The Day Before Forever (11 page)

We hardly had time for conversation on the walk—not that we had much to say—as we tried to walk briskly to make it back in time to call Carter House.

So it was very strange when Henley suddenly stopped short across the street from the hostel.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “It's right there. We need to call before—”

“That man's there again.”

I had no idea what he was talking about until I saw him myself.

It was the man from last night. He was there, pacing in front of the hostel, with his oversized sweatshirt and his sweaty hair. He obviously hadn't changed since last night.

I walked toward him before Henley could stop me.

“There you are,” the man said when he saw me. “Took you long enough.”

Standing in front of him now, I could see a brown stain near the front neckline of his sweatshirt. It was as if he had missed his mouth when eating something and hadn't bothered cleaning it up.

“You were waiting for us?” I braced myself as he got closer to me. I didn't want to know what his breath smelled like.

“Didn't we have business to take care of, you and me?” The man ignored Henley, who had come up protectively behind me.

“We want—”

“Not here.” The man turned and walked around the corner of the hostel.

It took me a second to realize I was meant to follow.

Trailing him, I walked into the narrow side street between the hostel and the next-door apartments. I realized this was the small street I could see from the window in our room, but now, actually walking the road, it seemed more like an alleyway than an actual street.

The man was flattened against the wall of the hostel. It was the perfect location: devoid of people, no security cameras, and not suspicious at all, especially in broad daylight. The man stood precisely where he could not be seen by either the windows of the hostel or the windows of the apartments. He was practiced.

“Next time you wait ten more seconds before following me, yeah?”

I nodded quickly.

“Now, what is it that you want?”

I thought on my feet. We ultimately needed passports to leave the country, but we surely didn't have the funds to pay for them right then, and it was likely there would be some deposit to pay ahead of time. But we needed something to show the auction house—or any other pubs—should they ask.

Henley had talked about using the Beauford Family Estate as part of the cover story on how we came to own the Tudor jewelry. Should we need to produce a form of identification, the auction house would surely ask him instead of me—as far as they would be concerned, I wasn't involved.

“We need two IDs. One for me and one for him.” I pointed at a fidgeting Henley. He had a deep furrow lining his forehead.

The man rubbed his short beard.

“Something like a London driving license of some sort?” I offered.

“Of course not. That won't do. Do you take me for an idiot?”

“Um . . . no?”

The man crossed his arms. “You have an accent. Where are you from?”

“The States,” Henley said.

“Of course I know that,” the man snapped. “I meant what state.”

“New York,” I said.

“Him too?” He jabbed his thumb in Henley's general direction.

“Yes.”

“Then you want New York driver's licenses,” the man said. “You're obviously not from around here. A British license would raise questions.”

“And you can do New York driver's licenses?” I asked.

“Of course we can. Don't insult me. You have an address and a name you want it under?” The man took a scrap of paper and a pen out of the pocket of his sweatshirt.

I took it and tried to write out Henley's name, but the capless ballpoint pen the man handed me didn't work.

“Do you have another pen?” I asked.

“Do I look like I have another pen?”

I took that to mean no and kept scribbling on the corner of the paper. At last some ink came out, and I carefully wrote out Henley's full name, my name, and Miss Hatfield's address.

The man took the pen and paper from me when I was done.

“Two names. Two cards. Same address,” I said.

“How much would that cost?” Henley asked.

“I'll give it to you for eighty pounds.”

“We're ordering more than one,” I said, giving him a look.

“Fine. Sixty.”

“And how do we know it'll be good enough to pass?” Henley said.

“Oh, it'll be good. But if you're so worried, why don't you pay half now and pay the other half when you see it?”

Henley looked at me. That sounded reasonable.

“Give him the money,” I said.

Henley dug into the backpack and emerged with the money. Each bill was folded neatly down the middle.

The man was quick to pocket the cash and produced his phone. Even a shady man like this had a glossy iPhone.

“I need to take a picture of both of you.” The man pointed to the white-painted brick wall behind us. “There.”

The photo was taken as soon as Henley got in front of the wall.

Henley opened his mouth. “But I—”

“Wasn't ready?” The man sniggered. “That's the first thing about fakes. The photos aren't supposed to be good. If you look too good, it's a telltale sign the ID's a fake.” He jabbed a finger at me. “You next.”

He quickly took my photo.

“How long will it take?” Henley asked.

“Calm it down, boy. It'll take as long as it takes. I promise quality, not speed.”

Henley's face flushed. “We need it fast. We're paying—”

The man looked at me with his hard eyes. “I don't like this boy. You should lose him as soon as you can.”

I ignored that and tried to ask in a way the man would understand. “We want to use the IDs as soon as possible . . . that is, if they're good enough.”

“Of course they'll be good enough.” The man mopped his sweaty forehead with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “You have something in mind?”

“We're putting them to the test as soon as we get them,” I said.

“Oh, they'll pass. You'll see.”

“I sure hope they do.” I surprised myself with how cold I sounded.

The man grinned. “I like you better than your boy there. I'll tell you what—I'll rush my guy for expedited service and I'll only charge fifty percent more. Because I'm that kinda businessman.”

I nodded to Henley, and he gave the man fifteen more pounds.

“The IDs will pass whatever test you throw at them.” The man turned and walked away from us.

For a second, neither Henley nor I moved. When the man was long out of sight, Henley finally turned toward me.

“So that was that?” Henley said. “The man will find us when he's done making the fake licenses?”

“He'll probably be pacing in front of the hostel again,” I said.

We walked into the hostel. Henley made to go back to our room, but I stopped him.

“Aren't you forgetting something?” I pointed to the phone number scrawled on the back of his left hand. “We were going to call the auction house, weren't we?”

“Oh, right. Yes.” It was obvious he was a little out of sorts from the encounter we had just had.

“I don't know when exactly we'll have the IDs, but maybe we won't need them for our first meeting . . .” I felt as if I was talking to myself more than Henley.

I rang the bell at the front desk and waited a few minutes. I didn't want to come across as too impatient, but when I didn't hear anything, I rang it again.

I heard a distant “Yes!” through the walls. A minute later, footsteps.

“So sorry,” Aaron said as he came through the door. He tried to wipe what looked like flour from his shirt, but he only managed to smear the white powder even more. “I was just baking. Can't leave the oven unattended for long! What can I do for you?”

“Sorry for taking you from your baking,” I said.

“Oh no, I'm here for you to ask me questions.”

“We just wanted to ask if there was a phone we could use?”

Aaron reached behind the desk and pulled out a phone. It was a landline and connected to the wall, so he made sure to move the cord around the computer monitor. “There you go.”

Thanking him, I reached for the phone and stopped.

“Why don't you make the call?” I said to Henley.

Aaron was still awkwardly standing behind the desk, watching us. He didn't look like he was going to move anytime soon.

Henley picked up the receiver and began dialing, looking
back at his hand every few seconds. He put the phone to his ear, and I could hear it ring.

“Carter House Auction Specialists.” It was a young female voice that picked up on the other end of the line. “Hilary speaking.”

“Um, yes, Hilary. I'm Henley Beauford, and I was hoping to come in to talk to you about a piece of jewelry I would like to sell.”

“Jewelry. I can most certainly put you in touch with one of our jewelry specialists for an evaluation and consultation.” Hilary spoke crisply, enunciating all her letters, so even I could hear every consonant she uttered. “Might I ask the decade this piece of jewelry is from?”

“Uh, well it's a set. A jewelry set. A woman's necklace and earrings. It's very old. Um, early 1500s?”

Hilary didn't miss a beat. “Could you briefly describe it for us? I'd like to take a few notes to give to our specialist before the meeting.”

“Sure . . . it's gold. With rubies.”

“Or garnets,” I whispered.

“Or garnets,” Henley repeated. “Red stones. Um, and the earrings match.”

“They're in very good condition,” I prompted Henley.

“They're in very good condition. Preserved
very
well,” Henley said.

I glanced at Aaron. There was no way he was not listening to this conversation. I wondered how much he could hear of the woman on the other end, but needless to say, this was probably not the type of phone conversation he usually heard at the hostel.

“Yes.” Hilary sounded like she was taking notes furiously on the other end. “And finally, when would be most convenient for you to come into our offices for us to assess the jewelry and discuss our process with you?”

“We—my . . . girlfriend and I are traveling from the States and will be staying briefly in the UK, so as soon as possible would be ideal.”

“We can see you first thing tomorrow morning at ten, if that would be convenient for you?”

“Yes, that would be fine. Thank you.”

“We look forward to meeting you, Mr. Beauford.”

Henley and I stood still, waiting for the click of the phone on the other end. When we heard it, it was accompanied by a sigh of relief, but I didn't know if the sigh was from me or Henley.

Henley put down the receiver, and we both thanked Aaron once again.

“We're trying to take care of a few things while we're in town,” I tried to explain.

Aaron asked no questions.

I asked for some paper and a pen, and wrote down the number from Henley's hand before we left.

Henley and I walked back to the room.

“So ‘girlfriend,' huh?” I said suddenly.

Henley chuckled. “What else was I supposed to call you? I heard Peter use the term when he described you. That was appropriate, right?”

“Yes,” I said. It wasn't perfect, but there wasn't really a word for what I was to Henley and what he was to me. I guessed it was close enough.

SIX

I KNEW IT
was morning before I opened my eyes. Light streamed into our room, and I could feel it through my eyelids.

I kept them closed and turned over onto my side. I could feel Henley next to me—his palpable warmth, the cadence of his breath, and the way his body fit around mine. In that moment, everything else was secondary. Henley was here next to me. That was all that mattered. With him there, I was the happiest I had been in a long time.

I sighed and turned onto my back once more. It was so comfortable in bed, but I knew I should start to get up.

I unglued my eyelids and stared straight up at the ceiling. It was plain and set lower than I had realized. My eyes followed every bump and bubble of the paint. Uninterested, I turned to Henley again. This time, with my eyes open, it was different.

With my eyes closed, Henley was Henley alone; he was the Henley that I loved and the Henley that existed in my memories.
With my eyes opened, Henley was Henley
and
Richard.

Henley had come back to me and I still loved him, yet he was so different—
this
was so different. Every morning when I woke up, would it be like this? Feeling Henley, hearing Henley, and expecting to see Henley, only to be met with Richard?

Frowning, I turned away.

“Good morning.” I heard Henley groan as he stretched beside me. “Sleep well?”

I turned toward him, almost expecting to see Henley's clear blue eyes, but I was met with Richard's caramel.

“Yes, I did,” I said.

“I had a dream I was back home,” he said.

Home.
It was amazing he still considered it that. With more time, Henley probably would stop thinking of the house in his original time period as his home.

“What was the dream about?”

“Not much.” He tucked his hands behind his head. “I was walking the grounds of the country house. Everything was there—the tree we sat by, the stables you loved, the original main house before it burned down . . .”

We sat in silence for a while.

“We have a long morning ahead of us, don't we?” Henley finally said.

I knew he meant our meeting with the auction house. “Yes . . .” I glanced at the clock on the bedside table. “We have enough time, but we should get dressed and eat a quick breakfast before we leave.”

Henley sat up without warning. “What do we wear?”

I had slept in a shirt, and Henley had slept in his pants. We
couldn't really go as we were.

I shrugged. “The nicest we can manage. You can wear that button-down shirt with the jeans, and I can wear my skirt and top set.”

“And shoes?” Henley ran his fingers through his hair. “What about shoes?”

I shrugged again. It was just like Henley to panic about shoes.

We both got up and changed into our respective outfits. I was spreading peanut butter on a slice of bread when Henley came back into the room. I was hungry and so absorbed in preparing breakfast that I hadn't noticed that he had left in the first place.

I turned to him with the bread in my hands, meaning to ask him where he had gone, until I saw that he was clutching a pair of shoes in each hand.

“The lost and found crate out there is a gold mine.” Henley grinned. “It's as if we have our own personal shop right outside.”

I laughed and offered the bread I was holding. “I'll trade you a scrumptious breakfast of peanut butter and bread for those shoes.” I pointed at the women's leather shoes in Henley's right hand.

“You drive a hard bargain,” Henley said, pretending to think about it. “But for
that
piece of bread . . . I think I'll have to accept.”

He set the shoes down in front of me, and I stepped into them. Henley took the bread from me and bit into it while looking me up and down.

“A little big . . . but surprisingly not bad,” he said through his full mouth. “Here, try walking around in them. Hopefully you won't step completely out of them.”

I walked to the end of the room and back. He was right; not bad, especially for something excavated from the lost and found.

“Amazing they even had both men's and women's shoes in there,” I said, picking up another piece of bread, this time for myself, and spreading more peanut butter on it.

“Everything's in there. I swear there are more things in the lost and found than there was food in the grocery store we went to. The world could end tomorrow, and we'd find our survival supplies in that crate.”

I thought it was funny that the grocery store had clearly made a big impression on Henley.

“Try yours on.” I took a bite out of my bread.

“Already did,” he said, but he put on the shoes anyway. “Aren't they nice?”

Henley's shoes actually looked like they were his.

“As long as I keep my pants this long, you can't see the big scuff mark on the instep.”

“They look perfect for the meeting.”

“Speaking of which . . .” Henley looked at the clock. “We should get going.”

I devoured the rest of my bread, while Henley made sure the jewelry and clock were in the backpack.

“Anything else we need?” Henley asked.

“IDs for us,” I said. “But it looks like we won't have them.” I wished we had ordered them from the man sooner.

“They probably won't need something like that on a first
meeting,” Henley said. But we both knew that was a complete guess. Neither of us knew the auction house's practices.

We walked down the hall and to the parlor. Aaron wasn't there this morning, though I don't suppose it mattered if he was there or not because he had already heard Henley's phone call with Carter House.

I saw a map behind the counter and pulled it toward me. I scanned the page for the street Carter House was on.

“Here we go.”

I saw Henley take the hostel's business card from in front of the computer. That was a smart idea, in case we got lost or had to call the hostel.

“We need to take a left up there,” I said as we stepped out of the building.

Before Henley could answer, we were interrupted.

“Finally! Finally!” It was the ID man, and he was running up to us waving his hands. “You two take so long. What'd you do? Decide this was the day to sleep in?”

I noticed the man was at last wearing different clothing.

Henley instinctively stepped in front of me.

“Well, you don't need your beauty rest no more—” The man glanced at Henley. “Well, maybe you
do
. You look more horrible than your picture.”

“So you have them then?” I asked. “The fake IDs.”

“Whoa. Whoa. What? I don't have any fake IDs to give you,” the man said in a theatrically loud voice. Much quieter he said, “Damn it, not here.”

The man slinked around the corner again, as he had done the first time. I remembered to wait longer than I had before,
and then Henley and I followed him.

“Here you go, princess.” The man held up the licenses, and from where I stood, they looked a lot like the IDs Miss Hatfield had for both of us in New York.

Henley tried to reach for it, but the man snatched it away.

“Huh-uh. You see the card. I see the money.”

Henley dug into the backpack and came up with the extra forty-five pounds. We watched the man count it out before stashing it in his pocket. He wordlessly handed us the IDs.

Henley leaned over me as we both peered at the card. Henley looked pale and dissatisfied in the photo, but it looked as if it had been taken in bad lighting in the Department of Motor Vehicles. Henley's name was spelled correctly. The address was also correct. There was even a fake signature and an estimated height. The card read “New York Driver's License” and looked official enough. Mine looked the same.

“So?” The man looked expectantly at us. “Tell me that's not the best damn job you've seen. It's perfect.”

I was about to tell him that I wouldn't know since I had nothing to compare it to, but I decided against that and just nodded.

“Thank you,” I said.

“For a sweetie like you? Any day,” the man said. “The name's Carl, by the way.” He squinted hard at Henley. “You're lucky you have this one,” he told him.

“Well, Carl, we'd best get going,” I said. We weren't late yet to our meeting, but I didn't want to be. I suddenly thought about the passports we wanted to get. “How can we contact you if we need something else?”

“For you, sweetie, I'll give you my number.”

Carl took a pen out and walked toward me. It took everything in my power not to step back. He took my hand and wrote his phone number on the inside of my wrist. The nib of the pen scratched along as it dug into my skin.

“T-thanks,” I managed to get out.

“Call anytime you need anything. That's what prepaid phones are for . . . That and making sure you don't leave a trail, of course.” Carl flashed a lazy grin at us. “If that's it, I'd best be going too. I have my own rounds to make, you know.”

We went our separate ways in the alley, though I'm sure Carl waited an extra minute so he wouldn't be seen leaving at the same time as us.

“That was . . . strange,” Henley said after we were safely a block away.

“Do you expect anything else when you're buying an illegal fake ID?”

Henley pulled out the map to get his bearings, before we started power walking to the auction house address.

Henley pulled open the heavy glass door and walked in first. I followed the muffled sound his loafers made on the floor as I clutched the backpack in my arms.

The lobby was empty and vast. The walls were smooth black stone in complete contrast to the green tile beneath our feet. It sparkled where we stepped.

There was a black desk, at least three times the size of the cramped one back at the hostel. A woman with a perfectly coifed bun eyed us as we walked in. I knew we probably looked
different—a little younger, differently dressed—from the regular people she'd seen walk into the building, but I didn't think we looked
that
bad.

Henley looked confident—at least from behind. He strutted up to the woman.

“We're here for Carter House,” he said.

The woman gestured to the far side of the room. “The elevator would be that way.”

Henley walked past me, and I followed closely at his heels.

The elevator looked imposing. It was tall and highly buffed to a gleam where the sun hit it.

“What company, sir?”

I hadn't noticed that there was a man in uniform standing next to the elevator. He had already pushed the button to summon it.

“Carter House,” Henley said.

Unlike the phone call he had made yesterday, there were no “ums” and “uhs.” This was a different Henley. A confident Henley. He must have been used to this type of lavish business environment. I wondered if this was the Henley everyone saw when he used to do business in his own time.

The elevator dinged, and we walked on. The elevator man wedged himself between me and the buttons. He pressed for the fourth floor, and we went up.

I silently watched my reflection in the heavily burnished silver doors. The woman I saw in the doors didn't look as nervous as I felt, but she looked so out of place. Her skirt was riding up and her shoes were large enough that there was a gap between her heel and the back of the shoe. She held her backpack so
tightly that her hands were turning white. She wasn't of this world.

The elevator sounded again, and I felt it come to a stop.

The elevator man held the door for us as we stepped out. “Have a good day, sir. Ma'am.”

I tried to smile at the man, but Henley didn't acknowledge his existence.

The room we had been dropped off in was a lobby like the one downstairs. It had the same matching color scheme of emerald and black, but it was smaller with a smaller desk. A seating area with a large emerald couch also took up space.

“Hello. How may I help you?” This woman at this front desk had a nicer smile than the last. Behind her, a large sign proudly announced
Carter House Auction Specialists. At least we knew we were in the right place.

“We have an appointment for ten this morning,” Henley said.

The woman glanced down. There must have been a computer at the desk hidden from sight. “Why, yes. Mr. Beauford?” She tucked a flyaway blond strand behind her ear.

“Yes.”

The woman smiled at me. “Please have a seat, Mr. and Mrs. Beauford, and we'll be right with you.”

Henley didn't bother to correct her and went at once to one of the single-seater black velvet armchairs. I sat on the green couch. The backs of my thighs stuck to the leather upholstery.

There was a single door between the seating area and the desk. I guessed it led to the rest of the office and that it would be where someone would appear to call our names.

“Coffee or tea while you wait?” the woman asked from the desk.