Ripped (50 page)

“
Katie . . . ?
Are you there? . . . Can you hear me?” A pause. “Can you hear me now, sweetheart?”

Chapter Fifty-eight

Grimace and Glower say the Bells of Clock Tower

K
a
tie stared at her
i
Phone
on the floor in the corner behind the London Stone. Her entire world began to spin out of control.
The voice on the other end had been her father
'
s!
Was it possible her dad hadn't died in a car crash on the way to the airport to pick up Collin . . .
because Collin had never been born?

Katie felt a surge of joy, followed by a plummet of sheer panic. She scooped up her backpack and cell phone and raced out of the glass-enclosed room, nearly knocking over an old woman with a cane who looked vaguely familiar.

Toby helped the elderly woman right herself, apologized, and hurried after Katie. He caught up with her near a wrought iron bench in the hallway just outside the Chamber of Horrors.

Katie stopped dead in her tracks and motioned to the neon sign over the arched entrance, electric candles flickering in brass candelabras on either side:

The Demon Duchess of Devon
the most notorious murderer in British History!
Enter If You Dare!

“Toby!” Katie cried, pointing to the sign. “This is where the Jack the Ripper exhibit was.”

At the thought of having changed history so drastically, Katie felt a chill shoot through her. She turned to Toby. “The voice on my cell phone was my dad's. If Collin was never born, my parents couldn't have died on the way to the airport to pick him up. They're alive!”

“Katie,” Toby said, taking hold of her hand. She pulled away.

“Something similar happened to me when I traveled back in time,” Toby continued. “It doesn't matter if your parents are alive. You need to go back and change things to the way they were because—”

“Not in a million years,” Katie choked out. “If my mom and dad are alive . . . I'm never,
ever
going back.” She turned away from Toby and ran down the hall, past a row of steel elevator doors. On the Plexiglas staircase, taking the steps two at a time, Katie shouted over her shoulder at Toby who was close on her heels.

“That old woman back there . . . near the London Stone. She looked . . . familiar.”

“She was blind, Katie! You barreled over a blind woman!”

“A blind wom—?” That's when it hit her.
The old woman looked like Mrs. Tray from Traitor
'
s Gate!
But Katie couldn't think about that now.
I have to get home!

Racing past the ticket counter and the waxwork policeman near the entrance, Katie jumped over the exit turnstile and burst through the front doors. Outside, she found herself blinking in near-blinding sunlight. She tried to get her bearings, but the wail of traffic from all directions drew her up short. She rubbed her eyes. There were no horse-drawn carriages, no cobbled streets, no small shops and narrow-fronted houses with lynch gates and iron-rail fences.

In front of her, Marylebone Road yawned as wide as a canyon with fast-moving cars, trucks, taxis, and buses all careening past — horns honking, tires thwacking, exhaust fumes billowing. And all around her came the eerie shuffling, laughter, breathing, hollow tumult of footsteps—the thunk of flip-flops, the squeak of sneakers.

“Give yourself time to adjust,” Toby warned.

Katie's knees began to shake, then her legs buckled. She would have fallen had Toby not held her tight, one arm wrapped around her waist. “Easy now,” he kept repeating.

A parade of tour buses rattled around the corner and seemed to be bearing down on them. But it was the
whhhhooooing
roar of a police siren in the distance, picking up speed in rising waves, that made Katie clasp her stomach. The deafening din of the twenty-first century was making her physically sick.

Toby tugged her away from the curb.

“Take a queen's death—a deep breath. Take your time, Katie. It's overwhelming at first, I know. Take it bright and breezy.”

She bent over and took several deep breaths. Bright and breezy? Did that mean take it easy . . . or don't get queasy? Katie wanted to laugh—in order not to cry.

When she finally straightened up, she was able to gasp out her grandmother's address.

Toby nodded. “Want to take the tube, luv? Or walk?”

“Walk,” Katie said without hesitation. The thought of being underground with steam engine fumes made her want to retch all over again.
No!
Steam fumes are in the nineteenth century, not this one!
Still, the idea of descending down into a dark, cavernous place—like a crypt—sent a shudder through her body.

Heading down Baker Street, Katie's eyes darted back and forth. Her heart pounded, her temples throbbed. Toby made a joke about Sherlock Holmes living at number 221b, but Katie wasn't listening.
I
'
ve got to get home.
My dad
'
s alive.

Right?

Moving at a fast clip, Katie tried not to think about the reality of what she might find at her grandmother's. She blinked around in order to distract herself. It was all so different here. The concrete buildings were enormous, and there weren't any churches on the street corners. In Victorian London, hundreds of steeples dotted the skyline in every direction.

“It's so big and loud and noisy here, and the architecture is so ugly, not like the nineteenth century—”

Katie stopped herself. She'd spoken aloud. When she was nervous she tended to say whatever popped into her head. It used to annoy her cousin Collin. At the thought of Collin, Katie felt an ominous dread in addition to wrenching anticipation. When she and Collin first visited Madame Tussauds, Katie hadn't cared about Jack the Ripper. She had wanted to see the London Stone. She knew the legend attached to the ancient stone was nonsense—a ridiculous myth—but she told herself she only wanted to ask for something simple. What harm could come of it?

I wanted Courtney and Grandma Cleaves to get along so we could be a family again! I wanted my sister in my life.

But what Katie had really wanted, in her heart of hearts, was to change history. She wanted her parents back.
I never got to say good-bye. Never had the chance to tell them I loved them.

Katie ran trembling fingers through her loose hair. There were no pins or hair adornments pricking her fingertips, no ribbons or heavy strands of pearls looped around her head.

Had the London Stone granted her the very thing she'd wished for? The reason she'd gone to Madame Tussauds in the first place?

Through a haze of tears, Katie could just make out a taxi stand across the street, but instead of a long line of horses dangling feedbags, she saw a row of shiny black cars, roofs domed like old-fashioned bowler hats.

Stop it
, she chided herself.
Stop comparing the two centuries!
This is now, that was then.
And if my parents are
alive . . . I
'
m never, ever going back!

When they arrived at Twyford Manor House, Katie sucked in her breath. She knew exactly what the condo building would look like, but still it gave her pause. The sweeping front lawn had been replaced by a parking garage. The high stone wall, pierced by iron gates, was nowhere to be seen. Gone was the stable yard, the carriage house, and the top-hatted footmen standing at the ready. No gargoyles jutted out from the roof; no battlements stood on each corner; no stone lions flanked the entrance.

Katie swiped her key-card, and they entered the lobby, which had the same black-and-white tile floor spanning out in all directions like a giant chessboard, but it was so chipped and worn as to be hardly recognizable. To their left, no grand staircase rose like butterfly wings to a balconied second floor. Instead, there was a cinderblock wall with a row of metal letterboxes. Katie moved cautiously through the lobby to a door at the far end that opened onto a doglegged hallway.

She dug out a metal key from a chain attached to her backpack, and pushed open the second door on the right. They were in the west wing of the apartment complex.

Inside her grandmother's condo, the tiny front hall was tiled in green marble, but unlike Twyford Manor, there were no suits of armor flush to the walls, no double doorway leading down a center hallway to the conservatory.

“If,” Katie whispered to Toby, “my dad's here, I'm never going back.”

“Never is a long time.”

“Don't look at me like that, Toby! I'm never,
ever,
going to change things back . . . if . . . my parents . . .” She couldn't finish the sentence. It seemed crazy to think that her parents might be alive. It just wasn't possible.

And yet . . .

Every fiber in Katie's body wished it were so as she hurried down the hall, her sneakers slapping against the tiled floor. She turned and beckoned impatiently to Toby who had stopped in his tracks behind her, scanning the hallway.

“Have I been here before? I have this déjà vu feeling . . . ”

Katie nodded. “You were here with me last time I traveled back in time—I mean forward in time.” She took his sleeve and tugged him down the hall in the direction of the library, and was about to call out to see if anyone was home, when a grandfather clock against the wall struck a chime like a ship's bell, startling them both.

Passing the tall clock, still clanging like a bell, they approached the drawing room—a small, graceful space that was her grandmother's favorite. Katie peered in. She recognized two pieces of furniture from the Duke's house: the writing desk in the corner and the oyster shell bureau by the window. She took a deep, gulping breath of air and held it in her lungs. There was no smell of coal gas stirring in her nostrils. No hissing gas jets from the wall sconces, no hollow pings from popping valves. Katie tore her gaze away and continued down the hall to the library, Toby at her side.

The door was closed.

Katie blinked down at the old-fashioned keyhole.

How many times had she and Courtney peered through that keyhole when her father and mother and grandmother were having family discussions? Or at Christmas when the tree and presents were off limits until Christmas Eve?

Katie gripped the crystal knob and shoved open the heavy oak door.

The air was thick with the smell of old leather books. There was no coal gas closing in. No wood smoke. In the corner stood an old-fashioned armchair, padded in red leather. Katie remembered it as the one her father loved to sit and read in. And the iron fender around the fireplace . . . was that in her bedroom at Twyford Manor? No. She was mixing up her centuries.

A slight, rumbling cough came from the shadows in the far right-hand corner.

Katie's heart skipped a beat.

Standing with his back to her, in shadow, holding a book, was a man. And when he wheeled around, Katie's pulse began pounding in her ears, like the rush of the waves in the Thames. She had a strong impulse to scream, but flew across the room instead and leapt into her father's arms, sobbing uncontrollably. She cried and cried and cried. She clung harder and tighter than she ever remembered doing when he was alive.

He
'
s alive!
I did it! The London Stone did it. I
'
m not going back. My parents are alive and that
'
s all that matters.
She put Collin out of her mind. Losing him was a small price to pay for having her parents back.

She stopped clinging when she felt her father stiffen. But she didn't stop crying even when he held her at arm's distance and peered into her face, anxiety and alarm stamped across his features.

“What is it, Kit-Kat? What's wrong? Katie! Sweetheart! What's happened?”

Worry and fear pressed into his forehead in little horizontal wrinkles.
Oh, how she
'
d prayed to see this face again!
She had forgotten about the furrows that creased his forehead when he was worried. How could she have forgotten? She'd thought about him a million times since the funeral, but never once remembered those deep grooves in his forehead.

“Daddy!” she wailed, though she hadn't called him that since she was little. Now she just kept saying it over and over again, as if he might disappear . . . or fade away into the oak paneled book cases . . . or dissolve into mist. “I missed you. I missed you. I missed you!”

When she finally calmed down enough for her father to ascertain that she wasn't hurt and nothing bad had happened to her, he said, “I missed you too, sweetheart. Though it's only been . . . What? Two hours? Three? Now what's all this about?”

“Oh, Dad! I love you, I love you, I love you. Where's Mom?”

Her father checked his watch. “Should be here any minute. She's with Grandma. They're doing that fund-raiser for the Widows' and Orphans' Charity in the East End. Remember? The one you had a hissy fit about? You refused to go? That one?”