The Day Before Forever (28 page)

I didn't know why she had disappeared from the records, because Miss Hatfield hadn't thought it important to tell me the rest of her story. I wondered whether in fact she had disappeared to go and hide in a part of Spain where she couldn't be found.

I wondered if this woman was one of those Juanas. It was a long shot, but it was possible.

I exited the tent, hoping to find out.

“Ah, here she is,” Juana said, seeing me emerge from the tent.

She was sitting on a log outside by the fire pit. There was some animal roasting, hung above the fire. Only a few of the men were around just then, and none of them were within earshot.

I sat down next to her. “Where is everyone? All the men?”

“Working for the next day. Some are taking their turns in confessional.”

“Confessional? Out here?” I said, before I remembered that Spain was very religious in this current time period.

“A priest from the colony encampment traveled for days to come to us. He just arrived two days ago. Today is the first day we've had proper Mass in a long time,” she said. “Nature and a New World are not places one should forsake God.”

“Yes, of course,” I mumbled.

I considered the thought I'd had in the tent. Perhaps Juana knew more than she was letting on.

“Is Ponce de León at this camp?”

She looked sharply at me. “What do you know of Ponce de León?”

“Not much.” That was true. I only knew what Miss Hatfield had told me and the very general fact that he had been the one to discover Florida.

“Clearly,” she said. She turned the animal on the wooden spit. “He's dead.”

“Pardon?”

“Dead. For a while too.” She squinted at me. “Why do you want to know?”

“I-I just thought . . . that he would be the one leading all this.”

She nodded. That seemed like a passable answer. “He was killed by a tribe of natives.”

Yes, that was what Miss Hatfield had said too. I just didn't know if it had already happened.
“Recently?”

“Depends on your definition of recent. He died more than a decade ago.”

I fell silent.

“I would have thought news of his death would have reached England.”

“Well . . . surely you must understand . . . We're concerned with our own explorers,” I said. “You mentioned that this expedition was to chart the new land. Is that what you're here for?”

“Of course,” she said, but she failed to meet my eyes. “I'm here because I know these lands. That's my reason for being here.”

It would have sounded more convincing if she hadn't
repeated herself.

“You said this was your second journey to the New World. Was anyone on this expedition with you during the first?”

“No,” she said quickly. “It was a long time ago.”

I was almost certain that this was Juana Ruíz. Which meant a lot of things—primarily it confirmed that Juana was immortal.

“Juana . . . what is your surname?”

She stared me down. “I will not have this interrogation from you. If you cannot be satiated, I suggest you leave. If you would like to stay, you will not ask any more questions.” Her voice was icy.

“I-I'm sorry,” I said. I couldn't have her throwing me out. “I don't know what came over me.”

Juana looked at me a moment longer to make sure I meant my apology. “I was a little too strong as well,” she said.

I didn't know why her last name would be such a touchy issue if it was just a name. Perhaps it would reveal more about her, like the fact that she wasn't a regular mortal. Or the fact that she was the killer.

“You must eat,” Juana said, taking a knife—one that I hadn't even realized she carried—out of a pocket sewn into her dress. “I imagine you're hungry.”

Juana took her knife and began to cut off the meaty leg of the animal roasting. It looked like a large rodent of some kind, but I wasn't quite sure. I noticed Juana's hand was shaking.

At first it was a little tremor, affecting mostly her fingers. But it seemed to grow into a full body shake.

“No . . . ,” she whispered.

She shook her head. And kept shaking it and shaking it. It was as if she couldn't stop.

She started talking in Spanish. Not murmuring, but talking loud, as if there were someone in the tent who could hear her and understand.

“Juana?” I asked. I reached out to touch her, but she recoiled.

“No!” she screamed at me, but she wasn't seeing me.

I sat still.

Another minute went by, and Juana quieted.

“Are you all right?” I said after the shaking had stopped.

“I-I said the interrogation was over,” she said. She handed the leg she was still holding to me. “Eat.”

There was still a foot attached to the end of the leg. It had nails that now looked crispy.

“Um . . . I'd like to, uh . . . Well, I drank too much water . . .”

“There's a chamber pot in the tent. Alternatively, you could use the woods.”

That was what I needed.

I excused myself and started into the woods. I found the tree that looked like it was bowing down.

Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine.

I was counting the steps to get to the clock.

Forty-six. Forty-seven. Forty-eight.

I had to talk to Henley—first to tell him that I was all right, since he would be worried, but also to tell him about Juana. Not including the strange shaking episode, there was something
off
about her, and I thought I knew what it was.

Fifty-two. Fifty-three. Fifty-four.

It was fifty-four steps to the clock. I looked around and saw
the tree with the linen strip of fabric tied onto one of its branches.

I pushed the loose dirt aside and started digging with my hands. My fingers felt something smooth and cold.

I pulled the clock out and turned it forward.

“Henley?” I looked around at the open road in front of me and the cliff.

He wasn't there.

Of course he wasn't there. He couldn't know when I would come back. He wouldn't have been waiting all day. I didn't even know how long I had been gone for.

I started walking down the road toward the hotel. I was glad it was only a few minutes away, as my leather shoes were fast deteriorating in 2016. I had just come more than four hundred years into the future in a few seconds. That never ceased to amaze me. It was a miracle the shoes even had their shape after so many centuries.

“Henley?” I knocked on the door to our room before retrieving the room key stashed underneath the potted plant.

Henley wasn't inside. Maybe he was by the pool. But the sight of the comfortable bed made me lie down there first. It wouldn't take long. Just a few minutes off my feet would do me good.

I kicked off my shoes and stretched out on the bed. It felt amazing.

Unexpectedly, I heard fumbling at the door.

I propped my head up with my arm in time to see Henley walk in.

Calling the look on his face a surprise would have been an
understatement.

“What are you doing here?” was the first thing he said, when he got around to speaking.

“Weren't you the one who told me to come back to let you know I was doing fine and that I had come up with a backstory?”

“But . . . it's only been ten minutes at the most since you left.”

That made me sit up. “Ten minutes? It can't be. I was away far longer than that.”

“I mean I only
just
said good-bye to you,” Henley said. “I walked back to the hotel and . . . here I am. And here
you
are. And what happened to your feet and your face?”

I sank back down onto the bed. “The clock has years, months, and days, but not hours and minutes. Time moves differently.”

“You're telling me,” Henley said, moving to the bed. “You almost gave me a heart attack. Move over. And tell me what happened to that cheek.” He gently touched the side of my face.

“A scratch. Tree branches,” I said, moving his hand away. “But I'm in. There's a camp of people there, exactly as we thought.”

I told him the backstory I had invented.

“A little shaky,” he said.

“Not like you would've been able to do much better.”

Henley ignored me. “But they bought it?”

“Well, one of them did. This woman. And that's what matters,” I said.

“Who's this woman?”

And I told him all about Juana. It didn't take long, since I
knew very little. I also told him about the shaking incident.

“But don't you think it odd that she snapped at me like that when I asked for her last name?” I said. “She could be Juana Ruíz. And there was that strange manic episode.”

Henley shook his head. “You might be reading entirely too much into this. It could have been a touchy subject for other reasons. Or maybe she snapped at you because you were aggravating her with all of your questions.”

“But it's a possibility, and we need to consider that.”

Henley rolled over on the bed. “So then, what if she is Juana? That would confirm she's immortal.”

“If she's immortal, there's a possibility that she could have a method to travel in time . . .”

Henley filled in the rest of my thought. “And that means she could be the killer.”

I swallowed hard. This followed my earlier guess that Juana could be the killer.

It was all conjecture, but it was a strong possibility. There was something strange about Juana—I knew that. And right then, she was the prime suspect. The only suspect, really. Who else could travel in time but another immortal?

I told Henley of the maps I had seen when I first walked into her tent.

“They were most probably maps of the island. You did say that they were charting it,” he said.

“But then why would she hide them from me? She couldn't even wait till I left the tent to hide them. It doesn't make sense.”

“You're right. It doesn't make sense.”

“I need to see what's marked on those maps. That could tell
me who she is.”

I picked myself up from the bed, though I winced when my feet hit the floor. I put my shoes back on and grabbed the room key and the clock.

“Do be careful,” Henley said.

“Aren't I always?”

I made sure to put the key back under the miniature potted palm tree on my way out. I walked the road to Sandy Cove with sure steps. Then turned the clock back.

“Where were you?” Juana said when I stepped out of the forest. I'd buried the clock in the same spot as before.

It was dark already, and the fire was half the size it had been. There was only one man sitting outside, and he sat on a log tending to the fire. It was clear I had been gone for longer than just the hour I had spent with Henley.

“Taking a walk to clear your head after a long day is all well and good, but it's dangerous out there.” She actually seemed concerned about me. I wanted to congratulate her on her acting skills. I didn't trust her.

“Everyone has already eaten. That's what you get when you leave for hours without saying anything.” She sighed and her voice lowered. “I did save you a piece, though. Come.”

As we walked toward her tent, she said a few quick words in Spanish to the lone man outside.

“Alberto's keeping watch tonight,” she said.

Back in the tent, a second hammock was hanging on the other side of the one I had sat in earlier.

“You take that one.” Juana pointed to the new hammock,
made with clean linen.

“Are you sure you wouldn't like—”

She cut me off. “No, I like my own.”

Juana took off her dress, leaving only the slip underneath and her petticoats, and she got into her hammock. She looked to me to do the same.

I took off my dress and put it on top of one of the chests as she had done.

I noticed Juana was looking pale. The wisps of her hair were damp and stuck to her face.

I heard her mumble, “It's happening more often now.”

“Are you feeling all right?”

“The food is right there,” Juana said. She tried to say it loudly, as if volume would mask her weakness. But her voice sounded strained. The pain was back.

“It's happening again, isn't it?”

Juana turned over in the hammock and faced away from me. That was all the answer I needed.

Her pain seemed to come suddenly and leave suddenly. Juana bore it well; she was practiced. She had mentioned it was happening “more often now.” Those were the facts, and to me it sounded a lot like the pain I experienced when I had been in one time period for too long. That was the curse of immortality—time rejected your body and your very presence, since you weren't supposed to be there.

I watched Juana. Her chest rose and fell in even breaths. She had fallen asleep. I couldn't help but sympathize with her pain, but if she was in fact immortal then perhaps she was . . .

I shook myself out of it. I couldn't think that. Not when she
had been so gentle with me.

I glanced over at the food she had left out for me.

The leg of whatever animal it was that they'd had for dinner was sitting in a cracked wooden bowl on another chest. I picked up the leg. I hadn't eaten in hours, but the foot still terrified me. I also knew I had to eat it. I couldn't risk offending Juana again.

I sat on my hammock, holding the leg in my hand.
Why hadn't vegetarianism been invented yet?

My side of the tent moved. Or rather, the tent flap on my left did.

At first I thought I had bumped into it, or maybe that it was the wind, but the flap kept moving like something was on the other side. I almost called for Juana, but I wasn't sure if I could trust her. Instead, I took a breath, counted to three, and yanked the tent flap up.

A face peered out at me. But I giggled, covering my mouth so Juana wouldn't hear.