Owens throws his head back and laughs. “You know which ones.”
Kiernan shakes his head as he opens the door to the truck, a black flatbed. “I totally forgot the truck’s been here all morning. He knows I didn’t drive you out here to look at the cabin.”
“Then why—”
“That’s what the wink was about. He’s assuming you were there all night. I just hope he doesn’t chatter to Mrs. Owens, or I’ll have a stack of church pamphlets about the dangers of sex before marriage on my porch, along with the pickles and jam. And she’ll probably drop a well-intentioned, motherly note up to Boston to let my father know his boy is misbehaving.”
“And you’ll write back later, thanking her for letting you know.”
He grins. “Precisely.”
The truck is already uncomfortably warm, so I tug off the sweater and crank down the window as Kiernan starts the engine.
He shoots a nervous glance in my direction once the truck is on the bumpy trail leading out to the road. “So . . . no twenty questions about Pru?”
I glance around. “Is it safe? I wasn’t entirely sure if someone could set a stable point in a car.”
He snorts. “If they did, it’s still back in the shed.”
“What about listening devices?”
“Not unless they did it in the past hour or so, and I think Owens would have told me if anyone was poking around my truck. Truthfully, I don’t think there’s a device in the cabin, either. But there are definitely stable points, and I wouldn’t put it past Leo to read lips.”
I’m quiet for a minute, because I have absolutely no idea where to start. I open the thermos and take a swig of the coffee, which is so hot it scalds my tongue but otherwise not bad.
“First,” I say, “please tell me Martha is okay.”
“Martha is fine. I put a few hundred dollars in a savings account for her and told Bill to give it to her when she came of age or got married. Meanwhile, Martha stayed with them. Mrs. Owens has four boys and was happy to take her in. She was less happy to take the two motorbikes, but her menfolk insisted.”
“And you think these Owens people will be good to her?”
“I know they were good to her. She married a guy from Atlanta, but he died in World War I. Martha and her little boy came back to the farm for another year or two after that. I saw pictures—he was a cute little tyke. Then she married again and moved over near Bishop, close enough she can drop by and visit every few weeks.”
“How did you explain—”
“I kept her here at the cabin until the police found the scene at Six Bridges and removed the bodies. Then I arranged to be at the local store at the same time she showed up asking what happened to everyone in her village. She’s a good little actress and played her part just fine—after that, I made the arrangements with Mr. and Mrs. Owens.”
“And Prudence knows nothing about it?”
“To the best of my knowledge, no. She had no reason to watch the cabin in 1911, because I never told her we were there in 1911. And you know how long it takes to watch stable points. I’m pretty sure she’s got other—”
“Why don’t you explain why in hell you’re telling Prudence anything?”
“Well, I’d planned to start with that. You’re the one who wanted to know about Martha first. And stop looking at me like I’m some sort of bloody traitor, because I’m not.”
I don’t say anything. We reach the end of the dirt trail, and Kiernan makes a left onto a two-lane road before glancing back over at me. “It didn’t make sense, okay? This has gone much too easy.”
“You take a bullet in the leg and you say it’s been easy?”
“That wasn’t Pru. That was probably Simon. Or someone else Saul sent out.”
“Which makes zero difference. Despite their internal squabbles, they’re on the same side, right? It doesn’t matter which ones you’re talking to and which ones you aren’t if they’re working toward the same thing.”
“Maybe. But it might matter that they want the same thing for different reasons.”
“No,” I say. “Not when the thing they both want is to wipe out a huge chunk of the world’s population.”
“Okay, you’re right. But . . . Pru’s reasons might make it possible to negotiate with her. To change her mind. But, Saul . . .” He shakes his head and reaches over for the thermos, then hands it back after he takes a swig. I wouldn’t have thought twice about drinking after Kiernan before this morning, but after seeing him kiss Prudence, the coffee doesn’t seem nearly as appealing.
“You know I was with Prudence and Simon for a few weeks after my Kate disappeared, right?”
“Yes. You said you convinced Pru that you didn’t remember your Kate and that you couldn’t really use the CHRONOS key. You said she decided to leave you alone.”
“Well, it may not have been that simple. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that we were being played, Kate.”
It’s really strange hearing him say that, having just said the exact same thing to Connor and Katherine.
“So,” he continues, “after we finished at Six Bridges and I got Martha settled, I decided to go back to Estero 2038 and see if I could get some answers. Chopped off my hair again, wore the same clothes. I jumped in maybe ten seconds after I left Pru last time. I asked her exactly why we broke things off. She gave me the same story she did before, which is total bullshit, but this time I pretended to believe it. And we patched things up.”
Kiernan grabs the thermos and takes another swig. He looks uncomfortable enough that I have absolutely no doubt what he means by patched things up.
“With Older Pru?”
“Yeah.”
I’m silent, and after a moment he continues, his voice a little exasperated. “It’s not like I wanted to, Kate. But it’s the only way she’d trust me. Anyway, I hung around at Estero for about two weeks—long enough to find out that Saul, Simon, and about half of the inner circle have moved into the big house near the regional temple in Miami. No surprise, since Saul has been spending most of his time there anyway. And I sneaked in a few jumps up to Boston for shows at Norumbega. Simon is still there, pretty much every day, with . . . her.”
“Young Pru.”
“Yeah,” he says, his voice strained.
“And Older Pru doesn’t know what’s up with that?”
“Older Pru sometimes doesn’t know what she had for breakfast.”
That cranks the eww factor up even more, but I keep quiet.
“Anyway,” he says, “about a week in, Pru’s talking to Philippa one morning and makes a joke about you getting the keys from Timothy and Evelyn in Dallas. Pru says maybe she needs to slap baby’s hand for breaking the rules, but it’s clear she doesn’t care one bit about those keys. Her only concern seemed to be that you’d start poking around in what they’re doing in 2038. So . . . I offered to babysit.”
“You what?”
“I told her I’d keep you out of the way, since you seemed sort of taken with me.”
I really do want to hit him, but he’s driving. I grit my teeth and say, “So she went for it?”
“No. Not at first. So I shrugged like it didn’t matter and went back to reading my book and sunning by the pool. Later she said she should put some surveillance on Katherine’s house, and I told her I was bored. At least she could let me take care of that minor task.”
“You hired someone to spy on us?”
“Sort of.” He glances uneasily at my clenched fists and then goes on. “That blue van you’ve seen out front—”
“Connor says that belongs to the neighbor.”
“It does, sort of. I went back a few years and had someone at the local temple buy the house next door when it was up for sale. The guy I hired stays there. He uses the van to get a visual confirmation when anyone is coming and going. And he was told to report back to me if his audio equipment picked up anything about the specific locations where I knew we’d already been. The first report I handed over to Pru said you were planning the trip to Australia and had also worked your way through a few of the stable points at Estero between 2028 and 2030.”