7
I seemed to have lost every bit of energy I possessed, and it was all I could do to move from the steps in front of the townhouse. Trey took charge and steered us toward Massachusetts Avenue, where we found a coffee shop. He sat me at a booth by the window and came back with two coffees and two blueberry muffins. I promised to pay him back, but he just laughed, saying coffee and muffins made me a cheap date, relatively speaking.
“So why do you think this time-shift thing made your dad and your mom… disappear?” he asked. “You said it happened twice before, and no one vanished. Why this time?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t really stopped to think about that.” I paused for a moment, going over what I knew in my head. “There were two photographs at my grandmother’s house—her friend, Connor, said they used to be identical copies of the same family portrait. One had been kept in a protected area—an area shielded from time shifts by one of these medallions. The other photo wasn’t. When I saw them today, they were portraits of two different families, headed by the same man.”
I took a sip of my coffee before continuing. “Something must have shifted the course of the man in the photograph’s life—two different paths. And yes, Connor and Katherine could be mistaken or lying—one picture might be Photoshopped, or the men could be twin brothers, I don’t know… But I’m pretty sure the man in both of the portraits is the same man I met on the Metro this morning, just after I was mugged. Only this morning, he was about twenty years younger than when the picture was taken in the 1920s.”
“Wait,” Trey said. “You met the guy in the photos? This morning?”
I nodded. “He warned me that something was about to happen. And I watched him disappear while he was holding a medallion just like this one.”
I gave Trey a weak smile. “All of this sounds just as crazy to me as it does to you. But to answer your question about why my mom and dad have vanished, I think something was changed in the past. Something that affected my family.”
I relayed the story my grandmother had told me, realizing as I spoke that there were huge gaps in what I knew. I explained about CHRONOS and how Katherine had escaped into 1969. “If I had to guess,” I concluded, “I’d say that Saul finally caught up to my grandmother in the past. If she never had my mother, then I was never born and my father…” I shrugged. “There would be no reason for him to be at Briar Hill. Or something else changed and my mom and dad, and maybe me…? I have no idea how this works. Maybe we’re all still in Iowa…”
Trey stood up from his side of the booth and motioned for me to slide over. He squeezed his tall frame into the seat next to me and removed a small laptop from his messenger bag. “Then that sounds like the place to start—let’s find your parents. Is it Debra or Deborah? And how do you spell Pierce?”
I looked at him skeptically. “You believe me? You actually believe all of this?”
He took a bite of the muffin, chewing it slowly as he considered his answer. “No,” he said. “Don’t be offended, please. You said yourself, it’s crazy. I don’t believe that reality has shifted and that the medallion around your neck will cause you to disappear. Although I have to admit that it made me nervous when you were holding it in your hand earlier, so maybe I don’t entirely disbelieve you, either.”
“So why help me?” I suspected it was, in part, because he found me attractive. Trey was a nice guy, but if not for that little fact, I was pretty sure that he would have decided that his obligation to help ended at the Metro station.
He finished off the muffin and then replied. “The important thing is that I do think you believe what you’ve told me. And I’m sure you have parents somewhere and I’d like to try to help you find them. Please eat something, okay—otherwise, I’m going to have to carry you on the way back to the Metro.”
“Why not just take me back to my grandmother?” I asked, a bit defensively, taking a bite out of my muffin. I felt like a lost kitten that he was feeding and keeping out of traffic while he searched for my owner.
“Well, first, you haven’t told me her name or address,” Trey said. “And second, that’s not what you want, right?”
I shook my head. “No. I mean… not until I know.”
“Okay, then—we look for your mom and dad. Let’s start with a Google search…”
Twenty minutes later, we had established that Deborah Pierce did not exist—or, at least, she had never taught history at either of the colleges where she had worked. I knew the login and password to access her university website, because Mom always used the same password for everything. The password was irrelevant anyway, since the system had no record of user dpierce42. We tried a search for several academic articles that she had written, but there was nothing listed.
It was hard to imagine a world in which my mother didn’t exist—had never existed. I bit my lower lip and took a few deep breaths, pushing down the fear that was building inside me so that I could focus on searching for Dad. He wasn’t listed among the faculty at the Briar Hill website, something that didn’t surprise either of us. Then we moved to a general web search. There were a lot of Harry Kellers, including one who had been a movie director back in the 1950s. I asked Trey to narrow the search to Delaware and to include my grandparents, John and Theresa Keller. Their address hadn’t changed and I felt a surge of hope.
“Try adding something called the Math Olympics. My dad was on the team in high school—it’s something he always puts in a bio. I guess it’s to establish his math geek creds.”
“Or maybe to inspire his math geek students,” Trey said with a smile. He adjusted the search criteria and a few minutes later I was staring at Dad’s photograph. He had a beard, which I had seen him wear only in a few pictures from his college days, but it was definitely him. He was teaching at a boarding school about an hour away from my grandparents’ house in Delaware.
I grabbed Trey’s hand and squeezed it hard. “We found him. That’s my dad!” I thumbed through the three pictures I carried in my ID holder. One was of Mom, who didn’t like having her picture taken and therefore looked a bit annoyed. One was of me and Charlayne after a belt ceremony at karate. The last picture was of Dad, taken the previous Christmas with the wok I gave him. I showed the picture to Trey.
He nodded. “Yeah, it’s the same guy. And it’s pretty obvious you’re related, even in the online photo—you have his eyes. And your smile is the same, too.”
I reached over Trey to scroll down and read the rest of the bio, laying the picture on the table beside the laptop. But as soon as I moved my hand away, the picture vanished.
Acting on reflex, I tried to grab what was no longer there, knowing as I did that it would make no difference. One second the photo was there, a splash of color against the polished black marble of the table. And the next, it was gone.
“Son of a—” Trey’s mouth was open, and he pulled away, moving toward the edge of the booth. “Kate, did you see that?”
We were both silent for a moment. “I don’t think I’m going to keep that muffin down,” he mumbled.
Without thinking, I pulled the CHRONOS key from under my shirt and held his hand against my chest so that we were both in full contact with the medallion. After a few moments the color returned to Trey’s face. “Do you remember what just happened?” I asked.
Trey nodded. “Yes. We found your dad. And then his photograph—which was right there by the salt shaker—just disappeared.” He looked down at his hand, which I was still holding against my chest. “I’m not complaining or anything—not at all—but why are you holding my hand… there?”
I blushed, but I didn’t move it off my chest. “I’m beginning to think that it could be rather… dangerous… for me to lose contact with this medallion for even a moment, Trey. If my mother doesn’t exist in this… time… then I don’t either, right? But I also remember what it was like when the temporal distortions happened and I didn’t have the medallion. I felt… like you looked, just a few minutes ago. Faint, queasy, panicky?”
“Yeah… it’s getting better now. But there’s a part of me that insists the picture was never there. It’s not just that I don’t think things should be able to vanish like that, but more that I remember two opposite things at the same time, if that makes sense?”
“None of this makes sense,” I said. “What I can’t figure out is why you saw the picture disappear at all. I don’t think you have the CHRONOS gene since the medallion looks ordinary to you… but Connor—that’s my grandmother’s friend—said that anyone who wasn’t wearing a medallion wouldn’t realize that anything had changed, when there was a time shift.”
“Maybe it’s enough to be touching someone who’s wearing a medallion?” Trey suggested. He moved his shoulder and his knee slightly, which had been brushing against me all along due to the small booth.
“Maybe,” I said. “But… you believe me now, right? That what I’m telling you is real?”
Trey made a slightly sick face. “Yes. I’m going to have to go with Sherlock Holmes on this one—‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth.’” He stared at the spot where the picture had been. “I would have said that the things you described earlier were impossible, but I’ve just seen an example with my own eyes. I could try to pretend it didn’t happen… I might even make myself believe it… but I know better.”
“That’s why I’m holding your hand on the medallion,” I said. “I’m scared that if you take your hand away, you’ll forget… that you’ll stop believing me.” Tears came to my eyes and I blinked them back. “I know that sounds incredibly selfish, but I really, really need someone to believe me right now.”
His grin was back, just a bit shakier. “Okay, but I think we’re going to find it difficult to finish this search with our hands in this position. And people are going to stare if we try to walk down the street this way. Maybe… if we just sit really close?” He put his left arm around me and very slowly pulled his right hand away, while I watched his face for any changes.
“See?” he said. “I still remember. We’re both fine.” He tapped the touch pad to pull up the rest of my dad’s bio, his arm still around my shoulders. “And I could definitely get used to browsing this way.”
I gave him a sideways glance, but didn’t disagree. My entire body had stiffened when Nolan, Charlayne’s latest matchmaking candidate, had put his arm around me at the movie. Being next to Trey, on the other hand, felt natural.
“Is there an address at the bottom?” I asked.
“I think so. But Kate… maybe you need to finish reading the bio.”
I scanned the three paragraphs quickly. The bio included the same bit that Dad always added about the Math Olympics, the same college data and interests. Some additional facts, however, brought me back to reality—the new reality. “Harry lives with his wife, Emily, and two children, in a faculty house overlooking Eastwick Pond.”
It was just before 4 P.M. and the traffic was beginning to pick up as we left the coffee shop and turned onto Massachusetts Avenue. We held hands even as Trey collected the laptop and stowed it in his bag, probably looking like a lovesick teenage couple who couldn’t bear to be apart for even a second. And within a few minutes, we looked like a lovesick teenage couple having an argument.
“He will still know me, Trey. He will. He’s my dad; how could he not know me?” I had already said this several times, but Trey didn’t seem convinced. I wasn’t entirely convinced myself, but I also wasn’t willing to acknowledge any other possibility.
We waited for the walk signal and Trey pulled me toward a bench that curved around the small park at the center of Dupont Circle. Several people—a few of them homeless, judging from the bags and blankets surrounding them—were seated at the stone chessboards nearby, intent on their games.
“I’m not sure, Kate. I know you want to see him—and I’m more than happy to take you if you really think that’s best.” Trey put his finger on my chin and pulled my face in his direction, forcing me to look at him. “Listen. It’s a ten-, maybe fifteen-minute walk to my house from here. We’re over near Kalorama. And it’s a two-hour drive, give or take, to Delaware. If we leave now, we’d get out of the city before rush hour and we could probably be there before dark.”
He held up one finger as I moved to get up from the bench. “But… hear me out. I have no doubt that, in your timeline, your father loves you dearly. To this Harry Keller, however, you’re going to be a stranger. Maybe we should go to your grandmother. Or at least call her before we go? You said that she believes you can somehow… fix… this. Shouldn’t we concentrate on that?”
I sighed. He was being logical, and I knew on some level that he was right, but… “I can’t call Katherine. I don’t have her number. It was in my phone, which was in my backpack, which was stolen. The number would be brand-new, and I can guarantee it’s unlisted anyway, since she’s worried about being tracked down by my grandfather.”
As I said this, I pushed away the nagging fear that the CHRONOS keys had, for some reason, not protected Katherine and Connor. I had to focus first on finding Dad. “Maybe we should go there first, but I think she’d try to stop me from contacting Dad. And I need to see him, Trey. Even if he doesn’t know me, I’ll convince him. I need to see that he’s real, that he exists. I can’t… I can’t do that with my mom. She’s not here… I don’t think she’s anywhere.”
Maybe it was the rising panic in my voice. I’m pretty sure I didn’t convince him with the strength of my argument because the reasons didn’t even sound logical to me. All I knew was that I needed my Dad, that he was only two hours away, and Trey had offered to take me to him.
“Okay.” He gave me a sad smile and took my hand, pulling me up from the bench. “We go to Delaware. I don’t think it is going to help, but I’ve known you—what?—right at four hours, now. I’m willing to admit I could be wrong.”
Trey’s family lived in a three-story house perhaps a bit smaller than the one Katherine had bought in Bethesda. It was in a quaint neighborhood, with row houses, the occasional single-family home, and a few small embassy buildings. Trey said it had belonged to his grandparents, but they had retired to Florida years ago, and he’d lived in the house for most of his life—at least during the times his family had been in the States.
We entered through a side door that opened into a large kitchen with pale yellow walls. “Estella?” Trey called as he opened the door. “It’s me.” A large gray cat who had been sleeping in the afternoon sunlight stretched and slinked over to Trey for a greeting. “Hi, Dmitri. Where’s Estella?”
I bent down to stroke the cat’s ears and he purred in response, rubbing against my legs.
“Hmm. Estella’s usually here. She must have stepped out to the market. Probably just as well, since she would have a thousand questions about you, even if I just said we were going to the movies. She’s a bit… overprotective.” Trey left a note on the desk for his father, telling him he was helping out a friend, and attached another note to the fridge, explaining to Estella that he wouldn’t be home for dinner.
At Trey’s suggestion, we found my dad’s number through directory assistance and called to be sure he wasn’t away on vacation or something. It was Dad’s voice that answered the phone, and it was all I could do to keep from talking to him, but Trey pulled the phone from my hand and said he’d dialed the wrong number.
Trey’s car was parked in a garage behind the house. It was an older model Lexus, dark blue, parked next to a much newer, similar Lexus in black. “This one is Mom’s hand-me-down,” he explained, “but Dad added the Bluetooth for my phone and music.” He grinned. “I convinced him that it was a safety issue—so that I can focus on the road and still call home—but I really wanted it because this car only had a CD player. It needed a serious music upgrade.”
The ride to Delaware was uneventful. Traffic wasn’t bad once we got out of the city. I kept my hand on Trey’s shoulder, so he could have both hands free to drive. Although my seventeenth birthday was fast approaching, I hadn’t yet gotten my own license—there seemed little need since the Metro went most places I wanted to go and the only car to which I had access was an old clunker that Dad used almost exclusively for trips to the grocery. Trey had apparently been driving for a while, however, and seemed very comfortable behind the wheel.
He was hungry, so we stopped to grab some food at a McDonald’s near Annapolis. We were through the door and halfway to the counter before we realized, simultaneously, that Trey had dropped my hand to open the door.
“Trey?” I said. No response. He was looking at me quizzically, his head tipped to the side.
I waited a moment and then grabbed his hand again, and practically screamed his name. “Trey?”
“Exactly who are you?” he said. “And why are you holding my hand?”
He broke into a grin before the last words were out, and squeezed my hand. “Joking!” I tried to pull my hand away, but he wouldn’t let go. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.”
I punched his arm with my free hand.
“Ow! Okay, that hurt, but I guess I asked for it.” Trey pulled me around the corner, holding my wrists together to avoid another punch. “I’m sorry, really. I didn’t intend to drop your hand… but I was thinking about it earlier, and it doesn’t make sense that I would forget. I mean, unless there is another temporal shift, or whatever you call it, I don’t think my memory would be affected.”
I glared. “Then why didn’t you say that earlier?”
Another grin. “Would you have held my hand for the past three hours if I had? Really, Kate—I was going to suggest that we test the theory after we sat down to eat.”
“Test it how?”
“Well, if I had forgotten, the worst that could have happened is that you had to pull out your Metro pass so I could watch that vanish, right? Or one of your earrings? I mean, if the picture disappeared, those things should, too. And if a disappearing photograph convinced me in DC, I think a disappearing Metro card would do it in Annapolis.”
I shrugged, and then nodded. I was still annoyed, but it was hard to stay mad at Trey.
“Also,” he said, “judging from the way you’ve been shifting around in the car seat the past twenty-five miles or so, I suspect you need to use the facilities as badly as I do. And a joint trip to the bathroom might have been pushing the limits of familiarity for both of us.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
I spent most of the next hour staring out the window and trying to decide what I was going to say to Dad when I saw him. The area looked a lot like Iowa—flat patches of farmland, broken up by the occasional small town. Chaplin Academy was just outside one of those towns and I wasn’t any closer to figuring out what I was going to say when we arrived.
There was a security gate at the entrance, and I leaned over Trey, holding up my school ID for the guard’s inspection. “I’m Kate Pierce-Keller. My… my uncle, Harry Keller, teaches here. We’re driving through, so I wanted to tell him hello.” I was terrified that the guard would try to take the ID from me to inspect it—at which point I had no idea what I would have done. I couldn’t risk everything in the ID holder disappearing. The guard, however, was a friendly sort who leaned in the window to glance at the ID and then gave us directions to the faculty housing area.
I had worried that it would be difficult to find Dad. We didn’t have an exact address and I thought we might have to go door-to-door until we found a helpful neighbor. But I saw him before we even located a place to park. He sat at a wooden picnic table near the pond, a book in his hand, watching two boys—one around five and the other a few years younger—who were riding Big Wheels across the grass. The area was green and lush, with a large willow near the pond. I could see the back entrances to several small, neat-looking houses fifty yards or so behind the table, most with grills on the patio and a few with sandboxes or plastic playhouses.
I sat motionless, just staring at him. After a minute or two, Trey came around to the passenger side and opened the door, kneeling down to look at my face. “Do you want me to wait here at the car or come with?”
I thought for a moment. “Would you mind going with me?” I asked in a small voice. It would undoubtedly be a more personal conversation than anyone should have to witness on such short acquaintance, but I could feel my knees shaking and I hadn’t even stood up yet.
“Not at all,” Trey said. He reached out his hand to help me from the car and continued to hold it as we walked toward the picnic table. “For moral support,” he said, squeezing my fingers gently.
I gave him a grateful smile. I had never felt so vulnerable.
“Mr. Keller?” I said. Dad looked up and closed the book, holding his place with his finger. The cover of the paperback was an autumn mélange of yellow, orange, and brown, with the image of a rabbit in front—Watership Down, a book that he had read to me years ago. One of our favorites.
“Yes?” He furrowed his brow a bit and glanced at our school uniforms. I realized they probably weren’t the same on this campus, if uniforms were even required. “Do I know you?” he asked.
I sat down on the other side of the picnic table, with Trey beside me. “I hope so.” I had rehearsed twenty different ways to start this conversation during the ride and now the only thing I could think to say was, “I’m your daughter. I’m Kate.”
His look of utter shock made me instantly wish that I had taken a different track. “I’m sorry! That’s not how I wanted to begin this… I mean…”
Dad shook his head adamantly. “That’s not possible. I’m married… only for the past ten years, but… Who is your mother?”
“Deborah,” I answered. “Deborah Pierce.”
“No.” Again, he shook his head. “I never dated anyone by that name. I’m sorry, but your mother was mistaken.”
“Oh, no, it’s not like that,” I said emphatically. “I’m… I already know you…” I did the only thing I could think of—I pulled the CHRONOS key from inside my shirt. “Have you seen this before? What color is it?”
Dad looked at me now as though I were stark-raving mad, and possibly dangerous. He glanced at Trey, although it wasn’t clear whether he was looking for a possible ally or sizing him up as a threat. “No, I haven’t… and it’s sort of pink.” He glanced again at the medallion. “It’s an unusual object—I’d remember if I had seen it.”
I reached into the plastic holder and showed him my school ID—Prudence Katherine Pierce-Keller. Then I pulled out Mom’s picture. “This… this was my mom.” He clearly noticed the past tense, because his eyes softened.
Dad looked down at the photo for several moments before raising his eyes to meet mine again. His tone was gentle when he replied. “I’m very sorry for your loss… Kate? Is that it?” He glanced over at Trey. “And who is this?”
Trey turned toward him and put out his hand. “Trey Coleman, sir. I’m a friend of Kate’s—I drove her here from DC.”
Dad leaned forward and shook Trey’s hand. “Hello, Trey. I’m sorry you came so far to be disappointed. If you had called, I could have saved you the…” He trailed off as the youngest of the two boys came running over and propped his foot up on the bench of the table.
“Daddy, fix my shoe, please. The sticky part came loose again…”
He reattached the frayed Velcro on the tiny shoe and pulled up the sock. “You need new sneakers, don’t you, Robbie?”
“Mm-hmm.” Robbie nodded, looking shyly at the two people talking to his father. His eyes were the same deep green as my own. I could tell from Dad’s expression, as he glanced at me and then back at the boy, that he had also noticed the similarity.
My father ran his hand through his son’s light brown curls and I drew in a sharp breath. The gesture was so familiar, but the hand was always on my head, the smile was always for me. “Go play with your brother, okay?” he said. “Your mom will be home soon and we’ll have pizza.”
“Yum!” Robbie cried as he ran off. “Pizza!”
When Dad turned back toward me, I pushed Mom’s picture forward. “This is the only photo I have of my mother.” I pulled my hand away, hoping fervently that my grandmother had at least a few pictures of Mom. The photograph vanished, just as Dad’s picture had earlier, in the café. I felt Trey’s body tense up and wished I’d had the forethought to tell him to look away.
Dad was staring at the spot where the picture had been, a stunned expression on his face. I reached out and took his hand. “I’m sorry. I know this is hard, but I need to make you understand.”
I spent the next several minutes telling him everything that had happened to me over the past few days. I told him about living with him in the cottage at Briar Hill, adding little details about his life and personality that I hoped hadn’t changed with a new marriage and a new family. I told him everything Katherine had said about his real parents and the accident, about my grandparents, and I explained Katherine’s theory on what was happening with the temporal shifts. Dad didn’t speak until I finished.
Finally, he met my eyes, his expression sad and distant. “I’m sorry… but I don’t know what you expect me to say or do. I can’t explain how you know the things you know. And I can’t deny what I just saw here. And seeing your eyes—it’s like looking in the mirror.”
“You believe me?” My voice was unsteady.
“I guess. I don’t really know, to tell you the truth.” His voice shifted, becoming a bit angry. “But either way, this timeline you’ve told me about… that’s not my world, Kate. You are a lovely young lady and I do not want to hurt you. In whatever reality you know, you could well be the center of my universe.” He stopped and nodded toward the kids, who were now chasing after something in the grass. “But those two little boys, and their mother, who will be home any minute now with pizza and groceries—they are my life. I can only assume that, in your world, John and Robbie do not exist and Emily—well, who knows if I ever meet Emily?”
My lower lip began to tremble and I bit down hard to steady it. Trey put a protective arm around me.
“I would like to be able to say that I wish you luck in… whatever this is that you are planning to do,” Dad said. “But that would be a lie. How can I look at my two kids over there and do anything other than hope you fail?”