I thought maybe I was bats. It was like I’d spotted one of those ghosts that disintegrate when the sun rises. I glanced around camp, but no dice; just the Spanakopolouses rinsing out their socks for the big event. Mr. Ratliff’s train whistle wailed out there on the desert, so I had to give up.
I couldn’t work my way through the crowd to Luke. The mob surged and I got close to the front, but then it flowed backward and pulled me away. About all I could make out was the sight of Dad studying Mom’s tires nervously.
A little girl standing near me, a little blond town girl in a dress that cost more than any dress my mom had ever owned, kept eyeing me. Finally, she yanked loose from her mother, marched up to me, planted both feet on the dusty ground, and declared: “My mother says you should be thanking us. Instead of bothering poor Mr. Ratliff. My mom says we gave you jobs, and all you could do was complain, when you should say thank you. And now nobody’s making any money! My mom says people like you, what are you good for! My mom says she hopes you’re happy, you upset that nice old man in his house and he had to come from New York!”
Before I could give the little angel my opinion of all this, I saw the red-haired girl again, from the corner of my eye, shimmering like a mirage on the far edge of the crowd, shamrock-green eyes on me for a second and then flashing somewhere else. Those eyes were like being zapped by the tail of a South American eel.
“Nice talking to you,” I said to the sweetie pie, “but I gotta scamper.”
I thought about fighting my way to the front to tell Luke about the red-haired girl haunting our town, but what was I going to say? “There’s a girl here! And she’s got red hair! And green eyes! And nobody seems to notice her but me!” Instead, I decided it would be better to catch her first and then tell people about her, so I scuttled around the crowd and began searching again.
Mr. Ratliff’s train was still a good ten minutes away. Victory was only three blocks long and four blocks wide, so I had time. I gazed up A Street and B Street, and when there was only C Street left, I glanced down an alleyway and spied her slipping up the back stairs of the Victory Fuels Corporation headquarters. Since I only saw her climb as high as the second floor, I figured she’d either managed to slip inside or she was hunkered down on the landing, hoping I hadn’t spotted her. Up the steps I clambered.
I found her crouched on the corrugated iron, calmly staring at me over the top step. When I skidded to a stop to keep from tripping over her, she gave a smile as if, somehow, she already knew me.
“Caught you!” was all I could come up with.
“Because I let you,” she returned.
“What?” I asked.
“I had to talk to you. But only you. I had to let you catch me, and nobody else,” she said.
“That’s what the disappearing act was all about?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Hold on. Are you,” I began, finally putting two and two together about the green eyes, “Doc O’Malley’s—niece?” I asked.
“That’s a long story,” she sighed. She stood and glanced up and down the alley.
“What story is a long story?” I asked. “Who are you?”
“Margaret O’Malley,” she said.
“I knew it,” I said, offering my hand. “An O’Malley. I’m Josh. Josh Garrett.”
“Of course you are,” she replied, shaking my hand firmly. “And—and—I’m sorry. But there’s something I have to tell you.”
Margaret was the first O’Malley I’d ever met who didn’t have glasses as thick as the window of a submarine in a novel by Jules Verne. I was afraid her eyes might fry me to a crisp.
At that moment, a cheer went up from across town, which meant Mr. Ratliff’s arrival had happened, and I’d missed it, but I didn’t mind too much because his big meeting with Aristotle was the next day, and our moment in the sun was still coming, and in the meantime, this Margaret O’Malley was turning out to be very interesting.
Without wasting energy on further introductions, she launched into a story about traveling through time that was so strange, improbable, eerie, sad, infuriating, and confusing, and at the same time so incredibly similar to Aunt Bridey’s, that I had no choice but to believe every word. She left the details hazy enough so that when the future arrived, I wouldn’t be able to get myself into too much trouble, but the upshot was, history as she understood it showed that Elijah Biggs was destined to murder Theodore Ratliff the next day and frame Aristotle Agrippa for the crime.
“But there’s no way Elijah Biggs would do something like that,” I objected when she was done. “Sure. He’s awful. And he has it in for Aristotle Agrippa. But he wouldn’t kill his boss. I mean, if Mr. Ratliff were dead, who would be president of Victory Fuels International?”
Margaret stared patiently at me.
“Oh,” I said. “Right. Elijah Biggs would.”
“It’s absolutely true. Mr. Ratliff will die tomorrow unless I do something,” she said.
“Unless we do something,” I corrected. “Come on. We have to find Luke.”
“No,” said Margaret, stopping dead. “He can’t know I’m here. Nobody can know I’m here. No police, no bodyguards, no friends or brothers or dads or moms, and especially no Luke Agrippa. I can’t let anybody know what I’m up to. I have to keep my effect on history as tiny as possible.”
“Then why’d you tell me?” I asked.
“Because I know you,” replied Margaret, “even if you don’t know me. And because I can’t do this alone.”
“Well, we have to tell Luke,” I insisted. “He’s smarter than I am. And taller. And can throw things farther.”
“What kind of things?” asked Margaret.
“For instance a football,” I said.
“How far?” she asked.
“At least forty-five yards,” I said. “Some people say fifty.”
“Well, that’s impressive,” said Margaret, “but we’re still leaving him out of it.”
“Then I’m taking you to see Aunt Bridey,” I finally said, ducking behind the fence along C Street, which was the only way to get to the foot of Mount Hosta without being seen. “I don’t care if you want to or not.”
“Aunt Bridey?” asked Margaret uncertainly, as if she recognized the name.
“If Elijah Biggs really has it in for Mr. Ratliff, and we’re going to have a snowball’s chance in July of stopping him, then we have to ask Aunt Bridey for help,” I told Margaret, turning toward the mountain, “because I don’t have a clue about what to do next, and if anybody does, she does, and that’s just how it is.”
“My dad used to tell stories about his aunt Bridey,” mused Margaret.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“She was a moonshiner.”
“Then his stories were true,” I replied.
Margaret
1938
AUNT BRIDEY HAD THE O’MALLEY eyes, all right, as I had plenty of opportunity to observe, since the second she opened her door to find us standing there, she jutted her head forward and slapped a stare on me so hard, I stumbled backward and just about fell.
“You hold still!” she snapped.
I obeyed. Then she whipped off her glasses, hunched to get eye level with me, and stared some more before she whipped her glasses back on (turns out it’s possible to do this) and eyed me head to toe, using those thick lenses like a Cub Scout uses a magnifying glass to focus sunshine on a bug and fry it.
“Giiirrll,” said Aunt Bridey, shaking her head and stretching out the word like chewing gum, “I’m in the middle of pickling okra! This had better be good.”
“It is,” said Joshua, quickly.
“I mean,” said Aunt Bridey, ignoring him completely and narrowing her eyes at me, “if you just did what I think you just did, then somebody better be about to die!”
“How about three people?” I blurted out. “Would three people be enough? Two in 1938 and one in 2014?”
“And here I was,” sighed Aunt Bridey, raising her eye
s imploringly to the sky, “thinking I was done hearing my relatives say things like that.” She gathered herself together. “Except I guess the only relative who said them was me. All right. Sit down. Tell me who.”
At Aunt Bridey’s kitchen table, I said, “Theodore Ratliff.”
“Now? In my time?” asked Aunt Bridey. “In 1938?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Tomorrow night.”
“Who else?”
I swallowed and glanced at Josh, who would be hearing this part for the first time.
“Nobody, if we save Ratliff,” I said. “But if we don’t . . . Aristotle Agrippa.”
Josh shot me a stunned look.
“What? Why?” he asked.
“And who,” pressed Aunt Bridey, ignoring Josh, “in 2014?”
So far, I hadn’t mentioned my dad to Josh either, figuring that the less he knew about a future he’d one day be walking around in, the better. But since he was in this with me, it seemed only fair to give him at least a bare-minimum, no-details idea of what was at stake. I took a breath.
“My father,” I said.
Joshua opened his mouth probably to ask questions, but then shut it, which I appreciated.
“I think he’ll be . . . your great-nephew, when he’s born, in 1968,” I told Aunt Bridey.
“You’d better give me the whole story,” she sighed, turning off the fire beneath her pot of okra with a shrug of resignation.
“You know I can’t give you the whole story,” I said.
“Tell me what you can,” instructed Aunt Bridey.
So I told her about Elijah Biggs’s dirty, double-crossing ways, about the murder of Theodore Ratliff and the faked suicide-murder of Aristotle at the infirmary, and how these awful things would lead to other awful things that I couldn’t tell her and Josh about, which would lead to my father’s life being in terrible danger in ways that I also couldn’t tell her and Josh about.
“But some of the things have to do with Luke,” I said, looking right at Josh.
“You mean Luke’s in danger?” said Josh, his eyes widening.
I nodded.
“If we save Ratliff, we save Aristotle; if we save Aristotle, we save Luke,” I said, simply.
“Save Luke’s life?” asked Josh.
I considered saying yes and leaving it at that, but when I saw the fear on Josh’s face, I just couldn’t. Luke was his best friend, I reminded myself, just the same way Charlie was mine.
“Save him from the life he’ll lead if we don’t save his dad, and believe me when I say he really, really needs to get saved from that.”
Aunt Bridey zapped me with a glare. “What if you don’t stop Ratliff’s murder? Because history doesn’t want to change, you know. History resists. If you don’t stop Ratliff’s murder tomorrow, what will you do?” she asked. “Give up and go home?”
I swallowed hard. “No. I—I’ll think of something.”
“Because I wonder if you realize how little time you have?”
“How little, um, exactly?”
“Three days was the longest I could ever stick it out.”
I felt like someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over my head. Three days. I’d hoped for at least a week.
“Family legend has it that one of our ancestors eked out five, but I have my doubts. You look strong enough, even if you’re on the skinny side, but no human being’s stronger than history when it’s resisting.”
“How will I know when it’s time to leave?”
“You’ll know. Your own body will tell you, and by gum, you’d better listen to it when it does!”
“Why?” asked Josh. “What will happen if she stays too long?”
“I only know what I’ve been told, but I believe it,” said Aunt Bridey. “She’ll die, right here in 1938 and in her own time, too, I guess, since she’ll never get back to it. Or worse will happen.”
“Worse than dying?” I asked.
“Well, I guess that depends on your perspective, but finding yourself wedged between dimensions with numbers higher than either of us could count to, stuck forever outside of time and space, sounds worse to me.”
I shivered. But three days? It might be just enough time, if everything went according to plan, but since I didn’t have a plan yet, much less a backup plan, the idea of three days was sending me right to the edge of panic.
“So I’ll go home and come back!” I cried out. “If I need more time.”
But Aunt Bridey was shaking her head.
“I tried that, but it takes a long time for your mind and body to get strong enough to defy history and travel again. A year, in my case, give or take.”
“But in a year, my father could be—”
I covered my face with my hands.
“I’m sorry, Margaret,” said Aunt Bridey, her voice suddenly heavy with sadness, “but it’s better that I tell you these things than that you find out the hard way.”
I uncovered my face and looked at Aunt Bridey, who was staring over my head, possibly out of the kitchen window, possibly into the distant, distant past.
“Learn the hard way,” I said, softly, “like you did?”
“I made so many blunders,” lamented Aunt Bridey. “The biggest one was attempting anything at all. But you’ve already made that one, and there’s no going back. The second one was falling in love.”
“With Lieutenant Walker?” asked Josh. “The Confederate soldier from your photo?”
“With him and with his cause.”
“You mean the rebel cause? Slavery? Breaking up the union?” I asked.
Aunt Bridey snorted. “Of course not. He was a deserter. Tried to leave that ugliness behind and start what he called a utopian society right here in Victory. No slaves, everyone working together. Came darn close, too, but his past caught up with him. I wanted so much to save him, maybe even could have, but . . .”
“But what?”
Aunt Bridey snapped to, dropped her sad, misty look like a hot potato, and said, matter-of-factly, “Your eyes are going to go bad. By the time you’re eighteen, you won’t see the portals opening, not even with glasses, not with anything. By the time you’re eighteen, you’re done.”
She stood up, slapped her hands on her apron, and went back to her okra.
“You couldn’t go back when you most needed to, could you?” I said. “You needed to travel one last time, but your time ran out, your eyes got weak, you didn’t know it would happen, and Lieutenant Walker—”
She stirred that okra as if her life depended on it.
“I let him down,” she said, flatly.
It turned out that even after she couldn’t time travel anymore, Aunt Bridey didn’t lose her adventurous spirit. Once she’d recovered, as much as she’d ever recover, from the Lieutenant Walker heartbreak, she’d done a lot of things in her life before she moved back to the house on Mount Hosta to grow her garden and tend her bees. One of them was ride the Desert Zephyr to Los Angeles to work in the movies. Because of her glasses, Aunt Bridey didn’t end up onscreen. She became a makeup artist, and she turned out to be a big help in hatching our plot to infiltrate Mr. Ratliff’s hunting lodge to save his life.
It wasn’t too much trouble for Aunt Bridey to give Josh sideburns, wrinkles, a bald spot, and a nose the size of W. C. Fields’s. Then she proceeded to dye my hair the color of dirt, coil it like a big cinnamon bun at the back of my head, plaster me with makeup, and—glory of glories—strap a giant fake butt made of goose down under my maid’s outfit.
As it turned out, Aunt Bridey, always full of surprises, had been earning a good-sized pile of money every year by supplying fancy-pants gourmet fruit, vegetables, spices, jam, and honey to Mr. Ratliff’s mountain hunting lodge. His cook, Mrs. Orilla, had just placed an order of goodies for Mr. Ratliff to gorge on during his visit to Victory.
“Mrs. Orilla will get a couple of unexpected vegetables in her order,” said Aunt Bridey, with a wink at me and Josh.
Eyeing my mind-boggling rump, Josh mu
ttered, “More like an extra load of watermelons.”
Of course, I had no choice but to kick him. Kicking isn’t easy when you’re shaped the way I now was, but I managed.
The hunting lodge was just a few miles up the side of Mount Hosta, but the donkey path was so steep and rocky that even without my new encumbrance, it would’ve been hard going. Nevertheless, Aunt Bridey loaded her donkey with provisions and marched us straight up that mountain, mentioning, on the way, the layout of Mr. Ratliff’s lodge, including the system of dumbwaiters linking the rooms to his basement kitchen. When we arrived, she forced Mrs. Orilla to hire us as extra staff during Mr. Ratliff’s stay. I didn’t understand all the conversation, which was mostly in Spanish, but it seemed to involve the cook saying no, and Aunt Bridey telling her good luck fixing Mr. Ratliff’s dinner when all the provisions she’d ordered mysteriously fell off the burro and tumbled down the mountain, not to mention the three bottles of Honey Brook Nectar Mr. Ratliff adored so much.
“Mañana, three p.m.,” snapped Mrs. Orilla at me and Josh. “Mr. Ratliff arrives at five.”
We labored back down the mountain to Aunt Bridey’s house, and Josh put the donkey away in his little barn. Then Aunt Bridey turned, stuck a hand on her hip, and pointed at us.
“It’s up to you, now,” she said.
Josh
1938
“MR. RATLIFF’S ALMOST HERE!” came the whisper down the line.
“He hasn’t even started up the mountain!” came the next.
“He’s in the yard!”
“He walks with a cane now. It’ll be hours.”
“He went to visit the people in Canvasburg.”
“His bodyguard, Earl, keeps stopping to smoke.”
“He’s on the porch.”
“He’s spending the night on his train.”
“The meeting is postponed.”
“The meeting is canceled.”