Daring Time (12 page)

"Your pardon, sir," she called out, giving the startled man her best smile. "I am new to this station and also abominably late. I wonder if you could be bothered to show me to the train shed?"

"It would be my honor, my dear," the man said, gallantly putting out his elbow for her to take.

Hope peaked over the man's shoulder as she rattled off some ridiculous story about visiting a sick aunt in St. Louis, glad to see that although Marvin had set down his paper he had not noticed her behind the man's bulk.

Her luck held strong. After she'd given her heartfelt thanks to the portly gentleman, she saw through the smoky train shed that the Milwaukee Road pulled into Chicago early.

With any luck, by the time its arrival was announced in the waiting room, Hope would have plucked a potential victim right out from beneath Marvin Ever-crumb's nose.

Minutes later Hope studied the faces of the stream of new arrivals with an expert eye. When she saw a slender, full-breasted young woman with the dark curls and expression of mixed excitement and panic on her pretty face, Hope stepped forward as decisively as if she were greeting a distant cousin on her first trip to the city.

"Good afternoon. I hope you had a smooth journey."

The woman glanced down over Hope warily but whatever she saw seemed to chase away her caution.

"That's the prettiest coat I've ever laid eyes on! My sister Eloise told me women in Chicago knew how to dress real smart."

"Thank you. I like your hat very much."

"It's nothing compared to yours."

"My name is Hope Stillwater. I belong to the Welcoming League, a group of Christian women whose mission it is to greet new visitors and familiarize them with our beautiful city," Hope lied effortlessly. In truth, she was a one-woman army. Her attempts at getting other female social reformers to join in her efforts had thus far been unsuccessful, as the train depot was considered to be nearly as unsavory of a locale as a tavern. She was still confident in her efforts to form a future Welcoming League, however.

Hope held out her hand. "The city can be a bit overwhelming on your first visit."

"I'm Sadie Holcrum, miss, and you're right about that," Sadie said as she shook Hope's hand and looked around slack-jawed at the bustling activity of the train shed. "I used to think Kenosha was a big city but it's nothing to what I saw as we pulled into Chicago."

Out of the corner of her eye Hope saw Marvin standing on the platform of the train shed.

She gave Sadie her most winning smile.

"May I help you with your luggage, Miss Holcrum?" She grabbed a suitcase from a dubious-looking Sadie, cradled her elbow and maneuvered her to the doors furthest away from a glowering Marvin. "My goodness, you pack light," Hope exclaimed when she lifted the suitcase with ease.

Sadie's cheeks flushed. Her gaze flickered over to Hope a tad nervously. "I'm afraid I haven't got much to pack, miss. None of my family does. I come to Chicago to get a job as a typist, see. I've been practicing on my mother's Remington. I hope to be able to send

'em back a portion of my wages."

Hope nodded in understanding, having heard a similar story countless times before. Once families in monetary need had sent off their sons to bread-win in the cities, but now out of necessity they sent their daughters as well. Hope saw nothing wrong with the practice in theory, but unfortunately the city had not yet compensated for the hoards of single, friendless women or provided them with appropriate avenues for security and guidance.

And white slavers like Diamond Jack Fletcher took blatant advantage of the situation.

"Have you a place to stay while you look for a job, Miss Holcrum?" Hope asked once they'd entered the waiting area. Sadie didn't respond immediately as she was busy gaping at the three-story-high bay window that overlooked Lake Michigan.

"Oh . . . well, as to that, my sister Eloise says there's a boarding-house on near every corner in Chicago," Sadie replied stoutly.

"There are a good number, such a plethora in fact that it's far too easy to make an error and choose one of the more . .. dodgy variety," Hope explained with a significant look.

"It is part of the Welcoming League's mission to take young women to respectable boardinghouses and provide directions and contacts for employers in the Loop who are looking for workers."

Sadie's blue eyes widened in amazement. "Well, ain't it lucky I ran into you, then?"

"Indeed," Hope replied as she gently nudged Sadie toward the exit where Evan would be waiting with the carriage.

"There's just one thing, miss." Hope blinked in surprise when the young woman's cheeky grin revealed a gleaming gold tooth. "I'll be needing to use the facilities after that long trip, if you don't mind."

"Of course, I should have asked. Right this way, Miss Holcrum," Hope said as she nodded in the direction of the ladies' lounge.

She got a measure of satisfaction when she saw Marvin slink back into the main waiting room notably with no young woman on his arm. A shiver of apprehension went through her when he gave first Sadie and then Hope a narrow, assessing look before Hope lost sight of him in the crowd.

NINE

Ryan's heart still hammered like a locomotive going full steam inside his chest as he stared at his laptop computer. He tried to take a slow, steadying breath and forced his attention on the black-and-white photo of men in the stands at Marshall Field watching a University of Chicago football game in the year 1905. None of his jackets would pass as suitable, but his long, black overcoat would work along with a white shirt and black tie.

Apparently it was time for him to fully enter Hope's world. He knew that because he just had.

The jarring experience had taught him that he needed to be a bit more cautious and prepared on his next attempt, although he didn't know how he could have prepared himself for
that.

Five minutes ago he'd noticed that the fog on the mirror had completely cleared.

Although he couldn't see Hope or the interior of her bedroom, he found that the surface of the mirror had enough give for him to penetrate it completely.

Like a fool he'd stepped through and ended up in the middle of a clamoring city street with a team of horses bounding straight toward him. The animals' shrieks of terror and the image of them rearing in panic—the lethal, kicking hooves and the whites of their rolling eyes—would likely be emblazoned on Ryan's memory until the day he died. He'd experienced some pretty significant shocks in his life, but that had to be one of the biggest ever.

He didn't have the opportunity to be dismayed over the fact that the window of the mirror had disappeared by the time he turned in panic. He'd dived through the space where it
had
been and smacked into the wooden floor of the Prairie Avenue bedroom so hard that'd it'd knocked the breath clean out of him for ten seconds.

Obviously this mirror didn't work precisely in the way he'd imagined, he acknowledged when he was finally able to draw air again.

He grinned distractedly when he pulled the ivory felt, short-brimmed hat from a still unpacked box of memorabilia from his college days. It was a replica of the hat Coach Amos Alonzo Stagg used to wear. The University of Chicago Hall of Famer had long been one of Ryan's sports idols. He'd bought the hat for fifty cents at a Hyde Park garage sale while he was still in college because of its similarity to the one Coach Stagg wore in the very picture Ryan had pulled up on his computer.

He put the hat on his head and studied himself in the gilt mirror. There was no way around it. He was going to have to shave his goatee.

Fifteen minutes later, clean shaven and wearing his best facsimile of early-1900s apparel, Ryan reached into the mahogany wardrobe and extricated his SIG Sauer semiautomatic from the holster. He slid the weapon into the chest pocket of his overcoat. After showing up in the middle of the street with those horses charging straight at him, Ryan didn't know what to expect. The last thing he needed was to find himself in a situation in 1906

where he was required to remove his coat, thus revealing his holster and gun. He checked that the clip on his Spyderco Captain knife was secure before he tucked it out of sight in his boot.

He stood before the mirror and concentrated on the poignant memory of Hope last night, the mixture of anxiety and trust on her face when she'd pushed her robe off her shoulders and gifted him with the sight of her naked beauty.

Gifted him with all her. Period.

Ryan didn't understand what had happened there at the end of their lovemaking, couldn't comprehend why she'd tried to escape his hold. He only knew it was the image of her giving herself so trustingly to him that he needed to cling to if he ever hoped to reach her.

If he ever hoped to save her.

He took a deep breath and stepped into the gilt mirror.

And found himself staring at a long bar in a dark, dingy room. Each empty wooden bar stool had a none-too-clean-looking brass spittoon directly beside it. A man with flaming red hair behind the bar's polished glasses. He glanced up and met Ryan's reflection in the dirty mirror behind the bar.

"Mother p'—" The bartender spun around. "How'd ya get there all of a sudden?"

Ryan took in the man's thick mustache and hair that had been slicked back with so much oil that it dripped onto his dirty white collar. His accent seemed strange and yet familiar at once; some exotic mixture of Irish and south-side Chicago.

Ryan's tongue had seemingly become glued to the roof of his mouth. Reality slammed into his brain with the effect of a baseball bat whacking his skull.

Holy shit. He really was in the early twentieth century. If Alistair could only see
this.

At first the man seemed angry at Ryan's muteness.

"The Sweet Lash ain't open yet fer business, mister, so scram." An idea seemed to occur to the bartender whose forearms reminded Ryan of Popeye. "Hang on! I know who ya are. Shoulda known, from the size of ya. At least Shapiro sent someone decent this time.

Well, sit yerself down there, fella. How 'bout a nice glass of cold beer? Something to take the sting outa Big Mario's fist?"

Ryan didn't care for the bartender's knowing look. He scowled at him while he struggled for how he should reply. Would something about his speech give him away? Did he really need to say anything at all? He needed to get out of this place. He needed to find Hope.

The Sweet Lash? Ryan thought in rising amazement. Wasn't that the name of the south-side restaurant and nightclub that his nemesis Jim Donahue owned in the twenty-first century? And hadn't he read in the
Tribune
at the time of the nightclub's opening a few years back that the establishment had once been the home of a late-nineteenth-century brothel?

Despite his eagerness to find Hope, Ryan couldn't help but look around him in wonder.

He quickly saw, however, that the Sweet Lash hardly warranted awe. Neither did the rancid, mildew odor that filled his nose. The room was large—perhaps a hundred by seventy feet—and contained a multitude of round tables and chairs. Four gas chandeliers with red lampshades cast as many shadows in the dim room as it did lurid light. Ryan realized that one of the dark corners contained a piano because someone started plunking out a raucous tune on the keys.

There were several raised platforms. The ones at the side of the room were cordoned off with frayed and dirty, gold velvet ropes. The floor consisted of some sort of black substance of unknown origin but had a slight give to it beneath Ryan's shoes. He suspected it might be solid earth and grime pressed down into solidity by thousands of hard leather soles.

Either that, or the wooden floor had long ago been covered by years of dirt, spittle, sweat and God only knew what other types of human and animal excretions.

The bartender obviously took note of Ryan's preoccupation.

"Yeah, maybe ya got a right to look down yer nose at me, fella. Beer won't do the trick, will it? No, sir, whiskey's yer only hope if yer climbing in the ring with Big Mario, friend. Ah, here we go. Doors have opened. Yer audience arrives."

Ryan glanced over to see dozens upon dozens of boisterous, black-suited men swarm into the room, their faces alight with excitement. A few of them had women draped on their arms. It struck Ryan as comical to see the manner in which the males ogled the prostitutes and then joked with their companions, almost as though they followed a socially prescribed script for brothel behavior. Despite their relatively low-cut gowns, their heavily painted faces and the brassy color of their hair, the women didn't look all that racy to Ryan's twenty-first-century eyes.

"I'd hoped you were going to take part in the Slip and Whip. That's why I came tonight, you know, Molly," one mustachioed man told the woman on his arm suggestively as they passed Ryan.

"I never do the Slip and Whip on the night of a Big Mario match. I know that fight and the gambling is the real reason you boys showed up here tonight," Molly sulked.

"Molly, m'dear, you malign me. I'd forsake all to see you again with the reins in your hand and your"—Molly shrieked dramatically and giggled when her suitor swatted her bottom—"gleaming promises at me from the stage."

"And there's the man who'll pay ya," the bartender spoke in an undertone to Ryan as the couple passed out of hearing. "Here's yerman, Jack!" the bartender called out more loudly to a large man

Standing at the end of the bar whose girth strained at the fabric of a pristine white suit.

"Big Mario's latest meal."

Jack paused and wiped what very much looked like blood off his hands onto a white cloth resting at the end of the bar. When he was finished he flashed a shark like grin. Ryan should have been bedazzled by the hundreds of diamonds flashing on rings that encircled every single one of the man's sausage-like fingers.

Instead he was preoccupied by another unexpected reality.

"Jim Donahue"
he muttered incredulously.

"What's that ya said?" the bartender asked quietly, obviously to shield Ryan's ignorance from the immense presence of the man at the other end of the bar. "That's the owner of the Sweet Lash, the owner of the whole Levee District, if the truth be told. Don't ya know, fool? That man's none other than Diamond Jack Fletcher."