Timebound (12 page)

“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 eyes, 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.