Hearing voices coming from around the front of the building, I slip into the trees and move through the cover until I have a better view. There are maybe a dozen buildings strung along a wide central road. I’m not sure I’d call it a town. A village perhaps, if even that.
Several people are about, and others are coming into the settlement on horseback via a trail that leads from the woods. The few women I see are all wearing black dresses, while the men tend to be dressed more in work clothes, though some have covered these with black jackets. They all seem to be heading into the building where Lidia is.
I cross a short, open expanse to a group of bushes that will give me a view of the front of the structure. A man standing outside the main entrance and greeting everyone as they go in tells me all I need to know. A church, but one that’s still under construction.
Why would Lidia be in a church? I doubt she’s sitting with everyone else. A stranger would stick out in a small place like this. Besides, I’d be willing to bet some people were inside already when we arrived, and if Lidia had appeared in front of them, people would be running out of the building screaming instead of calmly waiting as others walk in.
When the preacher follows the last of the arrivals inside, I decide to move closer. After crossing to the front of the building, I peek around the edge of the door, look around, and then quickly pull back when the preacher begins turning in my direction. There are at least thirty people seated inside. As far as I could tell, though, Lidia was not among them. What dominates the room — and is obviously responsible for the mood of the crowd — are two wooden coffins sitting up front, one considerably smaller than the other.
The father and son from the meadow — why else would we be here? The town is so small I wonder how the events that took the two lives can possibly be important enough to be of interest to Lidia. And yet they had. Obviously she knew the attack was coming and that the father would die. It’s the son who is really the key here, I realize. I’m pretty sure he was supposed to live. Lidia’s meddlesome hand has kept that from happening.
The preacher begins talking. There are prayers and quotes from the scriptures and then, “… we pray for Bathsheba Lincoln and her children Mordecai, Josiah, Mary, and Nancy to find peace in knowing that their husband and father Abraham and their son and brother Thomas are now in the arms of the Lord…”
Whatever else he says becomes background noise to my thoughts.
Bathsheba Lincoln… husband Abraham.
Could it be?
Abraham Lincoln is a giant in the history of Iffy’s time line. But something’s not right. That Abraham Lincoln rises to fame in the second half of the nineteenth century. This Abraham Lincoln, if he’d been allowed to live, would still be long dead by 1850.
And it’s Thomas Lincoln whom Lidia has murdered, not Abraham.
My breath catches in my throat as a possibility strikes me. A child sees his father killed but survives the attack himself. Would it not make sense for this child to grow up and name his own son after his dead parent?
Have I just witnessed the erasing of the man who is supposed to end slavery long before he would take his first breath?
When I hear someone moving around inside, I quickly retreat back to the brush in case they come out for some air, and it’s from this hidden place, a half hour later, that I’m whisked even farther back in time.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I look at my chaser twice to make sure I haven’t misread the date. I haven’t.
I’m at the edge of a dark, treelined road. A look at the map confirms what I already know. Though I’ve never been at this exact spot before, I have been in this area on this very day in 1775 several times.
Has it all been a ruse? Have the seeds of destruction Lidia has been sowing simply been a game? Has she just been teasing me? Playing a little joke before doing what she really wanted to do all along?
We are near Cambridge, Massachusetts, no more than a ten-minute walk from the infamous Three Swans Tavern. This is the night and the tavern is the place where I made the twelve-second mistake that wiped away the world I was born in.
Clearly Lidia lied to me when she said she was no longer interested in bringing the empire back. The only reason we are here must be to stop the earlier version of me from changing things. Why else?
I check the tracker and see that Lidia is in the woods off to my right and already moving toward the tavern. There’s no way I can sneak up on her without making a lot of noise, but the road provides a clearer path than the forest she is working her way through, and even with my limp, I should be able to reach the tavern before she does.
I set as brisk a pace as possible. Though I can feel a dull throb in my thigh, for the most part it’s numb. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but it is allowing me to move faster than I had thought I could.
It’s my fault Lidia has found this place. When I was executing my plan to bring my sister to Iffy’s world, I tricked the other rewinders who had survived the initial time line change into thinking I wasn’t the one who caused the break but that I had discovered where the deviation had occurred.
Mixing a bit of truth with a larger lie, I told them that Richard Cahill — the man who should have turned George Washington over to the British — had disappeared from history, his mother killed before he was born.
Oh, God, I realize as I nearly stumble on the path. The death of the two Lincolns and the likely erasure of the man who should one day be president.
She’s taunting me with my own story. A story that was all made up because Cahill’s death had nothing to do with his mother and everything to do with the twelve-second delay I created. That tiny change to the time line caused Cahill to be killed by a pair of British soldiers before he could report on Washington, an event that will be happening in just about ninety minutes unless Lidia interferes.
She’s had three years to check my story. There would be records showing that, unlike what I told her and the others, Cahill had indeed been born, and there would be more documenting the night he died. She could put the pieces together, and while she might not know the exact details of the evening, she had clearly figured out enough to get us here on this night.
It’s those details that I hope will be my savior. I know them intimately. All the events of this night, the multiple trips I made here, are all only a few months in my own past, and still vivid in my mind.
I push my pace even more, and tell myself she’s finally made a mistake. I just hope to God I’m right. I’m about halfway to the tavern when I hear horses on the road behind me. Two, coming fast.
I step into the trees, more to keep from being hit than to hide. Though the riders don’t even glance in my direction as they race by, I’m able to get a good look at their faces. I’ve seen them both before, inside the tavern. These are the two British agents who will instruct Cahill to report on Washington’s whereabouts.
As I watch them disappear into the darkness, I realize that I just discovered a second place where the time line could be altered. All I would need to do is keep them from reaching the tavern, say, flag them down and warn them of a waiting ambush at the Three Swans. Simple and more than enough, I would think, to get them to flee back the way they’d come. It’s not perfect. Cahill would still be alive, so who knows what he might do in his altered future, but I file it away, just in case I need to call on it later.
It’s the strong smell of cooking meat from the tavern’s chimney that lets me know I’m getting close. After making sure there’s no one on the road either behind or in front of me, I check at the tracking app. Lidia’s still heading straight for the tavern, but as I’d anticipated, her progress has been slower than mine.