Time Snatchers (22 page)

She looks at me for a moment. It’s impossible to read her expression, but I can tell that she’s weighing her words carefully before saying them.

“Cale, Frank and I …”

My heart sinks. I already don’t like the sound of this. I can’t meet Abbie’s eyes, so I look over her shoulder at a building with a wood sign in gold-lettering that says
EPHRAM P. ABERNATHY, NOTARY PUBLIC.

“We … he thinks I really like him,” she finishes.

“And do you?” I ask. “I mean, you’re always looking at him like he’s the last piece of chocolate cake.”

“It’s not what you think,” she says.

“Well, what is it, then?” I say.

“It’s not anything,” Abbie says. “It’s just that I need to know what he knows.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Isn’t it obvious? The only way to survive around here is to keep your eyes and ears open. Something that you don’t seem to be very good at doing.”

“Well, there’s a difference between keeping your eyes open and keeping your eyes on Frank,” I blurt out.

Abbie stares at me for a moment. “Will you get it into your thick head that I’m not with him?”

I look down at the ground. I want to believe her, I really do. But if I buy into what Abbie is saying, that means all the attention she’s paying Frank is just one big act. And if she’s acting with Frank, what’s to say she’s not also acting with me?

“Listen,” she says. “In case you haven’t noticed, things aren’t like they used to be. We’re not little anymore. Uncle’s not going to watch out for us. In fact, he’s getting harder on us all the time. And if you think things will get any better if and when Uncle retires, you’d better think twice. Because Frank is going to take over, and from the looks of things, he’ll be even worse than Uncle.” She pauses. “It’s each time snatcher for himself, Cale. That’s the only way to survive.”

I let her words sink in.

“I guess that means you’re for you and I’m for me,” I say, my stomach clenching.

She stops by a red building with a hitching post in front and turns to me. “What’s wrong with you? It’s like you’re a different person … I don’t even know you anymore.”

Abbie’s right. I am a different person. Ever since Frank started messing with me, and even more, ever since I saw Zach on the escalator
at Expo 67. But how do I explain it to her? How do I even explain it to myself? I run my hand over the rough grain of the hitching post.

“I want …” The words come slowly. “I want something more,” I say.

“What more do you need?” Abbie asks. “You’ve got an interesting job, opportunity to travel, and a snatch partner who’s hotter than a pocket nuke.” She raises up the hem of her dress a fraction of an inch and flashes some ankle.

“And a boss who holds my wrist under the water so that his snapping turtles can finish their lunch and a roommate who stays up late at night thinking up new ways to get me in trouble,” I add.

After a moment, she says, “You don’t have a choice. This isn’t exactly a job you can quit, you know.”

“I want to … I
need
to change my life,” I say, thinking of Zach, Jim and Diane.

She doesn’t say anything for a moment. A tall man clutching a walking stick with a horse head knob ambles by, tipping his hat to her in passing.

“Don’t do it,” she says finally. “If you run and Uncle finds you, which you know he will …”

Instead of saying the rest, she traces a circle in the air right in front of my forehead. I feel a shiver race up my spine.

“Besides, if you leave, I could get paired with ‘I love myself’ Lydia,” Abbie continues, scrunching her nose. “I’d rather spend a week in the Barrens than have Lydia as my snatch partner for even one second.”

I laugh and feel the knot inside my stomach relaxing. The truth is that if I ever did leave, the hardest part of all would be leaving Abbie.

We pass another storefront. The sign says
NORMAN’S GENERAL STORE
in four-foot-high curling letters. I stop and stare. Displayed in the big picture window is a miniature battlefield, complete with towering cliffs and two armies taking aim at each other with rifles and bayonets. I’m guessing there are at least a hundred miniature soldiers. All of them are beautifully carved and detailed.

I have a sudden inspiration. “Hey, can you wait here for a minute? I’ve got to check something out.”

“Okay, but don’t take too long, O Easily Distracted One,” says Abbie. “We’ve got some business at the Frisbie Baking Company to take care of, remember?”

How can I forget? We’re here to steal a very special pie tin. Special because it’s about to be the first Frisbee ever flown. Where’s the Chinese angle, I wonder? Ever since the start of the Great Friendship, most of our snatches have had something to do with China. Well, maybe, like our mission to France, there is isn’t any Chinese connection to this one. Although you never know. It could be that one of Uncle’s rich clients wants to give the world’s first Frisbee as a gift to the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. Whatever, it’s not really any of my business.

What is my business, however, is being on time for the snatch. If I time things right, I can make my purchase at Norman’s, take a short side trip to 1967, spend a few minutes there and still get back here with only a minute or two of 1871 time having elapsed. There’s one problem, though. Since Phoebe keeps track all of our time in the past, Uncle will know about my side trip if he looks at my file. Frank too, for that matter.

Maybe I can hypnotize Phoebe into erasing the record of the trip, like Frank does. Except I don’t know how to do that yet. Why am I even worrying about that? If anyone looks into everywhere I’ve been going, I’ll be in trouble anyway.

“Be right back,” I say.

A bell tinkles as I enter the shop. It’s dim and quiet, and the air smells musty and stale. A man in a green waistcoat is standing at a polished oak counter. Behind him, shelves are stacked with maybe a hundred colored bottles of all different shapes and sizes. I hear shuffling from the back of the store. Well, at least I’m not the only customer.

“Excuse me … but are those soldiers for sale?” I ask, pointing to the window display.

The man looks up, removes an unlit pipe from his mouth and squints at me from behind wire-rimmed eyeglasses.

“Norman, I says to meself, the lad’s a
Grosvenor
. But now I ain’t so sure. Yer clothes are a huckleberry above most Grosvenors’ persimmons. A
Cunningham
, more likely. Aye. But then again, yer face is a bit too peaked fer a Cunningham. Good thing too. They’re all a bunch of scalawags. And ugly as sin, to boot. So, you’ve got me perplexed, lad. Who in Sam Hill are ye?”

I straighten up and say, “My name is Robert. Robert … Franklin,” I add hastily.

He lights the pipe, sticks it in his mouth and looks me up and down now, frowning.

“Franklin, Franklin,” he begins. “Can’t says I heard uv no Bridgeport Franklins. Yer not tryin’ to hornswoggle me, are ye, lad?”

“Uhh, no,” I said, guessing that it was a bad thing to hornswoggle someone. “I … I’m from … Canada,” I lie.

“By the horn spoons! I’da never of suspicioned it.” He removes his pipe, smiles and I get a glimpse of crooked, yellow teeth. Still smiling, he lets fly a big ball of spit that sails past me and lands somewhere on the other side of the store.

Ordinarily I’m okay with small talk. But Abbie’s waiting. Plus there’s still a lot I have to do. I walk over to the window display and pick up one of the wooden soldiers from the battlefield.

He can’t be more than three inches tall, but he’s magnificent: dressed in a navy blue greatcoat with white piping down the arms and gripping a field rifle with a long bayonet.

“How much for this one?” I ask.

Norman chuckles and blows out a ring of bluish-gray smoke, “You’ve got a good eye, lad. Picked the biggest toad in the puddle, y’did. ’Tis a shame ’e’s not for sale.”

In a single gesture, he snatches the soldier from me and returns him to the battle scene.

“If the Rebels are to have any chance at whuppin’ those Loyalist ruffians,” says Norman, “it’ll be in no small part due to the grit and unflinchin’ leadership of that man, Captain Randolph Percival.”

I root around in my pocket. I could have sworn I’d been allotted four half-dollar coins for the mission, but my fingers only find three.

I pull out a coin and place it in Norman’s hand.

“It’s unthinkable,” he continues. “The men all look up to him. They’d be left like nomads in the desert, like sailors adrift at sea. In a word, rudderless.” The hand stays open.

I fish out a second coin and place it with the first.

“Their spirit will be crushed beyon’ repair, udderly exfluncticated,” says Norman. His hand is still open, but he’s really working that pipe stem with his teeth now.

I’m starting to sweat. Only one coin left. What if I need it for later? I could easily have pocketed the soldier when he wasn’t looking. Except that would have been stealing. And, if I can avoid it, I don’t like to steal outside of missions.

So I pull out my last coin, place it with the others and his fingers curl up like the tentacles of a sea creature. Norman raises his other hand in a salute.

“
Adieu
, Captain Percival! Happy trails.” He plucks the soldier from the edge of the cliff, hastily wraps him in brown paper and tosses him to me.

“What’s taking you so long, Caleb?” Abbie says over my mindpatch.

“Just finishing up,” I answer.

Norman turns away from me for a moment, bends down and places another soldier in the empty space where Captain Percival used to be.

But a moment is all I need to tap out a sequence for 1967.

A bell jingles. I glance up and my breath catches in my throat as I recognize the person coming in through the back door: it’s my future self.

Running into one of my other selves always feels strange. The first time it happened, Abbie and I were in Paris in 1920, snatching a cat drawing by Van Gogh from the exhibition at the Grand Palais. As we were heading out, this guy who could have been my identical twin said I’d left something in there. It turned out he was right—I’d forgotten a piece of bubble wrap that I’d brought along to pack up some of the stuff. Weird, huh?

Right now, though, I’m wondering what my future self is doing here. Hopefully, it’s me returning from 1967, which is actually my plan. But what wasn’t part of my plan is seeing my future self burst into the same room as me. Couldn’t he have waited a few more seconds until I had gone? I’ve got enough to worry about without having to explain to Norman why he’s seeing double. So I give my future self my best sour look. Then the captain and I leave 1871 in a hurry.

W
hen I open my eyes, I see a boy riding a green striped zebra, a young girl on a polka-dot rhinoceros and a paunchy older guy riding a lemon yellow ostrich.

Just to be sure I’m not dreaming all this, I close my eyes and open them again. Everyone is still present and accounted for, including me alone inside a Cinderella carriage. We’re all going around and around. Staticky waltz music blares from overhead speakers.

The carousel slows and stops. I step out and breathe in the night air.

All the rides are lit up. People are everywhere; large men in white shirts with skinny ties, skinny women in pastel dresses, ticket takers wearing pillbox hats. I hear a jumble of sounds: laughter, shouts, the rush of a train. Glancing up, I see a blue and white flag with the Expo 67 symbol, sixteen stick figures arranged in a circle, fluttering in the evening breeze.

The tension in my shoulders eases a bit. I made it back.

I have a sudden vision of Abbie, still waiting for me outside Norman’s General Store. I hate leaving her like that. Maybe I should have taken my chances and told her the real reason why I went into the store. But I’m not ready.

Anyway, I’ve got a more immediate problem: how, among all the thousands of tourists here, am I ever going to find the three I’m
looking for? And then I remember Jim mentioning that they were going to go on a ride that had two pyramids.

I begin walking, keeping my eyes peeled for pyramids. People stream by me going the other way. Some scrunch their noses when they pass by, and one, a priest, actually crosses himself. I long for a pair of those jumping shoes that I saw last week in the display window of FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue. You slip them on and you can hop about twenty feet in the air without breaking a sweat. I could use a pair of them right now to escape this suffocating crowd. I glance down at my well-worn shoes. There’s a brown smudge on the outside of the left one. Horse dung, vintage 1871. No wonder I’ve been getting the evil eye.

Cutting through a family of five, I find a small patch of grass and bend down to wipe it off. I’m about to stand when I see something that makes me freeze in a half crouch.

Frank.

He’s loafing near the Lost Children booth, one foot up on a bench, casual as can be. There’s a bandage over what’s left of his right ear. My heart is beating double-time, and alarms are going off in my brain. What’s he doing here? I don’t think it’s because he likes Ferris wheels. Is his plan to snatch Zach? Then I remember his words to me in the dorm: “I never forget when someone crosses me.” And here I am about to lead him straight to Zach. I can’t let him see me. Maybe I should just leave right now. No. First I’ve got to make sure Zach is all right and that Frank isn’t watching him.