The Time Seekers (The Soul Seekers Book 2) (7 page)

“I am listening. You said you wanted me to go with you, but I wouldn’t. And now that I want to go for a really important reason, you say I can’t.”

“And you sound unreasonable. You’re pregnant, Emma. Think about the baby.”

“Oh, this stupid baby!” I turned away from him because his last words had hit hard. Too hard. I hadn’t been thinking about the baby. All I wanted was to find those damn Seekers and rip them to shreds. Once and for all. But I couldn’t forget the baby. My stomach growled loudly because he or
she
was hungry again. Glum, I made my way into the kitchen to find something else to eat, leaving Will behind.

I opened the refrigerator. Nothing. I’d already cleaned out the leftovers. If I wanted to eat now, I’d have to cook it. Two steaks sat wrapped in butcher paper, so I grabbed them and an onion, and then some mushrooms. And a gallon of milk. When I headed for the counter, arms laden, Will propped himself up against the kitchen doorway to watch.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m
that
hungry.”

“I see.”

He walked over to the table and pulled up a chair. “Maybe after you eat you’ll have a clearer head and we can talk.”

“My head is perfectly clear,” I said, chopping down onto the onion with a bit too much ferocity. “We can talk about it now.”

“Huh.” William leaned back in his chair. “I’m not so sure.” Then, after I’d worked on seasoning and plopping both steaks onto a hot iron skillet, I heard him say, “Emma, you have hips.”

I froze.

“You never had hips before. It’s quite attractive.”

Rolling my eyes, I resumed positioning the steaks in their pan. “And so,” I said, continuing on, “when are we heading off?” I turned to him, spatula in hand. “To the good old nineteen-fifties, where men thought it was okay to say things about a woman’s hips and all?”

He cleared his throat. “I guess never.”

I laughed. “Wrong guess. The baby will be fine. We’re not going to raise her, or him, to be a coward anyway, so this will be great training. If our kid can get through this, our kid can get through anything.” Time to flip the steaks. I liked them rare now.

I threw in the onions and the mushrooms, salivating at the thought of how good it would taste and how cold the glass of milk would be to wash it all down.

William appeared out of sorts. His shoulders were slumped, his fingers thatched through his hair. “I should have never told you. I should have never started all this.”

In a few minutes, I had two plates heaped with food. Placing his down before him, I paused a minute to rub his back with a free hand. “Don’t you trust me?”

He lifted his face, eyes searing into mine. “It’s not that, Emma. It’s just that you haven’t been using your powers lately, and this is serious business. Yes, I trust you, but I don’t trust
them
. The cult. What if something bad happens and I lose you and the baby? I’d be alone, and all of this, everything, would be for nothing. It would destroy me.”

“And if you left without me, and didn’t come back, I’d be destroyed, too. They’d come here and find me, and I’d be all alone. Wouldn’t it be better for the both of us to go now? To fight them, together?”

He shook his head for a very long time. But I knew the things I’d said had gotten through, because they were the truth. “Dammit, Emma,” he said.

I walked around the table and sat down with my food. William cut into his steak in silence. When I’d eaten almost every bite of steak, and gulped down an entire glass of milk, I made a motion to get up and clear the table. William beat me to it. He grabbed my plate and glass and headed for the sink. “You won’t do anything dangerous,” he said from over his shoulder. “You leave that to me.” He turned on the faucet and starting scrubbing. “And you won’t challenge them, provoke them, or anything risky. You can be a spy. Okay?”

“A spy? Gee, how exciting. If I know you, it means I get to sit in a room the whole time with a pair of binoculars.” His silence told me he hadn’t considered such a thing, but liked the idea. I walked over and slid my arms around his waist. “I could seduce Marcus. Get him to tell me secrets.” Now this was an idea William
didn’t
like. His stern look told me not only no, but
hell
no. “Okay, but I can pretend to be interested in the cult and find out all their secrets.”

After a few more scrubs, he rinsed the plates and glasses clean. He dried them off with a towel and turned to hold me. “I hate to admit it, but your plan is probably the right way to go.”

I stretched up to peck him on the lips. “So, when
do
we go?”

“Tonight’s too soon. I just went, and I’m still tired, to tell you the truth. We could go tomorrow.” A quick, frustrated breath escaped his nostrils. “That sounds so soon. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe next week. Yes, it gives me time to plan this whole thing out.”

I shook my head. “Tomorrow, and no later. I’m not getting any less pregnant. The sooner, the better.”

William smiled. “Pregnant. In my day, we called it ‘with child,’ and women had to wear enormous dresses to hide their bellies. I guess it was so the world didn’t catch wind of the activities which had taken place to result in, well, you know.”

“Yes, I do.” I smiled back. I stretched up to kiss him again, but this time he was ready. My little peck was greeted with a full on kiss. It turned my knees into jelly.

Snow drifted outside; it fluttered silently against the kitchen windows, melting into streams running down. Inside, two people were making a little bonfire, sparks and all.

Chapter 7

With the university closed for Winter Break, the town of Penn Peak took on a deathly air—no traffic, no hustle; some of the shops even began to shut down. William and I made our way in silence through the university’s empty parking lot toward the library’s back entrance. Tiny snowflakes gathered onto both our shoe tips while he dug out the staff key he’d been given by Mr. Haskell with the utmost of trust. Unfortunately, we were about to breach his trust, but we had our reasons. With shaking fingers, he slid the key into the lock, and with a twist of the handle, the door gave way. The library was dark and morose, no students waiting to be checked out.

“We’re officially breaking the law,” William said into the darkness, reaching for my hand.

“Do you have to say it like that? We’re not doing anything wrong. Just using equipment.”

“In an illegal manner,” William added. He frowned down at me, and I shrugged.

“We’ll be in another decade when they figure it out.”

He’d tried to talk me out of going ten times already, but I refused to budge. No way was he facing the Seekers without me. After checking the front entrance for the twentieth time, I turned to watch William at the TRS-80, deep in concentration. “You used to hate that thing,” I said, pulling up a stool next to him.

“I still do.”

I sat down. We both stared at a blank screen with one blinking cursor. “You’re not doing anything.”

“Yes, I am. I’m thinking.”

“About what?”

Eyes still glued, William moved his head toward me to speak. “Something’s occurred to me about this thing.”

“And?”

William’s gaze finally broke away, and a pair of excited eyes met mine. “I’ve figured out time is a lot like this computer.” Geez, his face really beamed when he was onto something. “We enter data, it stores data. Data can be changed, edited, erased, all with a stroke of a key. Right?”

I nodded, then shrugged. “Right.”

“And so, time is the same way. It has a memory of its own. We do things, and it’s like entering data into this computer. Someone like me has the power to go back and retrieve the data and rearrange it, erase it, etc. Though, sometimes a malfunction can occur, and data can be lost.”

“Oh.” I kind of understood. He’d spelled it out to me in plain language, but still, hearing about time and data made my brain ache a little. Now I felt the same way William had when he’d been forced to enter all those book numbers. “So, we can go back, just like opening up a file here in the TRS-80, and use the information, or manipulate it as we see fit?”

“Yes, Emma. And it’s all laid out, so when one file is changed, the rest don’t have to change too.” He saw the confused expression on my face. “Ever hear of the butterfly effect? Someone goes back in time and kills a butterfly; the future is destroyed. In reality, time isn’t really like that. It has different files, separate texts for different eras, events, years, decades. It’s not all on one file. You see? We can go back and kill the butterfly, so to speak, without changing everything in the future. Just certain parts. The parts
we
choose.”

“And the butterfly is Marcus,” I said, hands clenching. I wanted to be the one to smack him down, to break his miserable wings the same way he’d broken Jesse’s.

“Yes. You could say that.” He kept staring at me. A slow grin spread across his face, happy I’d kept up with his theory.

“What about the malfunction?” I asked.

His grin faded. “Well that, that’s something I haven’t quite figured out yet. Files have a funny way of getting lost. I’m worried time can’t remember everything. I mean, I have a certain amount of power with the memories I’ve stored, but even then, there’s a danger.”

“Okay, I don’t want to hear about this part.” I shot up from the stool, hands in my jacket pockets. “Don’t try to scare me out of going, Will.”

“I’m not. Honest.”

“And we’re doing this tonight, remember? No excuses.”

“Tonight.”

“All right, then,” I said, sitting back down. “Tell me more about time and data, and this,” I patted it on its plastic cubed brain, “TRS-80. Because I’m still a little confused. But leave out the malfunction part, ’cause I don’t wanna know.”

¤ ¤ ¤

A few minutes after three a.m., we left the library and bundled ourselves against the arctic air which seemed to be making a permanent residence in Penn Peak. Last night’s snow had managed to turn campus into a brilliant landscape of white marshmallow drifts, but some of it had melted and left slippery patches underneath. William reached out to steady me when I nearly slipped on the path. I gave a laugh. “I’m okay, I’m okay.”

He stared ahead. “Are you nervous about tonight?”

“No,” I answered, though it was a lie.

Our plans were as such: Go home, sleep all day, eat a quick dinner, and then get dressed in the clothes we’d picked out. Yes, that was the fun part. I’d been forced to read every
LIFE
and
Look
so I could learn the hairstyles, the language, the products, the world as it was in 1956—the year we were going back. We would enter Springvale before the Seekers’ cult had turned William into a ghost, before they’d killed his sister by running her over. It would be summer, not this brittle cold we shielded ourselves from with scarves and heavy coats.

I glanced over at him and smiled. “We’ll be warm, at least.”

He stopped in his tracks. “Emma, I’ve been thinking. There’s something you should understand, about me, in case something goes wrong. I’ve never told you because I thought I’d never need to, however—”

“Are you trying to scare me again?” I asked, cutting him off. “Because if you are, it’s not going to work. I am going. Tonight. End of story.”

“But, Emma—”

“No. Stop trying to frighten me out of this.” It was freezing, and the car was only a couple of feet away. “Are you done, then? This wind is evil.”

He sighed. “Yes, I’m done.”

“Good.”

We reached the car and rushed to get in. William dug in his pocket for the keys and inserted them into the Camaro’s ignition. There was no roar of an engine, no revving when he pressed the gas. “Well, what do you think about that? She’s dead.”

“She?”

He tried again and again. Nothing. “This is strange. I tuned her up myself, checked all the fluids, the belts. This car is practically new. Hold on a minute.” William leaned over to kiss my cold cheek with his own cold lips. His beard was nice and warm, though. “I’ll be right back.”

I watched as he stepped out to inspect the engine, lifting the hood with a swift motion and locking it in place. “This isn’t going to work,” I mumbled to myself. “I know what you’re doing, Will. You’re trying to scare me, throw me off somehow.” When he peered under the hood to smile, I smiled politely back, muttering through my teeth, “I’m not giving in.”

After a few minutes, he dropped the hood and resumed his place behind the wheel. A twist of the key, and the engine roared to life. “You can never be too sure of things, Emma. See how it started, but before it was completely dead? All I did was jiggle a couple of wires.”

“Yeah. Uh-huh.”

With a yank of gears sending us into reverse, we were headed out, snow crunching under the tires. “Doesn’t that idea scare you?”

“Nope.”

He grimaced, and I heard him say under his breath, “Dammit.”

¤ ¤ ¤

Mascara, yes. Lipstick, yes. Powder, yes. False eyelashes,
no
. Grabbing a rumpled copy of
Harper’s Bazaar
for the umpteenth time, I again read the step-by-step instructions on how to transform myself into Grace Kelly. I could have gone for Debbie Reynolds or Doris Day, or if I’d been in a really wild mood, Joan Crawford. But I thought Grace Kelly would be more my style. Hint: she was more of a natural girl.

I heard a sound outside the door and peeked over my shoulder to see William still pacing in the hall. “Go do something!” I yelled when his footsteps stalled. I applied a moderate coating of lipstick from Coty Cosmetics—“
Smooth, easy to apply yet never smears!”
—in a shade of red which had never gone out of production, then I blotted my lips with toilet paper and stood back to look. Not bad. Nothing I’d wear on a daily basis, but for a trip to the 1950s, sure.

I shot a hand up to loosen a foam curler from my hair. The article said to set while wet using a good dollop of Dippity-Do gel, wrap the hair backward, and allow to dry overnight. I’d only had a few hours, so I used the hairdryer to speed things up. With the removal of one curler, a long section of hair fell into my eyes like a golden S. Each one fell the same way. My thick hair was almost impossible to pin, but I had another article explaining how to do that as well. For the old-fashioned girl who still had the locks of her youth, five strategic bobby pins would do the trick. Five, painful, industrial strength bobby pins. Ouch. In ten minutes I had a chignon to make Grace Kelly scream with envy—or pain.

“Are you done yet?”

“No.” I used the pointy end of a comb to ease out a few extra-tight sections. There. Less pain. And it looked good, it really did. Next came the outfit, a light blue blouse and tan skirt with black patent leather belt right above the waist. A nice touch since, with the way the skirt spread slightly outward, no one could see my expanding abdomen.

A pair of black pumps and some darling little pearl earrings, and I was done.

But now I felt sick. My hands shook as I carefully reinserted every item of beauty into the vintage bag William had bought for me at his favorite second-hand store. Among the curlers and lipsticks was a girdle I couldn’t bear to put on. I stuffed it down even farther and placed over it the wallet full of vintage ten and twenty dollar bills I was to keep safe for both of us.

But this wasn’t what made my hands shake. It was William, standing outside, waiting. I knew how much it meant for him to see me dressed like this, in the fashion and style of his upbringing. I would never think of wearing these kinds of clothes, or to do my hair in a chignon. Never. I liked my fashion light and loose. Natural and earthy. I imagined he’d been waiting for this moment since the day we met.

What if I failed to match his ideal of 1950’s womanhood? The one he’d fantasized about, harped on, yearned for all these months?

I squared my shoulders and raised the tip of my chin. Right. It didn’t matter what he thought. I may appear vintage, but my thoughts would be modern woman. Not a weak, apron-wearing, in-the-kitchen Pollyanna. Nope. If he didn’t like it, then too bad. Too darn bad. He’d have to deal with the mess called me.

“Here we go,” I said to myself, opening the bathroom door. I was surprised to find the hall empty. Hadn’t he been out here only minutes ago, wearing a path into the carpet? Light from his office spread out in a long, angled glow of amber. I approached quietly, opening the door with a gentle hand. His back faced me when I stepped inside the room. He sat hand over typewriter, lost in a stilted train of thought.

“Ahem,” I said, standing before the desk with my hands clutched together at my waist, in kitten gloves, no less.

The chair turned toward me. William had shaved off his beard and put on his old getup of flannel shirt and blue jeans. His eyes took me in. My heart raced. Oh, I did care. I did! I wanted him to like me,
love me
, in this stupid old getup. If he didn’t, I’d be severely hurt.

William said nothing. He stood, eyes drinking in every inch of my body like I was a glass of water in a forlorn dessert. “My God, Emma,” he said at last. “It’s more than I imagined. You’re . . . you’re . . .”

The scene of Lauren Bacall from the movie
The Maltese Falcon
entered my head, and I sauntered across the room. “You like it?” I held up a hand and angled myself around.

“
Like?
” he said, walking toward me. Then he laughed a few times, shaking his head. “Like isn’t a proper word. You’re amazing. Really, really amazing.” He placed his hands on my shoulders, smiling. “More than I ever dreamed.”

A spark ran through our skin. A very painful one, but it was a good sign. His eyes lit up, met mine again. “It’s time.”

We broke apart. William gathered his things: a pocket watch, an old jacket, jeans and shirts. I watched as he carefully placed those inside a leather briefcase with care. Then he slid open his desk drawer and pulled out something I would never have expected to see in a million years.

“This is for our protection, Emma. I hope you understand.”

“A gun?” I felt sick. When did he decide upon this little detail? And what did he expect to do with it?

William wrapped the vintage pistol with a square of soft fabric. Before he was done wrapping, he inserted a tiny box of ammunition. “I was going to tell you, but I thought you might try to talk me out of it.”

I groaned. “Yes, I would. Waving a gun around will only get us some unneeded attention from the worst of people. I can’t believe you—”

“I’ll keep it in this briefcase and won’t bring it out until absolutely necessary. It’s merely there as a precautionary measure.”

“Right, okay,” I said, working to calm myself down.

The briefcase snapped shut, and William flipped a hinge into place. “Safe and sound.”

The kitchen was silent as a morgue when we entered a few minutes later, bags in our hands. William placed the briefcase on the table before moving to the kitchen sink. He pulled out two mugs and began filling them with hot water. The Ovaltine. “You’ll thank me,” he said, handing one over. “Drink a little now, and the rest will be for our return.”

I took a sip. Blech. Ovaltine had a metallic taste. I tried not to gag. Mineral-chocolate flavor with a strange aftertaste. “Mmm.”

William chuckled at my expression. “I never said it tasted good.”

“And it doesn’t.” I placed my mug down on the table. “So, how are we going to do this?”

William straddled a chair and placed his cup on the table within good reach. “The usual way.”

I sat down.

He carried on. “We hold hands, I describe the scene to get your thoughts in tune with mine, and slowly we go through time together. I’ve thought of a good one. A time in my life when I was happy, even if just for a second. I wouldn’t want to show you the miserable stuff.” He grabbed my hands. “You’ll have to take off those gloves, I’m afraid.”