I shake my head. “I’ve had no luck with finding the guy in Moscow during a two-day window. Two centuries would be impossible. I guess we’ll simply have to assume that key can’t be found.”
“Well, maybe not,” Kiernan says. “I don’t know if Kate mentioned it in her diary, but I’m still working on something that we started together before she . . . before she disappeared. We’re pretty sure we’ve located a key in 1905.”
“Is that what she was talking about in London? She mentioned something about getting some flyers printed, which made zero sense to me, but there was nothing specific about a key. And it was all mixed up with the stuff about Georgia in 1938. She seemed kind of flustered those last few entries.” I glance at Katherine, but she’s looking down at her plate. She pushes her salad around with her fork until she finds an olive, which she spears and drops onto Connor’s plate.
“Yeah, well, 1938 wasn’t going so well,” Kiernan replies. “But to get back to 1905, I haven’t seen the evidence yet, but Kate was certain. She saw Houdini with it twice, once in London and once in New Y—”
“Houdini?” Connor’s eyes are wide. “You’re telling me Houdini had a CHRONOS key?”
Kiernan nods. “That’s what Kate, my Kate, told me. She was positive enough that she and Katherine—by which I mean the Katherine in the other timeline—put a good deal of effort into setting up . . . well, Kate called it a sting. And I now know exactly how much effort they put into it, because I’ve had to re-create all of their steps. I was back to square one after the timeline reset, but I think I have all of the puzzle pieces in place once again, and I’m back to working undercover.”
“Undercover as what?” I ask.
“Nice try,” he replies with a grin. “You’re still coming, right? Norumbega Park?”
“I promised, didn’t I?” I glance around the table. Dad and Connor are pointedly looking elsewhere, and Katherine still has her eyes on her plate, although they seem a bit unfocused. “Let’s go ahead and pencil that in for tomorrow morning. But maybe you could give us an overview now, for the sake of the others?”
“Nope,” he says, still grinning. “You can report back to them when you get home.”
I look over at Katherine, hoping she’ll chime in and say that she doesn’t want to wait, but she still doesn’t look up, so I’m on my own.
“I think we have a dress that will work for 1905, if we make a few alterations,” Connor says.
Kiernan shakes his head. “No need. There’s a dress at my place . . .”
At that point everyone, including Katherine, looks up at him, and even though there’s no reason for either one of us to blush, we both do.
“It’s sort of a hand-me-down,” Kiernan says. “From . . . before.”
I flip through the pages I’m holding to pull their attention back to the business at hand. “So, back to the list? The jump to 1938 makes me nervous.”
Truthfully, even mentioning the 1938 jump to Athens, Georgia, makes me nervous, because I’m certain Katherine knows more than the smattering of information she included. There’s not a word about anyone dying in her overview. It’s bare bones, with just the names of the two historians she remembers—Abel Waters and Delia Morrell—the fact that they were married, and a note that they were trainers.
“Can you tell us anything more about that jump, Katherine?” I ask.
“I’d suggest that we focus on getting Adrienne’s key and Wallace Moehler’s key first. If we manage to do that without Saul’s people bashing in the door and ending this entire enterprise, then we can talk about 1938.”
I’m reluctant to let this go without more information, but perhaps this isn’t the time or place. “Fine, Katherine. Let’s move on to the Russia trip. They never got that key in the previous timeline.”
We debate the various possibilities for a few minutes, and Connor asks Katherine the same question that Other-Kate said he’d raised in the previous timeline—why would the Russians even have press conferences in a country with a state-controlled media?
He has to repeat the question, but Katherine finally says, “I don’t know. That’s a good point, Connor. But that’s definitely where Moehler said he was going.”
“Well, what if we look at this another way?” Dad asks. “Where else might they have held a press conference on this issue? Maybe the jump wasn’t to Russia after all.”
Katherine spins her head around and blasts Dad with a look that is pure venom. “I. Was. There!” she screams, leaning forward, her thin body rigid as both hands grip the edge of the table. “I know what I heard, Harry. I think the much more likely scenario is that your daughter did a half-assed job watching the stable points. She was probably online flirting with Trey or thinking about going to some damned park with this guy.”
Kiernan’s jaw clenches, but he doesn’t say anything. Dad looks kind of stunned, and I suspect my face wears the same expression. Katherine gets snippy; Katherine even gets a little bitchy, but I’ve only heard her raise her voice a few times. This is not Katherine.
She shifts her eyes over to me and then takes the handout and rips it in half, tossing the pieces on top of her plate. Her voice goes even higher than before. “If you took this at all seriously, Kate, we’d already be—”
“Katherine!” Connor says, his voice sharp as he grabs her hand. She yanks away from him and sits back, her face slowly draining of expression, her shoulders slumping downward. After a minute, Connor puts his arm around her, and she leans into him. “It’s okay,” he says, and his voice reminds me a bit of when I was comforting Daphne. “Just family here. Want me to walk you back to your room?”
“No,” she says in a small voice that worries me even more than the shrieking. “I need to stay.” She takes the torn pages and puts them under her plate and then says, almost in a whisper. “I’m sorry, Kate. And Harry.”
I give her a smile, which I doubt she sees, because her eyes are glued to the table. “It’s okay, Katherine.”
“Sure,” Dad says. “Not a problem.”
Connor looks around at the three of us and gives us a grateful nod. “Okay,” he says, his voice all back to business. “I don’t think it’s very likely that Kate missed Moehler. There were four new Diet Dr. Pepper cans in the library when I went in this morning, and nobody else here drinks that nasty stuff. I’m guessing she’s put a week’s worth of effort into this over the past four days, in between getting Deborah off for Italy. Am I in the ballpark, Kate?”
“Closer to two weeks’ work, if we’re sticking to the standard labor laws.”
“Then Harry’s right,” he says. “We need to look for alternatives to Moscow. Ideas?”
“Well,” Kiernan says, “if you can pinpoint his location at any point prior to his death, Kate or I could go ask him.”
Katherine’s head snaps up, and she gives Kiernan an odd look, a bit sad and a bit confused. “An excellent point, Kiernan. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it.”
She’s just echoed my own thoughts pretty much verbatim. The idea hadn’t even occurred to me until Kiernan said it. I guess I still haven’t fully wrapped my head around the concept of time as a two-way street. Kiernan has been dealing with this a lot longer than I have.
Not longer than Katherine has, however, and I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what’s running through her head right now. She looks over at Connor and says, “I think I will go back to my room—I’m tired. You can fill me in later.”
And as they leave the kitchen, Connor holding on to her arm, it suddenly hits me that they’re together. Like, together together—a couple. I don’t know if this is something new or if I’ve been incredibly naive or if they’ve just kept it well hidden. But if they have been hiding it, why? It’s not like I’m a little kid who would be shocked—although I have to admit I am a little shocked that I haven’t noticed it before.