SIXTEEN

I WOKE UP when Henley wrapped his arms around me and hugged me close from his side of the bed.

It was dark in my bedroom in Miss Hatfield’s house because we had lowered all the thick blinds before going to bed, but I was sure it was already morning.

Henley’s touch still made my breath catch. I hoped he didn’t notice. He would make some joke about it. I knew Henley well—his thoughts, his words, his entire mind, really—but his touch was foreign. In the dark, if I tried really hard, I could almost make myself believe this was the same Henley I had known all those years ago in 1904. I could clearly imagine his blue eyes and the way his dark hair flopped into them at times. In the dark, it was real. I could make it real with my imagination.

“Henley . . .”

“I’m sorry. Did I wake you?” he asked.

I assured him he hadn’t.

“Then was it that nightmare again?” He was referring to the dream I’d had once before of Miss Hatfield dying.

I turned to face him in the dark and ran my fingers through his hair.

“I wish I could stop it,” he said. I knew he was talking of my nightmares.

“I know.” I placed my hand on top of his, feeling how much larger they were than my own.

“It’s time to get up and get going.” He pulled away from me and got up from bed.

I sat up in the dark. “Can you even see where you’re going? You don’t know the house well.”

“I think I’ll manage. Don’t worry about me.”

But I did worry about him. Henley had changed—whether he knew it or not—since the days when he had been ignorant of immortality and since his time in the turn of the century. New York had changed without him. He hadn’t seen much of the city yet, but he was bound to see this.

“Let me open the blinds,” he said, moving toward the window. There was a flurry of dust as he did so.

As I suspected, it was already bright outside and sunlight streamed in, momentarily blinding us.

“The first sunlight of the day is always dazzling, isn’t it?”

“It always is . . . I’m just going to grab a glass of water,” Henley said.

I listened as his footsteps pattered away before I remembered we wouldn’t have running water in the house. Henley would notice quickly enough.

“Rebecca!” He sounded urgent. Henley’s voice didn’t sound like it was calling me to come to him. It sounded like a warning.

I shot up out of bed just as Henley burst through the bedroom door.

“He’s found us.”

“The killer?” I asked, scanning his face.

“Juana. Whoever it is. They’ve found us.”

I slowly walked past him into the kitchen. I didn’t know what I would find.

In the middle of the room was a dead bird sitting in a pool of its own blood. It was a large bird, almost the size of a small human child. But its feathers were so matted, I couldn’t tell what kind of bird it was until I got closer.

“A peacock.”

“And it also had its head severed,” Henley said.

“Is it a warning of some sort?” I asked. “A sign that he’s watching? I don’t know what he could want . . .”

“The peacock’s often shown as the symbol for eternal life,” Henley said.

“Eternal life cut short,” I said, remembering what Henley had said when he had seen the snake in the hostel room. “He’s followed us to New York.”

“I’ll take care of this.” Henley pushed me out of the room, and I stumbled out.

I sat there on the edge of the bed until Henley came back.

“We have things to do today,” he said.

I assumed he meant buying plane tickets and reserving the hotel. Everything we needed to get out of here.

“There are things I would like to do. Need to do.” Henley’s lips were in a grim line.

“What things?”

“Places I need to go,” Henley said. “I’d like to go to the cemetery. I’d like to see my home—my former home.”

“Do you really need to?”

I didn’t know what seeing those places would do to him. This was different from meeting descendants you shared a last name with but didn’t actually know. Henley would see that his home wasn’t his home anymore. It would feel like he didn’t have a place to call home. Like the world forgot him. I didn’t want to see him get hurt.

“Yes.”

I got out of bed slowly. “Well, then . . .”

I found a washed pair of jeans and a clean, comfortable T-shirt in my closet, untouched for ages. I put them on, sorry I didn’t have any clean men’s clothing for Henley to change into.

I had a bit of time to throw out the spoiled food in the fridge. Since the food was about three years old, it had all but rotted to a paste covering the fridge shelves. I couldn’t even tell what each food used to be. Luckily, the fridge had also dried the rotted food, so the smell was contained. After cleaning up, I made sure the pantry had enough nonperishable food to sustain us for a day or two. Henley tried to wash up, but he soon found the water was turned off. I had forgotten to tell him that the bills hadn’t been paid.

He met me downstairs with the backpack slung over one of his shoulders. We didn’t talk about the peacock.

Henley didn’t ask me if I was ready to go. He just looked at me. I didn’t say anything either. We left the house and started walking.

I knew the way to the cemetery from Miss Hatfield’s house by heart. It was a half-hour walk, but it went by quickly. I struggled to keep up with Henley’s pace. I knew we were getting closer when we passed St. Paul’s Cathedral and the mob of tourists always parked around it.

I didn’t know what Henley was trying to get out of this visit. But I hoped I could do my best to support him.

“Where is it?” Henley asked, as we stepped through the gate.

I wordlessly led him down the one lone path. I didn’t have to count the rows of headstones to know where to turn. My legs remembered.

I stood silently in front of a grave that was all too familiar.

Henley drew a shaky breath, but he wasn’t looking at the grave I stood next to. He was staring at the one next to it.

Eliza P. Beauford, Loving Wife and Daughter.

Henley made no move to talk to me.

I remembered the last time I had been here in this cemetery. I had been gazing at Henley’s gravestone, and I had realized I knew nothing about this man I had fallen in love with. I had seen his name etched into the tombstone: Henley A. Beauford, but I hadn’t even known what the “A” stood for.

But now I knew. Ainsley. A little old-fashioned—to be expected—but a good middle name nonetheless.

“I had to pay my respects,” Henley said suddenly. “You understand.”

I told him that I did, carefully standing in front of his grave, blocking it from his sight.

“W-what are you . . . ?” Henley trailed off when he saw his own grave.

I didn’t want him to see it. I didn’t know what it would do to him. I didn’t know if he was ready. If anyone would ever be ready to see their own grave.

Finally, I couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “Say something.”

“What’s there to say?” He nudged me aside to get a better look at the tombstone.

A few more minutes went by.

“So that’s what they chose to put on my tombstone?” he said.

It might have been a funny moment, if it hadn’t been a tombstone we were looking at and if we hadn’t been talking about Henley dying.

“I wonder who chose the words,” Henley said. “Eliza wasn’t there anymore. It’s not like we had any children to take on the burden of making arrangements . . . It was probably a business acquaintance, maybe helped by some of the household staff.”

Henley stood there a moment longer in silence. I put my arm around him, not knowing what else to do.

“Are you ready to go now?” I said quietly.

Henley nodded slowly. “I’d like to see my—the house.”

“If you want.”

We walked from the cemetery to the Beaufords’ city residence. I led the way for the first few minutes, but once we entered the historic district with all the old buildings, Henley knew exactly where we were and he led the way.

I hadn’t been back to Henley’s city home in modern times. Even for me—when I thought I had lost Henley for good—it was too painful. It didn’t hold many memories for me, since Henley and I had spent most of our time at the country house. But it was still linked to Henley and that whole other life I had left behind.

Now, I didn’t even know if the building was still standing. Maybe they had knocked it down decades ago to replace it with some shiny new skyscraper or apartment complex? I wanted to prepare Henley for the worst, but I didn’t know how or what to tell him.

As we reached the street it was on, Henley started running.

That made me run too, but I couldn’t run fast enough, so Henley shot ahead of me. I saw him stop on the sidewalk far ahead. He had probably found the location. But was the building still there?

When I caught up, I saw what had made him stop.

Yes, the building was there. But more than that, the building—Henley’s house—looked exactly as it had in 1904.

There were no telephone wires or TV satellite dishes to mar the facade. The bricks were the same. The front steps had the same weathered look to them as they had when Henley’s father was still trudging up them.

The door was slightly ajar.

I knew I shouldn’t raise the possibility, but I couldn’t help myself. “Do you want to see inside?”

I climbed the first two steps to the front door.

At first, Henley didn’t budge from his spot on the sidewalk, but he soon followed me. He was the one to push open the door.

What we saw was not what we expected. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Henley’s eyes had shown no emotion when he first laid eyes on Eliza’s grave. They had shown no emotion when he saw his own grave. They hadn’t even changed when he saw the outside of his former house. But now, they misted over.

We stood at the door, hand in hand, looking upon rows and rows of white plastic desks, with people seated in matching plastic chairs at each one. The house had been completely gutted. It was all one floor, one big room with a high ceiling. There was linoleum on the floor. The walls were painted over in white. None of the grandeur of the previous age remained.

Henley broke free of my grip, went back out of the door, and started walking down the street the way we had come.

“Excuse me,” I said to the closest person I found. “Could you tell me what this is?”

“This office? Why it’s Katara Designs.”

Seeing the blank look on my face, she elaborated. “We design stationery and fabric prints?”

“Um . . . Well, thank you.”

I walked out the door and caught up to Henley.

“We should get going to a library or someplace we can find a usable computer,” he said without looking at me.

“Don’t you need a moment? We could take the rest of the afternoon—”

“I’m fine.”

I didn’t argue with him.

We walked back to Miss Hatfield’s for me to grab my laptop. It was something Miss Hatfield had insisted I get to “assimilate into the technological era.” I grabbed it quickly, and we walked to the nearest Starbucks, since that was the first place I could think of with internet.

We sat down at an out-of-the-way table.

I handed Henley a Visa gift card. Maybe we could use all of these before we started using the credit card. We still had quite a few left. “Could you go in and buy a drink while I set up the computer? We should make a purchase if we’re going to stay here and use their internet.”

“What kind of drink do you want?” Henley looked at the menu on the wall. “It looks like they have a lot of options.”

“Anything is fine. We can share it.”

I opened my laptop and plugged the charger into the wall. It took a few minutes for the laptop to boot up since it had been dead for who knew how long.

Once I had logged on to the internet, I pulled up the browser and looked up plane tickets to Florida first.

I had thought we’d have to fly into Miami and then somehow take a taxi all the way to the Keys, but there was a connecting flight from Miami to the Florida Keys Marathon Airport. And though they were expensive, since I was looking at flights that left tomorrow, it was still only about three hundred dollars per person—nothing compared to the international flight we had taken.

Henley came back with an iced coffee just as I was selecting the plane tickets.

“We can leave tomorrow,” I told him.

I took the backpack from him and took out the credit card.

He sat down. “What time?”

“Um . . . 11:20 in the morning is when the flight leaves, and we’d land at 5:34 p.m., according to this.”

A few clicks and I bought the tickets. I didn’t have a printer—Miss Hatfield had never bought one—so I couldn’t print out the tickets ahead of time like I had before, but that was a minor issue. They could print them out for us when we checked in. Another minor thing was that I couldn’t get seats together, since the tickets were so last minute.

“Are you okay with that?” I asked Henley.

“I’m fine. It’s not my first flight anymore, and as I learned from the last one, I’ll be sleeping through most of it anyway.”

I giggled.

“Now we can book the hotel . . .” I pulled up the website of the resort we had already settled on and got out the phone. There was a contact number at the bottom of the page.

“Why don’t I make the call?” Henley pushed the iced coffee toward me. “And you can drink this before it melts in this heat.”

I passed him the phone, taking a long sip of the sweet drink. Whatever Henley had chosen tasted more like sugar than coffee.

“How many nights am I asking for?”

“Um . . . two weeks,” I said. “Actually, why don’t we make it longer? Four weeks. Money isn’t an issue anymore.”

Henley dialed the number on the screen.

“Hello? Yes, I’d like to make a reservation.”

Something told me that we wouldn’t have trouble finding a room last minute at the Creekside Pointe Resort. The Florida Keys didn’t look like a place you’d take the time and expense to travel to only to stay at the cheapest place. Also, Islamorada wasn’t exactly the hottest spot on the Keys.

“Yes, four weeks, please. Two adults. Starting tomorrow night. Yes, that would be fine,” Henley said. “Under the name Beauford. B-E-A-U-F-O-R-D. Yes, that’s ‘B’ as in ‘baby.’”

While Henley was on the phone, I used the laptop to order a few gallons of water to the house. We needed something to drink and clean up with—not to mention also flush the toilet with. I remembered to add a few candles as well—it was a bit of a hindrance not having electricity. I drank half the coffee waiting for Henley to finish the call.

“Yes, thank you. Thank you very much.” He hung up and tossed the phone back into the backpack. “Portable phones are so useful.”

“So is express same-day shipping.” I grinned, sliding him back the remainder of the coffee.

He took a sip. “My God, that’s sweet.”

But that didn’t stop him from continuing to drink it.

“I know you probably don’t want to talk about it,” I started. “But are you all right? With all that happened earlier at your house, I mean.”

There was a pause.

“I suppose I’m not. I-it took me off guard . . . It was a house but not a home . . .” Henley fiddled with the straw in the drink. “I can’t expect myself to be all right. I just need time. I’ll be all right soon.”

That was an answer I could take.

Henley finished up the coffee, and we collected the laptop and charger before heading back to Miss Hatfield’s.

This time we weren’t in a rush, and Henley had time to walk through the house.

“Who are all these people?” Henley pointed to the black-and-white photographs that dotted one of the walls of the hallway.

I shrugged. “I imagine some of these women must be the previous Miss Hatfields—or at least that’s what I’ve told myself. And I guess the other people are former family and friends.”

Henley moved past the kitchen wall, which still had the faded mark where the clock had once hung. It had probably been there for years. The sunlight from the kitchen windows had imprinted a ring around its former position.

Henley moved back down the hallway, examining everything from the uneven hardwood floors to the dust covers hung over the banister of the staircase.

He came to the parlor and finally sat down on the pea-green-colored couch.

“Shouldn’t we be preparing for Florida somehow?” he said.

“We bought the tickets and made the hotel reservation. What more is there to do other than wait?”

“Then we should prepare for our life afterward.”

Henley sounded very sure that there would be an “afterward.” For me, my brain couldn’t process the thought of a time after this trip to Florida and after the killer was gone. In my head, there was no afterward.

“You know, we’ll get through this,” Henley said, hearing my silence.

I couldn’t tell him that I thought he was wrong. “What do you propose we do?”

“Well, after we’re both immortal, we’ll need to keep traveling in time, right? To retain our sanity and survive?” He spoke about it so lightly. “And you said Miss—my mother—kept many things that would come in handy around the house. So surely she has period clothing you might be able to take?”

“She does.” I remembered the first outfit she had dressed me in to pass for Mr. Beauford’s niece in 1904. “But even if I take a dress, if I go too far backward in time, the dress wouldn’t exist.”

“So what exactly is the problem?” Henley spread his arms out on the back of the couch. “Just get a really old dress. The oldest you can find. Chances are it won’t disappear on you if it’s old enough. Then you’ll have something to wear right away, instead of ‘borrowing’ clothing in each time period.”

Henley had a point. It would be nice to not have to appear naked in each time period I traveled to because the clothing I wore didn’t exist yet.

I started up the stairs.

“Are you coming?” I asked.

“To watch you play dress-up? I think I’m fine.” Henley talked over his shoulder at me from his spot on the couch in the parlor. “Just pick an old dress and pack it into the backpack. Make sure it’s something that’ll fit in.”

“So nothing too poufy?” I said, hoping to make him laugh.

“Nothing too poufy . . . I just want to take some time to myself.”

I went upstairs to the room where Miss Hatfield kept all the chests filled with clothing. They were all women’s clothing and I couldn’t find anything for Henley, but I did find a dress that looked old enough to be from Tudor times. It wasn’t as flamboyant as the dresses I had worn in 1527. It was rather plain, made of a linen-like material, with no jewels encrusted on it. Though it seemed the dress had once been a whitish color, the fabric had yellowed with age. It looked like the oldest dress in the chests I had opened. It would have to do.

The dress had been packed with a matching slip and undergarments that looked like petticoats and garter-like pieces. I knew it wouldn’t all fit into the backpack, since we had other things to carry, so I only took the dress and the slip.

It was strange to be in Miss Hatfield’s house without her, but it was nice to have Henley there to share the lonely house. In a way, it was like we were going back to our roots before one last great adventure.