Ava grasped the pipes and climbed to the rippled brickwork as if ascending a ladder. She stood on the second topmost pipe and reached her hand up to feel a little ledge where there should have been a wall.
Ava descended the pipes and stood at the bottom staring up at the spot where she had placed her hand. She unslung the bag from her shoulder and, calculating its trajectory, heaved it up and over the highest pipe. It disappeared, and she heard it land with a muted thud above her.
She almost laughed aloud with delight. Ava hated these underground warrens far from the sun, but who could resist a hidden passage? She looked cautiously about her again and then climbed the pipes to strenuously pull herself up and over the brick ledge and into a narrow opening.
She lay panting in a low-ceilinged tunnel that curved off into the darkness. After a few minutes, she sat up and pulled the electric torch from her bag. She was of above average height for a woman and had to stoop a little until the tunnel widened and enlarged after several yards.
Ava felt the floor slant dramatically uphill as she walked for the next several minutes until dead-ending into an oddly disjointed staircase. She took the stairs up and emerged headfirst into an elegantly wood-paneled hallway lit by glass-enclosed wall sconces, a décor that would have been more suited to the lobby of a fancy hotel.
She pulled out the palmavox and checked the map.
“Third door on the left,” she mumbled to herself as she walked down the hallway.
Ava stood outside the door for a few seconds to brush the dust from her clothes and pin several stray strands of hair back into place. She didn’t bother knocking but opened the door to an extremely commonplace room.
It was a study, a very nice study, but nothing out of the ordinary. Odell sat at a large wooden library desk, illuminated by two cut crystal hurricane table lamps and with papers scattered about the surface. There were shelves full of books, a sofa, and two comfortable-looking armchairs. A lovely oriental rug covered the floor, and a small fire burned in the grate.
Odell looked up, his chin in his hand and his eyebrows raised in mild surprise. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”
She walked into the room while pulling off her gloves and then unslung the bag from over her head and set it down on the sofa. “I can’t imagine why.”
“Because we’ve experienced a time shift,” he answered succinctly.
Ava blew out a long breath and shook her head. “I believe you, Odell, I really do, but you’ve got to realize how difficult it is to believe.” She laughed a little. “So what was I wearing the last time you saw me. I’m really fascinated that women can show bare legs in public.”
He smiled. “Sorry to disappoint you, but you had on a short, fitted-type skirt with rather thick tights and knee-high boots,” he replied, a little embarrassed at his detailed description.
“But I had some leg showing, right? Tights, I presume, are similar to stockings?”
Odell looked around and smiled uncomfortably. “Yes, they are. And you did indeed have a noticeable expanse of leg showing, albeit covered up by the tights.”
Ava grinned defiantly and nodded her head with approval. “Good,” she said, shaking the dust again from her heavy skirts. “It is this very fact that reassures me that I am working for good against evil,” she pronounced jokingly.
Odell laughed and looked down at the package on the desk in front of him. He was contemplating his next move and how to explain it to her.
“Hmm?” He looked up abruptly. “You said something?”
Ava was sitting on one of the armchairs. She had discarded her boots and had propped her feet up on the brick hearth for warmth. With her arms crossed, she stared into the fire and repeated, “I asked if you had thought anymore about my involvement. Why I retain knowledge of our meetings from one timeline to the other? Why I’m even essentially the same person?”
Odell looked at her profile. She was essentially the same person, he acknowledged to himself. She was a professor of liberal arts and grew up in New York City. She had danced at his mother’s studio and was a close friend of Ettie’s, but her quiet reserve and controlled presence was much less pronounced. The dazzling smile came more readily to her face, and she had a relaxed confidence that was a natural extension of a society that had never known the horrors of slavery or the indignities of racial segregation.
He shook his head ruefully. While the ruling class was lily white, the racial mix and social cohesiveness of the lower classes was, perhaps, the only truly good thing about this timeline. The collective sense of belonging was an unintended result of the tyranny and repressive order of this alternate reality. Odell felt a sense of comfort and even wholeness when wandering the city, seeing the mix of various skin tones, the graceful blend of cultures and traditions, the lovely variety of language and dialect. That it was encased within the deprivation of poverty and oppression never failed to amaze him.
“Odell?”
He looked up, clearing his throat. “Yes, I have given it some thought.” He rose and walked around the desk to take a seat in the other armchair. Leaning his elbows on his knees and staring into the fire, he explained, “I think it can only be your association with me, my decision to consult you on the matter. I appear to have inherited some… some abilities with regards to time.”
She looked at him questioningly.
He went on to tell her of his encounter with Ambrosius and what he had learned of the Time Traitors, his own lineage included. “When the time shifts, I believe I remain constant. Those who are most closely associated with me are pulled into…” He shook his head, searching for the right words. “…some sort of temporal wake created by my movements. Something that keeps you connected to my activities, my purpose…”
He sat back and ran his hands through his hair and admitted ruefully, “Honestly, I really don’t know.”
It was a gesture that Ava was learning to recognize. He was tired and frustrated. She wondered when he’d last slept.
She heard him draw in a sharp breath and then let it out slowly. Ava looked questioningly over at him. “Another shift?”
Odell nodded and stood up from a small conference table in the middle of a fair-sized and very modern laboratory. If he was going to make a move, it had to be now.
He crossed to the desk with its modular components, its ergonomically designed chair, and his computer opened on top. It had shelves above it and drawers and file cabinets to either side. He picked up the packet and turned to see Ava staring at the equations scribbled across the large portable white board.
She wore slim, loose-fitted cargo pants cinched just above her hips with a wide, black leather belt. On her feet were the same dance-type tennis shoes he had often seen Ettie wearing. She topped off her spelunking ensemble with a long-sleeved, fitted, navy blue and white striped tee shirt and black hoodie. It was an oddly modern incarnation of her previous outfit, and it made him feel momentarily disassociated from the present. He closed his eyes and shook his head. Opening them, he refocused and joined her at the white board.
Ava looked up at him and asked, “How did you find this place?”
He was a little embarrassed that he had this secret lab in addition to his well-equipped official lab when she didn’t even have her own office. But he smiled at the memory and answered readily, “I inherited it,” he said. “This corridor of labs is hidden underground beneath the physic’s building, but I actually access it from the attic.”
“There’s an attic in the physic’s building?”
“Not really an attic, I guess… more like a crawlspace or what used to be called a priest hole. It’s in between the topmost floor and the observatory. It’s hard to explain. I’d have to show you.”
He wiped off a part of the white board and drew a portion of wall jutting out from the corner of a dead-ending hallway.
“This is one of those hallways that are sometimes found in old buildings. They really don’t go anywhere, but they typically have a least a few
rooms along them. This one is notable for its lack of offices, its lack of anything really, no classrooms, no nothing. Even weirder, it doesn’t just dead-end, it turns right and then stops at a mural.”
“A mural?”
“Yeah, a kind of Roman frieze. I asked the maintenance people about it and was told the schematics showed some crawlspaces behind it, you know, for plumbing and such.”
Ava smiled. “But you weren’t buying it, huh?”
He returned her smile. “Yeah, no… it was, well, not right. And the mural… there was no reference to it anywhere, not when it was put up or by whom.”
“Is it Roman in design?”
“No. It just looks like one of those bas-reliefs you see on old Roman buildings. The design is more modern, a kind of quick overview of physic through the past one hundred years, lots of symbols and some famous faces.”
“So, let me guess. It opens via a secret code into a hidden passageway.”
“Bingo.”
“And the code?”
Odell looked down at the floor and shoved his hands into his pockets. “You’d think it would be some complicated physics-type code, but that was just a ruse with all the symbols and such. It took me two years of sneaking around staring at it to finally figure it out. Turns out, it was just a simple nursery rhyme all along.”
He was quiet for a couple of minutes until she raised her eyebrows expectantly. “Well?”
“Sorry. If I tell you, I’d have to kill you,” he replied seriously, then smiled and shrugged his shoulders before changing the subject. “Once past the mural, there are a few steps up into a space in between the top floor and the observatory. From there you can access a passageway. It’s a very narrow staircase that runs inside the wall all the way down here. It is the only entrance from the building, the other being, of course, the tunnel. Coming down the staircase that first time, I ran smack dab into Dr. Scuddy.”
“J.D. Scuddy?” she asked with her wide smile. “He was only here as an adjunct when they brought me in, but I met him at a reception for his wife. She used to be faculty in the History Department. He’s quite a character to say the least—kept me laughing the entire evening.”
Odell grimaced affectionately. “Yeah, that’s him. Not surprising he’d find the prettiest woman in the room to monopolize,” he replied without thinking, and then regretted it as she looked away, suddenly self-conscious.
He cleared his throat and continued, “Dr. Scuddy was coming up the stairs, all two-hundred and eighty pounds of him, as I was coming down. I’ll never forget our conversation. He said to me,” Odell assumed a growling baritone, “ ‘God dammit, Speex, can’t believe it’s you! I had my money on Simpson.’ ”
“What did he mean by that?” she asked laughingly.
“Well, over the last one hundred and fifty years the other labs on this corridor have been occupied by previous students and faculty who’ve discovered the secret. Seems there have been only a very few. So they’d pool their money and bet every year on who would be next. The pot would just roll over to the next year if no one found their way down here. Between me and the previous person, there was a spread of twelve years, so… well, the prize money was pretty substantial.”
Odell laughed and shook his head reminiscently. “Funny thing, Scuddy had to walk all the way down backwards, because the stairwell was too narrow for him to turn around. He gabbed at me the whole way, a running history of the place, the famous, and not so famous, who had occupied these labs.”
He looked around. “After he retired, I took it over. Since then, most of the others have also retired. Only one other lab is occupied now.”
He looked down at the package in his hands and headed for the door. “I need to give this to Sameena; she’ll deliver it to Ettie.”
“Sameena?”
“She has the other lab down here… discovered this place just last year. One of my students, a freshman, can you imagine? Smartest person I’ve ever met.” He shook his head with mild regret. “I definitely would have won some money if there’d been anyone to bet with.”
“Why don’t you just give it to me? I can deliver it.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s the reason I asked you here. But now, come to think of it, I’m not so sure it’s such a good idea. I haven’t been seen for almost two days, and if the police weren’t looking for me before you can bet they are now. The last lead they had was you leaving my house with my things. If you approach Ettie…” He shook his head. “Listen, I just don’t want to draw you into this any further.”
Ava furrowed her brow and gave him a quizzical look. “What are you planning?”
Odell hugged the package to his chest and leaned back against the door, facing her. “I didn’t tell you everything Ambrosius told me. I’m going away. Apparently, I have a job to do.”
“Where?” asked Ava. “Or rather, when?” she added uncomfortably.
“Seventeen seventy-six. Philadelphia.”
“The American Revolution!” she exclaimed, an unaccountable thrill racing up her spine.
“The very same,” he answered abruptly and then went out the door.
He was gone only a few short minutes before returning to find Ava digging in the canvas book bag she had brought with her. On the couch, she had placed the clothes and tennis shoes Marta had given her the night before.
“I don’t think you’ll need these, and I definitely could use the room.”
Odell noted the pile of objects she had gathered on the couch. She must have rifled through his desk while he was gone, because he saw his Swiss Army knife among them. Also, a large roll of packing tape, some night vision goggles he had planned to dismantle for parts, a travel clock, some ear plugs, and a package of five cheap reading glasses, indicated that no drawer in his lab had gone unsearched.
“You are not coming,” he declared flatly.
“Oh yes I am,” she replied without looking up, as she stuffed the bag with her cache of odds and ends.
“This isn’t an episode of ‘MacGyver,’ you know.”
Ava looked up, her lips parted in a little put-on half-smile. “Damn right, it’s not; this is time travel. And I have every intention of joining you on that Tempor-thingamajiggy—”
“Temporatus,” he replied stiffly.
“Yeah, that’s it. It takes two, right?” She nodded briskly. “Well, either this is for real or you are having a psychotic break of epic proportions. In which case, I may have to protect myself with this Swiss Army knife.”
“You think I’m suffering from psychosis?”
She stopped stuffing her bag and stood with her hands on her hips. “Honestly, I have no idea. It could very likely be me. Either way, you’re not disappearing on me.”
Odell looked at her for a few seconds tightlipped before stating the obvious, “You’re black.”
“Last time I looked, yeah.”
“Well, this may be Philadelphia we’re talking about, but slavery was legal and practiced throughout pre-revolutionary America, even in the northern colonies.”
“So, we’ll just pretend I’m your slave.”
“You know this may surprise you, Dr. Washington—white man, that I am!” he burst out. “But I have no desire for a slave, real or pretend. And I don’t think I’m going to have the time or energy to protect you from those who do!”
“And this may surprise you, Dr. Speex!” she countered angrily. “But I’ve had to develop some pretty innovative survival skills, this country not quite being the post-racial utopia some seem to think it. I assure you, I can take care of myself!” She took a deep breath and said more evenly, “I may even be of some help.”
He turned away from her and walked over to the opposite wall, running his hands through his hair. Finally, he heaved a dramatic sigh and pulled a beautiful crystalline object from a chain under his shirt. He punched several keys.
The air around them crackled with electricity and a cool wind swept through the room. Ava had to squint, because it looked like e
very particle of light was bursting around her. The brightness eventually faded, drawing back to reveal a sleek, metallic object that looked like nothing so much as some futuristic design of an aerodynamic motorcycle. A small machine, the seat was barely large enough to carry two. Its surface gleamed with a high polish and seemed to pulsate with liquid movement.
“Son of a bitch,” whispered Ava.
Odell had the good grace not to look smug.
*
A wet nose touched Ettie’s face, and she opened her eyes to the pit bull’s concerned yellow gaze. Beatrix sat on the floor next to the bed, one paw resting on the cover. Ettie dropped a light kiss on the dog’s head as she slipped quietly out of bed and walked down the steps to the foyer.
Ettie hadn’t needed Bea to let her know someone was at the door. She had heard the soft knock. She opened it to find a petite Indian woman standing in the hallway with a large manila envelope in her hands.
“Odette Speex?”
Ettie was modestly clothed in a pair of old gray gym shorts and a faded blue ribbed tank top. Still, she felt ill at ease meeting a stranger in her nightclothes.
“Yes,” she replied.
“I’m Sameena, a student of your brother’s.”
Ettie breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn’t seen Odell since the night of their mother’s murder, and the police were becoming increasingly suspicious, particularly Detective Hamilton.
“Did he send you?” she asked and then stepping back, invited her in. “Won’t you come in and have a cup of coffee or something?”
“Yes, he did send me, and no thanks, I can’t come in,” Sameena replied. “The police have this building under surveillance. It’s just lucky happenstance that I have a friend who lives here. The doorman waved me through, but I don’t want them to find me here.”
She handed Ettie the package and turned to go.
“Wait! Is he okay? Did he tell you anything?”
Ettie looked so worried that Sameena stopped and, brushing thick black hair back from her face, sighed, “Listen, I really can’t be found here. I don’t want to have to explain to the police how or where I got that package, but Odell was fine when I saw him yesterday afternoon. He looked tired, but otherwise okay. He really told me nothing, just to give you that.” She nodded at the envelope in Ettie’s hand, smiled, and left.
Twin Speex: Time Traitors Book II Page 9
