by Gary Jonas
A moment later, the other car door opened, and Naomi Miller stepped out. Her auburn hair was shorter than I remembered, probably styled to fit in with the 1920s when they arrived here. I hadn't seen her in more than fifty years, but my heart still did a little flip. Naomi was my first love. She'd never been good for me, but my heart didn't care about that. She would always have an effect on me. You never forget your first.
Kelly Chan slid out of the taxi, and like Naomi, she wore a dark skirt with a blouse and jacket. Kelly's jet black hair framed her lovely face, and once again, my heart did a somersault in my chest. The last time I'd seen Kelly, she'd been chopped into pieces by magically wielded hatchets. This after she'd single-handedly defeated a tong gang in the Barbary Coast back in 1877. To see her alive and in one piece hit me a lot harder than I'd expected. My eyesight blurred with welling tears, and I wanted to rush over to embrace her.
That would have been a bad thing to do.
Kelly wouldn't recognize me, so she'd probably kill me before she realized I was just an old man. Her reflexes and training as an assassin were too fast to actually behold in certain situations.
So I sat there and felt the tears spill from my eyes because while she was Kelly, she wasn't my Kelly. My Kelly was dead. This Kelly was very much alive.
She moved with the grace of a panther and scanned the area around them. I made sure to be looking at my cup of coffee when she swept her gaze along the sidewalk cafe. I was just an old man enjoying a September afternoon in New York City. Nothing to see here.
If she sensed me watching, she dismissed me as a nonthreat.
The trio entered Henry's office building as Esther exited.
Shade held the door for Esther and gave her a smile. He checked out the way her ass swayed in her dress as she walked away. Naomi pushed his shoulder after Esther was gone, and they moved into the building. Busted.
Esther walked down the sidewalk and stopped when she saw me at the outside table.
“Mr. Easton?” she asked. “I didn't expect to see you here.”
I held up my coffee cup. “Just enjoying a cup of joe. Looks like everything went according to plan.”
“I scrammed right when you told me to, but I’m all balled up about it. Do you mind if I join you?”
I gestured to the chair across from me. “I would be delighted.”
She sat down and frowned at me. “I don't like leaving Henry alone with those three going in to see him.”
“You accepted the money, Miss Carmichael.”
“Yes, but they think Henry is a hoodlum.”
I nodded.
“I could have set them straight.”
I shook my head.
“Why not?” she asked. “The handsome fella seems reasonable, but that China doll gives me the heebie-jeebies. The other woman was just rude.”
“They're good people, Miss Carmichael. They think they're doing the right thing.”
“They're certainly persistent.”
“Were you flirting with the man last week when they first visited?”
She blushed. “Only a little but that's beside the point.”
I grinned. “I think that is the point.”
A waitress approached but Esther waved her off, saying she was berries. When the waitress left, Esther leaned closer and lowered her voice. “I'm just worried they might rough Henry up.”
I shook my head. “They aren't there to hurt him.”
“Says you. Why are they looking for him? And how did they find out it was his office?”
“The young man is a detective. He did some detecting.”
“But everything is in your name.”
“They may have followed Henry from the performance the other night. That was his one public appearance this month.”
“They were there,” Esther said. “I saw them. But I didn't see anyone follow Henry, and I had my peepers wide open.”
That meant Shade sent Kelly to track him. Smart move. She thinks ninja are loud and obvious.
“It's all right. We knew they were coming.” What I didn't tell Esther is that while I'd had her send Shade away when he first came around, this time I'd sent an anonymous note to him. Henry's death needed to be on the same day as before, but what I didn't want was for Shade to accidentally get Esther to fall in love with him. I also didn't want Carlton to kill Naomi, so I made sure Henry remained hidden until the right time.
I wanted to save everyone.
And while I knew that was impossible, I still had to try.
From my talks with Esther when she was a ghost, I knew Carlton J. Penick murdered Naomi before Shade killed Henry. Time was all scarred up and layered in this area. It had been changed more than once. How many times was anyone's guess. There are people, for want of a better term, who alter time to suit their desires. Sometimes they do it for good reasons, and sometimes for wrong reasons. As I understand it, time is like a river, and you can make changes. The current still flows forward. A big change might send the river down a tributary. A massive change might be like building a dam, which would stop things in place. Most changes are absorbed in the minutia of everyday life. Sometimes small changes have larger ramifications. The whole “butterfly flapping its wings in China” routine.
That's a big part of what scared me. Some group was mucking about in time and had been doing so throughout history. Chronos had a watch that stopped time and could open portals to the past and probably even the future. Someone had to build that watch, and I knew it wasn't him. I'd thought about the entire situation over the years, and I didn't think Chronos was necessarily part of the group, though they might be like him, or they might simply be using him because they stood outside of time. All I really knew was that some events had definitely been changed, and there were signs that it had happened many times before. Naomi was a perfect example.
In my reality, Naomi Miller died in the twenty-teens at the hands of Blake Ravenwood. But in the reality she came from, she survived that and somehow ended up getting married to the Jonathan Shade of her time stream. That time no longer existed, but because they were sent back in time from that reality, they were outside the river when it changed. Esther died in my reality in 1929. After Carlton killed Naomi in Esther's old reality, Esther had fallen for the Shade who mourned Naomi in the nineteen-twenties. When Sharon showed up to take Shade and Kelly back to our own time, Esther was left behind, and in her distress, she killed herself. Her ghost had an effect on how the time played out in my reality, and now I was back here, making even more changes. Time ripped apart, scabbed, scarred, and the wound reopened to scab up yet again. Keep picking at it, and it will never heal.
As someone who managed to find a way to change time myself, the idea of others doing it as well just seemed wrong. It was probably wrong when I did it. And now here I was, doing it again. I told myself I was doing it for the right reasons, and I suspect they told themselves the same thing. Still, the people who'd paid with their lives due to all the tinkering should have gone on to live different lives.
I was going to set things right. Esther deserved to live happily ever after in her own time. She didn't need to be a ghost. I needed to keep her from falling for me. The younger me, I mean. I knew better than to think I needed to worry about her falling for an old man even though I was ridiculously wealthy. I didn't want to take a chance that Shade might stumble across Esther while searching for Henry, so I kept her close.
Naomi also deserved to live. If that meant the younger version of me went back to the future with her, that was fine.
I would never know what became of that version of me, and that was all right too. I just wanted to live out my days in peace once this final mission was complete.
“What’s eating you?” Esther asked.
I snapped back to the cafe. “Sorry,” I said. “Senior moment.”
Kelly and Naomi returned to the street, and Shade was right behind them.
For a man who'd just committed murder, he looked mighty calm.
> A chill ran through me, and I rolled my shoulders to try to get it to stop.
“You're sure you're all right?” Esther asked, concerned.
I nodded but inwardly I wondered. Shade was me, after all. What did it say about me that I could kill a man and walk away like I'd simply left a boring business meeting?
CHAPTER FOUR
Traffic crawled down the street, and pedestrians filed down the sidewalks. New York went on as if nothing were different even though the man I'd raised as a son now lay dead on the thirteenth floor of the office building in front of me.
Shade and his companions caught a taxi, and I pushed myself up from the table. I slipped some cash under my coffee cup as a tip.
“Are they gone?” Esther asked.
I nodded, ran a hand through my hair, and donned my fedora.
“That was fast,” she said. “We should check on Mr. Winslow.”
“You go on home, Miss Carmichael. It's late.”
“I want to make sure he's jake. I have a really bad feeling about this.”
“I don't think that's a good idea.”
She stood and gave me a suspicious look. “Why not?”
“Because it's not,” I said, knowing how lame it sounded.
“Just you try and stop me.” She stormed away from the table.
She was in her twenties. I was in my eighties. I couldn't keep up with her. “Esther! Please don't!”
But she refused to stop. She moved through the throng of people on the sidewalk and entered the office building.
***
By the time I caught the next elevator, I knew it was much too late. I stepped into the hall and walked over to the open door to our offices. Esther knelt beside the corpse of Henry Winslow. Her shoulders shook, and her voice came out in sobs.
“I should have stayed,” she said.
I had two choices. I could tell her the truth, or I could pretend to be surprised.
I chose the latter.
“What happened?” I asked as I approached.
She looked up at me. “Henry is dead!”
“Oh no,” I said. My acting skills fell between Steven Seagal and Dolph Lundgren, but she was in shock, so she didn't really notice that my reaction wasn't as strong as it should have been.
Henry’s ghost stood by the desk and shook his head. “You might want to tell her you’ll call the police,” he said. “Ralph should have his team ready.”
I nodded. “I'll call the police.”
I went to the phone and placed the call while trying to think of what I could say to Esther.
“I need to report a murder,” I said and watched Esther.
As soon as I'd given my men the pertinent information, I went to Esther and placed a hand on her back. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“I'm far from all right,” she said.
“The police are on the way. We need to get out of the office so we don't disturb the crime scene.”
Henry waved as we left. He needed to remain with the Emerald Tablets.
I helped Esther up and guided her out of Henry's office. She sat in her chair and wiped tears from her cheeks. “We have to tell them about the private dick.”
“Did you get his name?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I just did like you said and told him Henry didn't work here. I just knew I shouldn't have left him here alone.”
I knew by “him” she meant Henry. “There's no way you could have known, and there's nothing you could have done had you been here.”
“How many private detectives can there be who work with a China doll?”
“Not many,” I said.
“They'll nab him quick, and I'll testify to put him away.”
I kept her talking, wishing I'd just sent her home rather than let her join me in the cafe. I wanted her to be safe, so I kept her close. Maybe I was just being selfish. I missed my Esther and never should have hired this one to work here. I knew I could change things, and I should have changed that.
She would have nightmares about finding her boss dead in his office, and it was my fault.
“And to think I thought he was quite the sheik.”
Or maybe she'd been strong before I'd ever met her. That made more sense.
I heard footsteps in the hall, and when the police burst in the door, I pointed to Henry's office. “The body is in there.”
“Are you the one who called?” a middle-aged uniformed officer asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“But I found the body,” Esther said.
“Tasker,” the officer said, “get over here.”
A younger policeman with red hair stepped up to us. “Yes, sir?”
“I need you to escort this young lady to another office to take her statement.”
Tasker nodded and gestured to Esther. “If you'll come with me, miss?”
Esther nodded, wiped tears from her cheeks, and followed the young officer out the door.
The middle-aged cop glanced into the office where two more cops stood over Henry's body.
“Well, Mr. Easton,” he said. “I sure hope you know what you're doing.”
“Me too, Ralph.”
“I'll have the boys take the body to the morgue. Tasker will handle Miss Carmichael. I'll get all the reports filed so everything's official, but if the captain gets word of any of this, we could all lose our jobs.”
“That happens,” I said. “I'll see to it that you have enough money that you'll never have to work another day in your lives.”
He shook his head. “Not worried about the money, Jon.”
“I know.”
“Henry was a good man.”
“And he will be again,” I said.
“Is he still here?”
I nodded. “His ghost is sitting on his desk, watching your boys bag his body. Everything is going according to plan.”
Ralph sighed. “All right. We'll get this cleaned up, and I'll see you at the temple in a few days.”
We shook hands and I left them to their business. I glanced back at Henry’s office. Henry’s ghost gave me a thumbs-up.
***
The next night I sat in a speakeasy called Sully's on Lexington and sipped a whiskey. The night brought out a bunch of interesting people. The men wore their nice suits and smoked expensive cigarettes, while the women wore their flapper dresses short with their hair bobbed even shorter. They, too, smoked cigarettes, of course, because damn near everyone smoked in the twenties. I hated going home smelling like cigarettes, but I wanted to get a look at Rayna Noble.
She might not be here tonight, but I knew she'd show eventually because she'd need a drink after the trip through time and to deal with the pressure of trying to find Winslow alone. I'd paid the concierge at the Aberdeen to recommend Sully's to any young women who overtipped. Rayna was wealthy and conditioned to twenty-first-century values, so I knew she'd feel weird offering anything less than normal for her. I knew she'd end up at the Aberdeen because it was the only hotel in New York that accepted what they called “unaccompanied women.”
I'd spent a good amount of time at Sully's last night, and here I was again. I hadn't seen Rayna in more than fifty years, but I knew I'd recognize her in an instant. If nothing else, she'd have long hair, which would make her stand out.
The jazz band playing in the back kept the place hopping. They recognized me when I entered because I'd tipped them well the previous evening and spent some time chatting with them between sets. I'd needed to get away after Henry's death, and music had always calmed my soul.
“Welcome back, sir,” the piano player said. “Do you have any requests tonight?”
“You know anything by Metallica?”
“What kind of name is that? Give me something we can work with, sir. Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington.”
“I do like jelly rolls, so go with that,” I said.
The piano player laughed and dedicated a piano ditty called “King Porter Stomp” to me. His fi
ngers danced on the keys, and he had a great time with it. They followed that with a version of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and I half expected the Harlem Globetrotters to race in, doing trick basketball shots. After a few measures with just the band, the singer launched into the lyrics with perfect pitch.
As they finished the song, Rayna entered the bar. She looked stunning in a period dress. She glanced around then made her way to the bar to get a drink. The place was packed, and there were no seats at the counter, so she took her glass and wove a path toward the back where I sat.
Some jerk got in her way, but she handled him easily by grabbing his crotch. I couldn't hear what she said, but the guy, who had a knife scar on his face, did not look pleased.
Rayna looked right at me as she moved on, but there was no recognition in her eyes. She leaned against the wall, sipped her drink, and looked a bit lonely as she listened to the music. I could see why I'd been so attracted to her. She stood there for a time then looked like she suddenly realized she could have had a V8. As she moved back to the bar, I saw Mr. Knife Scar watching her. He pushed away from his table and moved to intercept her.
I pushed myself to my feet and wandered in his direction. Rayna set her empty glass on the bar and headed for the exit.
Mr. Knife Scar tried to reach out for her, but I stepped into his path.
“Move it, old timer,” he said.
“Oh, I'm so sorry, Uncle Albert,” I said with a feigned innocence.
“I ain't your uncle.”
“And I'm not Paul McCartney,” I said with a grin. By the time I got out of his way, Rayna was out the door.
I made sure Mr. Knife Scar went back to his table. Then I, too, left the bar.
Rayna walked back to the Aberdeen, and I shadowed her all the way. I told myself I just wanted to make sure she made it back to her hotel safely, but the truth was that she reminded me of my youth. I missed being young and strong.
I checked my watch. It was time to go see about a body at the morgue. The fun never ends.
***
The morgue stank of disinfectant and formaldehyde working in vain to cover the smell of a butcher shop. Ralph and I had slipped into Bellevue at one in the morning while the attendant was on a bathroom break. Some bodies were piled like cordwood along the walls, and some lay on metal tables in the center of the room. Rats scurried along the wall of corpses. Henry's body lay naked on one of the slabs. I'd considered waiting until they drained the fluids to get the body out, but it wouldn't make any difference to the ritual as it was months away, and I wasn't sure how much time we had before Winslow's spirit escaped from the Underworld.
