Phillip chuckled. “Fast on our feet, aren’t we, Kathy Lee?”
“You must make allowances for the novelty of the situation,” Robert remarked pleasantly. “I doubt Kathleen has ever been held at gunpoint by an old family friend.”
“Just the occasional student,” I quipped nervously.
“You were a bit of a smart-aleck even as a kid,” Phillip said fondly. “I always liked that about you.”
I felt a disorienting sense of loss. I had known Phillip nearly all my life. I liked him. I had even trusted him. I glanced uneasily at Robert, who was describing small even circles with the tip of his sword.
“I wouldn’t try it,” Phillip advised, as if privy to Robert’s thoughts. I saw Phillip’s arm move slightly and I realized that he had shifted his aim so that the barrel of his gun pointed not at Robert, but just past his shoulder at me.
“I might miss her, of course. But do you want to risk it?”
Robert lifted the tip of his blade slightly, and stepped in front of me.
“Such an especially nice sabre,” Phillip commented. “Spanish steel, I’ll wager, and I expect it’s beautifully balanced. A fine choice for an officer of light cavalry. But I suggest you put it down.”
Robert had been an officer of light dragoons, which functioned as light cavalry. I glanced up sharply. Robert still stood with his blade at the ready.
Phillip gestured meaningfully with his gun. Robert waited a beat, then lowered his sword to the floor.
“Slide it, very carefully, toward me.”
With his foot, Robert did exactly that, keeping himself between me and the gun. I took the opportunity to slip back a little, easing deeper into the gloom. A heartbeat later Phillip kicked the sword into the other room. I heard it scrape across the floor and bang into the wall. Then he took a step closer to us, allowing some light from the dusty window to fall on him.
Except for the sweat beading on his forehead, Phillip was, as always, impeccably tailored. His tattersall shirt looked new. His lightweight gabardine trousers draped perfectly despite his pudgy waist. His thinning hair was perfectly clipped. If I had looked, I am sure I would have seen a pair of Italian tassel loafers on his feet.
“Why don’t you step forward, Kathy Lee,” Phillip invited politely, “where I can see you better.”
I was silent, partly because I could tell by the set of Robert’s shoulders that he strongly advised I do no such thing, and partly because I was busy threading the garden stake, which I still gripped in my right hand, along my spine beneath my shirt, securing the base of it inside the waistband of my jeans. This was not an easy maneuver, but I accomplished it in the darkness behind Robert (acquiring several splinters in the process) without anyone noticing.
“Kathy Lee?” Phillip prompted. “I really would appreciate your cooperation.” He tipped the muzzle of his gun oh-so-slightly in the direction of Robert’s head, just to get my attention.
It worked. I stepped up beside Robert, who slipped his arm around my shoulders, wedging himself slightly in front of me. He felt the stake beneath my shirt and slid his hand against my back, his fingers tapping experimentally down the lathe.
“Show me you hands, my dear,” Phillip said to me. “Not that I don’t trust you, but you’ve been standing in the shadows and, well, you are prone to mischief.”
Dutifully, I held my hands out, even turning them to show him both sides.
Phillip nodded his approval. “I had not wanted to involve you in this,” he went on smoothly. “But the shed provided a venue most to my advantage, and, regrettably, you were underfoot. In a perfect world, I would have confronted Colonel Upton alone.”
Colonel? I shot a glance at Robert, who calmly raised an eyebrow.
“Oh yes. I know exactly who you are.” Phillip offered up a chilly smile. “In fact, I know a great deal about you.”
“Then you have me at a disadvantage, sir. For I know little about you.”
“In fact, you know even less than you think.”
While Robert and I tried to decode this, Phillip stared at us for what seemed to me in my agitated state like a long, full minute. Clearly, he had something nasty in mind, not to mention that scary gun in his hand, and the thought occurred to me that perhaps our best chance to stay alive was to keep him talking. Accordingly, I plunged in with a string of chatty questions.
“So, Phillip, why not just tell us what this is all about?”
When he didn’t answer, I tossed out question number two.
“Maybe you could explain how you knew to find us here.”
I was about to move on to number three when Phillip finally spoke. “I called Lila in Kinsale. She mentioned where you were.” He sighed wearily. “It would have been far simpler, you realize, had you shared your plans with me the other night at dinner. As it was, I checked your cottage not once but twice before I realized you had gone.”
I blinked. “Last week someone—”
“You’re referring to the intrusion at your cottage, I suppose,” Phillip cut me off. “And I’ll take credit for the phone calls, too — or hang ups, I should say. I’m sure you noticed. They were a useful means of tracking of your movements when I couldn’t observe you personally from the dunes.”
I stared at him, remembering the morning I stood alone on the deck and felt someone watching me. “You spied on us,” I accused. “I had thought I was imagining it, but you were spying!”
“Of course I was, Kathy Lee. And it was so ridiculously easy. There’s so much glass in that cottage I could tuck myself in the dunes and literally look through the house from one room to the other and out to the deck. I just parked my car around the corner and slipped through the sea oats. You never even knew I was there.”
I thought of Alfred slinking around with his camera, posing as a tourist, and wondered how he and Phillip had avoided stumbling over each other.
“Why did you do this?” I asked, dismayed.
“He was waiting for a chance to break in,” Robert pointed out. “After he blotched it the first time.”
“Less blotched than interrupted,” Phillip said agreeably. “Although, I admit I rushed the planning. After all, it had been only hours since I first saw you at the market.”
“Too bad about the dog,” I said.
“Yes, he complicated things. I thought it was you returning home, so I ducked back out. By the time I figured it out, I saw your headlights coming up the drive. After that you were so diligent about locking doors and windows. I suppose I could have forced a lock, smashed a window pane, but that would have raised all sorts of complications and alarms.”
“But what was the point?” I asked. “What were you looking for?”
“The Colonel has something of mine,” Phillip said. “I want it back.”
“How on earth could Robert have anything of yours?”
“Ask him. He knows exactly what I mean.”
Robert gazed at him coolly. “Are you quite sure?”
There was a heavy, ominous silence. “I’d stake my life on it,” Phillip told him finally. “And yours.”
I felt the tension ratchet up a notch or two. “So when you couldn’t break into my house,” I said, attempting a diversion, “you decided to befriend me.”
“Befriend you, invite you to dinner, worm my way into your confidence, as it were.” Phillip chuckled. “I figured it might be simpler than hiding in the dunes or tailing you up and down the road — although the library was an interesting detour. Such an unusual topic you chose to research. If I had any doubts as to who you were, Colonel, the library put them to rest.” He paused. “By the way, Kathy Lee, were you aware that you were being followed? By someone other than me, that is. I think your husband might be on to you. Just a word to the wise.”
“How thoughtful of you, Phillip.”
“Think nothing of it, my dear.” He looked at Robert. “You know, this has come as such a shock. I had heard, of course that Kathy Lee inherited the Tipton house but I didn’t thi
nk it mattered any more. And then I went to the market and stumbled across the two of you. I saw you first, Colonel, before I saw Kathy Lee. She was trying hard to make it seem she was alone, but I knew you were together. The coincidence would have been just too much. I must say I was utterly dumfounded. I had long given up the idea we would ever meet again.”
Finally, I knew who Phillip was.
“You’ve waited decades,” I told him.
“Clever girl,” he said.
“The doppelganger.” Casually, Robert flicked a speck of dust from his shirt. “I should have listened to you, Kitty. You hypothesized the time delta, as well.”
“Which is where you must have gotten separated,” I remarked. “And each washed up at different points of time.”
Robert glanced at Phillip. “How many years?”
“More than forty.” he paused. “A delta, was it? Until I saw you, still youthful, unaged, I never realized that the pathway would permit us to arrive at different times.”
I began tacking in a new direction. “You don’t sound British,” I pointed out. “Were you a colonial? Wouldn’t they have sounded British, too?”
“Most did, more or less. But remember, I’ve been here, on this side of the divide, forty years. From the beginning, I worked hard to disguise my accent. In the hospital where they sent me I rapidly picked up the appropriate dialect. I realized immediately that my freedom would depend on my ability to pass as one of the natives.”
“Which I would say you’ve managed rather well,” I prompted him.
“Which I’ve managed very well,” Phillip corrected me. “I was practically a raving lunatic when I realized where I had got myself to. And there were so many things I couldn’t remember. I even forgot my name, and then it came to me that it was Phillip, with two lls. The surname, which I couldn’t recall, I took from a mailbox we passed as they drove me — straightjacketed — to the mad house. Later, I remembered it was Childs, but by then it didn’t matter.”
I shifted restlessly. The garden stake rubbed uncomfortably against my back.
“It was a difficult thing to comprehend,” Phillip went on, “though I expect my age — I was not quite eighteen — helped me make the necessary mental leap. Still, I imagine that the asylums count among their inmates any number of … travelers.”
Now there’s a thought. “So the Tiptons found you,” I prodded. “And they believed you were crazy. But they stood by you—”
“Yes, yes,” Phillip interrupted impatiently. “When I was released they offered me a home. They assumed I had run away from my family at some point and landed on their lawn, a boy vagabond who had had some frightful experiences — drugs, alcohol, abuse, and god knows what else. They supplied a history for me through their own musings. I simply agreed with it.”
“And so you came with my father to Virginia,” I said. “And became an artist.”
“I was always an artist.”
“And then a stock broker, an investor. A collector of antique inkwells and pens.”
“Yes. And waited for you all the while, Colonel Upton, as Kathy Lee has pointed out. Even from Virginia, I waited.”
“How?”
Phillip jerked his head toward the field that ran behind the house. “As soon as I could manage it, I bought a small house through those trees. I used to drive up from Virginia to spend quite a bit of time there, painting and watching this house, searching for any sign of you. The Tiptons never knew.” He gazed hard at Robert. “I believed that in the confusion of my … arrival … I had lost track of you, that you had escaped somehow. In the beginning I even wondered if you were an inmate of the same madhouse I was. At one point I thought you might revisit the scene, like an arsonist at a house fire. So I watched, never realizing that you washed up in a different decade. Eventually I gave up. And then, when I least expected it, there you were.”
“Indeed. What luck,” Robert said drily.
Phillip leveled his gun. “Now, let’s get to the point, shall we?”
“I’m afraid I’ve quite lost track of the point.”
“Then let me help you along. You have something that belongs to me, Colonel Upton. And I want it back.”
“Prompt my memory.”
“I don’t need to.”
“Prompt it anyway.”
“You were at the Hound and Hare down the Pike with your fellow officers.”
Robert lifted an eyebrow. “So that’s what it was called.”
“Oh, how stupid of me. I’ve forgotten. You haven’t been here long enough to recall all those pesky details, have you? They’ll come back with time, you know, though unfortunately time may be in short supply for you.” Phillip smiled sympathetically. “But in any case, you left your friends at the Hound and Hare and rode on by yourself. I know. I followed you. But before you left, you walked down the back passage of the inn to the privy.”
I slid a glance at Robert, who nodded at Phillip. “I recall the passageway.”
“And on your way there, or back, you slipped a brick from the wall and took a letter hidden behind it.”
“I have no memory of that.”
“You had that letter in your hand as you came back in the room. I saw you slip it into your coat.”
Puzzled, Robert shook his head.
“I saw you. I was sitting by the window several tables down from you sketching a patron. I saw you leave—”
“Sketching?” I broke in.
“Ah, so you were the artist,” Robert eyed Phillip with new interest. “The itinerant artist. Did you ever sketch my friends that day?” he asked, spinning out the time. “They had remarked you, and thought to have their likenesses taken.”
“They didn’t have the chance. I saw you go down the passage and return with the paper in your hand. As soon as I could I made the same trip down the back passage and saw that the space behind the brick was empty. And I knew it shouldn’t be.”
I looked at Phillip. “How did you know there was something behind the brick?”
“Because I put it there,” he replied.
“You were running communiqués back and forth.” Robert surmised. “You were a go-between.”
I stared. “A what?”
“A spy,” Robert told me. “Phillip Olson was a spy.”
Chapter 44
If anyone ever asked me to describe my childhood, I could do so in one word: confusing. At any given time, Lila always seemed to have at least three husbands underfoot: the current one, the one she just divorced, and the one she hadn’t married yet. We seemed to pack and move with alarming frequency, depending on whom she was married to or whom she was in the process of leaving. When she wasn’t married (or even sometimes when she was) there was River House, and later, Havenhurst, where she was sent for increasingly longer visits. Threaded through all this were endless sotto voce discussions between Mae-Mae and my uncle John (or Mae-Mae and just about everyone) that stopped the minute I walked into the room, leaving me with just a tantalizing phrase or two, like manic-depressive disorder or electroconvulsive therapy. Until I went away to college I spent a good portion of my life never really understanding what was going on around me or what was going to happen next. Only Henry was straight with me: Your mother’s gone around the bend but fortunately life is circular so she’ll be back. It’s cocktail time in London. Have I ever shown you how to make a martini?
And Earl: feed me, pet me, life is good.
Clearly, I tolerance chaos well. This is why I survived the shuffle of my childhood and it accounts, I believe, for the relative equanimity with which, a mere two weeks ago, I accepted the reality of time travel. In just fourteen days — a trifling fortnight, as Robert would say — my life turned in directions I could never have predicted, and in the process I never missed a step. After all, weirdness is relative.
Then Phillip showed up in the garden shed and things got very complicated.
“A spy?” I asked incredulously. For some reason this was almost as startling as knowing he was
the doppelganger. “You were actually a spy?”
“Spy is such a pejorative word, Kathy Lee.” This from the man who peered into the windows of my house and lurked around the dunes. “I prefer the word courier. Which more accurately describes my assignment, anyway, since I merely carried messages between the sides.”
Quickly, Robert began buying time. “Who were your principals?” he asked.
“I don’t suppose it will hurt to tell you now,” Phillip said reasonably. “I was recruited in town by a man named Richard Strawbridge, wealthy merchant and a secret rebel sympathizer. He commissioned me to paint his portrait, which I thought was odd since he could have hired an established artist, but I grabbed the chance. Over the course of weeks he asked me to carry correspondence, as he called it, to someone on the rebel side. He was just the middleman,” Phillip went on, his eyes on Robert. “The messages originated from someone at Howe’s headquarters, someone leaking information to Washington. That part, however, you already know.”
I looked at Robert, who merely said, “How did it work? This back and forth business.”
Phillip eyed Robert appraisingly. “You must know this,” he said.
Silence.
“The Hound and Hare was the dead drop,” Phillip went on finally. “Each time, I would take the message there and hide it behind the brick in the passage where the courier from Washington’s camp would retrieve it. When I was first recruited, I was told the courier would have a feather in his hat, and that he would know me by my sketchbook. It was important that I wait until the courier retrieved the message. Often, but not always, he left a new communiqué, which I returned to Richard Strawbridge. It was a very simple operation and quite lucrative to me. It would not do to have it blow up in my face, to be hunted and hanged for a box full of coins.”
Now that he had begun, I knew that eventually Phillip would tell us everything. “What sort of information did you pass?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I never knew, and at the time I didn’t care. I came from London when I was twelve years old, indentured to a printer, and I had no allegiance to either side. I didn’t give a damn who won or lost as long as I was paid.”
Out of Time Page 34
