Timekeeper (5 page)

“You’re not safe!”
Dorothy wailed.

Frozen in place, Michele watched her refined grandmother lose all composure. The sight was more terrifying than any words could have been.

“Why don’t you go up to bed and let me talk to Michele,” Walter suggested quietly. “You’ll make yourself sick worrying like this. Try to get some rest.”

“No.” Dorothy took a deep breath. Though she was still trembling, her eyes red, she seemed to regain a bit of control. “I need to be here.”

“Please just tell me what’s going on,” Michele pleaded, her voice strangled. “At this point I can only imagine the worst.”

Walter nodded slowly, and Michele braced herself for what was to come.

“About a month ago, you were looking at a photo of Irving Henry in this album,” he said. “We told you he was no one important, just the family lawyer in the old days—but we lied. We had to. We thought we were protecting you.”

“I knew it,” Michele whispered. “You knew who he really was all along, didn’t you?”

“How did
you
find out about him?” Walter asked sharply. “We always thought Marion never knew.”

“She didn’t. It’s a long story, but I figured it out when—when I found this,” she said, clutching her key necklace. “He’d left it behind for Mom, but she never realized what it was, and she just kept it in her safe at the bank all these years. I found it after she died.” Michele lifted the key out from under her shirt. Its reveal had a physical effect on her grandparents. All the color drained from Walter’s face, and Dorothy gripped both arms of the chair, struggling to breathe normally.

“Until today, we always wondered and worried that you might be like him. But we never knew for sure,” Walter said, his expression a mix of both fear and amazement. “Have you—have you
seen
him?”

“Once,” Michele admitted. “For a split second … in 1925. But we didn’t speak, and I was sent back to my time right away.” She almost added that she had also been at her father’s funeral in 1944, and had seen her grandfather as a little boy, but she had a feeling that information might send them both over the edge.

Walter closed his eyes, trying to collect himself. He then reached over and opened the photo album to a new page. “This is your father, at the same age he was when we first met him—when he began dating Marion.”

Michele leaned over the photograph, hungry for a look at the father she had never known. She felt her heart clench as she gazed at his picture. Irving Henry was the epitome of boyish good looks and charm, grinning in front of a Christmas tree in the Grand Hall. He had wavy hair and a mustache, which made him look even more like the quintessential Victorian gentleman. But Michele was most struck by the similarities she could see between his face and her own, despite the crude quality of the aged photograph, dated Christmas 1887.

“I got my dimples from him,” she whispered. “I have his nose. And … we have the same smile.”

“It caught us off guard when we first saw you,” Dorothy said quietly. “Of course you look like your mother … but you’re so much like him too.”

Michele pored over the snapshot, trying to memorize his face.

“Irving was born and raised in this house, with the servants,” Walter divulged. “He was the butler’s son, and even after his father, Byron, died and he went away to school, he returned to Windsor Mansion on holidays. While it was certainly unusual in those days for the staff to befriend the family they served, the butler was the highest-ranked position in the household, so the Windsors respected Byron. And his son, Irving, grew up with the daughter of the house—Rebecca.” Walter turned the page, his expression hardening. “As I heard from the few relatives who knew her back then, she was always a strange girl who no one liked. It seems she and your father, however, were once very close.”

Michele peered at the photo Walter was eyeing so grimly and covered her mouth with her hands in disbelief.

The image revealed a girl with dark, soulless eyes, who looked neither young nor old. She was standing in the drawing room of the Windsor Mansion, wearing a long satin dress with a pronounced bustle, her head turned to the side. An upswept pile of black curls framed her sharp face.

Michele staggered away from the album.

“That’s her,” she choked. “Today—there was a—a ghost of a person following me. I didn’t get a clear look at her face, but I know it—
that’s her
.”

“She’s done it, Walter,” Dorothy cried. “She’s come after Michele already.”

Walter gripped Michele’s shoulders. “She can’t harm you
for seven days. We know this from the last time she tormented us. She can follow you and frighten you, but she won’t have her full physical form and strength until she’s been in our time for seven days. That’s why we need to get you out of town immediately—”

“Wait.” Michele looked from her grandfather to her grandmother, shell-shocked. “How do you
know
all of this? And … why? Why would someone from the 1880s want to hurt me?”

She stopped short as her eyes caught the image on the opposite side of the page. She moved in for a closer look and a cold, clammy sensation settled in her stomach. In this snapshot, dated January 1888, Rebecca and Irving were huddled together on the steps of the grand staircase, their smiles secretive.

“This is the last known photo of them together,” Walter revealed. “Something happened later that year in 1888, something that caused Rebecca to turn on your father and hate him for the rest of her life—and beyond. To this day, we don’t know what it was.”

“When Marion brought Irving home to meet us in 1991—he called himself Henry then—we thought he was nothing more than a polite teenager who just wasn’t in our daughter’s league. We never in our wildest dreams imagined he could be the same Irving Henry I’d known as a boy. We figured it was a harmless young romance and didn’t try to stop it. But he and Marion became serious. And that was when Rebecca showed up.” Walter’s face twisted in anguish at the memory. “Seeing that girl materialize in front of us, decades after her death—there was nothing more terrifying. And yet somehow she gained our trust. She was family, and a powerful time traveler
at that. When she proved to us who Irving really was, showed us these very photographs and the secret he had kept from Marion, our first instinct was to believe Rebecca when she said that he would bring about the downfall of our daughter.

“We knew Marion wouldn’t believe us if we tried telling her the truth, or maybe we feared that it wouldn’t make a difference to her—she loved Irving so much, we were scared that she would follow him anywhere, even to another time. So when Rebecca threatened us into helping her break them apart, we didn’t fight her.” Walter bowed his head in shame. “I’d been to Irving’s
funeral
. I knew he was supposed to have died in 1944—so it wasn’t hard to believe Rebecca when she said that he was an abomination, and that his union with our daughter would lead to terrible consequences. She told us that we had to separate them before they could have a child. She was obsessed with that, constantly warning us of what would happen if you were born.”

Dorothy spoke up, her voice weak. “We tried to pay Irving to leave Marion. He wouldn’t accept the money, but when we finally broke the news that we knew who he was, and that Rebecca had been appearing at our home … well, he disappeared the day after that, without a word of warning. But it was all for nothing. Marion never forgave us, and we lost her so early. It was everything we were trying to avoid when we cooperated with Rebecca.” Dorothy buried her face in her hands. “And now, after seventeen years, she’s come back for you. It’s our worst nightmare. But we won’t ever listen to that despicable creature again. We know now that she was the real enemy all along.”

“You see, Michele, we have always cared deeply for you,” Walter said softly. “We kept things from you only because we felt we had no choice.”

Michele reached for her grandparents’ hands.

“I can’t imagine what these years must have been like for you,” she said. “It kills me to hear what Rebecca did to you and my parents. But we won’t let her win.” Michele’s teeth clenched with anger as she realized that everything in her life would have been different if it hadn’t been for this psychotic time traveler. She would have grown up with both parents and grandparents in her life, Marion wouldn’t have been left alone to raise Michele as a single mother—and most of all, Michele wouldn’t now be an orphan at sixteen.

“Rebecca broke up my whole family,” she whispered as the horror of it all sank in. She looked up at her grandparents. “What does she want to do to me?”

There was an agonizing silence as Walter and Dorothy looked at each other, unsure of what to say.

“She wants me dead, doesn’t she?” Michele said flatly.

After a pause Walter said, “But remember, she can’t do anything about it just yet. That’s why we have to take you away from here. We know you must miss your old home and your friends, so we’ve booked one-way plane tickets to Los Angeles. We can stay there until the danger has passed.”

“No,” Michele said firmly. “Rebecca has been terrorizing our family since before I was born—it doesn’t matter where I go. She’ll find me. That’s why I have to be ready when she does. I have to finish this.”

“But—but how can you?” Dorothy sputtered. “How can
you stay here when she’s haunting the house, and go to school and act normal, when you might only have seven days? At least if we go away—”

“It won’t change anything,” Michele interrupted. “How do we know she won’t just follow us there? The only solution is for me to find a way to stop her—for good.” As she spoke, Michele couldn’t help marveling at how calm she sounded, despite being thrust into the middle of a real live horror movie. But as she thought of the family Rebecca had stolen from her, fury and determination overrode her fear. Her mind suddenly filled with the image of Philip’s face, and the longing to stay alive, to be with him, was so profound that in this moment she felt as if she could defeat any obstacle in her path.

Seizing the album, Michele flipped through it until she found the first visual she had ever seen of her father: his business portrait from the year 1900. He was thirty-one in this photograph, though there was a heaviness to his eyes that made him appear older. The cheerful boy of 1887 was barely visible.

“What I don’t understand is, if Irving and Rebecca’s friendship ended in 1888, then why was he still working for the family so many years later?” Michele wondered.

“The oddest part is that this photo of Irving was never in the album originally,” Dorothy said in a hushed tone. “It appeared the day after he left the 1990s.”

“We did some research through the family to find out what we could about Rebecca and Irving,” Walter continued. “It wasn’t easy, as nearly everyone who knew them had died, but we did speak to her niece, Frances Windsor.”

Michele felt a jolt of recognition at the name. She had seen
little Frances, known as Frankie back in 1910, when she’d met Clara Windsor. Frankie was Clara’s little sister.

“Frances was in her nineties when we visited her in ’93, but she still had a sharp memory. Rebecca was her father George’s sister, and she remembered her aunt being the strange, unfriendly black sheep of the family. Rebecca never married, nor did she make anything of her life. Frances remembered her always disappearing on mysterious travels, sometimes for years at a time. George inherited this house after their parents died, and Rebecca moved into a townhouse on Washington Square—though she was rarely in the city. According to Frances, her aunt never seemed to want much to do with the family. They only saw her when she made an occasional appearance at Windsor balls. On the other end of the spectrum, as Rebecca drifted away, Irving grew closer to them. Frances said that whenever he came to the house to discuss legal or business matters with her father, he would arrive early and linger after the meeting, as if he was waiting for someone.” Walter took a deep breath. “I always wondered if it was Marion he was waiting for—if she was the reason he kept so close.”

Michele swallowed the lump in her throat. “Did my … my dad ever see Rebecca again?”

“Not that anyone knows of. Rebecca was rarely around, and on the occasions that she did return to Windsor Mansion, Irving must have stayed away. Frances said that although he was invited for holidays and parties at the house, he never once attended.”

“I have to find him,” Michele declared. “I have this feeling that—that he’ll know what to do.”

Dorothy gasped, appalled at the idea. “But if you find him, then you could be walking straight into her trap. She lives in his time!”

“Don’t worry. I won’t do anything until I’ve figured out more and made a … a plan.”

Walter squeezed her hand. “We’ll help you. We’re in this together.”

Michele took a deep breath. Seeing the worry written across her grandparents’ faces, she wondered if she was deluded in thinking she could take on this cross-century war with an adversary she hadn’t even known existed until today. But then … she had no choice.

T
he Key of the Nile is the device that enables us to travel through time. These keys come from the very birthplace of time travel, ancient Egypt. More than two hundred keys are known to exist: one for each family in the Time Society. Though they all form the shape of the ankh, each key has its own unique feature, size, and design
.

The Key of the Nile is always given by a Timekeeper within the family before he or she departs this earth. Therefore, time travel is an inherited gift. The power runs in each family’s blood, through the Time Travel Gene. The gene is activated when you receive your key
.

The vast majority of our kind cannot travel without their Key. Only a select few extraordinary Timekeepers are able. I am one of them
.

—THE HANDBOOK OF THE TIME SOCIETY

3