Timebound (38 page)

I looked around the platform for Mick, hoping that he could sneak in next to my skirts, but it was soon clear that he had already boarded. Just as I stepped into the car, he let out a loud howl of pain and the woman in the navy blue dress burst from the back of car, dragging him by the ear. She was twisting hard, judging from the expression on Mick’s face, as she pushed her way toward the men who were still lined up to enter the wagon. “We have a little stowaway,” she said sternly, pulling up on his ear so that he had to stand on his tiptoes. “If you gentlemen could just step to one side, I’ll toss him out.”

I took a deep breath, hoping I wasn’t making a colossal mistake. “He’s not a stowaway, ma’am. I have his ticket right here.”

I held up two ticket stubs, and everyone turned to stare at me, including Katherine. Her eyes were fixed on my upraised wrist, specifically on the hourglass charm that she had given me on my birthday. I caught her eye for a brief moment and then turned back to the woman who had the death grip on Mick’s ear.

This was my first chance to get a close look at her and I had a sudden flash of recognition. The resemblance was still quite strong,
although not as striking as it had been in the images on the stained-glass windows because she’d altered her hair color. And, up close, it was easier to tell that the eyes, now hidden behind wire-rimmed glasses, were a bluish-gray instead of green. I glanced down to look for the Cyrist symbol, but her hands were gloved, like my own had been until I managed to coat them in mud coming up the hill on the Wooded Island.

It was hardly the manner in which I’d expected to meet my long-lost aunt. I’d always envisioned her as the same age as my mother, so it was odd to meet this younger version. The gray streaks made her look a bit older to the casual observer, but now, on closer inspection, I doubted she was much beyond twenty-five. Her expression made it clear that she knew exactly who I was as well. Her eyes flashed briefly and then she slipped back into her character, a tiny, unpleasant smile inching across her face.

Mayor Harrison stepped forward. “Thank you, Mrs. Salter, but since the boy does have a ticket perhaps we should just…”

Prudence released Mick and pushed him toward me. “Funny,” she said, narrowing her eyes as she continued to stare at me. “I don’t remember you being part of this group.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I purchased the tickets this morning and we didn’t realize this cart was exclusively booked.” I nodded toward Mick. “He’s my assistant… I’m writing a story, for my… my newspaper.”

She sniffed and arched one eyebrow. “He’s your
assistant,
all right, but you’re not writing any story for a newspaper. Mayor Harrison, you might want to call fair security and have them evict these two from the grounds. They attempted to pick the pocket of a gentleman this morning as I was entering the gates. The young lady was distracting the gentleman so that this little tramp could do his work. If I hadn’t rapped him across the bottom with my parasol, the two of them would have made off with the old man’s wallet.”

“That’s a
lie,
” I said vehemently. “That never happened, and you know it.”

It was, however, a common enough ruse that it rang true for most of the people in the compartment, and I could feel the atmosphere shift. A few of them had seemed sympathetic a moment earlier, but now even Mayor Harrison was looking at me with a hint of suspicion.

“Why didn’t you call for security then?” I asked. “If you thought we were doing something illegal—”

A soft voice from behind interrupted me. “What paper do you write for, miss?”

I turned toward Katherine with a panicked expression, and I stammered the first thing that came into my head: “The Roch… Rochester’s
Worker’s Gazette.
It’s just a small weekly. We write mostly on labor issues.”

“Oh, I
know
that paper,” she said, stepping forward to stand next to me. “Your editor wrote an excellent piece on the complexities of dealing with child labor a while back. There was a short excerpt in the
Woman’s Journal
just last month. Are you here to interview some of the younger workers at the Exposition?”

“Yes,” I said, giving her a grateful smile. Her ability to pick up the tiny thread that I had dropped and weave a plausible story was impressive. “Mick knows a lot of young workers here, and he’s been helping me. I thought I would take him on the Ferris wheel as an extra token of my appreciation.”

“I always dreamed ’bout ridin’ the big wheel,” Mick added, looking down at his shoes with a plaintive expression. “But me mom needs all the money I c’n make.” He glanced around at the others and then back at me. Those big brown eyes—with long black lashes that were going to make him a real heartbreaker in a few years—were all the more effective because they were still brimming with tears from the ear twist. “But it’s okay, Miss Kate. I don’ wanna make no trouble for you.”

Mick was a convincing little actor, and I could feel the mood in the car shifting again as several of the people around me relaxed. Some of the men were glaring at Prudence, although I noted that they were generally the same bunch that had been looking unhappily toward her and Katherine as we’d entered.

“Dora,” Katherine said, leaning forward, “don’t you think it’s possible you were mistaken this morning? Perhaps you misjudged the situation—it’s
so
hard to tell what’s going on when a place is teeming with so many people. I hardly think this young lady looks or sounds like a common thief…”

Mayor Harrison stepped in at that point. “Perhaps we could just ask you and your… young assistant… to take the next car? It seems like this was an innocent mistake, Mrs. Salter—and they do have tickets, as you can see.”

Prudence knew she had lost the vote and shot an annoyed look toward Katherine as she huffed toward the back of the car. I paused on the pretense of slipping the tickets into my purse and whispered out of the side of my mouth to Katherine. “I need to speak to you alone. Today. And that’s
not
Dora Salter.”

Her eyebrows rose the tiniest bit and she gave me a small nod as I turned toward the door of the compartment, pulling Mick with me. Several apologetic smiles later, we were outside, and the rest of the men in the mayoral group, including Saul, boarded the car we’d just vacated. It was clear from Saul’s face that Katherine hadn’t exaggerated his motion sickness—he was already pale and kept glancing at the cluster of more timid souls across the street as though he might bolt at any moment. Paulie closed the door and shifted the lever to move the remaining cars into position for boarding.

“Thanks anyway, Paulie,” Mick said as we entered the next car along with a throng of other passengers. We pushed toward the back of the car and Mick slumped against the side of the compartment, his face miserable.

“It’s okay, Mick,” I said. “I was only able to speak to her for a second, but she knows now that I need to talk to her later.”

He didn’t say anything and I bent down a bit to look him in the eye. “You did a good job. A
really
good job. I’m not sure they’d have believed us if you hadn’t chimed in…”

Mick shook his head. “It ain’ that, miss. I just got problems now.” He closed his eyes for a moment, rubbing his temples with his fingers in a circular sort of motion. It was a very adult gesture, and somehow very familiar, although I couldn’t quite place it.

I waited a moment to see if he would elaborate, but when he opened his eyes he just stared out the window at the gears of the giant wheel. A few seconds later we jerked upward again, after loading another group of passengers.

It tore at me to see a kid so young looking like the weight of the entire universe was on him. “So tell me about it. Maybe I can help.”

He looked even more miserable and then shrugged. “Me mom’s gonna be furious an’ you’re gonna hate me, and you prob’ly should. But I
like
you an’ I don’ really like
her
anymore.”

“Your mom?” I asked.

“No,” he said, clearly shocked at the thought. “No. I
love
me mom. It’s that witch what pulled me ear. I didn’t recognize her at firs’ on account of how she dyed her hair to look older an’ all, but it’s her. She’s me
other
boss.”

19

My jaw dropped. “Your boss? You mean, from the cabin? On the Wooded Island?”

“Yeah,” he said, his dark eyes imploring. “I’m sorry, Miss Kate. I shoulda tol’ you, but I’m not s’posed to tell anybody, ever. Even me dad agreed wi’ that part. And I was doin’ the same as you, watchin’ out for when those two showed up, so I thought maybe it would be okay, y’know, to join forces.”

“And exactly
why
were you watching for them, Mick?” I asked. “What were you supposed to do?”

“I…” He shook his head and let out a long breath. “You won’ b’lieve me, Miss Kate. There’s this book? It belonged to me dad. It sends her a message. Me granddad give it to him, before he died, along with this round thing that glows. It lights up the space around it with words ’n’ stuff when you touch it. They make all them inventions in the Expo look like cheap toys.”

Apparently Saul had figured out a way to use the diaries that Connor and Katherine had missed. The boy glanced up at me, but I kept my face composed and nodded for him to continue.

“Well, I’d just finished doin’ that—sendin’ her a message—when I looked aroun’ an’ there you were comin’ up the hill. An’ then I saw the letter you dropped, an’…” He trailed off, and the
gears roared loudly as the wheel, with its last passenger on board, began to rotate, lifting us high above the Midway.

“Is your boss the lady from the church that you were talking about?” I asked. “The one who wants your mom to move back to the church farm?”

He nodded but didn’t say anything, so I pressed a bit further. “Why don’t you trust her, Mick?”

“Because me dad didn’,” he said fiercely. “Tha’s why we left. The church brought us over—they paid our way on the boat all the way from Irelan’—so I think they ’spected us to work longer and for me to keep takin’ their Cyrist classes, but me dad said we’d find another way to pay ’em back. There was a lot of arguin’ when we left, an’ me dad said we were done wi’ that lot. He got a job on the construction, and me mom found work and some odd jobs for me. Ever’thin’ was okay again, once we left.

“Then when the fair was all built, money was real tight.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and continued in a voice so low that I had to lean in to hear him over the excited chatter of the crowd as we climbed higher into the sky. “Sister Pru, she found us here and she said she forgave me dad for leavin’ the farm an’ for all the bad stuff he’d said ’bout the Cyrists. She pulled some strings t’get him on wi’ the firemen—an’ I tol’ you how that turned out.”

His mouth twisted bitterly. “Me mom says she couldna known me dad would get killed an’ I know
here,
” he said, tapping his head, “that me mom is right. But here,” he added, tapping his chest, “says she
did
know an’ she foun’ a good way to shut me dad up.”

His lower lip trembled, and I gritted my teeth in anger. I couldn’t say for certain whether Prudence
had
known that the Cold Storage Building would go up in flames and his father would be killed, but she’d certainly had the opportunity to know.

“I know it’s stupid, but it’s what I feel, an’ I wish I didn’ hafta work for her. Although,” he said with a weak laugh, “I guess
maybe now I
won’
hafta work for her. But oh, me mom is gonna be madder’n bloody hell.”

It clicked then, with his last two words, and I realized why I’d had the touch of déjà vu earlier when he rubbed his temples. I probably would have recognized those eyes earlier, but when I had seen them before—both through the medallion and on the Metro—they had burned with a type of passion that the little boy in front of me wouldn’t understand for several years.

He mistook my stunned expression for disapproval. “Sorry, Miss Kate. I ain’ ’sposed to say that. One more thing me mom would be mad about if she knew I was cursin’, ’specially in front of a lady.”

I smiled at him. “No, it’s okay, really. I told you, I’m not prissy.” He didn’t look convinced, so I leaned in and whispered, “Bloody hell. Bloody,
bloody
hell.”