Ripped (18 page)

Chapter Twenty

Do Not Tarry say the Bells of St. Garrily

“
B
ut, Toby
!”
Katie cried.
“The past has already happened. It's part of the stream of history. What I need to know is, can I stop Jack the Ripper? Can I save any of his victims?”

Toby had accelerated his stride, fairly pulling her along behind him down the Plexiglas staircase and through a crowd of tourists to the ticket window. He inquired as to the policy for reentry once they'd left the museum. A woman behind the counter wearing cat's-eye reading glasses nodded and told them to hold out the backs of their hands, which she marked with a rubber stamp. “And keep your ticket stubs, just in case. Museum closes at five sharp tonight.”

Toby hustled Katie toward the entrance doors. “You can change small things, but not big things. That's my best guess.” They were passing the lavatories.

“Wait! Omigod, a real bathroom!”

Toby chuckled. “I know, I know. I had the same reaction. Chamber pots and outhouses are the pits.”

And they stink
, Katie was about to say. She looked longingly at the “Women” sign over the restroom door. She thought about hot water.
Hot running water
. She shook her head. “It's okay. I'll wait till I get home.” The thought of a real bathroom brought a shudder of unexpected pleasure. She turned to Toby, who was grinning ear to ear.

“The first time I came back,” he said, his eyes sparkling, “I took the longest hot shower on record. I just stood forever under the spigots relishing the jets of water. Who would have thought?” He laughed. “Some of the things we take totally for granted are the greatest gifts on earth, like showers—and flush toilets!”

Now it was Katie who was tugging Toby along with her through the revolving doors, and a moment later, they were headed down Marylebone Road to the Baker Street tube station.

“We don't have much time.” He grew serious.

“What do you mean?”

“You're going to start to feel as if you're fading in and out,” he said, glancing at his watch, “in a little over an hour. Then you either go back to Victorian England, or you stay here. The museum closes at five. It's now three-thirty.”

“And if I choose . . . to stay?” Katie felt her mouth go dry.

“Then it's over. You can never go back in time to the same place again. You only have a two-hour window . . . give or take. I'm betting you'll go back. Actually, I know you will.”

“And you know this because . . . ?”

“Because that's what I did.”

When they were outside the museum, Katie glanced back over her shoulder. It was so different here. Space-age street lamps soared overhead like giant propellers, and the asphalt streets, gummed with grime, held no hint of nineteenth-century cobblestones.

As they loped off down the street, crossing walkways painted Day-Glo orange, Katie was struck by the deafening noise and sputtering rumble of modern trucks and cars sweeping past, the belching gas fumes, and most striking of all, the dull cinderblock buildings on every corner. Gone were the stone gargoyles on overhanging ledges, intricately carved woodwork, and cobbled walkways; gone, too, the profusion of scrolled ironwork gates and the flower sellers on every corner.

Katie sighed. There was a roundness to the nineteenth century that the twenty-first lacked. Arched doorways, oval windows, circular pillars were all missing here. And the balloon-like dome over Madame Tussauds with its “JUMP THE Q” sign in bold mustard yellow against a lipstick-red background, looked like an inflated, fake planetarium crayoned against the sky by a five-year-old.

Though this century is modern
, Katie thought,
with sophisticated technology, the architecture looks so . . . chunky . . . and heavy . . . as if someone threw cement blocks together and piled them high.

“Okay,” Toby said. “Tell me everything. Start at the beginning.” Katie nodded, and as they hurried to her grandmother's home, she told Toby all that had happened to her, ending with Toby—the other Toby—hiding a message in the stuffed vulture.

When they arrived at Twyford House Condominiums, Grandma Cleaves wasn't home. Because it was Wednesday, her grandmother would be at the Charity Mission in the East End doing volunteer work.

Moving quickly through the front vestibule, Katie pressed the code and turned the key in the lock of number 211 and motioned Toby to follow.

Inside her grandmother's place, they hurried past the coat closet (a “cloak closet” in the olden days) and descended several steps into the oak-paneled foyer. Katie stopped and blinked around. Down the hall, spanning out to the left, was an octagonal room called the “morning room” at Twyford Manor, but here it was used as a sort of den and dining room combination. The library, opening down the hall to Katie's right, was part of the original library. The other half would be part of Mrs. Drumlin's studio apartment.

Glancing through the mullioned windows at the rear of the foyer, Katie caught sight of the car park. There were no remnants of the old carriage house or portico.

Taking a deep breath, Katie led the way up the baronial staircase, past the stained glass window at the landing, and on up into the attic. Just a fraction of the original attic, it smelled strongly of mothballs and dust.

Weaving past boxes of Christmas ornaments, broken toys, trunks full of clothing used for dress-up, and shelves packed with cardboard boxes, Katie brushed past ancient furniture draped in old sheets, giving the cluttered attic a haunted appearance. With Toby following on her heels, Katie deftly picked her way through the clutter. But even with Toby close behind, Katie couldn't help the jumpy feeling in the pit of her stomach.

A dim hanging bulb cast a shadowy glow from the raftered ceiling. This portion of the attic smelled like heat, old paint, wood, glue, and dust. At the far end stretched stacks of chipped teacups and broken pottery. A pile of canvases lay stacked against a workbench. Lining a shelf in the corner under the eaves was a collection of old-fashioned hats, and next to the hats, on either end of the book shelf, perched the moth-eaten eagle and vulture. Bald in patches, the vulture peered down at them with lifeless marble eyes. The eagle's eyes were missing, and most of its feathers, giving it the appearance of a worn and much-loved teddy bear.

Katie reached for the
v
ulture. Mounted on a wooden base carved to resemble a tree branch, the stuffed bird made a clunking sound as it scraped across the metal shelf. It was heavier and more bulky than Katie remembered. She turned to Toby when she finally got it down.

“Got a Swiss Army knife or something?”

“Will a box-cutter do?”

“You carry around a box-cutter?” Katie's eyebrows shot up at the sight of the blade Toby wrenched from the pocket of his duster coat.

He shrugged, looking sheepish. “Never know when it might come in handy.”

“Remind me to keep you close whenever I'm in a dark alley.” Katie turned back and stuck the box-cutter into the seam at the base of the bird, below the wings. She didn't gingerly pick at the worn thread. She gouged and stabbed at it.

When she'd made a hole the size of a small plum, she wiggled two fingers inside and eased a compression of gauze out, then several wads of stuffing, until her fingers touched something crinkly. She grappled with the bunting, then managed to grab a small, yellowish piece of rolled-up parchment, the outer layer as thin as onionskin, from the bowels of the bird.

Katie scooted to the workbench, sat down, and gingerly smoothed out the small piece of parchment. It had been rolled up like a small scroll, the size of a narrow cigarette. Katie feared it might crumble in her hands, but instead it was so stiff she couldn't manage to uncurl it without tearing it.

There was a canvas apron hanging from a peg on the wall. Toby unhooked it and strode over to the bench. “Here.” He spread the canvas apron on the workbench. Toby took the rolled parchment from Katie's trembling hands.

Taking great care, Toby smoothed out the tightly wound parchment. Watching him, Katie had a momentary vision of the other Toby with his silky black hair, fathomless dark eyes, and inscrutable smile. The two boys were different. Yet there were striking similarities. They both had dark complexions, angled jaws, and smooth-as-silk black hair.

“Can you make out the words?” Toby asked, peering down at the ancient writing.

Katie leaned over and squinted, trying to read the words, but the ink had seeped into the paper over the decades and was splotchy and smudged.

“I think it says, ‘My sister's pet name was Tuppence.' ”

“On the other hand,” Toby maintained, “It might say, ‘My sister's pet's name was Tuppence.” His glance lifted to hers. “Maybe his sister had a pet cat or dog named Tuppence.”

Katie nodded. “But look here. The next sentence reads, ‘Because of me, she died.'” Katie cocked her head sideways. “Does that mean the pet died or the sister?”

“Dunno. The sister, I think. But why write this? The dude's not Jack the Ripper, is he?”

Katie swallowed hard. “I don't think so. No. Not possible. I mean, it's unlikely.”

But was it?
she wondered.
Could Toby be Jack the Ripper?
Or Collin, for that matter? Or even the Duke?

Chapter Twenty-one

Do Not Go Home say the Bells beneath the Great Dome

T
e
n minutes later
they were back downstairs heading out the door.

“Hold on!” Katie sputtered. “I just thought of something—”

She raced down the hall to the library. There was an old Bible in the library that listed all the births and deaths in her grandmother's family going back generations. Katie never went near the dusty old tome because it listed her parents' deaths. Both deaths had been carefully recorded in her grandmother's spidery handwriting. It had so upset Katie, Grandma Cleaves had taken to hiding the heavy leather-bound book or at least wedging it unobtrusively among the bookshelves.

“What?” Toby asked, tromping noisily behind.

“Help me look for the family Bible. It's leathery and old, with a huge gold clasp that looks like a buckle,” Katie said, tugging him along with her into the library where afternoon sunlight was pouring into the room through floor-to-ceiling windows, making the rows upon rows of bookshelves sparkle and seem to dance.

Katie blinked around, shading her eyes from the dazzling light. The room was half the size of its nineteenth-century counterpart, yet it still looked massive. Katie remembered seeing her father perched on top of the tall, wheeled ladder that ran on brass rails around the book-crammed shelves, his arms laden with leather volumes. She remembered watching him climb midway down and when he caught sight of her peering up at him, he had laughed and called out, “Look, Kit-Kat! A veritable feast for a book-lover such as myself!” Then he climbed down several more rungs and held out a small book to her. “You'll like this one. Same author as
Kidnapped
. Remember when I read that to you and Courtney? You hid under the covers and begged me to stop reading. Well . . .” he chuckled from his perch on the middle rung of the library ladder. “This one's scarier. But of course you're older now.”

She remembered reaching up for the book. Remembered the kindness in his eyes. They had been visiting Grandma Cleaves during a school vacation. The slender volume her father handed to her was by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
.

Katie had forgotten.

Dad gave it to me the summer before he died
.
How could I forget he gave it to me?
After the double funerals everything had become a blur for Katie. And when she moved to London to live with Grandma Cleaves she had tried hard not to think back on the life she had once shared with her sister and her mom and her dad. It was far easier to lose herself in a book than to remember who had given it to her.

Katie felt the sting of tears. “My dad loved this room,” she said out loud. She shook her head trying to banish the memory of how happy her dad looked that afternoon, sunlight bathing him in a golden glow. Her heart caught in her throat.
I wish my parents were alive
.
If Collin
'
s plane hadn
'
t been delayed . . .
Her parents had died on the way to the airport to pick up Collin. They had waited an extra fifteen minutes because his plane was delayed. If her mom and dad had driven to the airport on schedule, they would have missed the truck that overturned in the Sumner Tunnel, causing their car to crash. “If only they hadn't died—”

If wishes were unicorns, maidens would ride
.

That was one of her father's favorite sayings.

“Hey!” Toby called out. “Is that it? Over there?” He pointed to the oak table against the far windows; as he strode across the room toward it, he stepped into the same golden, dazzling light that had engulfed her father that day so many years ago. The light spilled over Toby's shoulders like a shimmering golden cape, enveloping him and swirling out behind him onto the floor.

Katie saw where he was pointing. She dashed over to the table and tugged out the leather-bound Bible from under a stack of dictionaries. But the leather-bound book with its gold clasp was so heavy it fell from her grip and clunked against the surface of the table. She yanked it open and thumbed through the pages, then ran her finger down a column of dates. Her heart pounded. She couldn't believe what she was reading. She blinked. Then blinked again. “So young. He died so young,” she gasped.

“Who?”

“Collin Chesterfield Twyford, the third. The nineteenth-century Collin. Here's his birth date, and here—! Wait a sec. It says he married Prudence Farthington in eighteen hundred and eighty-nine . . . at the age of eighteen. That's awfully young, isn't it?” She glanced up at Toby.

Toby shrugged. “They married young in those days.”

“But look here! It's so tragic. He died several months later on September 12. Drowned in a peat bog on the moors in Devon, near Bovey Castle, the Duke's country seat. He was so young.” Katie stared hard at the old-fashioned script, with its curlicues and flourishes, hoping she had misread it. She pointed to the next sentence and stepped away. Toby moved forward.

“Hmmm,” he said, looking perplexed. “Seems like my namesake was with him when he died. Says here Tobias Becket”—Toby glanced up—“did you know that Becket is my last name? Anyway, Tobias Becket pulled Collin's body out of the bog. Horrible way to die. It's like quicksand.” He blinked at Katie, then back down at the page. “Says here that Tobias Becket, trusted family friend, accompanied Collin on a hunting expedition on the moors. Collin lost his footing and . . . drowned in the peat bog. He was buried in Dartmoor at the castle. Oh, no—” Toby groaned. “He died just after his son and heir, Collin the fourth, was born.”

“This is awful!” Katie cried. “How can I go back knowing that Collin has less than a year to live? Maybe I can warn him. Maybe—”

“No, don't. You can't. I mean . . . you shouldn't.”

“Who says I shouldn't? I'm going to warn him.
And Toby
. I'll make Toby promise to keep Collin off the moors. Or better yet, stop them both from going to the castle at all.”

“Katie.” Toby took both her wrists in his hands.

She tugged back.

He held fast. “These people—these other boys, Collin and Tobias—have been dead a very long time. You can change little things in the past, but not big ones. And I thought you told me you wanted to save Beatrix Twyford? What's it say about Lady Beatrix in the family book?”

“I forgot to look.”

Katie ran her index finger down the page. “There's only one entry. Nothing about Jack the Ripper or how she died. Just the date. November ninth, in the year eighteen eighty-eight.”

“Which is odd,” Toby said. He cupped his large hand over hers and ran it down the page as if guiding a computer mouse. “Each of these other entries list the person's place of interment and cause of death: apoplexy, scarlet fever, brain fever, consumption, old age, infected wisdom teeth. Not much advanced medicine in those days. This entry here says the fifth Duke of Twyford died a lingering death from gout in 1842 at the advanced age of fifty. Didn't know you could die of gout. But I do know that fifty was considered ancient.”

“That would be the Duke's father or grandfather.” Katie's mind flashed on an image of the guv'nor, with his large domed head, watery blue eyes, and multiple chins. The poor man would lose Beatrix and Collin all within a year. It would probably kill him. He wouldn't need gout to do that for him. He'd die of sorrow.

“So what does this other Toby look like? Not as handsome as me, eh?”

Katie blinked at him. “Toby looks like you . . . or, rather, you look like your ancestor,” she said, and quickly changed the subject, not wanting to think about how handsome they both were. “Why does Collin have to die so young? It's not fair. It's bad enough Beatrix gets slaughtered . . . but Collin, so shortly after?”

“At least the Duke gets an heir. Collin Twyford the fourth. And obviously Toby has kids, too, cuz I'm here.” Toby grinned.

Katie
definitely
didn't want to think about the other Toby having a girlfriend or a wife . . . and children. She stared down at the page once again.
But the Duke will have an heir
. Collin had a son before he died. She read the dates and chuckled. “What a goose.”

“Who?”

“Collin. He married Prudence after he got her pregnant. The baby was born just weeks before Collin's accident. At least that's something. He got to see his son before—” But Katie couldn't say it.
Why, oh why, does everyone in my family die violent deaths?
Katie took a deep breath.
That
'
s not true
, she told herself. In her own family her parents were the only ones to have had an accident, as far as Katie knew. But Collin and Beatrix felt like her family. She fisted away a tear and thumped the leather-bound Bible shut.
I have to get back to the nineteenth century
!
“Maybe . . . just maybe I can change history. Save Beatrix
and
Collin!”

“Don't count on it. The most you
might
be able to do is discover the identity of Jack the Ripper, which is pretty cool. But don't count on—”

Katie wasn't listening. She sped out of the library and veered down the hall to the kitchen. She needed to call Courtney. Just to hear her voice. Katie's own cell phone, nestled in her backpack, rarely got reception at her grandmother's house. The stone walls were too thick.

Hurrying into the kitchen, Katie snapped up the land-line phone on the butcher-block counter next to the microwave, hit the speed-dial button for her sister's number, and waited impatiently until Courtney's voice message pounded in her ear: “
Yo!
Dudes and dudettes!
Leave a message at the beep and I'll get back to you
as soon as I am able . .
 .” this last was sung to the tune of a Beatles song.

“Hey, Court! It's me,” Katie all but shouted into the phone. “I just wanted to say . . . um . . . I miss you. Call me.
Please, Courtney.
It's important. I'm heading back to Madame Tussauds. I'll be on my cell phone for the next half hour.
Call me! Call me! Call me
!
”

Katie dropped the receiver into its cradle, and the
thunking
sound of plastic hitting plastic reverberated through the kitchen. A sound not heard where she was headed.