Chapter 22

 

 

Vic threw herself on her bed and closed her eyes. She let the exhaustion of last night take her down into a deep slumber. Noah was safe. Nothing else mattered.

She woke up in the late afternoon but stayed in bed while she thought over everything that had happened yesterday. Blood still stained her hand and her sleeve where she’d stabbed that man, but she couldn’t regret killing him. She’d accomplished her aim. She’d saved Noah’s life.

She sat up and smoothed her smudged dress. Noah was free, but she was a prisoner. If Boyd had his way, he would torture her in Noah’s place. She never doubted that. He might use different techniques on her. Heaven only knew what tricks he had up his sleeve.

Well, dreading it wouldn’t help anything. Maybe she could use the same ingenuity to free herself too. She paced around the room and looked out the window.

Her room afforded a perfect view of the main street. People wearing Gunn tartans bustled all over the town. She’d been in Scotland long enough to recognize it now. So much for getting out of here. She couldn’t rely on anyone in this crazy town to help her against a Gunn.

She wandered over to the door and rattled the latch. Yep, it was locked, all right. She went back to the bed and sat down. She had to think. She had to use the brain God gave her and come up with a way out of here. She glanced around, but only the bare room surrounded her. Boyd wouldn’t put her in a room containing anything that could help her escape.

All at once, she sat bolt upright. Of course! Why didn’t I think of that before?

She dropped on her knees by the bed and burrowed under the bed skirts. She fished out her handbag and the pile of clothes she was wearing when she’d first shown up in Orkney. She turned her bag upside down on the bed and pawed through the contents. Her wallet, her phone, her hairbrush, her makeup kit—they were all still there, right where she’d left them. She rummaged through everything until she found a lone paperclip buried in the bottom of her bag.

She cut a little jig of triumph right there on the carpet. Eat that, Boyd! She raced to the door and got to work. She’d only ever seen anybody jimmy a lock with a paperclip in movies, but what the hell did she have to lose? She bent it into a thin, straight wire and slotted it into the keyhole. She jiggled it around for an hour without success and then sank back on her heels. Maybe copying the movies wasn’t the greatest idea she’d ever had.

Voices on the other side of the door drew her attention. She tried to peer through the keyhole as she listened to what sounded like men trooping down the landing. Curiosity and excitement gave her new strength, so she returned to work. She pushed the paperclip into the keyhole and dug around in a flurry of random activity when, out of nowhere, the lock clicked. She held her breath, hardly daring to move for fear someone might have heard her. Slowly but surely, she depressed the door handle and cracked it open just enough to peek out.

Kilted men milled around the landing. She pressed her eye to the opening and watched them carry a bunch of wooden boxes and cartons into a room across the hall. Then they jostled and pushed each other until they’d retreated out of her sight.

Silence descended over the Guild House, all except Vic’s heartbeat pounding in her ears. The door wasn’t locked anymore. She could get out, but how? Where could she go? She couldn’t steal a ship and sail across the channel like Noah. She was trapped on this island.

She waited for what seemed like eons, but no one came back. She couldn’t hear a single voice in the whole house. She eased the door another inch wider. Still nothing. She climbed to her feet and swung it the rest of the way open.

The landing spread out before her. The stairs dropped away a few feet down the landing. She could leave whenever she wanted, but where would she go?

She glided out, looking both ways. Here she was, walking around unfettered. While she tried to make up her mind what to do, she glanced into the room across the hall. Piles of crates and boxes sat stacked up in front of the bed. Wisps of straw stuck out of them, and she caught sight of a few books. She took a step closer and then crossed the threshold into the room, but she was still too far away to read the bindings. She put out her hand to pick up one of the books when footsteps thundered up the stairs behind her. Voices shouted and called up and down the landing. She didn’t have time to retreat to her own room, so she ducked behind the door.

Her heart thumped in her neck, and she trembled in every limb as a dozen men poured into the room. She tried to pull the door farther open to hide herself from them, but she couldn’t think through the terror clouding her thoughts.

The men laughed and joked, slapping each other on the back and shoving playfully out of the room. Just a few more seconds, and she would be all clear to hightail it out of this place for good.

At the last second before they’d all left, one of the men picked something out of the topmost crate. He held it aloft for the others to see. “What do ye make of all this tripe? He must have been collecting these from all over the world. What do ye suppose is in them?”

“Who kens?” one of his companions returned. “It doesnae mean aught to us. Put it back before the Master catches ye meddling with it.”

Vic plastered herself against the wall but couldn’t have moved if she tried. She stared at the item in the man’s hand, and her blood ran cold. It was a copy of Time magazine with a picture of Ronald Reagan on the cover.

For a brief instant, she experienced a dizzying spell of vertigo. Past and present got all muddled up in her brain. Where was she? What was she doing here? Was she in the past or was she in the present? Past and present ceased to hold any meaning for her.

Then the man tossed the magazine into the crate, and the last three men filed out of the room. Their heels vibrated through the floor and up Vic’s legs. She remained hidden behind the door far longer than she should have, but when they didn’t return, she stole out to take a peek.

She eyed the stack of boxes. Was it real? Had she only imagined that picture of Reagan with the bright red letters emblazoned above his head. Time. Where had it come from? It could only have come from one place, and that was the future. Someone brought that magazine here from Vic’s own time. Was she the only person in this house who understood what it meant?

Her instincts told her to run back to her own room and lock herself in, but she always was way too curious for her own boots. She sidled closer until she stared straight down at Reagan’s smiling face. The date at the top read, November 19, 1984. Her mind refused to comprehend how that magazine could have gotten here, to Orkney, in 1740. She scanned the other books in the boxes around her but couldn’t make sense of them, either.

A Brief History of Micronesian Culture from the Jurassic Era to the Present.

The Cold War and its Discontents.

Australian Aboriginal Dialects.

Vic shook her head, but that did nothing to clear her thoughts. Who did these books belong to? How did they get here?

Then she spotted a book with no printing on the cover at all. Without thinking, she picked it up. It fell open to a bunch of loose scraps with notes scribbled on them, tucked into the binding. She rifled the pages. She had no idea what she was looking for beyond some clue to the identity of the magazine’s owner. Whoever he was, he must have traveled back and forth in time quite a lot. Her eye fell on a particular note stuffed into the book. The words brandywine tundra beetle shot into her brain. She fumbled to find the page, and when she did, she couldn’t believe her eyes.

Brandywine tundra beetle—Cotinus nitida.

Vic frowned. That was impossible. It couldn’t be. Her thoughts churned all over the place. Just then, a door slammed far away in a different part of the house. She jumped out of her skin and scampered back to her own room, still holding the book.

She shut the door as well as she could without slamming it and locked herself in with the paperclip. She raced over to the bed and snatched her phone off the pile of stuff she’d dumped out of her handbag. She kept repeating the same manic prayer in her head. “Please, God, please let there be enough power. Please, oh please, please, please.”

She depressed the power button, and the screen flickered on. Her hands shook, waiting for the thing to blink awake after lying unused for so long. When the screen lit up, the battery icon read 30%. She fought to breathe. The home screen appeared. Vic tensed every muscle, counting the seconds until the signal came through. Finally, a window popped up with the message: No Internet Connection.

No shit, Sherlock. She punched the Notes icon and every document she’d saved came into view. Yes! There it was. The ELISA assay they’d conducted on the insect they thought might be the brandywine tundra beetle Mila emailed her. She touched the saved document and scrolled down to the results.

Vic’s gaze skipped down the sheet, reading the results in a heartbeat. No wonder they made no sense when she’d first seen them. That entomologist Ree consulted about the beetle had steered them to the wrong insect.

Insane glee bubbled out of her soul, and she let out an involuntary burst of laughter before swallowing it down. Of course! Now that she knew the identity of the beetle, she had to get this information back to San Francisco. She had to tell Ree and Ned the truth. They would never make the Cipher’s Kiss without this.

She turned her attention back to the book. What other nuggets of useful information remained hidden in its pages? She flipped to the front. Inside the binding, on the first leaf, someone had written in beautiful scrolling copperplate handwriting, Nikolai Wainwright.

The name meant nothing to her, but this guy sure knew his stuff. He must have been quite the time traveler. He’d collected useful information from all over the world and from multiple time periods.

She sat down on the bed to study the whole book. Maybe some other books in that room across the hall contained information she could take back. She spread it on her lap as a scraping sound jerked her out of her elation. She barely stuffed the book into her handbag before the door opened.

At the sight of her visitor, she jumped to her feet and hurtled across the room. “Malcolm!”