took my own mother longer.”
Despite Wald’s impatience to move on, he stayed a few weeks to help. “He must have stripped every bush for miles around for those berries. ‘I’ll get thee more,’ he said to me. ‘Trouble not.’ And will you look at this? He did. How did he know, Kenny?”
I shook my head and watched her sip the tea. For just a moment, I felt something relax in me, a thing that had been twitching and grinding like a bag filled with rocks and frogs.
I had done some good. Maybe Wald had known things would work out this way, and maybe he hadn’t. But everything ended up fitting together. Rose needed someone to tell her the future worked out, or maybe she just needed partridge berry tea for the pain. Curtis needed a friend.
But the feeling didn’t last. I hadn’t come back to plaster a wall or babysit a lonely kid. Where was Prince Harming? Where was the thing that needed doing? Up in 1977, I was due for school in a week. Curtis had a birthday in three days, and a newspaper with tomorrow’s date in 1947 was going to be found in fifty-nine years wrapped around a blackened package I could barely think about.
In the afternoon, Curtis helped me sneak a shovel from the carriage house, and we forded the creek so that I could bury my August box for Luka. In it, I had told her about my time with my dad in the fifties, my encounters with Curtis and Rose, and my discovery of keys.
Curtis was in an odd mood. He didn’t ask questions as we buried the box. A light rain started, and we retreated to his hiding place under the creek bank. Again, I ran my fingers over the initials carved in the tabletop.
I tried to interest Curtis in the plot of
“I should go into the past tonight,” he said after I had given up and just sat with him for a while watching the rain. “I know it would be strange, but I should.”
I frowned. “I thought you didn’t like visiting Rose much anymore.”
“Not to see Rose. She’s not so bad anymore, though. She’s been nicer. I meant to see my mother.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because this is when I was born.”
Part Five
One
Leave tomorrow when you’re called.
I stared at Curtis as he continued. “When I started, anyway. My birthday’s in three days, but Mother says I was hard coming. That’s what she says. ‘The boy was so hard coming, the girl almost died.’ That’s a silly way to say it, though. She wasn’t a girl when she had me.”
I half stood, bumping my head on the low ceiling. “You’re coming this soon? I mean you came … this soon? I thought she wasn’t due … I mean, she didn’t look … Oh, man, I gotta go.”
“Why?” said Curtis. “You don’t even know my mother. And it doesn’t matter. I was born. Why do anything?”
In a sense, that was true, wasn’t it? I was going to get home. Curtis was going to be born. Was there anything I could do to change anything?
The boy was so hard coming, the girl almost died.
What was her mother’s stupid plan, anyway, to just let her daughter have a baby all by herself in that half- converted barn? And me, a kid, what was I going to do? I didn’t even want to be near the birth of a baby.
I clutched my hands into fists to stop the shaking. Things weren’t supposed to sneak up on me like this. I was from the future. I could travel in time.
I wasn’t supposed to deliver a baby. Professionals were supposed to do that.
Doctors.
Nurses.
“Curtis, I need a piece of paper and a pen, and I need you to sneak me back into the house, to the mirror. Can you do it?”
He frowned, but nodded.
Five minutes later, we were in Rose’s old room. “I’ve got this figured out,” I said to him. “I’m going into the future for a few minutes. When I come back, I’ll bring help.”
My first stop was ten years up, 1937. Empty as it had been for days. I looked at my watch and left a note:
Crossing my fingers, I went into 1947.
And for the first time that year, things started working the way I thought they should.
She was there. Ten years older and eyes filled with wonder, she was there.
She wore a plain blue dress, and her hair was shorter, a little darker. She carried a tightly packed leather bag.
“You got older,” I said.
She smiled, that same warm smile from … well, last month, but ten years ago as well. “You stayed the same.”
“You came.”
She shrugged. “How could I not? You know, I never saw you again? After Peg and I—” There was a noise outside. Lilly’s head whipped around. “Kenny, that might be Peg’s father. He’s been prowling all around the whole day. I think he’s getting desperate to find her. They’ll report her missing in a day or two. We’d best go.”
I had a million questions to ask her, but she was right. Thirty years ago, Rose needed help.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get going.”
“How can this work?” Lilly said. “It’s only supposed to open up for Peggy, isn’t it?”
I grinned, happy to be the one who knew. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve got a key.”
The door to the carriage house banged open. I thrust my hand into my pocket to get the key and grabbed Lilly’s elbow.
“Wait,” she said.
I looked down the stairs. There, carrying another man over his shoulder, was John Wald. He grinned up at me.
“Well-timed, lad. I have him here, though a more tricksy rabbit has never bethump’d my wits.” He half turned and let me see the face of the man he was carrying, all tied up, the man who had shot me two months ago, still in what was left of his raincoat. He was, if anything, wilder now, but I knew at once it was him. Thick ropes bound him and a gag stopped his mouth, but he glared at me with silent, fiery hatred. It was, I was sure now, the same face as the man with the yellow tie. But there was something else. What was it?
“You caught him,” I said. “But how are you here? How did you know the right time?”
Wald smiled and touched his nose. “Auld John Wald knows many a hidden thing, Kennit. Where pass we that our tales may be expounded?”
“But wait. How is Prince Harming here? He put that mirror in water. How did he come through it? Never mind. I can’t deal with this now. We’re going back to 1917 to save Rose and the baby.”
Wald looked for the first time at Lilly. He grunted and smiled. “Lillian Huff, thou art a woman now, and fair
