The long windows were closed now to keep in the warmth, but in summer, all of them would be open and the humid, fragrant air would pour through the house like a sweet fog. At night, her bedroom curtains would billow out and in and she would lie in bed, inhaling the sweet scent of the night-blooming jasmine that grew outside her window.
It was almost supper time, and Mrs. Washington was with her own family for Christmas Eve. Hazel found a plate of cold roast chicken that Mrs. Washington had left for them and sliced off pieces to make two sandwiches. Hazel could have cooked a proper Christmas Eve supper for them both, but it was only the two of them and the Professor didn’t care about such things. She supposed he was in his laboratory. He seldom left it.
The years since Miss Sanchez and Oren McCullen had slipped from 1857 through the time rip into the twentieth century had been hard on the Professor. He blamed himself for Miss Sanchez being brought to their world in the first place, and he blamed himself for losing her. He was not a naturally responsible man, often forgetting to pay bills or take care of mundane tasks, but Hazel knew that the weight of his duty to Miss Sanchez pressed heavily upon him.
She brought the sandwich and a glass of water up to the Professor, setting it on an old stool in the corner where she used to sit with him when she was younger. He muttered a thank you and she left to eat her supper alone in the kitchen.
The Professor was a man obsessed. Her schoolmates and people around town called him the Mad Irishman, usually mocking but sometimes with a touch of admiration. He was a brilliant man, known for his inventions and his exceptional luck at gambling, but also for his reclusiveness and eccentricity. Long ago, Mrs. Washington had explained to Hazel that the Professor’s focus on his work did not mean that he didn’t care for her. The housekeeper felt sorry for her, an orphan, one of many on the streets of New Orleans. Part of Hazel hated the pity, but she liked having Mrs. Washington’s motherly care.
Once in her bedroom, she took off her shoes and put on a more comfortable dress without a hoop skirt. She would only be spending time around the house and perhaps opening gifts with the Professor later that night.
On her dresser sat a tiny black mechanical jackal. The Professor had long ago confiscated the tiny engine inside that had not only made the creature’s eyes glow green and its head nod up and down, but had been part of a plan to rip many holes in time and send energy for McCullen’s monstrous machine. Now, the jackal was little more than a hollow figurine, but she kept it anyway. Aside from the beautiful violin, it was the only other thing Neil Grey had given her.
That and a promise to return on her eighteenth birthday.
Chapter 3
February 23, 1857
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Neil Grey shoved his hands into his coat pockets and kept his eyes low as he walked down the center aisle of the train on its way north to Birmingham. He had purchased his outfit, a loose gray coat, plain wool trousers, linen shirt and top hat at a secondhand shop in Tuscaloosa. He had stuffed pieces of cloth into the toes of his new shoes, as people in this world had feet not unlike those of apes, with large big toes growing out sideways from the balls of their feet. Their feet were so dexterous that they could almost be used as hands. No one in polite society would ever do such a thing, of course, but it was something he had to keep in mind: never allow anyone to see him barefoot.
There were minor differences like this between different worlds. In some, people’s eye colors were much lighter than in his world where his medium brown eyes were considered typical. In another world, people had no canine teeth. These differences between worlds were part of the fun of his job, as were the food, the landscapes, the technologies and the people. He tried to keep these things in mind in the quieter moments when he questioned his work.
“Pardon me,” he murmured to a man blocking his way. The man noticed him and moved aside.
Neil knew that he moved almost silently and he was easy to miss, but sometimes it was inconvenient. Most people didn’t feel him come up behind them or notice him unless he spoke to them. Typically, this worked to his advantage, as did his appearance. From his own time in the mid 1990s throughout every time and world he had visited, a man with his build and presence drew no attention and his sort of ordinary face was easy to forget.
He had boarded in Tuscaloosa and would leave the train at the next stop in Birmingham. It was a short trip, and there was no reason for him to stay on the train any longer unless something in his plan went awry. He had no luggage and carried only two items in his coat pockets. One was a billfold with enough currency from this era to pay for expenses. The other was a tiny syringe, no longer than his finger. It was from the twenty-second century, and a safety cap covered the small injection pad. A few milliliters of transparent fluid waited inside.
He reached the dining car and took a moment to have a look around from the doorway. Three barstools were bolted to the floor in front of a long countertop. Regular tables ran along the wall, a few of them occupied by passengers having their breakfasts of pastries or soft-boiled eggs. Rose-colored curtains swayed over the windows as the green and yellow landscape flew by. The tables were real wood, not the hybrid plastic materials that things were made of in his own time, and the cups and plates were real ceramic, not safety plastic. The whole place felt warm and homey and smelled like polished wood and coffee. Delightful.
Though he was here to do an unpleasant job, there were always a few things that were enjoyable on any job, and a trip on a train could be one. The Civil War was still four years away, so travel between the South and North was easy. There was peace, for now.
He spotted the man he had been sent to find, Andrew Dubois, and took a seat at the table behind him.
“May I get you anything?” asked a man in a waiter’s uniform.
“Just a coffee, please,” Neil said. And then, as an afterthought, “and a newspaper.”
He enjoyed the innumerable ways he could compare this time to his own. The land was different. There were no highways, no shopping malls, no stadiums or skyscrapers. Just huge, open expanses of land. He had vague memories of attending school, and knew that people of this time period thought that the land’s resources were inexhaustible, that the space was unlimited. He understood now. Here were these people, on this luxurious modern conveyance of a train, taking only days to traverse a continent. It was a little miracle to them.
And here he sat, a twenty-year-old man who had soared through the sky in impossibly heavy planes, had sailed the seas in ships yet unimagined and had traveled through time itself. And now, he was on a train in 1857 having coffee. It almost made him smile.
Andrew Dubois sat alone, reading a newspaper and taking occasional bites of a pastry. Neil noticed that he rarely looked out the window. Had he made this journey before, or was his mind elsewhere? It was not his job to speculate, and past experience had taught him not to try to understand or empathize with his targets.
According to Mr. March, this man had robbed numerous families of their land and livelihoods through legal maneuverings involving land ownership disputes. Worse than that, he was a child molester and left unstopped, he would victimize others.
Mr. March knew these things. He was the one who made all of Neil’s trips through time possible. He was a thin man with pale skin and white hair who saw it as his duty to use his ability to travel through times and worlds to make those worlds better. Neil was, as Mr. March told him often, his right-hand man. He was the one Mr. March called when there was a hard job, like the removal of a person.
It was always a bad person, a murderer, rapist, someone the world needed removed. And it was only done when the justice system failed or society wasn’t advanced enough to protect its people. That was the case with Andrew Dubois. Mr. March could see future possibilities, things that Neil could not, and told him that left alive, Dubois would harm others. There were no laws to p
rotect children in this time. But Mr. March and Neil could take the place of the law.
It was almost time. Mr. Dubois finished his pastry and tossed his white cloth napkin to one side. Neil sipped his coffee and then pulled out a dollar bill. He didn’t know how much the coffee and paper would cost, and he had no coins. Let the waiter think he was a big tipper. He did not want to be held up for failing to leave enough money.
Mr. Dubois rose from his table, and Neil kept his eyes on his newspaper as he passed, vaguely registering news of trade disagreements between North and South involving steamships and airships. A few seconds after Mr. Dubois passed him, Neil set down his paper, slipped the dollar under his half-empty coffee cup and followed him.
Andrew Dubois was an ordinary-looking man. In that way, he and Neil were alike. But evil hid behind every sort of face, the young and old, the beautiful and the homely. The teeth or eyes or feet of the people in various worlds might be different, but their capacity for cruelty and viciousness did not vary. It was another constant throughout all times and universes. Mr. March had once said that the human race had a peculiar genius for evil. Neil had to agree.
Mr. Dubois slipped into a seat in the passenger car. The man was already guilty of molesting his niece and a neighbor girl two years before that, but for whatever reason, Mr. March had waited months after the last incident to send Neil to end the man’s life. If Neil had been the one to decide, then after one crime the man would be removed. But tampering with time was a delicate dance, and Neil was intelligent enough to know that he didn’t have the skill to foresee possible futures or to understand how events wove together to lead to other events.
Mr. March had that skill. He could make paths between times and worlds, but more than that, he understood the interconnections of births, decisions and, of course, deaths. Sometimes they had to wait, and other times they had to act. Mr. March always knew the correct course to take.
Neil took the seat behind Mr. Dubois and looked out the window. He wished he had taken the newspaper from the dining car, but then, taking in some scenery was not such a bad way to pass the time. The man before him had not brought anything to read either, and twenty minutes later, his head tipped sideways, leaning against the window frame.
There were a few other people in the car, but most were reading, embroidering or chatting quietly. Neil could feel the people and where their attentions were focused. It was like a sixth sense. Their attention was not on him or Andrew Dubois. A porter passed through the car and out the back. A woman with a young boy hurried in the opposite direction. They were all caught up in their own lives.
He drew the syringe from his pocket and removed the safety cap from the administration pad. The device was small and completely anachronistic. The fluid within was deadly, but this particular type had a time release of approximately twelve to fourteen hours. He had used other types of drugs in his jobs, but he wanted to be long gone by the time Mr. Dubois’s body was discovered.
He thumbed back the plastic safety cover that protected the trigger button. Careful not to touch the administration pad, he moved the syringe around the side of Mr. Dubois’s seat. The tiny pad was no larger than a dime, white, sterile and as soft as the sole of a kitten’s paw. Through it, the drug would pass through Mr. Dubois’s skin and into his bloodstream, leaving no mark and causing no pain.
The drug was illegal in its own time, naturally. And in the twenty-second century, forensic scientists could identify the drug in autopsies. But here, it was undetectable.
He pressed the pad gently, so gently, like a kiss, against the side of Mr. Dubois’s neck and pressed the little button. Soundlessly, the drug entered the man’s system, and Neil placed the cover back over the syringe’s pad. He would take the used device with him, leaving nothing for even the garbage collector to find.
An hour later, when the conductor announced the Birmingham stop, Mr. Dubois stirred and woke, but then settled back into sleep. By midnight, he would have a heart attack, or what would pass for one, and die.
The train hissed to a stop and Neil stepped out onto the covered platform where families and friends embraced and greeted each other. He had no such people, in this world or any other, except, perhaps, for Mr. March who would be meeting him in two hours. A cool wind whipped through the crowd and people grabbed their hats and pulled their coats tighter.
Neil did what he always did. He kept his eyes down and passed through the crowd.
Chapter 4
December 24, 1863
New Orleans, Louisiana
“What is it?” Seamus growled, not bothering to turn toward the laboratory doorway.
“It’s Christmas Eve,” said Hazel. “Did you want to come downstairs and open presents?”
“Presents?” muttered Seamus, looking up from his papers and blinking. Yes, it was Christmas Eve. What time was it, anyway? He glanced at the clock. Eight fifteen in the evening. “Aw, Hazel, I’m sorry, but I didn’t get you anything. I was going to get out earlier today, but I forgot.”
“It’s nothing,” said Hazel airily.
“I got caught up …” he said, but he felt like a fool. What imbecile forgot Christmas?
“I have a fire started in the front parlor. And I already got a fine present from Mr. Augustus—new horsehair for my bow.”
He should have bought her some new rosin, or new sheet music or some gloves or something, but he thought he had gotten closer today, closer to solving the equations. He followed her downstairs where she had a cheerful fire crackling away in the fireplace. A few packages sat in a neat pile on the center table, and Seamus remembered other Christmases, when Hazel was younger, and she’d plop herself into the stuffed chair and fold her hands in her lap, trying to be patient.
Today, she arranged her skirts and seated herself gracefully in that same stuffed chair. She was on the short side for a woman, with a petite frame, and her brown eyes twinkled with pleasure as he took his seat across from her.
He was glad she was enjoying herself, but for his part, Christmas always made him feel gloomy. His family was in Ireland: his mother and father, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews. He would never see them again. For him to reveal his whereabouts to them would bring trouble to them and arrest for him. They had to believe he was dead, for all their sakes. Sitting in their front parlor, he felt like his Christmas was a shadow of what Christmases were like in other houses with puddings and punch and scores of children scampering about.
“What is it?” asked Hazel. “You look sad.”
“Not at all,” he said, forcing himself to brighten. “It’s Christmas, and here we are, with comforts and fine company. In fact, I might even make us hot chocolate later.”
“Do you mean it?” Hazel laughed.
He hadn’t made her hot chocolate since she was a girl, but at that moment, he decided he would do it that night.
“Certainly. Why not?”
He thought of that little girl, a frightened slip of a thing, distrustful but with a touching optimism that her situation would improve. He had liked her when she was Henry and had run short errands for him. But when they had discovered that Henry was a female, he had felt more protective of her. A little girl, even a tough and scrappy one, should not have to live on the streets.
Her mouse-brown hair was no longer short and wild, but was parted down the middle, smooth on top and caught up at the back of her neck in the style that many of the young women wore. Her railroad cap and scruffy trousers were replaced with a high-collared blue dress and when she had come back from the Boston Women’s Conservatory, she had carried herself differently.
Perhaps this was how fathers felt, watching their children grow up. Seamus was thirty-one years old, old enough to be married with children. But he had not married, and though Hazel was only fourteen years his junior, she was as close as he thought he would ever get to havin
g a daughter.
She handed him the first gift, a new lapel pin from Mrs. Washington. Then she unwrapped an embroidered bookmark that Mrs. Washington had made for her. On the table sat a small red box tied with a gold bow.
“Who is that one from?”
“It’s from Mr. Ross.”
Seamus thought it was an expensive-looking package, and he had not even seen the contents yet. Hazel unwrapped it and lifted a silver bracelet from inside, set with nine dangling pearls that quivered in the firelight. Both of them looked at it in astonishment as it hung from her hand. The gift was extravagant, more extravagant than one given from a young man to a girl he fancied. It was the sort of gift one gave to a fiancée. Or a wife.
“He’s going to ask you to marry him,” Seamus said softly.
“No,” said Hazel, setting the bracelet in the open box on the table between them.
“It’s too expensive a gift for a mere admirer.”
“He hasn’t asked, and I haven’t accepted.”
“But would you accept him if he did?”
Hazel stood and walked out, her footsteps fading down the hall. Seamus considered leaving her alone to her thoughts. It’s what he would have wanted. But Mrs. Washington wasn’t there, and it was only the two of them in the big, dark house. The bracelet rested gleaming in its box, next to the long, thin box holding whatever Hazel had gotten for him. She had wanted to save his gift for last.
The Time Corps Chronicles (Complete Series) Page 31
