The Tangled Rose (Time Rose Book 4)

by Renee Duke

  “There are other dimensions.” Worn out from struggling, Penelope’s words came out less forcefully this time. “They go in and out of them. In and out of them. You all do. The medallion’s been taking you in and out of them for generations. But it’s our turn now.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Ours.”

  Mrs. Marchand and Aunt Augusta stared at her, aghast.

  “Nervous breakdown,” Uncle Trevor faintly avowed. “Only explanation.”

  The museum guard holding Penelope nodded. “Ja. This one must go to hospital also, I think.”

  “We’d better let her father know,” said Aunt Augusta. “I don’t know his mobile number. Do you, Tania?”

  “No. Never thought I’d want it.”

  “Penelope might have it. If she’s got a phone, he’d be in her directory,” said Paige.

  She pried open Penelope’s shoulder bag. Penelope raised no objection. She was now just producing hiccup-type sobs and staring straight ahead.

  “Here it is,” said Paige. “I’ll get him for you.”

  She selected the number and handed the cell phone to Aunt Augusta. Cousin Bentley didn’t answer, so Aunt Augusta left a message telling him to go to the hospital.

  “See how helpful it is for kids to have cell phones, Mum?” Paige said.

  “Yes. You’re still not getting one.”

  Aunt Augusta then called Uncle Gareth and Mr. Marchand, whom she did get through to.

  A few minutes later, the museum guard relinquished Penelope to an ambulance attendant and the ambulance sped off.

  “Two patients,” said Cousin Ophelia. “Both injured. One in body, the other in mind. Trevor’s right. Poor little Penelope has suffered a nervous breakdown.”

  “Not surprising, really,” Dane said to Paige and Jack. “Cousin Percy had her under a lot of pressure.”

  “Cousin Percy?” asked Mrs. Marchand, overhearing.

  “He wants the medallion,” said Dane. “All the Wolverton-Hernes want the medallion. Penelope said so. She tried to get it for them at Grantie’s party. Remember?”

  “Yes. Percy must be going a bit funny, too, if he thinks they can just take it.”

  “And with a gun,” said Cousin Ophelia. “Imagine giving a gun to a girl Penelope’s age.”

  “Beyond belief,” agreed Mrs. Marchand. Reminded of her children’s narrow escape, she gathered them into a hug. In doing so, she became aware of the Reitzels’ hand-me-downs. “Where did you get those coats?” she asked.

  “From the ambulance people,” Jack said swiftly. “They gave them to us just before you and Mummy arrived. Do you think we’d be allowed back in to get our own?”

  “I don’t know. The police are here. They’ll want to talk to you. And Uncle Trevor, once he’s feeling better. Oh, Gus, do you think he’ll be all right?”

  “He should be. As long as there are no complications.”

  “We’ll come right back,” said Dane, thankful their mothers’ attention seemed to be returning to Uncle Trevor and hadn’t moved on to wondering why they had bare knees beneath their ‘borrowed’ coats. “The guard could take us in.”

  The children all looked imploringly at Penelope’s former captor, who nodded.

  Relieved, Dane stooped to pick up Uncle Trevor’s suitcase, which Jack had put down in the snow.

  “Where did that come from?” Aunt Augusta inquired.

  “It’s Uncle Trevor’s,” Dane replied, mentally kicking himself for bringing it to her attention.

  “How can it be? He didn’t bring it with him from the guesthouse. And he couldn’t have acquired it here. If he had, we’d have noticed him carrying it about.”

  “Which we most assuredly didn’t,” said Mrs. Marchand.

  “No? Well, we saw him with it, didn’t we, guys?” He looked at Paige and Jack, who nodded vigorously. “I guess you’ll just have to ask him about it.”

  With that, Dane and the other two hurried toward the museum.

  Once inside, they retrieved their coats and modern clothes from the cloakroom and transformed themselves back into children of the twenty-first century before returning to the ‘scene of the crime’, where the police were indeed waiting to talk to them.

  Cousin Ophelia was still regaling them with her version of the events.

  “No. No, I’m afraid it wasn’t just an accident,” she was saying. “She definitely meant to do it. Well, in so far as someone in her mental state can mean to do something. It’s a good thing the wind whipped up some snow just as she fired. That spoiled her aim. Lucky, don’t you think?”

  “Ja,” one of the policemen said wearily. He had obviously been listening to her for a while. “Ah, die Kinder. We will speak with them now. Thank you, Fräulein.”

  “So, I can go?’

  Having already agreed upon what they were going to say, the children told the police that Penelope had been after the medallion for months, and must have thought she stood a chance of getting it when the three of them accidentally got separated from the adults. Slipping away herself, she tracked them down and ordered them to hand over the medallion. Not knowing she had a weapon, they refused, and could hardly believe it when she pulled out a gun and told them she’d shoot them if they didn’t give her what she wanted. But she obviously meant it, because she did shoot Uncle Trevor when he caught up to them and so bravely tried to protect them.

  It was a simple, straightforward account, and close enough to the truth to keep the police from doubting it. They did ask the children a few additional questions, but then allowed them to go off with their mothers to see how Uncle Trevor was doing.

  Hospital staff directed them to the appropriate floor, where they found Mr. Marchand leaning against the waiting room wall with his arms folded, Uncle Gareth sitting sedately in a chair, and Cousin Bentley pacing back and forth.

  “They’re saying she had a gun.” Cousin Bentley sounded genuinely horrified. “Where in hell would my little girl get a gun?”

  “From your grandfather,” Paige informed him. “He even got her an instructor so she’d know how to use it. She told us she was a good shot. Guess she wasn’t. She only got Uncle Trevor in the leg instead of the head or heart.”

  Cousin Bentley stopped pacing and stared at her. “She wouldn’t have been aiming at either. She wouldn’t even have been aiming. She’s just a child. The gun went off accidentally. It had to have. She couldn’t… she wouldn’t…”

  “Could, would, and did,” said Mrs. Marchand. “Would have kept shooting, too, if Alan’s cousin hadn’t grabbed her.”

  Mr. Marchand’s eyebrows shot up. “Bev?”

  “Bev,” Mrs. Marchand confirmed.

  She and Aunt Augusta then made the children tell their fathers and Cousin Bentley everything they had told the police, and threw in a few comments of their own as well. As the tale unfolded, Cousin Bentley became more and more agitated, dismissing out of hand the children’s assertion that Penelope had, twice now, attempted to steal the medallion on the orders of his grandfather.

  “No,” he said. “No. I can’t accept that. You kids have got it all wrong. Penelope wouldn’t do that. She’d like to have the medallion. We all would. It’s a lovely piece of jewellery and a family heirloom. But my daughter’s no thief. She’s…she’s just ill.”

  He turned to the adults. “It’s that school she’s in. It’s too hard. Too demanding. The stress has got to her. Her great-grandfather’s made up some rather wild stories about the medallion, and in her present state of mind…well, she didn’t know what she was doing. She was just playing out some sort of fantasy.”

  “With a gun?” said Uncle Gareth. “That was no fantasy. Ask Trevor.”

  “I didn’t know she had a gun.” Strangely, the children believed this. It was Cousin Percy and Penelope who were the dangerous ones. Bentley and his father mere minions, bullied by Percy their entire lives. “If my grandfather did give it to her,” Cousin Bentley went on, “I dare say it was so she’d have something to defend herself with if she r
an into trouble here. He’s old, and mistrustful of foreigners.”

  Just then, two doctors came to speak to them, one to Cousin Bentley about Penelope, the other to the Marchands and Taisleys about Uncle Trevor. They were told he had gone into surgery and they would not be able to visit him until the next day.

  Back at the guesthouse, the children found Zach and Alina were still out, and went up to the boys’ room to discuss events. The grown-ups stayed downstairs, dealing with grown-up stuff like contacting Uncle Trevor’s wife and parents.

  “It’s our fault Uncle Trevor got shot,” a remorseful Paige said as she seated herself on the window ledge behind Zach’s bed and Dane and Jack clambered onto the bed itself. “We shouldn’t have stayed in the past as long as we did. He wanted to come back to our own time, and if we had, if we hadn’t refused, if we’d just thrown our stuff in the suitcase and said the connecting rhyme there and then, we’d never have run into Cousin Percy.”

  “We couldn’t say the rhyme there and then,” said Dane. “We didn’t have the medallion. Jack did.”

  “And Cousin Percy had me. But why didn’t you want to come back?” asked Jack, who had missed those discussions. “We often do for a while.”

  “Yeah, but only when the Keeper Piece we’ve connected to still belongs to the kid or kids we’ve connected to and we’ve got an ongoing time task,” said Paige. “Once Marta and Hani’s Keeper Bracelet became mine, it was no longer theirs, and since it looked like things were going to be okay for the Reitzels, we knew coming back here would break our connection to them, and to their time period. And we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to stay and help Nicko and his family as well. But now, thanks to Cousin Percy, we had to come home and can’t get back to him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Have you not been listening? We don’t have anything to connect to anymore, Jack. The Keeper Bracelet’s sitting over there, in the suitcase. We can’t go back to Nicko’s time if there’s no Keeper Piece there.”

  “But there is.”

  “Huh?” Paige and Dane said in unison.

  “Well, it was bit obstructed by his vest when he wore it for the Jubiläum, so I didn’t really get a good look at it, but I did when Delo had it on for Christmas Day.”

  “Had what on?” Paige demanded.

  “The belt. The Keeper Belt,” Jack replied. “The roses on the buckle were Keeper Piece roses. Did neither of you notice that?”

  “No,” said Dane. “I wasn’t talking to Delo much that day.”

  “Neither was I,” said Paige.

  “Oh, well, I was. He told me it’s a family tradition that the boys all wear that belt when they’re twelve. It’s supposed to protect the wearer and bring him good luck.”

  “And it just might do that, if we can connect to it and persuade the Brases to leave Germany while they still can,” Paige said excitedly. “I vote we go tomorrow—after we’ve been to the hospital to see Uncle Trevor and made sure he’s okay.”

  But in the middle of the night, Dane woke up convinced they had to go then.

  Right then.

  Slipping on the medallion, he woke Jack and the two managed to dress in the dark without disturbing Zach. Uncle Trevor’s suitcase was now in their room, so Dane extracted their document pouches and Uncle Trevor’s German money before they tiptoed to the girls’ room and roused Paige. Fortunately, Alina was as heavy a sleeper as her brother.

  “Where are we going to say the connecting rhyme?” Paige whispered after she had dressed and joined them. “If the Altmeyers are still in Munich, they won’t mind us popping up here. But if the guesthouse has got new owners, we could be in trouble. Even if they aren’t Nazis.”

  “That’s true,” said Dane. “Let’s go out onto the street. The front door will be locked, but the lobby window’s just latched from the inside. We can unlatch it, climb out, cross the courtyard, and climb over the gates.”

  “You can,” said Jack. “My arm’s better, but it’s not up to climbing over the gates. Those things are high.”

  “What about the walkway? We can access that from the courtyard. Could you drop down from that?”

  Jack could.

  After the time transfer, they found it was still the middle of the night, but not a chill winter night such as the one they’d left. If not summer, it was close to it.

  As they stood pondering what to do next, a slight movement near the gates of the guesthouse caught Dane’s eye.

  “Get back,” he whispered to the others. “Someone’s there.”

  Chapter Twenty

  They moved closer to some bushes but relaxed when they realized the ‘someone’ was Delo.

  Much taller than he had been when they last saw him, he wore dark clothes and had a satchel slung across one shoulder as he moved toward them.

  He jumped when Dane called out his name.

  “You,” he said. “What are you doing out here after curfew?”

  “Curfew?” Dane echoed. “I thought only Jews had a curfew.”

  “And people under eighteen. Imposed to save impressionable youth from the evils of American jazz music and other non-Nazi forms of entertainment. You’ve obviously just arrived from…wherever it is you come from. Rosa says it is a place beyond us. A place once of us, but no longer of us. She says, when you leave it, it is to serve us, or be served by us, as fate determines.”

  “You make it sound like she thinks we’re ghosts. Or spirits, or something,” said Dane, wondering if that was why, unlike Marta, the Brase family had never questioned their unchanging appearance.

  “Or something,” said Delo. “But not a bad something.”

  “Just strange, huh? Well, here’s a strange question,” said Paige. “What year is it?”

  “Nineteen-forty.”

  “And Germany’s at war?”

  “A war with, for months, little engagement, but things are now picking up.” From there Delo proceeded like a newscaster. “Just over three weeks ago, German forces invaded France and the Low Countries. Luxembourg was taken immediately and Holland soon after. Belgium held for a short time before it, too, fell. France should have been able to repel the Germans, but failed to do so, and my uncle is sure its leaders will give in any day now. French and British troops have fled to the coast and it is said they are being ferried across the channel in whatever seaworthy vessels the British government can lay hands on.”

  Dunkirk, thought Paige. “Which uncle?” she asked.

  “Jimmy. Lena and Philo went back to England with him just after the Reitzels went to America. So did I. Not to escape anything. Just to see it because I’ve always wanted to. Then war broke out and Uncle Jimmy wouldn’t let me return to Germany. I sulked for a while, and then ran away. He came after me and said, since I was so determined, we might as well both go. He knows secret ways to travel and thought, with life here now being even worse than it was before, the rest of the family might finally be willing to let him smuggle them to England.”

  “But they’re not?” Paige guessed from his demeanour.

  “Onkel Othi still won’t leave his animals. Because of this, my grandmother also refuses to go and so do my parents. Uncle Jimmy is very frustrated. He thought they’d at least let him take Nadya and Brosi.”

  “What about the others?”

  “If our parents stay, Anya, Ava, and Rosa will stay. As for Nicko, he wants to fight Nazis, like Onkel Poldi, Drogo, and Vester. They’re all in the resistance movement and he wants to be as well.”

  “He’s too young,” Paige protested.

  “That’s what my mother thinks, but he’s almost sixteen and as soon as he is, Herr Altmeyer will vouch for him. He’s in the resistance, too.”

  “How come he isn’t in the States? He should have been by now,” said Dane.

  “He was not permitted to go,” Delo replied. “An altercation he had with one of his guests caused his passport to be revoked. This guest claimed Herr Altmeyer attacked him while he was questioning a spy at gunpoint, and in the
ensuing struggle, the spy managed to escape. Fortunately, the police believed Herr Altmeyer when he told them that he did not know the person holding the gun was one of his guests, as he came upon him from behind and thought him to be an armed robber attacking one of his other guests. He told them that, like an HJ boy who also intervened, he had simply ‘got things wrong’.”

  “But if they believed him, why was his passport revoked?” Jack asked.

  “That was Herr Gruber’s doing. The guest involved was the son of a friend. English, but a Nazi sympathizer. As was the son, who got in great trouble with the English government when Herr Altmeyer accused him of the attempted murder of an unarmed fellow citizen. The other guest was English, too, you see, and was shot at twice. The first shot, Herr Altmeyer turned aside, causing the young English Nazi to strike him several times. He was too badly injured to intervene when the swine pushed past the HJ boy and fired again. But by great good fortune, the gun jammed and exploded in the English Nazi’s hand.”

  “Guess we missed that bit,” said Paige.

  “You were there?”

  “Yeah. The ‘other guest’ was our uncle.”

  “Ah. No wonder Herr Altmeyer was upset. He likes your uncle.”

  “How come the gun exploded?” Dane inquired.

  Delo shrugged. “No one seemed to know. And since a specific defect could not be found, the English Nazi was not able to get his money back. This made him quite angry.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Paige, picturing Cousin Percy’s wrath with pleasure. “But getting back to how Herr Altmeyer’s passport got revoked...?”

  “Herr Gruber called in some favours. Perhaps he thought the revocation of his passport would make Herr Altmeyer fearful of crossing the Nazis in any way. If so, he was wrong. Herr Altmeyer now spends much of his time finding places to hide Jews.”

  “In there?” Paige indicated the guesthouse.

  Delo shook his head. “He oversees the storing and shipping of ‘packages’ from his new abode—a small apartment not far from here. I’m on my way there now. Many people will not deal with Gypsies, so Herr Altmeyer sometimes sells things for us.” Delo touched the satchel and gave a wry smile. “Unfortunately, our supply of marketable goods is dwindling.”