been true an hour ago—and we talked music and movies for a few minutes. Or, rather, Trey talked while I listened and nodded.
As we headed up the escalator into the sunlight, I stopped and closed my eyes, taking in a deep breath to steady myself.
“Are you okay?” Trey asked.
I shook my head. “It’s only a few blocks to the townhouse, and I… I don’t think she’ll be there. And I’m scared.” It felt odd saying this to someone I barely knew, but Trey was so friendly that it was hard to stay distant.
“Well,” he said, “we cross that bridge when we come to it, right?”
When we arrived, I didn’t even have to try the key. I stared up at the windows of the house as Trey opened the mailbox and peeked in—all of the mail was addressed to someone named Sudhira Singh. But I had known as soon as we’d rounded the corner that Mom didn’t live there. Pink ruffled curtains with tiebacks would never be in any house where Deborah Pierce lived. If such curtains had come with the place, they would have been down and in the trash before the first box was out of the moving truck.
7
I seemed to have lost every bit of energy I possessed, and it was all I could do to move from the steps in front of the townhouse. Trey took charge and steered us toward Massachusetts Avenue, where we found a coffee shop. He sat me at a booth by the window and came back with two coffees and two blueberry muffins. I promised to pay him back, but he just laughed, saying coffee and muffins made me a cheap date, relatively speaking.
“So why do you think this time-shift thing made your dad and your mom… disappear?” he asked. “You said it happened twice before, and no one vanished. Why this time?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t really stopped to think about that.” I paused for a moment, going over what I knew in my head. “There were two photographs at my grandmother’s house—her friend, Connor, said they used to be identical copies of the same family portrait. One had been kept in a protected area—an area shielded from time shifts by one of these medallions. The other photo wasn’t. When I saw them today, they were portraits of two different families, headed by the same man.”
I took a sip of my coffee before continuing. “Something must have shifted the course of the man in the photograph’s life—two different paths. And yes, Connor and Katherine could be mistaken or lying—one picture might be Photoshopped, or the men could be twin brothers, I don’t know… But I’m pretty sure the man in both of the portraits is the same man I met on the Metro this morning, just after I was mugged. Only this morning, he was about twenty years younger than when the picture was taken in the 1920s.”
“Wait,” Trey said. “You met the guy in the photos? This morning?”
I nodded. “He warned me that something was about to happen. And I watched him disappear while he was holding a medallion just like this one.”
I gave Trey a weak smile. “All of this sounds just as crazy to me as it does to you. But to answer your question about why my mom and dad have vanished, I think something was changed in the past. Something that affected my family.”
I relayed the story my grandmother had told me, realizing as I spoke that there were huge gaps in what I knew. I explained about CHRONOS and how Katherine had escaped into 1969. “If I had to guess,” I concluded, “I’d say that Saul finally caught up to my grandmother in the past. If she never had my mother, then I was never born and my father…” I shrugged. “There would be no reason for him to be at Briar Hill. Or something else changed and my mom and dad, and maybe me…? I have no idea how this works. Maybe we’re all still in Iowa…”
Trey s
tood up from his side of the booth and motioned for me to slide over. He squeezed his tall frame into the seat next to me and removed a small laptop from his messenger bag. “Then that sounds like the place to start—let’s find your parents. Is it Debra or Deborah? And how do you spell Pierce?”
I looked at him skeptically. “You believe me? You actually believe all of this?”
He took a bite of the muffin, chewing it slowly as he considered his answer. “No,” he said. “Don’t be offended, please. You said yourself, it’s crazy. I don’t believe that reality has shifted and that the medallion around your neck will cause you to disappear. Although I have to admit that it made me nervous when you were holding it in your hand earlier, so maybe I don’t entirely disbelieve you, either.”
“So why help me?” I suspected it was, in part, because he found me attractive. Trey was a nice guy, but if not for that little fact, I was pretty sure that he would have decided that his obligation to help ended at the Metro station.
He finished off the muffin and then replied. “The important thing is that I do think you believe what you’ve told me. And I’m sure you have parents somewhere and I’d like to try to help you find them. Please eat something, okay—otherwise, I’m going to have to carry you on the way back to the Metro.”
“Why not just take me back to my grandmother?” I asked, a bit defensively, taking a bite out of my muffin. I felt like a lost kitten that he was feeding and keeping out of traffic while he searched for my owner.
“Well, first, you haven’t told me her name or address,” Trey said. “And second, that’s not what you want, right?”
I shook my head. “No. I mean… not until I know.”
“Okay, then—we look for your mom and dad. Let’s start with a Google search…”
Twenty minutes later, we had established that Deborah Pierce did not exist—or, at least, she had never taught history at either of the colleges where she had worked. I knew the login and password to access her university website, because Mom always used the same password for everything. The password was irrelevant anyway, since the system had no record of user dpierce42. We tried a search for several academic articles that she had written, but there was nothing listed.