“Oh!” she quietly exclaimed, “have I got some breakfast for you!”
She retrieved Anna Mae’s basket of food, extracted two of the ham biscuits, gave one to the professor, and watched him take the first bite.
“Dear God, these are exquisite,” he whispered. “Not to mention the fact that we’re eating food prepared yesterday by the hands of a woman who lived over two hundred and sixty years ago! You couldn’t find ham like this now if you wanted to, smoked in someone’s hand-built, little ol’ smokehouse. And the biscuits! Smooth as silk, buttery; they melt in your mouth.”
“I am sure she makes them…made them…with lard.”
“I don’t care; they are absolutely heaven.”
One each was enough to fill them up, but the professor tossed an apple up and down and sniffed at the cider. “Two-hundred and sixty-nine year-old apples!” He couldn’t resist a bite of oatmeal cookie.
Cassandra left him to enjoy the food and went to dress in the clothes she had left behind for herself in the lab, while the other scientists began to file in. Evie finally roused and scurried into the bathroom to dress. Cassandra didn’t want to begin the account of their journey without her.
Eventually James, Shannon, Yoshi, Professor Carver, Jake, and Evie were all present and they squeezed in around the coffee table in the lounge area of the lab. The suitcases were still closed on an examining table nearby. Nick had slunk in and found himself a seat, but Cassandra still couldn’t look directly at him. She began to relate all that had happened, from meeting Reverend Williams, Miss Johnston and all the others, to going to live at the house on Fifteenth Street, meeting Thaddeus Evans, the trouble with the Vanderhoffs, and how they were looking for the runaways and Evans. She went on to tell how they fled to Astoria, then escaped on the boat up to Albany.
Nick spoke up then and told his story—that he’d met the reverend and his daughter at the church, that they’d been making a plan to find the missing persons, and that he helped them escape the fire. It was all he told, but it irritated Cassandra that he came off as the hero. She suggested they take a break and motioned Nick to join her near the front door. There, he moved to touch her shoulder, but she backed away.
“I hope you know that I mean it. We are through.”
“Cassandra, I beg you to give me another chance. You are angry just because I was concerned about you and risked my life to come and save you?”
“What are you talking about? You did not save us, not by any stretch of the imagination. We got ourselves back to New York and I got you back to the portal. Your actions only said to me that you were being hasty and irrational. That, and your attitude before I left, makes me uncomfortable. I feel you are too…possessive.”
“Cassandra, we belong together. We can work this out.”
She ignored his overture. “I also plan to speak to Elton about your continuing to work with us.”
“Oh, really?” A sneer formed on his face. “I see how it is. Well, you just do that. Maybe I’ll start up my own team again. I don’t need Carver.”
“You are too impulsive to be a responsible traveler, Nick. I do not trust you, and I plan to make those sentiments public when I publish my account of this trip.”
He moved closer to her. “You just try.”
Her voice rose. “Is that a threat?”
James quickly walked to his mother. “You okay, Mom?”
“Nick was just leaving,” she said, turning away from him.
“All right, I’ll go. I hope you come to see things differently, Cassandra.”
Cassandra ignored him as she strode across the room to join the others.
James stood tall before the other man. He opened the lab door.
Nick looked over the room. The other scientists were quiet now, observing the scene. Professor Carver stood with his arms folded, his face stern. Nick looked back at Cassandra. His eyes traveled up and down her body once, then he turned and stalked out the door. James closed it and locked it. Cassandra could feel that her face was hot. Evie came and took her arm and they went into the small kitchen.
“Let me get you some water,” Evie said to her.
“I am sorry about that,” Cassandra said to her.
“I am too. I did not know Nick was like that.”
“He has changed. He is not like he used to be.”
Shannon called out from the lounge. “I’m going to start examining your luggage, ladies, if you don’t mind.”
Cassandra heard a clasp click open.
“What?” cried Evie. “No!”
She ran the few steps back into the lounge with Cassandra following.
“What the hell?” Shannon exclaimed.
She had opened Evie’s suitcase and it lay exposed on the table.
Evie ran to it. “No!”
Everyone craned in to look while Evie shrank back, her hand covering her mouth. Shannon carefully lifted a rolled canvas from the suitcase. She unfurled it with care. She gasped and slowly turned it around for them all to see. It was a painting of a field, green and brown, dotted with endless white cotton. The white starkly contrasted with the black figures bent over the plants. She carefully handed it to Yoshi and picked up another, gingerly unrolling it. It was a picture of a group of dark-skinned men and women huddled around a fire, a ramshackle cabin behind them, a small child standing in the doorway staring, his eyes bright in the darkness. The suitcase was full of the rolled up canvases.
Cassandra turned and stared at Evie. “You took Caleb’s paintings!”
“We were going to take them to Canada,” she said breathlessly. “But, once I decided not to go,” she looked around the room at everyone staring at her, “he sent them with me for safety.”
“But you took them knowing they would be going into the future,” Cassandra began slowly. “Those paintings were never supposed to survive. They were supposed to have burned in that fire, or disappeared somewhere in Canada—history dictates that the paintings did not survive, am I right? Caleb Stone is an unknown artist—”
“Except for his painting of the river crossing. But,” Evie added quickly, “you said that a person could bring artifacts into the future with them.”
Cassandra was speechless for a moment. “Things that might have survived otherwise, things that no one would miss—small things—souvenirs…this, this could change the future in a way that was never meant to be!”
Everyone was asking questions at once about Caleb and the paintings.
Evie cut through the confusion. “I do not care!” she shouted. “I do not care if the paintings were not supposed to survive. Who are we to determine that? Yes, so I changed history. Now the paintings have survived. Now we have them, and Caleb Stone will be revered as one of the greatest American painters of all time. We should have them. What I did was right, and I do not regret it. Because of me, all of Caleb’s works will live on forever! And I am glad!”
Everyone was stunned. One by one, Shannon extracted the paintings while they watched. Each was more beautiful than the last. Evie had saved all his work, all seventeen canvases. The one missing, the eighteenth of Caleb’s masterpieces, was the painting that at that moment was hanging in All Angels Church a few blocks away.
*****
Evie had forgotten all about the press until she stepped outside into the summer sunlight two days after returning to the present. She’d been sequestered in the lab, going through a debriefing process and answering questions about her intentions for the paintings for two days. She was sick of the cramped little space and the scientists who served as her inquisitors. Cassandra was not among them. She had been excused to return to Boston. She’d been so furious with Evie, she hadn’t been able to stay in the same room with her, so Carver had let her go. But in spite of the fact that she regretted hurting Cassandra, she was glad she’d brought the paintings back. Though she hadn’t been allowed to keep them, she had been successful in her own, personal mission. Her reason for going on the trip was fulfilled.
&nbs
p; Her bodyguard was at her side in an instant as the paparazzi swarmed, flashing their palms at her to capture her image, and yelling her name.
“Ms. Johnston, how was your trip?”
“Elinah, look over here! What was it like?”
She ignored them and ducked into the car. It sped off to her loft apartment downtown.
*****
For two weeks Evie holed up in Soho, not venturing outside, but ordering all her meals in, refusing to see friends, thinking, dreaming about Caleb, worrying about the paintings. She finally received word that there would be a hearing by the MIT Chronology Department’s Board of Directors and that she would be expected to be there to tell her story.
Several days after the hearing, Professor Carver called her to his MIT office. When she entered, Cassie was there. She did not rise to greet Evie, but they said their hellos without undue awkwardness. When she had seen Cassandra at the hearing, they had not spoken, but Evie thought she had answered the questions about their trip in an unbiased and even sympathetic way.
The professor held in his hand a small, flat device. He tapped it and a document opened and hovered in the air for all of them to examine.
“Will you read it, Professor?” Evie breathed. “I can’t do it.”
He scanned it and looked over at Evie. “It’s an interesting decision.”
Evie held her breath.
“They want to sponsor an exhibit.”
“What?”
“They want to display the paintings. They would like it to open next spring, displayed here at the school. If it is successful, it will eventually tour.”
Evie looked at Cassandra who had an air of sphinx-like mystery about her.
“And,” Professor Carver went on, “they want Caleb’s narrative to accompany it.”
“Caleb’s narrative—” Evie said, “I don’t understand.”
Cassandra opened her hand and aimed her palm-link at Evie’s. In a moment, Evie felt a vibration and opened her own device to find she’d received a message. When she opened the document, she found Caleb’s words, almost exactly as he’d spoken them, recounting his journey out of slavery with Samuel and Lillian.
“How did you do this?”
“I have a nearly photographic memory. It helps me to remember musical pieces easily. I remembered what Caleb told us and entered it in my computer when I got home.”
Evie read over the some of the text. “It really is almost word for word, at least as far as I remember. But why? Why aren’t you still angry with me?” She turned to Professor Carver. “Why am I being forgiven for bringing the paintings back?”
“Because after the hearing, Cassandra sent the board chairman Caleb’s narrative, and once he and the Board understood the historical value of having those illustrations of the slave experience, they decided it overcame whatever harm might have been done by bringing something from the past that, for all we know, should have been lost or destroyed.”
“And after thinking about it carefully, Evie, I’m glad they weren’t,” Cassandra said. “They should be preserved, and now they will be.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Who do you want to start with?” Cassandra asked Evie nervously, perching on the edge of a soft leather chair in her home office. James was there with them.
“Well, there’s no point researching Caleb’s life, there’s nothing to be found there. I looked and looked before we made our journey.”
“I hate to say it, but something could have changed in his history since we returned.”
Cassandra called up Caleb’s name in her computer but nothing was mentioned beyond his being the artist to whom the painting, “The Crossing,” was attributed around 1853.
“Just as I thought,” said Evie, her voice quivering. “He disappeared into oblivion. Perhaps he died shortly after arriving in Canada.”
“So many records of African Americans were lost, or simply not even kept back then.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Let’s look up Miss Johnston. The research I did on her before we left showed that she died in 1858, but it didn’t say how.”
Cassandra called up the name and the general time period on her computer, and the sensory net searched all references. The information was spoken in the blandly pleasing tones of a female voice: “Cassandra Imogene Johnston, born New York, New York, 1825, died New York, New York, 1858—”
“So she did return to New York before the war!” Evie’s voice caused the computer to automatically pause.
“Interesting,” said Cassandra. “Continue.”
“Daughter of Benedict and Sarah, sister to Jeremiah and James, granddaughter of abolitionist and activist Jeremiah Williams, she was an outspoken abolitionist in her own right and participant in the Underground Railroad in the early eighteen fifties. No other information is found.”
“That’s all we knew about her before we left,” Evie commented. “I just didn’t remember that she died in New York.”
“So we don’t know why she came back. Let’s check the records for Lillian Ketchum.” Cassandra gave the command, and the computer responded.
“Lillian Marguerite Ketchum, sister to Samuel, parents not known. No date of birth on record. Died St. Catherines, Ontario, May thirty-first, eighteen fifty-seven.”
“Oh my God,” Cassandra uttered. “That’s why Miss Johnston went back to New York! Miss Ketchum died!”
“Oh, that’s so sad,” said Evie. “I wonder if Miss Ketchum’s health was weakened by the illness she contracted during their escape from slavery.”
“She didn’t seem that fragile to me,” Cassandra commented. “It could have been anything.”
“Check her brother,” suggested James, “let’s see what happened to him.”
Evie spoke the command.
“Samuel Abraham Ketchum,” the computer responded, “brother to Lillian, parents not known, no date of birth on record. Married in St. Catherines, Ontario, April seventh, eighteen fifty-four to Jessame Matthews—”
“Wow, he didn’t waste any time,” remarked Evie.
The computer continued blithely, “Father to Anna, Caleb—”
“He named his son after Caleb!” Evie cried.
The computer went on, “…Evelyn,”
Evie gasped.
“…Sarah, Lillian, Jeremiah, Cassandra, Samuel Jr., Nate, Thaddeus, and Sharla.”
“Dear God!” Cassandra exclaimed. “He had a pack of kids!”
“And the names he chose are a tribute to all the people that he loved,” James observed.
“Amazing!” said Evie. “How many of Samuel Ketchum’s children survived to adulthood and how many had offspring?” she asked the computer.
“All survived past the age of twenty-one, and all produced offspring,” replied the computer.
“In that time period,” remarked James, “that was amazing.”
“It’s incredible to think that so many of Samuel’s descendents survived and are probably populating a decent percentage of the planet as we speak!” Cassandra said. Evie and James laughed.
As they continued to enter names into the computer, they discovered that Reverend Williams lived many years longer, long enough to see the slaves emancipated. His daughter, Sarah, lived another ten years beyond that. Jerry lived to the age of seventy and had three children, two girls, and a boy who would have been Evie’s ancestor. Jerry’s brother, James, lived to the age of sixty-five, and had two more children with Isabelle, making a total of four.
Cassandra was sobered to think of Sarah losing her daughter, even though her sons went on to live long lives. She couldn’t imagine losing a child, no matter what their age. She found herself wondering if Cassandra Johnston had died of a broken heart. Miss Johnston and Miss Ketchum had risked much to be together and, sadly, their time together was all too short.
They found that Reverend Williams had bequeathed some money both to Anna Mae and Caroline, and thus found their last names, and could search their histories. H
owever, there was no further mention of Anna Mae. Evie and Cassandra were left not knowing if she were also a runaway slave. They were happy to see that Caroline eventually married and had children.
They had searched everyone now, except Thaddeus Evans. Evie gave Cassandra a look that said: Now is the time.
Cassandra took a breath and entered the name. She could not recall reading anything about the year of his death before they’d left, or how he died, because his name was not well-known and she’d had no way to know that she’d meet him. She only thought she recalled seeing the one pamphlet of his antislavery writings, which now popped up and was displayed in the holographic image. In addition, there was a newspaper clipping alongside the pamphlet, as well as another document. The newspaper article was a brief account of his death at the hands of Jack Vanderhoff, in the town of Albany in August of 1853.
Cassandra gasped. “They found him! They killed him! Oh my God!”
The article related that the killer had gunned down abolitionist Thaddeus Evans as was out walking in the garden of his brother’s house. Jack Vanderhoff was caught and confessed, and was sentenced to hang. Cassandra put her hands to her face and wept.
Evie knelt down next to her and put her arms around her, while James continued to look at the information on the hologram.
“Wait, what’s this?” It was a letter, accompanying the other documents, enlarged and floating in the air before them. James scanned it quickly. “Your name’s here, Mom, and something about…Nick?”
“What? No, that can’t be right.” Cassandra swallowed, dried her face with her hand, and took a breath. She briefly looked at the addressee and noticed the name Jonathan Evans. At the bottom, it was signed Cecil. “This must be a letter from Cecil Evans to one of their other brothers. C65, will you please display and read the entire contents of the letter from Cecil Evans to Jonathan Evans, dated November twenty-fourth, eighteen fifty-three?”
Evie stood. The computer did as commanded. The letter read as such:
Dear Jonathan,
I am writing to give you further details related to the death of our brother Thaddeus. After the funeral, the court proceedings began, and some odd details surfaced. It turns out that in the confession of Jack Vanderhoff, he claimed that he had been paid to kill Thad by a man he called Nicholas Stockard. Naturally, based on this testimony, the police searched extensively for this person but found no record of anyone by that name. It is presumed that this was nothing more than a ruse concocted by Vanderhoff in an attempt to divert attention from his own crimes, and to perhaps gain sympathy by laying the blame at another’s feet. He said that this Stockard fellow tipped them off to the fact that Thad was hiding here at my house in Albany, and paid him to make sure the job was finished. We still don’t know who this person is, if he exists, and if so, why he had a vendetta against our brother. Perhaps Vanderhoff thought that if he mentioned an accomplice, he would get off easier.
The Time Heiress Page 27
