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  Patricia lay on her right side, the only position she could comfortably manage these days; her belly was so bulky in contrast to her small frame it had become a struggle for her to walk during the last two months. Without opening her eyes, she murmured, “Good morning, Ruthie.”

  Months ago we’d named the unborn baby Cole Montgomery Spicer, after his father, but referred to him almost exclusively as Junior. Or Monty, if I was trying to coax a smile from Patricia. He was past due, as best we figured with our less-than-scientific way of keeping track of passing time. Patricia felt from the first she was carrying a boy, undoubtedly conceived the evening of the last day she’d seen Cole, when they made love in the empty bunkhouse after his marriage proposal. I knew the intent of the nuns here at the Immaculate Heart of Mary was to separate Patricia and her child the moment the boy emerged from her womb. Of course I would die before letting that happen. Just how I would prevent this from happening plagued me on a nightly basis, ever-increasing now that his birth was imminent.

  “He could use a little sunshine and so could you, Mama,” I said. Patricia wagged her head side to side but I insisted, “Come on. Sister Bitch-face will be here any minute. I’ll help you walk.”

  And I earned the smile, however small, I’d been hoping for, using our nickname for the grim-faced, stubbornly silent woman who walked us without fail to our morning and evening prayers, and had since day one in this hellhole of a convent where we existed in only slightly better conditions than convicts.

  Patricia wore a loose, bulky black dress, the only color the nuns allowed us to wear. All of the clothes we’d arrived with had been disposed of; to be fair, and I tried my best to be fair so I would not go entirely insane, the majority of the nuns treated us with a sort of bland apathy. Pity and slight revulsion at our sinful ways, sure, but no one was outright hostile; we’d not been physically abused. When we first arrived at the convent, just after Thanksgiving, when Patricia had no longer been able to hide her pregnancy from Dredd, the nuns were stricter, more uncompromising. They’d forced Patricia to kneel and pray almost without end, which she had endured even with her incapacitating morning sickness.

  Posing as her lady’s maid, I’d knelt dutifully at her side, spreading my shawl beneath her knees to provide a layer between her and the stone floor of the small chapel, doing our best to help each other’s mental state from complete unraveling; when we did pray, it was always for Axton. Eventually the nuns grew accustomed to our presence, or at least learned to tolerate us, and the rigor of endless prayer decreased to twice daily, morning and evening. In what was surely a case of Stockholm Syndrome, in addition to the balm of advancing springtime, I’d even grown fond of the adjacent chapel where we were escorted to repent, a narrow, vine-covered stone building located away from the main structure of the convent, its own separate, peaceful place.

  By this point in our friendship Patricia knew everything about me, and vice versa. Without television, radio, or cell phones, magazines, books, or board games, not so much as an ink pen, we’d spent the weeks and then months – hidden away far more effectively than we would have been in a maximum-security prison – talking, singing, and dancing. I’d taught her every song and dance move I could remember, and until growing too large and cumbersome, she danced every single one with me, including the Macarena, the Grapevine, and the Electric Slide. I told her about airplanes, cars, television, the Internet, and refrigeration. She entertained me with stories of her childhood, in turn teaching me how to waltz and dance the Mazurka.

  She knew all about Landon, Flickertail Lake, and Shore Leave, Jalesville and The Spoke, and could have named each and every person in my family tree, including grandparents, nieces, nephews, and the entire Rawley and Spicer families. She knew my theory about souls remaining in family groups, and how I thought she and Tish shared a soul, as well as Marshall and Miles; the verdict was still out on whether Case was Axton or Cole. We talked to stave off the horror of what lay ahead, for both of us. We spoke nightly of our plan to escape this place, a small Catholic convent we assumed was somewhere in Illinois; it had taken us, along with our armed escorts, roughly half a night to reach it after leaving the Yancy estate in Chicago.

  There seemed limited hope of making contact with the outside world; there was no paper trail, no hint of where we’d been taken, and even if Cole or Axton – we chose to believe he was still alive – dared to breach the security of the Yancys’ home, they would find zero trace of us. The past winter proved long and harsh, punctuated by endless blizzards. Oddly, Patricia and I remained together due to the efforts of none other than Dredd Yancy. He’d arranged for Patricia, whom he believed to be the victim of rape, to spend the duration of her pregnancy at the convent where his mother’s younger sister had once been sent to serve as a nun; later, while a resident, the poor girl grew ill and died. Once delivered, Patricia’s illegitimate child would “disappear” into an orphanage and Patricia, miraculously recovered from an unspecified ailment, would return to Chicago to reclaim her status as Mrs. Dredd Yancy.

  Fallon’s words, spoken back in Howardsville, made more sense the longer I was acquainted with the younger Yancy brother. Dredd – slim and dark-haired, with a delicate, almost pretty, facial structure – wasn’t exactly useless, but he held no actual job and rarely ventured from the luxury of the family estate on Lake Michigan. The sprawling mansion was located just outside Chicago, which even in 1881 seemed to me like a huge and teeming city. Thomas Yancy maintained a second home in Boston, where he resided during the winter months, only returning to the lakefront estate to escape the broiling summer heat. As far as everyone knew, Fallon traveled extensively, both in the States and abroad, orchestrating the family’s business interests while Dredd was a compliant rule-follower.

  We had further learned that even when Fallon was absent he was everywhere, at least as far as Dredd was concerned; Fallon’s orders were not to be questioned, let alone disobeyed.

  Patricia and I were separated within an hour that night on the train, when we’d been forced to flee Howardsville along with Fallon; he recognized his blunder in allowing us the chance to speak privately. The train had slowed in the empty darkness, alerting us to danger as it ground to a halt. Peering out the single window in the sitting compartment we beheld nothing but featureless black night pressing against the windowpane. Patricia’s breathing grew shallow; I tried to comfort her even though my heart felt about thirty seconds from a full-blown attack. We heard boots clanging on the steel steps. Clutching each other’s hands we could do nothing but wait as bolts were unlocked from the outside and the heavy door swung open.

  I was pulled from the train by a man who led me along the tracks to the passenger car directly behind the engine. I was dirty, reeking, and blood-smeared; my wrists were raw beneath the rope binding and hindered my ascent into what could only be Fallon’s personal chamber. He sat smoking a cigar, the scent of which brought Miles to mind and offered fleeting comfort. The red tip of the ember glowed as Fallon inhaled; his order emerged along with a lungful of smoke. “Leave her and go.”

  I stood as far from him as the length of the room permitted. Behind me the door thumped shut, leaving us in smoky dimness. Fallon sat in a wingback chair with one ankle atop the opposite knee, shirt collar undone and sleeves rolled back. A bandage had been tied around his upper arm on the left side; I saw traces of blood. I hoped the wound beneath it hurt. I hoped he felt it with every breath. Try as I might to keep a neutral expression, hatred welled in my eyes. My knuckles became ridges of peaks as I fisted both hands. I’d never been so close to someone I despised so desperately. He’d killed countless people, including perhaps Axton.

  “Tell me how you got here,” he said.

  “Tell me the way back,” I whispered.

  “How long have you been in the nineteenth century?” he continued, as though I hadn’t asked a question of my own. “How much did you tell that little whore of my brother’s?”

  “I won’t tell you anything unle
ss you promise to keep Patricia safe.” I squared my shoulders. I had everything to lose but it was no time for weakness.

  Fallon moved so swiftly the muted cry barely cleared my lips. He fisted a hand around my hair, bending my head to an unnatural angle, and poised his cigar an inch from my right pupil. Ashes dusted my cheek. His eyes were so frightening, reflecting the red ember-point in twin bursts of burning color, I could almost believe he was less a human than the embodiment of a true monster, the one right behind you, the one hiding in your closet, keeping silent watch until it’s too late.

  “You will tell me whatever I want to know or I will blind you. You think you’re at liberty to fuck with me, is that it?” He spoke softly but I knew he meant every word.

  No. My lips moved but only a whimper emerged.

  He released my hair and retreated one pace. My knees were so limp I folded straight to the carpet, listing sideways because my hands remained bound together. Fallon crouched beside my prone body and drew again on his cigar. He smiled as I struggled to one elbow, bending my knees toward my chest.

  “Miles Rawley was a shitless coward. I knew him from boyhood, did you know?” His voice now conveyed a conversational tone. He flicked ash on my waist and resettled his forearms on his narrow thighs. “Dredd and I lived with the Rawleys after our mother’s death in 1864. I buried her alongside the hired hand she was fucking at the time. My father was away fighting the Rebels that summer. I figured he would have done the same, had he been home.”

  I blinked, fighting off waves of intense panic, seeking anything in the vicinity I could use as a weapon – not that there was much. I spied a long iron poker, the sort Branch had used to poke at his cookfire, propped near a small brazier, but its current distance from me might as well have been a thousand miles. I would have been forced to belly-crawl at least a dozen feet to grasp it; Fallon would be on top of me long before I could get my hands around its iron length. He went on talking; despite everything, I had the odd sense he wanted to impress me.

  “The first time I leaped it was utterly inadvertent, only a week into the future. It took me some time to realize when I was, of course. The why of it I did not attempt to understand, at least not back then. Over time I came to realize it was a gift, the universe’s way of acknowledging my superiority. It was 1869 and I was a month shy of sixteen. Father and Dredd and me, poor as shit, panning for ore in the miserable foothills behind us. And then one night I leaped over a week and discovered a thick silver vein had been unearthed in the foothills a few minutes’ ride from our shanty. I was allowed roughly four hours during that first leap, just enough time to ensure the location of the silver vein. When I returned to the past, the present as Father and Dredd knew it, I said I’d had a dream.

  “Father demanded to know where I’d vanished to earlier in the afternoon, told me I’d scared him half to death. But wasn’t he surprised when my ‘dream’ proved fruitful. Eventually, once we began to accumulate wealth, I learned to better manage the explanations for my disappearances. To this day, Father and Dredd aren’t entirely aware of all the details. But I’ve made us unimaginably rich and so they don’t question. They allow me a wide berth.”

  Momentarily abandoning thoughts of reaching the iron poker, I stared at his angular face as if transfixed – and in a way, I truly was. He was detailing for me the story of his abilities, studying the air a few feet above my head, witnessing things I could not begin to imagine. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realized this outpouring of information, a confessional of sorts, would only be made before someone who would never live to tell another soul.

  Keep him talking, I thought.

  It took willpower to dredge up my voice. “Do you always…go forward?”

  His head twitched as his eyes sought mine, reminding me of a snake. “My full potential is restrained because my leaps are arbitrary. I’ve tried for over a decade to manage them, all without success. Often I’m allowed only a few hours before being returned here, to what I perceive as my original timeline. Thus far I have only been allowed to leap into the future from a fixed point. Never the past.” He paused for a terrifying beat, holding my gaze. “Which brings me to you. The only thing keeping you alive is this fact. I want to know how you travel backward rather than forward.”

  My next words must be chosen with extreme care; I debated lying but recognized the futility.

  “I came here accidentally,” I whispered through a dry, rasping throat. “I don’t have…any control over it.”

  “You’ve never been displaced prior?”

  I shook my head.

  “How did you know I was Franklin?”

  “There was a text…saying Franklin didn’t exist.”

  “Explain.”

  “Someone texted my sister’s friend, Robbie Benson, with those words.”

  Franklin leaned back to direct a huff of laughter at the ceiling. “How poetic. I saw your sister and her dirt-grubber husband at Benson’s funeral on my last leap.”

  “Robbie’s dead?” I gaped at him, unable to restrain my shock. Oh dear God, what else had I missed? What had happened in my absence?

  Fallon shrugged. “He saw me leap. I appeared in Christina’s bed-chamber and he was there, rooting through her things. I knew he was fucking that high-priced whore, along with a truckload of others including myself, but it wasn’t about that. He saw me.” He shrugged, reflectively. “It was almost the last thing he saw.”

  I squeezed my thighs with both hands, seeking my center. I could not allow him to drag me down this dark, warped path. A dozen questions surged to existence in my head, swirling like laundry in a boiling kettle, sheets streaked with the bodily fluids of dozens of male customers…

  Bile surged in my esophagus; I choked it back. “It was you in the barn that night.”

  He cocked his head, again reptilian-like. “What do you mean?”

  “In Case’s barn that night. It was you. You disappeared because the dogs were about to attack.”

  He didn’t respond and in a flash I realized it hadn’t yet happened to him. He hadn’t yet been there.

  “Your…leaps aren’t chronological?” I whispered. My jaws felt wooden but I was dying to pry answers from him. It’s probably how you will die, something in my head whispered.

  “They are not. Derrick wouldn’t admit to it, but he set fire to that barn in hopes of scaring your sister away from Jalesville for good. Ron Turnbull wanted her dead, too smart for her own good he said, and I can’t say I wouldn’t have enjoyed hearing about a Spicer roasted like a hog in the hearth, but Derrick wouldn’t burn their home. I haven’t the same control over him as I do Dredd, you see. I am only a tentative figure in that timeline, despite my existence as Franklin.”

  “Why Jalesville?”

  “It’s simple, really. It’s where I first leaped from, my own personal lightning rod. I’m drawn to the land there and exercise a modicum of control over my leaps from that starting point. That’s the main reason for buying up the otherwise useless town. Very few people in the twenty-first century know of my abilities. Ron Turnbull, Derrick, and Derrick’s father, T.K. They’ve maintained a façade for me, an identity as T.K.s elder son, Franklin.” He took a moment to puff his cigar. “It’s quite fascinating that those I know in this time have counterparts in later centuries. The Yancys are my blood, of course. They keep my secret because I increase their wealth.” He smiled, exhaling a thin stream of bluish smoke. “And because I know things they couldn’t imagine. Take Miles Rawley’s damnable mother, for instance. Or rather her future counterpart, Faye Rawley.”

  Ice water seemed to replace my internal organs.

  “What…”

  Fallon knew he’d struck a nerve, had flayed open every fucking nerve in my body. His smile widened. “In 2004 she suspected the power plant near her home of illegal waste dumping. T.K. Yancy owned the plant at that time and wasn’t complying with environmental regulations. It was a trifling thing, easily dealt with, but a local law-dog teamed up with
her and the investigation got out of hand. Stirred up national media attention. T.K. was on track to end up in federal prison. This little shit town, everyone so proud of taking down a wealthy outsider whose business holdings trickled into their turf. The goddamn public loved Faye Rawley. She was a fucking folk hero.”

  “What did…” I couldn’t bear to finish the question, pressing my folded hands as hard as I could against my heart.

  “She was a dead woman, as far as I was concerned. I killed her the very next time I leaped to a timeframe before the investigation had happened. Small cars are no match for trailer-trucks, especially on highways. Problem solved, for a time. No threat of federal prison for T.K on my next leap to 2004, and Faye Rawley was buried beneath a tree in her backyard.”

  Hot, vicious fury seared away any trace of logic. I lunged with no other thought than causing Fallon Yancy as much harm as I was able.

  “You fucker, you fucking son of a bitch…”

  He was in a crouch and ill-prepared to dodge. I crashed against his front side, taking him to the carpet, the cigar flying from his grasp. I scrabbled over his body, seizing what little advantage I could, gripping his hair with both hands. I would have bitten and torn free any part of him I could reach if he hadn’t jabbed a closed fist and connected with my solar plexus. Wheezing, gasping, I rolled to the side and he was on me at once, pinning me flat to the carpet. His face was red, teeth bared. My breath was too short to struggle; I smelled his sweat with each attempt at an inhalation, so scared of him my sense of reality zizzed in and out like a lightbulb in its dying flickers.

  Focus, Ruthann!

  The iron poker was now less than three feet from my right side.

  He stretched one leg across my thighs and put his mouth against my ear. “I should kill you right here. I want to kill you. But I also want to fuck you.”