“My uncle makes good pretzels,” said Adam. “He runs a bakery.”
“What’s it called?”
“The Biscuit Basket,” said Adam before he caught himself. He added, “It’s not going to be open for, uh, a while.”
Jack found this oddly funny and snorted in laughter. He helped himself to a piece of bubble gum from the newsstand, which made Charlie snarl, “Shouldn’t you be in school? It’s Tuesday.”
Jack admitted he was skipping class.
“Ya gotta stop this, Jack,” replied Charlie.
“Won’t your dad be mad?” chimed in Adam.
Jack gave him a hard look. “My dad’s gone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about? He died in the factory fire. I live with my aunt and uncle now, a few towns over.”
Adam backtracked. “The…fire?”
Jack chewed on the bubble gum, looking disappointed. “You really aren’t from the future then, are you?”
Charlie gave the boys an odd look as Adam felt himself turn pale. “Why would you say that?” Adam asked.
Jack looked away. “Just an observation.”
Adam swallowed hard. “You—you told me at the cemetery that your grandpa and his friends had fantastical ideas about time and magic…”
“Yeah. My grandpa used to study the properties of time.” Jack stopped chewing the gum as his expression grew serious. “His friends—followers—once told me there’s a high probability that time traveling exists, and that I should watch for signs. For strange events. People showing up and then disappearing, for instance.” Jack looked pointedly at Adam. “I’ve always been keeping a lookout for that kind of thing. But I didn’t believe them, not completely. Because if time traveling exists, why do bad things still happen? Shouldn’t someone be warning us each time disaster’s going to strike?”
“There’d be too many to keep track of,” grunted Charlie.
Adam said nothing. It was the very question he’d been wondering too. He held his snow globe tighter and glanced at the newspaper stand. The print date on the front page of the papers read:
AUGUST 13, 1968
Nearly a year after the candle factory burned down.
No wonder Jack seemed a little different from the first time Adam had met him. Adam had dealt with his own loss by retreating into a shell; Jack, by skipping school and acting out.
Charlie helped himself to one of his own pretzels and growled, “Your grandpa sounds like he had some interesting ideas, Jack.”
Jack shrugged. “He and his friends believed there are three pieces of time on earth—past, present, and future. And that there’s a way to control them.” He stopped talking after noticing Adam’s expression. “You okay?”
“How?” asked Adam, who was only half listening. His mind was still on the factory. It burned down a year ago.
“He said that long ago, the pieces were trapped in containers. If you were lucky enough to find one of them, you could use it to unleash that piece of time’s power.” Jack shook his head. “A lot of people thought my grandpa was cuckoo. Even my dad didn’t listen to him. They called him Elbert the Eccentric.” Jack’s grin faded as he kicked at the sidewalk. “At least he got a proper burial. The people who died at the factory…that was their grave. My dad included.”
“Candlewick’s Candles,” Charlie said with a sigh. “Horrible accident. Story made it to all the papers here. Can’t imagine the nightmare those workers went through. All those safety violations they found afterward…How’d the owner get away with all that?”
“I think he was controlling them,” answered Jack. “That’s my guess.”
Adam suddenly felt lightheaded, the way he did when a teacher called on him and he had to speak in front of the whole class.
“He was,” he said hoarsely.
“What?” asked Jack.
“Robert Baron the Third. The Gold Mold. He used his pendulum to hypnotize people. I mean, his father did, but I’m sure he did too.”
“You—you met my dad’s boss?”
Adam didn’t answer. He didn’t understand why the snow globe had brought him to this place, one year after the factory fire. How could he warn Jack now, after the fire had already happened? Nor did he understand why he met the Barons forty-five years before the fire. The visits must be connected, yet the connection wasn’t clear.
“Charlie, you got any water back there?” said Jack. “Adam looks like he’s about to pass out.”
Adam heard Charlie mutter something about annoying kids driving him out of business, which made Jack laugh and say, “Charlie, you’ll be here forever.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. “Probably.” He gave Adam a look of concern before disappearing to rummage behind the window. Jack stood on his tiptoes and leaned over the sill to help.
Meanwhile, Adam started to put down the snow globe and half-eaten pretzel so he could rub his eyes. As he did so, the snow globe tilted, and the snowflake confetti whirled inside the glass.
“Wait!” he shouted, realizing too late that the cemetery inside the glass had disappeared.
The next moment, he was standing in his bedroom again.
He kept shaking the snow globe. “Take me back!” he cried in exasperation.
His exclamation woke his uncle. “Adam?” called Uncle Henry in a groggy voice from the living room. “What’s going on?”
Adam noticed the time on his bedside clock. It was almost midnight, the same time he had left.
“Nothing,” he answered. “Just a bad dream is all.”
On Friday after school, Adam headed for the subway.
Ever since Adam moved to his uncle’s place from the suburbs after his parents died, Uncle Henry had reminded him about the rules of traveling alone in the city:
1. Say where you’re going and when you’ll be home.
2. Don’t talk to strangers.
3. If you ever feel unsafe, go into the nearest store and find a trusted adult.
4. Avoid unlit areas.
Now that Adam was twelve (a perfectly adequate age, despite what Daisy’s mother thought), he was venturing to more places on his own, though Uncle Henry preferred him to stay within twenty blocks of home. Anywhere north of Times Square or across a river still worried his uncle, as it was “too far.” So Adam hadn’t bothered much with
