Saving Lucas Biggs (14 page)

“Save him from the life he’ll lead if we don’t save his dad, and believe me when I say he really, really needs to get saved from that.”

Aunt Bridey zapped me with a glare. “What if you don’t stop Ratliff’s murder? Because history doesn’t want to change, you know. History resists. If you don’t stop Ratliff’s murder tomorrow, what will you do?” she asked. “Give up and go home?”

I swallowed hard. “No. I—I’ll think of something.”

“Because I wonder if you realize how little time you have?”

“
How
little, um, exactly?”

“Three days was the longest I could ever stick it out.”

I felt like someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over my head.
Three days.
I’d hoped for at least a week.

“Family legend has it that one of our ancestors eked out five, but I have my doubts. You look strong enough, even if you’re on the skinny side, but no human being’s stronger than history when it’s resisting.”

“How will I know when it’s time to leave?”

“You’ll know. Your own body will tell you, and by gum, you’d better listen to it when it does!”

“Why?” asked Josh. “What will happen if she stays too long?”

“I only know what I’ve been told, but I believe it,” said Aunt Bridey. “She’ll die, right here in 1938
and
in her own time, too, I guess, since she’ll never get back to it. Or worse will happen.”

“Worse than
dying
?” I asked.

“Well, I guess that depends on your perspective, but finding yourself wedged between dimensions with numbers higher than either of us could count to, stuck forever outside of time and space, sounds worse to me.”

I shivered. But
three days
? It might be just enough time, if everything went according to plan, but since I didn’t have a plan yet, much less a backup plan, the idea of three days was sending me right to the edge of panic.

“So I’ll go home and come back!” I cried out. “If I need more time.”

But Aunt Bridey was shaking her head.

“I tried that, but it takes a long time for your mind and body to get strong enough to defy history and travel again. A year, in my case, give or take.”

“But in a year, my father could be—”

I covered my face with my hands.

“I’m sorry, Margaret,” said Aunt Bridey, her voice suddenly heavy with sadness, “but it’s better that I tell you these things than that you find out the hard way.”

I uncovered my face and looked at Aunt Bridey, who was staring over my head, possibly out of the kitchen window, possibly into the distant, distant past.

“Learn the hard way,” I said, softly, “like you did?”

“I made so many blunders,” lamented Aunt Bridey. “The biggest one was attempting anything at all. But you’ve already made that one, and there’s no going back. The second one was falling in love.”

“With Lieutenant Walker?” asked Josh. “The Confederate soldier from your photo?”

“With him and with his cause.”

“You mean the rebel cause? Slavery? Breaking up the union?” I asked.

Aunt Bridey snorted. “Of course not. He was a deserter. Tried to leave that ugliness behind and start what he called a utopian society right here in Victory. No slaves, everyone working together. Came darn close, too, but his past caught up with him. I wanted so much to save him, maybe even could have, but . . .”

“But what?”

Aunt Bridey snapped to, dropped her sad, misty look like a hot potato, and said, matter-of-factly, “Your eyes are going to go bad. By the time you’re eighteen, you won’t see the portals opening, not even with glasses, not with anything. By the time you’re eighteen, you’re done.”

She stood up, slapped her hands on her apron, and went back to her okra.

“You couldn’t go back when you most needed to, could you?” I said. “You needed to travel one last time, but your time ran out, your eyes got weak, you didn’t know it would happen, and Lieutenant Walker—”

She stirred that okra as if her life depended on it.

“I let him down,” she said, flatly.

It turned out that even after she couldn’t time travel anymore, Aunt Bridey didn’t lose her adventurous spirit. Once she’d recovered, as much as she’d ever recover, from the Lieutenant Walker heartbreak, she’d done a lot of things in her life before she moved back to the house on Mount Hosta to grow her garden and tend her bees. One of them was ride the Desert Zephyr to Los Angeles to work in the movies. Because of her glasses, Aunt Bridey didn’t end up onscreen. She became a makeup artist, and she turned out to be a big help in hatching our plot to infiltrate Mr. Ratliff’s hunting lodge to save his life.

It wasn’t too much trouble for Aunt Bridey to give Josh sideburns, wrinkles, a bald spot, and a nose the size of W. C. Fields’s. Then she proceeded to dye my hair the color of dirt, coil it like a big cinnamon bun at the back of my head, plaster me with makeup, and—glory of glories—strap a giant fake butt made of goose down under my maid’s outfit.

As it turned out, Aunt Bridey, always full of surprises, had been earning a good-sized pile of money every year by supplying fancy-pants gourmet fruit, vegetables, spices, jam, and honey to Mr. Ratliff’s mountain hunting lodge. His cook, Mrs. Orilla, had just placed an order of goodies for Mr. Ratliff to gorge on during his visit to Victory.

“Mrs. Orilla will get a couple of unexpected vegetables in her order,” said Aunt Bridey, with a wink at me and Josh.

Eyeing my mind-boggling rump, Josh muttered, “More like an extra load of watermelons.”

Of course, I had no choice but to kick him. Kicking isn’t easy when you’re shaped the way I now was, but I managed.

The hunting lodge was just a few miles up the side of Mount Hosta, but the donkey path was so steep and rocky that even without my new encumbrance, it would’ve been hard going. Nevertheless, Aunt Bridey loaded her donkey with provisions and marched us straight up that mountain, mentioning, on the way, the layout of Mr. Ratliff’s lodge, including the system of dumbwaiters linking the rooms to his basement kitchen. When we arrived, she forced Mrs. Orilla to hire us as extra staff during Mr. Ratliff’s stay. I didn’t understand all the conversation, which was mostly in Spanish, but it seemed to involve the cook saying no, and Aunt Bridey telling her good luck fixing Mr. Ratliff’s dinner when all the provisions she’d ordered mysteriously fell off the burro and tumbled down the mountain, not to mention the three bottles of Honey Brook Nectar Mr. Ratliff adored so much.

“
Mañana
, three p.m.,” snapped Mrs. Orilla at me and Josh. “Mr. Ratliff arrives at five.”

We labored back down the mountain to Aunt Bridey’s house, and Josh put the donkey away in his little barn. Then Aunt Bridey turned, stuck a hand on her hip, and pointed at us.

“It’s up to you, now,” she said.

Josh

1938

“MR. RATLIFF’S ALMOST HERE!” came the whisper down the line.

“He hasn’t even started up the mountain!” came the next.

“He’s in the yard!”

“He walks with a cane now. It’ll be hours.”

“He went to visit the people in Canvasburg.”

“His bodyguard, Earl, keeps stopping to smoke.”

“He’s on the porch.”

“He’s spending the night on his train.”

“The meeting is postponed.”

“The meeting is canceled.”

“Mr. Ratliff was never really coming at all.”

The rumors kept swirling down the row of servants assembled in the hallway of Theodore K. Ratliff’s famous mountain lodge. Margaret and I had done everything we could think of to prepare for the events to come, and all we could do now was stand there with everybody else and wait.

We’d reported for work two hours before, armed with a very simple plan: stop the murder. Even if we’d had time to think of something better, I don’t know what we’d have come up with, because we didn’t know anything about what was going to happen except that it
had
happened—in the cigar parlor on the top floor of Mr. Ratliff’s lodge. Yes. This was the kind of hunting lodge that came complete with a cigar parlor.

So for two hours, along with an army of maids, messengers, butlers, waiters, and gardeners, we helped prepare Mr. Ratliff’s digs for his arrival. His lodge was like something in a movie, gleaming, glimmering, gilded, burnished, bronzed, lacquered, layered, waxed, varnished, and spectacular, hidden up there amid the mountain ridges. Once, when I was little, my parents had led Preston and me into the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, to show us the mahogany tables, Tiffany glass, leather chairs, crystal decanters, and gold-plated boxes for keeping cigars in called “humidors.” I’m telling you what, that place had nothing on Mr. Ratliff’s lodge, except maybe the family of ducks swimming in the fountain.

Margaret’s job was to dust the antlers of all the animals Mr. Ratliff had shot over the years.

Me, they handed a bottle of furniture polish and sent into the parlor. There I stood, all alone in the room where it would happen, which might have been a stroke of luck, if I’d had any idea
what
was going to happen. On a giant oak desk sat a crystal paperweight big enough to crack a skull wide open, so I hid that behind a fern. I stashed a stray letter opener in the roots of a potted rubber tree. There was also a pen on the desk, heavier than lead. As I read the tiny gold letters along the cap (
MATTERHORN: 24 K GOLD
) something caught my eye in the corner of the room: a dumbwaiter. Judging from the aroma of roasting duck wafting out of it, I was pretty sure it led to the kitchen. Smoking cigars must’ve whetted Mr. Ratliff’s appetite. I wedged the dumbwaiter door open a hair, not enough to notice from inside the room, but enough to keep it from latching. At the bottom of the shaft, I could hear Margaret talking the cook into letting her keep Mr. Ratliff’s glass full during the meeting. The voices died out.

“Put it down, boy!” shrieked a voice from the doorway. I spun around to see Mrs. Orilla with her hands on her hips. “Don’t you get any ideas!” she snarled. I realized I still had that blasted Matterhorn pen in my hand, and I ditched it on the desktop pronto, shooting her an innocent smile. If that old lady had had any inkling what I actually
did
have in my mind, her hair would’ve fallen out on the spot. “Get out here in the hall and wait at attention with the rest of us!”

So I went to stand in line to listen to the rumors fly, and the wait dragged on. For some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about that pen. I knew Mr. Ratliff was one of the good guys. But his pen—that one fountain pen, which lay all year on a desk in a hunting lodge collecting dust and got used maybe five days out of every three hundred and sixty-five, that one neglected solid gold toy cost enough to feed all of Canvasburg for a year. The lodge itself—the money sunk into that place would’ve fixed everything that was wrong in the lives of everybody I had ever known—forever—and I just had to wonder—

—and of course, as soon as my mind had drifted so far down this road that I almost had it in me to ask if Mr. Ratliff, white beard, pink cheeks, good intentions, and all, didn’t have a thing or two to answer for himself, all heck broke loose.

“Mr. Ratliff’s here!” shouted the butler from the front porch. “Mr. Biggs is here! Cue the quartet!”

And I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if there wasn’t an entire string quartet socked away in a corner that I had completely missed. The violins, viola, and cello launched into a song that called to mind a platoon of dukes in buckle shoes sashaying around a ballroom with their duchesses.

“Ah, Aristotle, welcome to my home away from home!” cried Mr. Theodore Ratliff as he swept through the front door, Aristotle Agrippa half a step behind, and Elijah Biggs bringing up the rear, coated in dust cut through with little arroyos of sweat. “You’ve convinced me, sir. Your ideas are fascinating. We’ll add them to the agreement right now. In addition to a living wage and safe working conditions, the Victory Corporation will also provide medical care at a fully equipped hospital. And fund a library. And endow a scholarship fund for the children! What’s good for the people is good for the company!” He twirled his walking cane. Biggs scowled.

To the assembled staff, Mr. Ratliff said, “At ease! Take a break! Earl, for heaven’s sake, go outside and have yourself a cigarette. My new friend and I will be in the parlor. Mrs. Orilla, please send up my Honey Brook Nectar in short order.” And with that, he led Aristotle and Biggs upstairs.

Margaret ran for the kitchen to grab the nectar for Mr. Ratliff, and I followed her, slipping into the massive kitchen. I caught her eye as she hurried past. “Good luck,” I whispered.

“Don’t worry,” she assured me, and while Mrs. Orilla described the terrible fate destined to befall any worker who spilled moonshine on Mr. Ratliff’s trousers, I climbed into the dumbwaiter, latched the hatch, and hauled on the rope.

The dumbwaiter wouldn’t budge.

I tried again, but even with all my weight hanging on the rope, nothing happened.

History resists.

Through the shaft above me, I could hear their voices.

“. . . little memento,” I heard Aristotle saying. “Thank you.”