Alt.History 102 (The Future Chronicles)

by Samuel Peralta

  I scrolled back again, and nine minutes earlier, just after 8:13, Saul arrived. He looked younger than the Saul I knew, even though he was wearing a full beard and mustache that should have made him look older. He headed off in the same direction as the woman.

  Following Saul was risky, since he might remember me and it might trigger a double memory that would get me chewed out. But I’d never meet this other woman, Esther. I couldn’t see any harm in following her.

  A buggy drove by a few seconds after Esther jumped in, but as soon as the coast was clear, I locked onto the location hovering over my CHRONOS key and blinked in. Luckily, Esther's long skirt kept her from moving very quickly. I kept a decent distance behind her and followed as she crossed Second Street and turned right at the next intersection.

  Shortly after turning onto Spring Street, Esther veered off onto a path between the houses that faced Second Street and those that faced Third. There was no way I could follow without being noticed, so I walked past and then doubled back. When I first glanced down the path, I didn’t see her, but then I realized she’d slipped under a wire fence into one of the yards and was weeding the garden. She wouldn't be able to see into the Borden’s yard from there, so she must be watching for someone they thought would come along the path.

  Spring Street dead-ends onto Second, so the road wasn't exactly busy. But I still couldn’t stand there watching Esther all morning without somebody, either Esther or a passerby, taking notice. So I set a stable point on one side of the alley and another near the center as I walked past. Then I ducked behind some shrubs and blinked back to my room at Saul’s house in 2027 to monitor the location remotely.

  As I pulled up the stable point on my key, it occurred to me that Saul probably took the same route. Sure enough, Saul turned the corner onto Spring Street and ducked down the trail just before 8:15. He didn’t stop to weed the garden like Esther, but sprinted down the path to the Borden house. Most of the yards were fenced, but the Borden residence also had a string of barbed wire across the top of the fence that faced the alley. Saul scaled the fence of the neighboring property instead.

  At 8:24, Esther arrived to take up her position weeding.

  For a long time after that, there was nothing. Then at 8:52, a couple of men—one tall and thin, the other shorter and stocky—paused at the opening. They were talking, but I couldn't tell what they said because the CHRONOS geniuses didn’t bother with audio.

  When I got a close look at the tall guy, I recognized him as John Morse, the uncle who’d spent the night at the Borden’s house. The other man was younger, and not at all familiar. Something about his expression made me think he was a bit simpleminded. He kept his right arm tight against his side. His clothes were different, too. Morse wore a suit, but this guy was in work clothes, like someone who does manual labor.

  Morse pulled a flask out of his pocket and both men took a swig. The younger guy drank quite a bit more than Morse did. Then Morse put the flask away, clapped the other man on the shoulder, and disappeared toward Third Street.

  I switched to the view from the second stable point. Morse must have said something as he walked away, because I could now read the younger guy's lips—I’m going, I’m going.

  Except he didn't go immediately. He stood there another fifteen, twenty seconds, eyes twitching back and forth like a cat's tail. Then he sucked in a deep breath and started down the path. He was maybe three steps beyond the edge of yard where Esther was weeding, when something spooked him. He looked over one shoulder, then up ahead, and then he turned back to where Esther was hiding.

  That's when I got a clear look at what he was holding in his right hand—a small hatchet.

  I couldn’t see Esther at all. I don’t know if the guy saw her. Maybe he heard her. Either way, something scared the holy hell out of him when he glanced back at the garden. He dropped the hatchet and took a few backward, stumbling steps. Then he bolted straight toward the stable point, not even bothering to pick up the hatchet he dropped.

  When I saw him barreling toward me, I jumped up from the sofa so fast that I dropped the key. It felt like the man could see me, like he was charging straight toward me, not just toward the stable point and for a moment, I completely forgot that I was safe in Saul's library, over a hundred and twenty years later.

  Once my heart dropped out of my throat and back into its normal position, I pulled up the stable point again and waited. A few minutes later, Esther’s head peeked tentatively out of the bushes and then she inched her way into the center of the path, looking miserable. She crouched there for a moment, watching the fence, and then crawled back under the fence into the garden. Nothing for the next twenty-five minutes. Then, at 9:42, Esther bolted out, scooped up the hatchet from the ground, and took off running down the path toward the Borden house. She passed the fence that Saul had scaled and I couldn’t see her anymore, so she must have turned into one of the yards that wasn't fenced.

  Following Esther wasn't an option. Instead, I decided to check out the stable point in the barn loft. At 10:58 a.m., a woman's head—light brown hair beneath a blue bonnet—peeked up from the edge of the loft. Lizzie was wearing a blue dress with a diamond pattern in a lighter blue, and I was surprised to see that she actually did look a little like a younger, prettier version of Berta. Maybe my nightmares hadn’t been all that far off base. She wasn’t holding an axe, though—just a tiny pear with a few bites already missing.

  Lizzie removed her hat and fanned herself with it briefly before putting it on top of a wooden toolbox. There was a window a few steps ahead and she walked over to it, pulling back the curtain and staring outside as she finished her pear. Then she pulled a second one from her pocket and started in on it. She leaned against the window sill as she ate, so close to my stable point that I could see a drop of sweat make its slow journey down the side of her face.

  She was waiting for something. I didn’t know what, but you could tell just from the way that she was standing that she was on edge. After a couple of minutes, she paced to the side window and I panned around so that I could continue watching her through the key. I couldn’t see her as well from this vantage point thanks to a pile of hay off to the left, but the view was good enough that I could tell she wasn’t getting any calmer. In fact, something had her as rigid as stone, gripping the window frame so hard I half expected the wood to crack.

  At 11:10, Lizzie tossed the pear cores—three of them now—out the open window at the rear of the barn. I caught a quick glimpse of her face and she looked confused, maybe a little frightened. She shook her head a few times, then walked over to take one more look out the window before backing down the ladder to the main floor.

  What was she looking at? What was she waiting for?

  I gave Lizzie a minute to reach the barn door, then blinked in. And I nearly cut it too close, because Lizzie took her own sweet time getting outside. The door opened just as I arrived, but then Lizzie halted, probably because the damned floorboards creaked under my weight. I held my breath and stood completely still, except for my thumb, which was busy pulling up my return point at Saul's library, just in case she decided to come back up and investigate.

  Just in case she now had a hatchet.

  But no. After that short pause, Lizzie left the barn, closing the door behind her.

  When I reached the side window, I saw her moving down the little walkway toward the side door of the house. She stopped just before she reached the steps as a horse came into view on Second Street. I heard the clatter of the horse and cart first, and then a young guy calling out something, a sales pitch I guess. His accent was thick and I wouldn’t have known he was selling ice cream if I hadn’t seen a sign on the side of the wagon as he passed by.

  I watched a single housefly crawl along the window sill where Lizzie had placed the pear cores before tossing them away, but its exploration was the only movement I saw for several minutes. Then Bridget burst out the side door, screaming as she ran toward a neighbor’s house. />
  There was nothing much to see at the back window, either, at least not by the time I looked out. It overlooked a garden of sorts—grape vines and the pear trees that had provided Lizzie's snack, bordered by the back fence and the path beyond.

  Okay, now I knew that Lizzie told the truth about being in the barn. But she wasn’t doing anything. Not looking for lead to make fishing tackle as she’d claimed in her testimony. Not looking for iron to fix a door, as one of the policeman testified she’d originally said. Just waiting, eating pears, and nervously watching out the window.

  And there was no evidence of Saul or Esther anywhere.

  I set two new stable points in the barn—one from a slightly different angle so that I could actually see out the rear window where she’d tossed the remnants of her pears and another at the side window overlooking the walkway. Then I jumped back to Saul’s library at 2:22. I went to the kitchen and made a quick sandwich out of some leftover roast beef, then came back to the library to watch what Lizzie had seen while I ate.

  The view at the barn’s back window was partially blocked by Lizzie's shoulder, but as best I could tell, she’d been staring out at absolutely nothing most of the time. Just the grapes and the fruit trees and the barbed wire fence in back. But about the time Lizzie moved over to the side window, Esther came running across the yard, past the pear trees, and out of sight around the back of the barn.

  Then I shifted over to the view from the side window and watched. The view was again partially blocked by Lizzie's arm, but my eye caught a movement just outside the main residence, near the side entrance. I could tell it was a man—short dark hair, thin, and too tall to be a woman—moving at a rapid clip toward the cellar door at the back of the house. And I was pretty sure he was naked.

  I watched it several times. The man was visible for 1.12 seconds, according to the timer on the key. I paused, trying to figure out if I could zoom in, but if that’s possible with the keys I never figured out how. He looked familiar, though.

  Lizzie might have been innocent of the actual murder, but she clearly knew something was going on. And someone killed those people, most likely that naked man. The view was blurry, but he looked quite a bit like Lizzie’s uncle, John Morse.

  Problem was, he also looked quite a bit like Saul.

  The Farm

  Estero, Florida

  March 24, 1902

  I spent two full days back at the Farm trying to talk Kiernan into taking a trip to Fall River with me. The story I gave him was that I’d been playing around with the key and I thought maybe I had the Lizzie Borden mystery solved. That maybe her uncle had been in on it.

  Nothing about Saul being there, because I didn’t want to get him started on Saul and the Cyrists.

  “I’ve got three different ways of going about it, Kier. The place is a hotel of some sort in the future, starting in the 1990s. People go there to spend the night and scare themselves, I guess. And the owners give tours during the day. I can go inside and set stable points, but that’d mean having to act like I’m from a hundred years from now. It might be easier just to go back and pretend I’ve some sort of business with Borden before it happens. Get into the house that way. Or…here’s what I’d really like to do. You and me can both go.”

  “You got an extra CHRONOS key?”

  I think he was still a little pissed that I didn't leave his dad's key with him all the time. To be honest, I wanted to trust him, but there was a little voice in my head that worried he'd get tired of the Farm and take off somewhere it wouldn't be as easy to track him down. That little voice was dead on, as it turned out, and I should have listened to it.

  “I could get one," I told him, but left out the bit where I could get it by reaching inside my boot. "Saul would let me borrow it again, like he did last time. But, here's the cool part. We don't need it. I was thinking we could catch a train up there, check the place out. I've never been on a train trip before. It'd be fun. The Borden place is all boarded up now. And yeah, the teachers would be pissed at us if we took off on a spree, but Ross and that other kid ran off a while back and they took them back in, right? Just a few extra chores.”

  “Not going, Simon. I couldn’t go anywhere until me mum has the baby, even if I wanted to. Still can’t believe she let the bastards pressure her into this.”

  Kiernan wasn't fooling anyone, probably not even himself. No one pressured Cliona at all. She’d been willing to be a surrogate from the time she and Kiernan arrived at the Farm. Everybody was supposed to be equal, but the women who served as surrogates for the Pru babies were generally viewed as more faithful, more devout, since there was maybe a one in four chance that the little bundle of joy they were carrying would be able to use the key. And, if they could, maybe a one-in-ten chance they'd be able to use it effectively, but I'm guessing that got left out of the recruitment speech.

  If anyone had been pressuring Cliona, it was Kiernan. He kept reminding her that she wasn’t supposed to have more babies, that the doctor had cautioned her back before his dad was killed. But Cliona made her own decision and she’d been walking around the Farm with a round belly and a peaceful glow for the better part of the year. The only thing that wiped the happy off her face was seeing how miserable the pregnancy made Kiernan. He tried to be good about it, stopped by to check on her each day and offered to handle any of the heavier chores around the bakery, but Cliona could tell he was angry. Kiernan didn’t get good at lying until after he took up with Kate.

  “So fine,” I told him. “I’ll jump forward a few months and then—“

  “Still not going, Simon. It’s too risky. What if we get caught up there, foolin’ around in some building that isn’t ours? We could end up in jail or worse.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. But a little risk is what makes it fun, right? I hadn’t pegged you as a coward.”

  His brown eyes narrowed. “Easy to be brave when all you have to do is pull out that key and jump away if we get into a pinch. You know it's hit or miss with me. And why can't you just leave it alone? Everybody knows Lizzie did it. They just didn’t want to hang a woman.”

  “And everybody knows you’re too chickenshit to find out for certain.”

  I left him with that little witticism and jumped back to 2027. No point in sticking around to argue any further. It pissed me off that Kiernan wouldn’t budge. And thinking back now, I’m doubly pissed, since I’m pretty sure he still was wearing a spare key the whole time, even back then.

  Miami, Florida

  February 11, 2027

  Plan B, then. I'd just see if I could get the full story out of Saul. Wait until he’d had a few drinks and was talkative, and then I’d ask. Saul being drunk and talkative is like Saul breathing—you don't have to wait long to catch him at it.

  But when I brought up the Borden case he just snorted.

  “You wanna know so bad what happened, find out yourself. We both know you’re going to Fall River, so why don’t you quit pissin’ around the post and just go.”

  “Okay. Maybe I’ll do that.”

  I tried again a bit later, with no luck. He just gave me the same side-eyed, slightly disgusted look, and went back to his scotch.

  Saul seemed dead certain that I was going, even though I'd mostly decided against it since I didn't want to go alone. What made him so sure? Had he been spying on me while I was spying on him?

  I glanced around the room, looking for cameras, until I realized that just as I'd been watching the events in Fall River through the key, Saul could be using a key to watch me. He couldn't jump, but he could have stable points all through the house. So much for privacy.

  But, on the other hand, it meant I didn't have to worry about sneaking around anymore.

  “Fine, then. You want me to go, I'll go. I'll be careful, though. I won’t change anything.”

  “Of course you’ll change something," he said. "But it won’t be anything that matters.”

  I was really, really tempted to just forget the whole damned thi
ng, since Saul was so positive I was going to Fall River.

  But who was I kidding? That would mean never knowing the answer, even though I had a way to find out.

  It would keep nagging at me until I gave in. Might as well get it over with.

  Fall River, Massachusetts

  July 9, 1998

  At some point between 1892 and 1998, the paint on the Borden house was changed from blue to a pale cream shade. It didn't look right. The feel of the neighborhood was all wrong, too. Less residential and more commercial, with some sort of government building now sitting across the street from the Borden house. Or, rather, The Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast Museum.

  The longer I'd thought about it, the more I'd realized my original plan to go back to before the murders, pretend to be a salesman or whatever was flawed. I had clothes that would work for the 1890s, but there was no guarantee that the Bordens would let a stranger inside. I could have gone after the trial, when the place was boarded up, or later, after it was sold, but as Kiernan pointed out, that carried some risk, too.

  And why go to all that trouble when I could just jump to some point after 1996 and waltz right in with a tour group? A few 1990s movies gave me insight on the look and the lingo. Chinos. Flannel shirt, unbuttoned over an old Aspire tee shirt I dug out of the Cyrist International crap down in the basement. Hair parted down the middle, my Yankees cap on backward, and I'd be slammin', yo?

  Getting to the Borden place via the existing stable points turned out to be the toughest part. Two of them weren't even functional for the year 1998. One of the stable points at the old courthouse was still there, however, so I jumped in and walked the mile or so to 92 Second Street.

  About a dozen people were hanging out on the sidewalk and near the front of the building as I approached the house. They were waiting, but they didn't seem to be in line, so I bypassed them and went inside.