“Well, I din look real close, miss—I was sweepin’,” he said, his forehead creasing as he tried to remember. “But he looked young t’me, ’bout your age mebbe. Di’n’ look like he worked outside much, kinda pasty-lookin’. And di’n’ look like he missed too many meals either, if y’know what I mean,” he added with a low chuckle. “Mick’ll be able to keep up with ’im, no doubt there. He’s a smart li’l cricket.”
“Thank you,” I said, giving him a shaky smile over my shoulder as I ran toward the Midway entrance.
The description was too much like Simon to be a coincidence. Was Kiernan working with him? His older self and Simon had been on the Metro together. And they’d apparently been friends or at least compatriots at some point, based on what Simon had said when he attacked me in Katherine’s front yard.
I had a hard time believing Kiernan was in on this, however. It seemed more likely that the boy had realized Simon was the one I’d pointed toward when yelling, “He has a gun!” Maybe he was still acting as my assistant, and trying to keep tabs on Simon for me.
Either way, his absence worried me. But what really baffled me was why Simon would be going to the Midway. If he’d come back to make a second attempt on Katherine’s life, which was the only reason I could think of that he’d be back at all, why was he going in the opposite direction from the stable point on the Wooded Island?
And then I remembered—there were two Katherines wandering around the Expo today. That first trip was also in the diary that Simon grabbed when he took my backpack. Having been thwarted in his attempt to kill Katherine at the station, he had just moved on to the next logical target.
Connor’s voice in my head was telling me to go back to the stable point, head home, and have another go at this after we’d had a bit of time to plan. But the idea of trying to tail Simon and, at the same time, avoid running into myself or anyone I’d seen that day, seemed fraught with even more problems than trying to find him here and now on the Midway. And he couldn’t be too far away—I was only a minute or so behind him.
I just prayed that Kiernan wasn’t with him. I really didn’t think the boy would be helping Simon—it seemed too out of character—but I had to admit that I hadn’t known Kiernan long enough to be completely certain. And if he was simply following Simon, I just hoped he would be careful, because I was pretty sure that Simon wouldn’t hesitate to hurt him. Or use him as bait.
The Midway was much more crowded and noisy than it had been earlier in the day. I had to veer off the sidewalk into the main street in order to avoid a large group lining up to enter the one o’clock showing at Hagenbeck’s Trained Animals exhibit. Colorful banners over the entryway displayed a collection of elephants, lions, and tigers patiently standing on a pyramid of platforms, watched over by a ringmaster cracking his whip. The temperature had increased since the morning and the air around the building now had the stale, fetid odor that I remembered from the one sad little circus I’d attended as a child. That didn’t seem to affect the enthusiasm of the people in the line, but in this era, I supposed that most of them had seen these exotic animals only in paintings and black-and-white photographs.
My eyes scanned both sides of the wide street for any sign of either Simon or Kiernan as I tried to recall everything Katherine had said or that I had read about the earlier jump. We had focused most of our research on the second trip. I’d just skimmed through the first one, mining it for background information about the fair itself. Katherine had said that the jump hadn’t been connected to her own research—she was there to gather general impressions about the last days of the fair and the people’s reaction to the assassination of Mayor Harrison, along with some background work for other CHRONOS agents.
I vaguely remembered her saying something about a camera, an African exhibit, and a beer garden. By African exhibit, she must have meant Dahomey Village, at the far end of the Midway. The beer garden was just ahead in the German Village, but I had no clue which day she’d gone where.
Rather than waste time trying to dredge the pieces up from memory, I paused in the shade of one of the viaducts that intersected the Midway and pulled the copy of the 1893 diary from my bag. After a few minutes of searching, I found the entry for October 28th and quickly scanned it. Katherine had spent most of the morning talking to young women at the International House of Beauty, a sort of global fashion show that was very popular—there was a long line outside both times I walked past, oddly enough with nearly as many men as women, although I suspected most of the guys were there to see pretty girls from around the world rather than to observe the latest trends in global fashion. Around noon, Katherine had walked back to the main Exposition, where she talked to some of the many workers who would be looking for new jobs in a few days when the fair closed its gates for the last time.
The next journal entry was the one I was looking for. It placed her at the German Village around 3 P.M. She didn’t stay long, however, since she was there specifically to speak with the friend of a barmaid who had disappeared a few weeks earlier. The girl wasn’t on duty until six, so Katherine decided to return that evening.
I leaned back against the brick wall of the viaduct and considered my options. Simon was also working with only the info from the diary, so he had no more clue than I did where Katherine would be between noon and three. His best chance of finding her, just like mine, was to stake out the various entrances to the German Village.
I could see one of the entrances from where I stood, but I wasn’t sure if it led into the beer garden. Shoving the diary back into my bag, I decided to head over to the German Village to do a bit of reconnaissance.
Three little girls in native costumes were working their way across the street from the Javanese exhibit, holding hands as they crossed the Midway. I had just stepped toward them, thinking I would ask if they had seen “Little Mick”—he seemed to know everyone else at the Expo—when I saw the expressions on their faces transform all at once. One small brown hand flew up suddenly, as though its owner was trying to warn me.
I realized with a jolt of surprise that they weren’t actually little girls at all but three tiny older women. The startled look on their faces was the last thing I remember clearly before I felt the sharp jab of a needle in my upper arm. The Midway began to melt into a kaleidoscope of random faces and body parts. I caught a brief glimpse of a man with a mustache and a black bowler, the colorful brocade fabrics of the Javanese costumes, and a small scuffed shoe as my knees buckled under me. Then, just shapes and colors. And finally, everything went pitch-black.
For several seconds after I awakened, I thought I was in the small, cozy spare room where I always slept when visiting my dad’s parents in Delaware. There was a slightly musty smell in the air, and as my eyes adjusted I began to pick out the intricate pattern of a crocheted doily on the nightstand next to the bed. I reached over to feel for the bedside lamp, but my hand bumped instead against a candleholder, knocking the stub of wax onto the floor. It rolled a few feet and then stopped, blocked by what I was pretty sure was a chamber pot.
This wasn’t Grandma Keller’s guest room.
I pulled back the thin blanket that someone had tucked in neatly around me. My green dress was missing. I was wearing only the white silk chemise and petticoats that Trey had so admired earlier. My right arm was unusually stiff and there was a small welt about six inches below my shoulder where the needle had punctured the skin. A red scratch marked the inside of my wrist, and the bracelet Katherine had given me was gone.
Everything was strange in the dim light, and I suspected that I was still feeling the effects of whatever drug I’d been given. Only the tiniest bit of sunlight seeped in through a dingy, grime-covered window about the size of my foot near the very top of the wall. A larger window, with closed curtains, was several feet beneath it to the right. I slid to the other side of the narrow bed and reached up to open the drapes, hoping to put a bit more light on my current situation.
But there was no window behind the curtains. The painted brick continued in an unbroken line to the opposite wall, where it was joined at an odd angle. There were no pictures, no decorations of any sort aside from the totally unnecessary curtains and the doily on the nightstand. Three holes had been drilled in the wall above the door, the first two no more than an inch in diameter and the third, the center hole, about twice that size.
I sat back on the bed and pulled my knees up to my chest. The movement triggered a memory of sitting in the same position, back in my room at Katherine’s, watching DVDs with Trey. I glanced back at the non-window and then at the small holes above the door and my heart began to pound. I tried to tell myself that I was jumping to conclusions based on incomplete evidence, but I knew.
I was in the World’s Fair Hotel, which meant that I had now broken two promises to Trey—although that was clearly the least of my worries.
How many women had Holmes killed in this room? How many had died on this very bed while he watched through the peephole?
My skin crawled at the thought and I stood up quickly. I was considering whether to try and open the door when it started to… well, slither toward the floor. I bit back a scream, and then a nervous laugh, as I realized the door was still on its hinges. The slithering was my dress, which had slipped off a coat hook.
I moved cautiously forward and picked it up, nearly tripping over the shoes that were underneath it. I was very glad to see the dress, but I had mixed feelings about those boots.
A movement caught the corner of my eye again, and for a split second I thought that I saw a flash of light in the opposite corner. I had the fleeting sensation of being watched, but when I turned it was still dark and no one was there. All that I could make out was the dim outline of a chair.
Sitting back down on the edge of the bed, I rubbed my eyes, hoping that the effects of the drug would clear soon. I spread the gown out beside me, feeling around for the hidden pocket in the bodice. I didn’t really expect the CHRONOS key to be there, and it wasn’t. That confirmed my suspicion that this hadn’t been a random decision by Holmes to grab a girl who seemed to be traveling alone. That wasn’t his modus operandi, and he was having plenty of luck luring young women here without resorting to abduction in broad daylight.
Somebody had convinced Holmes to take that extra bit of risk, and I was pretty sure that somebody was Simon. Why bother getting rid of me himself when there was a local serial killer who would be more than happy, probably for a ridiculously small fee, to keep me out of his way?
As that cheerful thought percolated in my head, the door opened suddenly. A soft yellow light spilled into the room from the gas lamps that lined the corridor. I tensed and was prepared to fight, but the figure in the doorway wasn’t Holmes. The young woman was tall with wavy, flaxen hair. Her pretty, heart-shaped face creased with concern when she saw me.
“Oh, no!” she said, quickly setting the tray down on the nightstand. “You mustn’t be standing yet. You’re still much too weak. Here, let me help you get back into bed…”