Time's Enemy: A Romantic Time Travel Adventure (Saturn Society Book 1) (25 page)

The same face had leaned over him last night, a halo of short, wavy, brown hair framing her concerned expression. Those hands had held a glass of water to his lips when he awakened for a few hazy moments. The same curvy body had led him to the bathroom a couple times during his stupor, one he vaguely remembered thinking reminded him of Violet.

Charlotte filled the second customer’s cup. “Oh dear, Mr. Dawson, you should have hollered for me.” Her voice held a hint of the same throaty quality that characterized Violet’s. When she leaned over to top off the third man’s cup, the v-neck of her dress drooped to offer a view of her ample cleavage, drawing all of the men’s stares. Charlotte appeared not to notice.

Her step carried an energy, and the sincerity of her words and their reflection in her eyes bespoke a life force that elevated her otherwise ordinary appearance to timeless beauty. All this in a woman who read heavy science in her free time. Tony had perused her cluttered bookshelf and found it crammed with volumes by Einstein, Hubble, others he’d never heard of.

He leaned on his hand, elbow on the counter, as she approached. “Oh! I’m so sorry, sir, I didn’t hear anyone come— Tony!” Her hand tightened on the handle of the coffee carafe, and her lips parted to reveal the same gap-toothed smile that had charmed him when she was a child. “How are you feeling?”

“Good, now that I’ve rested.” Her face brightened the room like a neon light in a smoky bar. The men stopped talking and peered sidewise at them. Tony lowered his voice. “What day is it?”

“Tuesday, May sixteenth.”

She’d taken care of him for three days. “Thanks for taking me in. Honestly, I didn’t mean to pass out on—”

“Think nothing of it.” She waved him off. “I know what it’s like.”

“You do, don’t you?”

She tipped her head toward the other customers as she lifted a coffee cup and saucer off the shelf. The three men resumed their talk of sports and the weather. “Coffee?” she asked.

At his nod, she filled the cup in front of him. She could’ve been Violet’s twin. All she’d have to do was let her hair grow and color it blond, and put on some weight.

“What else would you like? You must be famished.” She slid a hand-printed, paper menu toward him.

“Now that you mention it...” He skimmed the restaurant’s offerings as he poured some cream—the real stuff—into his coffee. No bagels, of course. “Scrambled eggs and bacon would be great.” In the 1930s, no one worried about cholesterol. A tendril of smoke curled from a cigarette as the man beside him took a puff.
Or smoking.

He felt the men’s eyes on him as he watched her depart through the kitchen door. They didn’t bother to look away when he met their stares. “Morning,” he said.

Two of the men grunted a response. The guy nearest Tony lay the newspaper on the counter. “Don’t reckon I’ve seen you around before.”

“I’m an old friend of Charlotte’s.”

For a long moment no one moved. The wall clock behind the counter ticked off several seconds. Tony pointed at the newspaper. “Mind if I look at your paper?” Brushing up on current events might help him immerse himself in the time.

The man slid it over to him. “What few jobs in it’re probably taken. Then again, I don’t guess you’re hurtin’. You a salesman or something?”

“Something like that.”

The men resumed their conversation as Tony opened the
Dayton Journal
, a newspaper which no longer existed in his time.

The man beside Tony muttered something about how long his brother had looked for work. “Lord knows when it’ll get better.” The other men grumbled their assents, little different than the patrons at Bernie’s decades later. So ordinary, yet not.

Tony felt their stares and turned to the paper.

“Hearing Dropped when Faber Resigns” (whoever he was) read the main headline, followed by news of qualifiers in golf’s National Open. Tony found the ads most intriguing of all. Engrossed, he barely heard the door open and shut when the men left. A few minutes later, Charlotte emerged from the kitchen and walked around the counter.

“Oh good, they’re gone.” She leaned around him to place a fragrant plate of food on the counter, then climbed onto the stool beside his. “I swear, those three are worse than a bunch of gossipy old women.”

Tony popped a bite into his mouth. “Mm-hmm.”

“They would’ve hung on every word you and I said, then gone straight home to their wives...” She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a box of cigarettes. Chesterfields. “Of course, we need all the business we can get, so I should hardly wish them to leave once they’ve paid their nickels—”

Tony sucked in a bite of eggs too fast and coughed. She held a cigarette in one hand and dropped the box back into her pocket with the other. “What’s wrong?”

Tony swallowed, then chuckled. “It’s just funny. A nickel for coffee. Where I come from, a buck is cheap.”

Charlotte’s free hand flew to her chest. “A whole dollar for a cup of coffee? Why, that’d buy lunch for five here. A good lunch, too.” She held the cigarette near her lips and gazed at him through a fringe of wavy hair. Her voice went soft, sultry. “Do you have a light, by any chance?”

Tony’s mouth opened but nothing came out. She was hot—no, that wasn’t quite it. Something about her... maybe the ease with which she spoke to him, the way her luminous eyes settled on him as if he were the only man in the world—made it hard for him to reconcile this woman and her flirtatious smile with the little girl he’d pulled out of the floodwaters.

“Tony?” She jerked the cigarette away from her mouth. “Did I say something wrong?”

Tony shook off the fog in his mind. “No, I... you know, you’ve grown up to be a beautiful woman.” He mentally slapped himself as soon as the words tumbled out. What the hell was he doing?

She demurely turned away for a second. “About that light... or don’t people do that in the twenty-first century?”

“They do, but I don’t have one. I quit years ago. Or, I guess I should say, years from now?”

With a giggle, she pointed to the counter’s back edge where a box of matches lay. It took him three tries to light one. He lifted it to the tip of Charlotte’s cigarette as she leaned close, and a warmth burst through him that had nothing to do with the hot coffee or the match in his hand. Somehow, it seemed much different to be doing this for Charlotte, in the light of day, than for the women at Mulroney’s. With them, he complied only out of politeness.

“You know smoking’s bad for you?” he asked.

She pulled back and took a puff. “It is?”

“Causes all kinds of health problems. Doesn’t get to be common knowledge until the sixties or seventies, though.” He took a bite of scrambled eggs.

She regarded the smoldering tip. “But it’s so relaxing.”

“Lots of people in my—where I come from still enjoy it.”

“After this morning I can certainly use it.” She took another puff. The smoke formed ribboned whorls in the air. “Had a big breakfast rush just before you came in. Normally I cook, but the waitress didn’t show up this morning.”

Tony mumbled his sympathy. He sneaked furtive glances at her while he ate. She sat sideways on her stool, gazing out the window as she smoked. Her casual, unfeigned elegance belied the apron or the threadbare hem of the cotton print dress beneath it. She even stubbed out her cigarette with grace.

Finished with his breakfast, Tony pushed his plate away. His hat slipped forward on his head. “Oh, man,” he said. She tilted her head as he swiped the hat off. “You must think I have no manners at all.”

“Actually, I just thought you were very hungry.” The side of her face twitched in a half-wink, half-smile. “I always was after... you know.”

Tony lowered his coffee cup. “When— how long have you been able...?”

“Ever since you rescued me.” She cast her eyes down. “Though most of the time I choose not to.” She fidgeted with the corner of her apron.

“Why?” This was a far cry from Everly’s “it’s incredible... anytime, anywhere.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve spoken of this.”

“Believe me, I understand.” He stared into the honeyed depths of her eyes.

“It was horrible. Those first few times... No one knew me, I had no idea what happened. The police took me to a girls’ home. They were so hateful there, especially to someone... different.”

She shot a nervous glance at the pass-through window. “Papa was frantic. A couple times I disappeared right out of my own bed. He was so desperate by the time Theodore showed up it didn’t even matter that Theodore’s colored—”

“Theodore?” Tony gripped his fork tighter. She had to mean Theodore Pippin, from the award plaque in the Society House. The man who’d made it his life’s mission to hunt down and punish those who disrupted the fabric of space and time.

“I suppose you could call him my mentor of sorts.” The warmth in Tony’s middle vanished. She drew out her pack of Chesterfields again.

Theodore Pippin. Her mentor, of all people. Honored by the Society for capturing time-criminals.

Tony studied her face as she shook out a cigarette. She concentrated on it, frowning at the box as if trying to avoid looking at Tony.

He should find someone else to answer his questions.

She tipped the cigarette box and let the one she’d shaken out fall back in. Her eyes swept over him. “You haven’t changed a bit.” Her voice held a quiet amazement.

“It’s only been six weeks for me.”

“Six weeks?”

“Since the flood.”

“Oh my.” She straightened. “Then you must find this... this thing as much of a puzzle as I did at first.”

“I found someone to answer some of my questions. I was hoping you could answer the rest.” Should he tell her about her brother?
Better not
. Once Dewey had concluded Tony was the man he’d met with his sister, he’d grown agitated until his shouts drew the staff and they’d made Tony leave. And wouldn’t there be an inherent danger in knowing one’s own future? Or in Charlotte’s case, lack of one? Dewey said she’d died the second time Tony came to 1933.

A future he’d make sure didn’t happen. There would be no second visit.

“I’ll do whatever I can to help you,” Charlotte said. “Though it’s been years since I’ve jumped to the past, or even thought about it, other than to avoid it.”

“Can’t say I blame you.” Tony recalled his own resolve to do no more time traveling once he got Bethany back. Especially after his short trip back two years had so affected his life. Memories of another life in another timeline surfaced, one where he hadn’t discovered Dora’s betrayal and had remained married.

The greasy face appeared in the pass-through again. “Charlotte!” the man bellowed. “I ain’t paying you to sit around and jaw with the customers! There’s dishes—”

“Coming, sir!” Charlotte hopped off the stool. The man disappeared again.

“Irving, I assume?” Tony asked.

Charlotte’s lips tightened as she straightened her apron.

“Nice guy,” Tony commented. She snatched the empty coffee carafe off the counter and hurried through the kitchen door.

He should leave. If Charlotte knew Pippin, and he’d still been at the Society House in 1954, that meant he’d be there now. How close were Charlotte’s ties to him?

Irving scowled at Charlotte as he strode into the kitchen, broom in hand, and jerked his thumb toward the dining room door. “Some dandified darkie’s out front asking for you,” he growled. “I told ‘im his kind ain’t welcome here, but he insisted. So I made ‘im wait in the alley out back.”

Theodore! Charlotte flung the dishrag into the sink. “I’ll go talk to him.” Time to pay the piper. She dashed past Irving, but not fast enough to avoid a pinch on the fanny.

Louse.
She waited to rub the sore spot until she was through the door and out of Irving’s view, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of even that small acknowledgment. If jobs weren’t so hard to come by... Of course, she could always do like Theodore and let the Society support her. But she’d rather suffer Irving’s attention than allow them to own her. It was bad enough she’d let them put her through college.

She forgot her indignity when she glimpsed Tony at the counter, bent over the newspaper. The sight stabbed her heart. How could she tell Theodore he was right there, in the restaurant? What terrible things would he do to him? She ran out the front door before Tony could hail her. Thank heavens his back was to the window. For the first time, she was glad Irving didn’t permit colored in the restaurant.

“Good morning, Charlotte.” Theodore tipped his hat as she slipped out the front door.

“What are you doing here?” she hissed as she led him around the corner of the building. Away from the window.

He held up a hand. “I know, I won’t keep you. I’m just a little concerned. You haven’t answered the telephone for the past two nights, especially after you missed dinner Sunday.”

“I’m better now. Just tired.” Due to Tony’s presence, she’d begged off their weekly dinner at the Society House, claiming she didn’t feel well. Theodore cocked his head, unconvinced. “Really, Theodore, there’s nothing wrong.” Nothing, if she didn’t count the fact she was harboring a wanted man, and hiding him from the person to whom she owed everything beyond life itself. She started to lean on the restaurant’s white, frame wall, then pulled away when she remembered how dirty it was. “It’s been busy here, and after fighting off whatever bug it was I had, all I want to do when I get home is collapse with the radio and a cigarette.” Which was the truth, except for the reason. For the past two days, as soon as she walked in from work, she’d taken up her post next to Tony, to be near in case he woke.