Ripped (42 page)

“Correct.
Severe
hemorrhaging. Also, that the blade was very sharp, possibly cutting through her windpipe. See here,” Whistler said, pointing to the body, “from the collarbone to the lower edge of the Adam's apple? The knife's laceration caused serious injuries to the large vessels in her throat. Beneath the skin, in the middle of the neck, lies the trachea and just behind it, the gullet.”

Katie held her breath and inched closer. She reminded herself that this couldn't be Molly Potter because she wasn't seven months pregnant, and that whoever it was had been dead for over a century. She knelt down next to Whistler whose cuffs appeared paint-splattered like his beret—deep crimson splotches—and peered at the body.

A dark trickle of blood showed across the girl's throat in such a jagged manner that it appeared as if a spiky piece of barbed wire had been branded into her flesh. Courtney had a similar looking barbed tattoo circling her biceps. But this jagged line wasn't a tattoo.

Katie reached out and felt the girl's wrist. The skin wasn't warm, but it wasn't stone-cold either. She hadn't been dead very long.

Katie gently tugged the straw bonnet away from the girl's face. Collin gasped. Katie blinked and blinked again.

The violet eyes staring blankly out from a bone-white face were those of Elizabeth Stride! The girl from the pawn shop. Busy Lizzy! What was going on? Lizzy Stride wasn't supposed to die tonight.
It
'
s September thirtieth!
Had Toby managed to save Molly Potter only to have Lizzy die in her place? Did this mean they couldn't change history, just rearrange it? Would the outcomes be the same, but the dates of the deaths changed?

If we can't change history, how can we can save Lady Beatrix? Or prevent Collin from drowning?

Katie closed her eyes. Her mind flashed to the future. She was standing in Madame Tussauds, the musty smell of the museum in her nostrils.
“
You can
'
t alter history, Katie
!”
the future Toby had warned her.
“
You can only change small things, inconsequential things.
”

Katie's eyes flew open.

She glanced from Collin to Oscar to James and then at the dead girl whose bloodless lips were puckered as if in a twisted kiss or the throes of agony.

I can change history! I know I can,
Katie told herself.
I have to!

She just didn't know at what cost.

But all too soon, in the predawn hours when one's mind plays tricks and time seems to bend and mold to accommodate nightmares, Katie would find out. And she'd wish with all her might that she hadn't tempted fate.

Chapter Forty-nine

Sailors and Oars say the Bells of Saint Flores

“I
'll fetch
the police,” Oscar said, the feather in his top hat quivering. “There's a constable box around the corner.”

“Why didn't the girl cry out?” James Whistler asked. “With a constable so close. And look. There are lights on in the club. Someone would have heard her scream for help, surely.”

“Perhaps she knew her assailant,” Katie ventured.

“Or perhaps the killer looks harmless,” Oscar said. “The very
essence
of a successful murderer is that his victim sees a smiling face.”

“Or
her
victim.” Katie nodded. “The killer might be a woman.”

Whistler turned, grim-faced and apologetic, to Katie. “You shouldn't have witnessed this, Miss Katherine. I'm sorry. I forget myself sometimes. I should not have let you—”

“It's all right, Mr. Whistler. I'm fine. I've seen—” Katie was going to say worse. But of course she hadn't, not in real life, only on TV. In advanced biology, she'd seen an autopsy performed in real time on a video cam.

Collin tugged Katie by the elbow, telling Whistler he agreed that this was no place for Katie, and that they would wait in the carriage. But they didn't climb back into the varnished two-wheeler. They both knew that as soon as Oscar summoned the constable, the entire street would be swarming with police.

And they were right. For the next twenty-four hours both Berner Street and Mitre Square would be teeming, not only with the Metropolitan Police, but with angry vigilantes demanding justice, amateur detectives looking to solve the murders, social do-gooders, voyeurs, newspaper reporters, ministers preaching the evils of sin, thrill-seekers, and dozens of law-abiding citizens demanding that Scotland Yard catch the murdering, evil fiend who was Jack the Ripper.

Instead of climbing into the carriage, Katie and Collin hastened to Mitre Square, where Catherine Eddowes was supposed to have died tonight. Catherine Eddowes, Katie knew, was safe.

But will we find another girl dead in Catherine Eddowes
'
s place?

They headed west on Commercial Road and south toward Minories Street. It was a fifteen-minute fast walk to Mitre Square, but Collin led the way down side streets and through several backyards, and they arrived in under ten minutes.

Katie wondered who would be lying dead in the Mitre Square instead of Catherine Eddowes? Had they saved Eddowes only to postpone her death in exchange for another innocent victim?

When they reached Minories Street, Collin led the way to Fenchurch, overshooting Mitre Square and thus coming upon the dingy courtyard from the corner of Leadenhall Street, due north of the Tower of London.

Katie's pulse raced. A cat yowled in the distance.

The moon, low in the sky, gave pale light through the fog-filled air. Church Lane Alley, where they'd escaped from Major Brown earlier, doglegged into darkness; the rear entrances of Kearley & Tonge Grocers and O'Fingal's fish shop were shuttered and padlocked.

To the right of the pitch-black alley, Katie could see the back walls of tenements rising up, the bottom bricks—glossy with whitewash—showing more clearly in the moonlight. She could just make out the stone drinking well anchored in the center of the cobbled square. The pump handle, jutting out from the slime-crusted side of the well, looked like the crooked spout of a teakettle.

Katie held her breath.

A shadowy figure leaned menacingly over another shadowy figure that lay prone on the ground in the exact spot where Catherine Eddowes was to have died. Was the person bending over, silhouetted in shadow, Jack the Ripper
?

Collin snatched up Katie's hand in his own damp, shaking one.

The rattle of something familiar, like the tap of hobnail boots, sounded in the distance. Katie's heart raced; her spine tingled. They both stood still, listening. But the sound was so faint, Katie thought she must have imagined it. Clutching Collin's hand tightly, she tugged him forward.

The moon overhead showed, then hid, then showed itself through dark clouds scudding across an even darker sky. Katie peered into the gloom. When they were several yards from the stone drinking well, she let out a strangled gasp.

It can't be!

But it was.

Toby was bending over Catherine Eddowes, whose body lay in a pool of blood near the stone drinking well. Lying on her back, her head cocked at an unnatural angle, Catherine Eddowes stared straight at Katie with blank eyes. No. No, that wasn't right.
One
eye. Catherine Eddowes had only one eye. The other had been gouged out.

Katie felt a thrumming in her ears, a roaring as the blood rushed to her head. She told herself to look away, but it was no use. She couldn't help herself.

The dead woman's pantalooned left leg was extended, while her right was bent at the knee. Both arms, stripped of their sleeves, extended outward as in a crucifixion, palms up. Catherine Eddowes's throat had been badly mutilated, and there was a long gash across her face from the nose to the curved angle of her cheekbone. Her left eye had been gouged out, and her right ear was missing. The flaps of her abdomen lay exposed, the entrails spilling out like coils of dark rope. A handkerchief lay on the ground by her open left palm.

“It's Catherine Eddowes,” Toby said heavily.

From his crouched position next to the body, Toby peered up at Collin with a faint inflection in his voice that might have been suspicion. “You weren't able to save—”

“But we did! I swear it!” Collin sputtered. “She was alive at midnight!” Trembling shook his words.

“She's stone cold,” Toby answered, his voice composed but with a terrible fierceness in it.

Collin hunched up his shoulders defensively. “I swear to you, I don't know what happened! Katie was keeping watch. Catherine Eddowes was singing most of the night. I tell you, Toby, she was with us at midnight. She can't be stone cold. We were together less than an hour ago.” But he said this as if it were a rehearsed speech. As if he felt guilty about the poor woman's death. As if it were somehow his fault. He went on in a rush. “I don't understand it, Toby. I don't. There are elements of the supernatural at work here. That's the only explanation.” Collin's face was pale, Katie noted, almost inhuman in the moonlight.

Collin pointed a shaking finger at Toby. “You've got blood all over you!”

“Elizabeth Stride's blood. I went to Berner Street. Lizzy Stride from the pawn shop . . . she's dead. She was bleeding badly when I arrived. I tried to stem the tide of blood, but it was no use. She'd been slit from ear to ear. So I came here and found—”

“And what's that?” Collin yelped. “In your hand?”

“My dagger,” Toby answered, his lips twisting in a strange way.

“Your . . . dagger?” The steel blade glistened with blood stains. “What's it doing—?”

“Precisely.”

Then Toby did something very odd. He threw back his head and laughed.

“I hardly find this amusing,” Collin bristled. “A dead woman lying at our feet, who, not an hour ago was singing robustly at the Ten Bells. Have you lost your mind, Toby? There's nothing laughable about this!”

“Isn't there?” Toby seemed to smile and frown at the same time. “Can't you just see the spectacle at the coroner's court? This is
my
dagger stained with blood. My clothes are awash in even more blood. I was seen entering Berner Street, and now I'm here. Coincidence . . . or planned? It appears as if I've played right into the hands of a puppet master whose tricks are far superior to my own.” Toby narrowed accusing eyes at Katie.

Katie reached out her hand to him, but Toby jerked back. Katie wished with all her might that she'd never traveled back in time, never gotten Toby and Collin involved in the hunt for Jack the Ripper.

Toby's eyes, as he stared at her in the waning moonlight, showed a boiling rage even as he continued with that strange, twisted smile on his face. “Jack the Ripper is not a slap-dash, spur-of-the-moment killer, nor supernatural, but a cold-blooded person tugging on strings behind the curtain of this deadly farce, someone I underestimated but who carefully planned every piece of this. The Ripper is brutal and cunning, but flesh and blood, I assure you.”

“Major Brown!” Collin cried. “He's trying to frame you!”

The muscles down Toby's jaw tightened. “Hasn't the Duke told you? If anything happens to you, I'm to be his legal heir. Jack the Ripper has no choice but to pin this on—”

“Both of us.” Collin bent down and scooped up the handkerchief near the dead woman's open palm. He turned it over, exposing the monogrammed initials “CCT.”

“It's mine.
Collin Chesterfield Twyford
. We'd best get out of here—”

Too late.

The shrill of a police whistle was followed by the familiar rattle of steel, leather, and hobnail boots. A moment later, the yellow glare of a bull's-eye lantern caught them all squarely in the face.

The lantern's light dazzled in a stinging sort of way, making Katie squint and hold up her hand to shield her eyes, as if from the burning rays of the sun. Like a pantomime, the three teenagers stood there frozen in a tableau of guilt, caught in the glare, with Toby hunched over the dead woman, dagger in hand, blood stains splattered across his clothes.

The bull's-eye beam was lowered. But it rendered the shadows in the courtyard so heavy that Katie could scarcely make out Major Brown standing across the way, clutching the lantern to his side.

Major Brown began to swing the lantern back and forth. To their left, the whitewashed walls glimmered in the light's swinging arc. To and fro, the wink of the swaying lamp created puddles of light around the dead woman's stomach—making her bulging intestines appear as wet and slick as the skin of an eel. Katie felt bile rise up her throat.

Hoofbeats pounded in the distance. Footfalls sounded closer, fast approaching.

Two police officers raced into the square from Minories Street. Major Brown stepped forward and raised the lamp again, letting the beam's light shine directly into their faces.

“Stand fast! Tobias Becket, put down your weapon! In the name of her Majesty the Queen, you are under—”

That's when everything became a blur.

For the second time that evening Collin began shouting,
“
Run! Run! Run
!”
But he was screaming these words at Toby.

In the glare of the lantern, Katie watched Collin charge headlong into Major Brown, toppling him over.

Toby took off like a shot. And it was this image of a cannonball that made Katie scream at the top of her lungs: “I've been shot! I've been shot! You have to help me!” It was all she could think of as a diversion. “I'm dying! I'm dying! Help me!”

One of the constables stopped in his tracks and came rushing to Katie's side. There remained only the second officer to pursue Toby. Katie fell into a pretend swoon onto the cobblestones not two feet from the lifeless body of Catherine Eddowes.