Jaclyn the Ripper (22 page)

He closed his eyes and listened, her voice reminding him of how much he had missed her companionship. Maybe after a few more happy years at Sandgate, especially if he insisted that she get more help running the household, she would grow stronger and they'd become intimate again.
I'll swear off passades, I'll control myself, I'll—

“Where am I . . . ?” he said. “Well, according to this Orwellian device in the car—you remember Orwell, don't you? we read him in 1979—I'm supposedly nine minutes and forty-seven seconds away from you, dear. . . . And what was all that nonsense about earthquakes . . . ?” He laughed. “We'll have to think of some clever comeuppance for that Chichester chap. . . . Yes, yes, I got your number from your mother. Are you still at their house . . . ? You're not?” He listened, then turned back to Amber. “ 'Dusa, do you know where the Franklin Canyon Reservoir is?”

She nodded, then slammed on her brakes for a light turning red—a patrol car lurked on a side street behind a bougainvillea. She shot H.G. a defiant look, then stubbornly made the adjustment on the GPS, but he was so lost in his tête-à-tête that he didn't notice.

“How are the boys . . . ?” he repeated. “The boys are fine, I'm sure.” He chuckled softly. “Mrs. Vickers sees herself as a far better parent than either you or me, so they may actually be well behaved when we get home. However, I must tell you, her effect may be negligible, since we'll arrive before we left.”

A pause. His face was wreathed in smiles, and he seemed awash in
a warm glow that came from her voice over the cell phone. Suddenly, he sat up straight.

“What . . . ? Someone
what
?”

He listened.

“Amy! Get out of there now!” he shouted. “RUN!”

The phone had gone dead.

He gaped at it, horrified, then turned to Amber, but groped and couldn't find the words.

She floored the accelerator.

Jaclyn pulled over slowly, let the Mercedes idle and purr, and watched Amy Catherine Robbins. She'd followed her through the curving side streets in Beverly Hills, was surprised when the girl had stopped on a narrow country road overlooking a reservoir just north of a major thoroughfare going into the hills. Why hadn't she pedaled down to the water, the picnic tables or parking area? Instead, she'd left her conveyance leaning on the shoulder of the road and had rushed down a trail for a solitary rustic bench beneath the trees. Briefly, Jaclyn feared that the girl had noticed her, then saw her chattering happily on a tiny cell phone as if she'd just heard from a long-lost friend or lover.

That would be Wells.

After sex at the motel, Jaclyn had driven to the address on her lieutenant's Post-it note, parked on the wide, quiet street and waited. Satan was with her. She had been watching the Robbinses' home for less than an hour when Amy Catherine Robbins came outside and rode off on a shiny red twenty-first-century bicycle. Jaclyn had chuckled appreciatively. If she hadn't known better, she would've assumed that the girl was in her own time and had lived here all along.

Jaclyn had followed at a discreet distance, waiting for an opportunity.
And now, with the ideal escape route of Coldwater Canyon Drive less than a mile away, this seemed like the time. Amy Catherine Robbins had her back to the road, and aside from a pair of runners gliding around the lake and a couple walking their dog, the canyon was deserted. Crickets chirped from the shadows, calling for other crickets, calling for night. Jaclyn fixed on the red bicycle, eased up on the shoulder and drove forward till she heard metal popping.

She crushed the bike, then backed up, turned off the car and waited. She hoped that this Amy Catherine Robbins would talk for an inordinately long time, for she wanted the day to become dusk. She appreciated the light dying behind the hills, the beauty of day's end, nightfall soon and its coming terror. She relished the night; she wanted Amy Catherine Robbins in the dark, hysterical with fear; she wanted no part of a hostage who had her wits about her.

Alas, Amy slipped the cell phone in her pocket and started back for her bike, happy like a girl in a melodrama, her early-twentieth-century mannerisms obvious and hateful. Jaclyn took one last look around, then got out of the car, putting on a concerned, apologetic housewife's face that she imagined had been in Heather Trattner's repertoire.

“I'm
so
sorry!” she exclaimed as Amy saw her and wondered what was going on. “My husband called, and I was trying to be safe, so I pulled off the road, and I didn't see your bicycle.”

“Oh,” said Amy, her face falling at the bent tires and snapped frame—the curious, twisted mess of handlebars. “Oh, my.”

“I'll pay for it, of course, I'm just so terribly sorry about the inconvenience. I mean, it's getting dark, and I just didn't see it.”

 

Amy was paralyzed by the sight of the broken bicycle. If she had been home, she would've expected help from the woman. Failing that, she would have shrugged stoically and started walking back to Sandgate, maybe waving down a passing carriage or motor car. Either way, she would've been fine, knowing that sooner or later Bertie would come for her. Here, she had no such assurance. Yes, of course she had just spoken with him, and being ridiculously accurate, he'd said that he was
nine minutes and forty-seven seconds away, yet beneath his ebullient tone he'd sounded on the verge of panic—as if nine minutes and forty-seven seconds might as well have been nine centuries. And now, she'd never felt more alone in her life.

The moment had become a tableau: her in a twenty-first-century outfit that didn't fit right; the metallic pretzel of red bicycle on the pavement before her; and this bright-eyed, beautiful and strange woman—all silhouetted by a muted sunset. All stopped in time by happenstance. Or so it seemed. Nothing moved or changed except the growing fear inside Amy that something terrible was about to occur. When musing on time travel, Bertie had assumed happenstance as being part of the process because one was traveling beyond cause and effect, outside logic and reason; he had accepted it and hadn't dwelled on it. Moreover, he'd never gone on at length about time warps or fractures between universes or how one distinguished one from the other—did he even know?—yet to Amy this moment seemed more like an immense bubble in which she was trapped, and Bertie had never mentioned such entities, such possibilities.

Maybe if I move.

She lifted a hand to her face. It went there.
All right, fine.
She hugged herself.
Fine.
She shrugged helplessly at her mom's bike.
Fine.
She smiled with relief.
All right, okay, I'm all right, I can move, nothing out of the ordinary here except being one hundred and three years from home, so let's get on with—

Then the woman moved, and instinctively Amy stepped back, for with the woman's movement came a weird, invisible aura that chilled Amy to the bone, though all the woman had done was turn and glance furtively up and down the road.

Paralyzed again. Bewildered. Amy hadn't been in 2010 long enough to automatically reach for a cell phone when she sensed trouble. In her mind, calling 911 was a pay phone or call box away, a lesson from her twentieth-century childhood. So she backpedaled, stumbled on a rock, but stayed upright, trying to make sense of the aura, this moment, this woman.

“Can I give you a ride somewhere?” the woman said sweetly, coming after her. “I'm sure you're not in walking distance.”

How does she know I'm not in walking distance?

“We can put your bike in the trunk.”

What's with the Bond Street accent coming from a typical Beverly Hills housewife? What on earth is she doing here?

The woman popped the trunk on the Mercedes with her key, thoroughly spooking Amy, who wasn't yet accustomed to remote buttons, then reached for the bicycle.

“No, no, please,” cried Amy, waving her off. “It's all right, quite all right.” She forced a polite smile. “My husband's meeting me here.”

 

Jaclyn straightened up, hesitated. Despite guessing that Amy Catherine Robbins had just spoken with Wells on her cell phone, she hadn't planned on both of them being present for this particular moment.
Wells might have someone with him when he arrives, which means I must be nimble, I must be quick.

“Well, then, why don't I give you my number?” Jaclyn hurried to the Mercedes, pantomimed writing a note, then came back to Amy, the knife hidden behind her leg.

Amy stood behind the bicycle, cautiously extended her hand, expecting a scrap of paper with a phone number on it.

“Are you from the UK?” Jaclyn asked suddenly, hoping to catch the girl off guard. “I thought I heard a bit of an accent.”

Her words had the opposite effect. Shaking her head, Amy crouched defensively and backed away. Then she turned to run, but tripped over a bush and went sprawling. Jaclyn sprang forward, caught Amy as she was scrambling to her feet, grabbed her by the hair, snapped her head back and laid the knife against her throat.

“We're going to get in the car, and you're going to drive.”

“Please, I—”

“Shut your delicate little mouth, and you will live longer.”

Jaclyn prodded her toward the Mercedes. The tip of her knife pricked Amy's skin; blood ran down her neck and between her breasts.

H.G. was straining forward in the seat as Amber raced east on Sunset, zigzagging through traffic. He didn't care about Beverly Hills, the landmarks, the mansions and fancy cars they were passing; he didn't give a damn about irate drivers leaning on their horns and gesturing; he was coming to Amy in a strange new world.

We must get there in time.

He felt the car swerve around a bus, barely missing it, and rocket forward into a clear lane, zooming past the Beverly Hills Hotel. He glanced at Amber, now driving too fast even for him, but he said nothing. Her worried look told him she sensed that something beyond her reality was happening—or maybe she was merely angry about the GPS guiding them into a traffic jam. On cue, it spoke: “Turn left on North Beverly Drive. . . .”

Already running a red light and halfway through the turn, Amber ignored the reminder. She punched the accelerator hard up Beverly, tapping her horn repeatedly to clear the left lane.

“You are exceeding the posted speed limit.”

“And
you
are bloody well driving me insane!”

“Can you
chill
?” Amber shouted at him. “A car hit her bike, that's all! She's fine!” She began crying. “She's fucking fine!”

“Merge onto Coldwater Canyon Drive,” intoned the GPS.

Muttering furiously, H.G. hunted for an On-Off button, but before he found it, the device spoke again:

“Turn left on North Beverly Drive. . . .”

“Oh, shit!”

Amber had just flashed past it. She pulled hard on the wheel, and—tires squealing—the car swung across the road into oncoming traffic. The first car veered around them, but they were too far in the lane for the second. It clipped Amber's front fender, and both cars spun around, somehow missed the third and fourth cars—horns blaring as they sped by—and ended up facing the wrong direction on the wrong side of the street, one wheel of the Milan on someone's lawn. The car had flattened a wrought-iron mailbox. Amber immediately backed off the curb, the right front tire making an awful grating sound against the fender. She turned to him, placed her hand on his.

“Are you okay?!”

H.G. nodded slowly.

Shocked, they stared at each other for a very long time, Amber not breaking his gaze until the driver of the other car rapped on her window. She sighed heavily and got out to deal with the accident, but H.G. went on staring, reminded of that ghastly night in 1979 when he and Amy had been racing to John McLaren Park, trying to—

“No,” he said out loud, trying to convince himself, “this isn't happening. Déjà vu is a state of mind, nothing more, nothing less.”

His pocket watch read 5:52
P.M
., but he had no clue what that meant. Never before had time seemed so arbitrary, so absurd, yet inevitable.

He got out and inspected the car. The mangled fender had bitten into the tire so that it barely rotated, and the air smelled of burnt rubber. Grim and determined, he picked up the mailbox, forced the blade end between the tire and the fender and pried them apart, then kneeled and listened for air hissing. Nothing. He straightened up and Amber came around the car.

“He wants us to wait for—”

“We're not waiting for anybody!” he said in a controlled fury. “We're getting back in this car and going to that reservoir as fast as you can bloody well drive!”

Her hand shaking badly, Amy ground the starter twice before the engine finally caught. She turned, her face white with fear, her voice quavering. “Where am I supposed to go?”

“You will drive up there. . . .” Jaclyn nodded at where Lake Drive snaked down the hill to the parking lot. “Turn the car around, then go back to Sunset Boulevard, then head west toward the land of the less fortunate.”

“I, I don't understand.”

“What could you possibly not understand, my dear?” Jaclyn checked the rearview mirror to make sure no one was approaching. “It seems rather obvious to me that if you don't do as I say, you're going to die out of your own time in a strange land.”

Amy swallowed hard, stared at her hands on the steering wheel.
Out of my own time.
This woman's poisonous aura finally made sense. She was not of this world, and this was no ordinary kidnapping—this had something to do with her and Bertie in the past, but she couldn't place this beautiful, knife-wielding woman. She had never seen her before—not in the nineteenth century, the twentieth, not here, not anywhere. “Who are you . . . ?”