Timekeeper Read online

  Her panicky thoughts were interrupted by the middle-aged housekeeper, Annaleigh, striding into the room.

  “Hey, Annaleigh.”

  Annaleigh’s pale blue eyes peered at her closely. “Are you all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Maybe I have.

  “Oh—I’m fine.” As she spoke, Michele realized that all day she’d been reassuring different people that she was okay. What was happening to her? She took a deep breath, unnerved as ever, but determined to at least fake normalcy until it felt real. “How’s everything over here?”

  “All right, I suppose. I noticed your grandmother having trouble with her breathing this afternoon. She and your grandfather didn’t seem to think anything of it, but I encouraged him to take her to the doctor. They just left ten minutes ago.”

  Michele swallowed hard. “Do you think she’s going to be okay?”

  “Of course,” Annaleigh said soothingly. “I only suggested the doctor visit to make sure.”

  Michele nodded hopefully. For all the issues she’d had with her grandparents upon moving into Windsor Mansion, she had grown to love them. They were her only family in the world, and though she knew they were getting older, she couldn’t imagine ever losing them.

  “They instructed me to make sure you stay put until they get back,” Annaleigh told her with a wry smile. “They were quite insistent. I hope you don’t have plans to go anywhere.”

  “No plans,” Michele told her. “They picked a good day to have me on lockdown.” She felt a flicker of worry that her grandparents’ request might have something to do with her grandmother’s health, but she pushed the thought away, reminding herself of the many other overprotective moments she’d experienced with Walter and Dorothy since moving in.

  Michele clambered up the curving, red-carpeted marble staircase to her room. When she reached the third floor, she briefly leaned over the railing and looked down at the lavish foyer she had just come from, called the Grand Hall. Designed like an indoor open piazza, the Grand Hall was the focal point of the mansion. Marble columns soared up to the gilded, hand-painted ceilings, and plush chaise lounges and armchairs surrounded a large, carved fireplace. Portraits by the masters graced the walls, while a bronze statue and glittering fountain stood beneath the grand staircase. Those who entered the mansion usually drew a gasp at their first sight of the Hall, and even after living there for two months Michele still felt the same sense of awe. Yet she considered her bedroom the most special place in the mansion, having belonged to her mother and a century of Windsor daughters before her.

  She’d been shocked by the suite at first, unable to imagine her low-key mom living in this lilac-and-white bedroom fit for a princess, with its delicate eighteenth-century French furnishings, full-size dressing room, marble bathroom, and sitting room large enough to throw a party in. But when she discovered the key from her father and traveled back in time, she met three formidable Windsor daughters from the past who showed Michele that their name stood for something far more important than money or privilege. There was a passion and strength passed down through the Windsor girls, a desire to break past the constraints that bound them, and Michele had watched as they fought for their dreams and used their positions and fortune for good. While she’d grown up ashamed of her secret family identity, she now looked upon the portraits of the bedroom’s past inhabitants with a surge of pride.

  Closing the bedroom door behind her, Michele opened the top drawer of her white mahogany desk, and pulled out a small box. Though she knew its contents by heart, she still felt a flutter of anticipation upon lifting the lid.

  Nestled carefully inside the box were pieces of a man’s life. An October 1910 newspaper clipping from the society pages of the New York Times, which Michele had scanned from the public library, gave a breathless account of the Windsors’ Halloween Ball—the setting where she and Philip had first met. Grainy black-and-white photographs of the ball’s most eminent guests were printed alongside the article, and Michele felt her heart constrict whenever she looked at the image of eighteen-year-old Philip Walker. Despite the poor quality, she could still make out his expression. He was looking off into the distance, his gaze intent. There was something beyond the camera that held his full attention, and Michele knew every time she looked at the photo that she was the one he was gazing at.

  Underneath the newspaper clipping was Philip’s handwritten sheet music for one of the songs he and Michele wrote together in 1910, “Bring The Colors Back.” She had written the lyrics and he had composed the music, the two of them falling in love through a composition that expressed to each other what mere words couldn’t.

  At the bottom of the box were remnants of Philip’s later life under the alias of Phoenix Warren, the famous composer and pianist of the mid-twentieth century. A photo from a 1940 back issue of Life magazine showed him looking debonair in his middle age, holding up a gold record plaque for his symphony Michele—the song that had given Marion Windsor the perfect name for her daughter. Michele still felt goose bumps rise on her neck whenever she thought about it.

  The last item in the box was his obituary from December 12, 1992. He had lived a long, fulfilling life, just as he’d promised Michele when they last met. But he had never married, and Michele couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d spent the rest of his days looking for her. Had his search finally brought him here? Or was this new Philip Walker just a descendant?

  As Michele placed the lid back on the box, she thought there might be one person who had the answers to all this: her father, the very reason she was able to time travel. But Irving Henry was lost in the past, unaware of her existence.

  I can go back in time, Michele reminded herself. I can find him. The thought both thrilled and terrified her. He was the most important person from her past. She would have to be ready.

  When the clock struck six, signaling dinner hour at the Windsor Mansion, Michele was still immersed in her online search for any information she could find on the present-day Philip Walker. While most people nowadays had practically their entire lives laid out online for the world to see, Philip was just as elusive on the Internet as he was in person. She couldn’t find him on any social-networking sites, and with one of the most common surnames in the country, it took hours to weed through all the search results leading to other Philips. She got up from her desk with a frustrated sigh just as her cell phone beeped with a text message. Caissie’s name popped up on the screen.

  What if he’s Philip’s great-great-nephew or something? That would explain the resemblance, and why the ring was passed down to him, the message read.

  But Philip’s family believed he died in the 1920s. He wouldn’t have just shown up and handed the ring to one of them, Michele thought. There was no explanation—only the undeniable fact that the eyes she’d looked into today were the very same she’d gazed into in 1910.

  She slowly made her way to the dining room, lost in her thoughts, but when she stepped in and saw her grandparents, her mind was jerked back to the present. It was clear that something was wrong.

  Michele had never before seen her grandparents slouch. Their razor-straight, proud posture was a mark of regal upbringing and seemed to announce their identities whenever they entered a room. But tonight, as Michele stood in the doorway of the marble-pillared dining room, she found Walter and Dorothy wearily hunched over in their seats, Dorothy trembling while Walter murmured something in her ear.

  “Is everything okay?” Michele asked, though she was afraid she knew the answer to the question. “What did the doctor say?”

  The two of them looked up, both attempting to smooth their expressions into a pretense of calm.

  “My health is fine,” Dorothy said shakily. “It was nerves. We only went to the doctor to appease Annaleigh. She is very kind, the way she fusses over us.”

  “What were you nervous about?” Michele asked, taking her seat across from them at the long oak dining table. Before they had a chance to ans
wer, the kitchen maid, Martha, entered, carrying a steaming tureen of soup. That was when Michele saw the photo album resting between her grandparents, and she stifled a gasp.

  Since the day she’d moved in with them, Michele had sensed that Walter and Dorothy were hiding something from her. The burden of their secrets shadowed their faces whenever they looked at Michele and stilted all their conversations. She gleaned her first major clue about what they were hiding the night she found this same antique Windsor photo album in the library, opened to a black-and-white snapshot of Irving Henry—depicting him as the family’s lawyer circa 1900. Her grandparents’ flustered reaction at finding Michele with the photo album confirmed her suspicions that they’d known—and kept hidden—her father’s true identity as a time traveler from the past. In recent days, Michele had found herself waiting for the right time to tell her grandparents that she too knew the truth … but so far, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to speak the words. She was afraid to crack the shell of their secrets, afraid of what they might do when they learned that she was a time traveler too.

  Michele gazed at the worn leather cover of the album, engraved with the words Windsor Family History, 1880–1910. She had only ever seen the one picture of her father in the book, but it struck her now that there might be more, and she felt her pulse quicken at the thought. As Martha left, her grandfather cleared his throat nervously.

  “We have something to tell you.”

  Michele held her breath as she looked up at them.

  “Are you wearing it?” Dorothy asked suddenly, her voice oddly high-pitched.

  “W-wearing what?”

  “The key!”

  Michele stared at her grandmother in incredulous silence.

  “She knows you have it—she knows what you are—and she’ll stop at nothing to destroy you. You’re not safe, not so long as you’re anything like him—but you can’t let the key out of your sight! It might be your only protection.”

  Chills ran down Michele’s spine, and she found she couldn’t speak. For a moment the only sounds in the room were the short gasps of Dorothy’s panicked breathing.

  “I’m not safe from who?” Michele whispered.

  Dorothy doubled over in sobs at the question. Michele shrank back at the alarming sight, her heart racing with panic.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” she asked frantically.

  Walter pushed out of his chair and leaned over Dorothy, rubbing her back. “You’re okay, honey.… I t’s going to be okay.” He turned back to Michele, his expression tortured. “This has driven your grandmother mad for more than seventeen years. I had hoped it was over, that we would never have to discuss it with you. But I’m afraid we can’t keep you in the dark anymore.”

  “You’re not safe!” Dorothy wailed.

  Frozen in place, Michele watched her refined grandmother lose all composure. The sight was more terrifying than any words could have been.

  “Why don’t you go up to bed and let me talk to Michele,” Walter suggested quietly. “You’ll make yourself sick worrying like this. Try to get some rest.”

  “No.” Dorothy took a deep breath. Though she was still trembling, her eyes red, she seemed to regain a bit of control. “I need to be here.”

  “Please just tell me what’s going on,” Michele pleaded, her voice strangled. “At this point I can only imagine the worst.”

  Walter nodded slowly, and Michele braced herself for what was to come.

  “About a month ago, you were looking at a photo of Irving Henry in this album,” he said. “We told you he was no one important, just the family lawyer in the old days—but we lied. We had to. We thought we were protecting you.”

  “I knew it,” Michele whispered. “You knew who he really was all along, didn’t you?”

  “How did you find out about him?” Walter asked sharply. “We always thought Marion never knew.”

  “She didn’t. It’s a long story, but I figured it out when—when I found this,” she said, clutching her key necklace. “He’d left it behind for Mom, but she never realized what it was, and she just kept it in her safe at the bank all these years. I found it after she died.” Michele lifted the key out from under her shirt. Its reveal had a physical effect on her grandparents. All the color drained from Walter’s face, and Dorothy gripped both arms of the chair, struggling to breathe normally.

  “Until today, we always wondered and worried that you might be like him. But we never knew for sure,” Walter said, his expression a mix of both fear and amazement. “Have you—have you seen him?”

  “Once,” Michele admitted. “For a split second … in 1925. But we didn’t speak, and I was sent back to my time right away.” She almost added that she had also been at her father’s funeral in 1944, and had seen her grandfather as a little boy, but she had a feeling that information might send them both over the edge.

  Walter closed his eyes, trying to collect himself. He then reached over and opened the photo album to a new page. “This is your father, at the same age he was when we first met him—when he began dating Marion.”

  Michele leaned over the photograph, hungry for a look at the father she had never known. She felt her heart clench as she gazed at his picture. Irving Henry was the epitome of boyish good looks and charm, grinning in front of a Christmas tree in the Grand Hall. He had wavy hair and a mustache, which made him look even more like the quintessential Victorian gentleman. But Michele was most struck by the similarities she could see between his face and her own, despite the crude quality of the aged photograph, dated Christmas 1887.

  “I got my dimples from him,” she whispered. “I have his nose. And … we have the same smile.”

  “It caught us off guard when we first saw you,” Dorothy said quietly. “Of course you look like your mother … but you’re so much like him too.”

  Michele pored over the snapshot, trying to memorize his face.

  “Irving was born and raised in this house, with the servants,” Walter divulged. “He was the butler’s son, and even after his father, Byron, died and he went away to school, he returned to Windsor Mansion on holidays. While it was certainly unusual in those days for the staff to befriend the family they served, the butler was the highest-ranked position in the household, so the Windsors respected Byron. And his son, Irving, grew up with the daughter of the house—Rebecca.” Walter turned the page, his expression hardening. “As I heard from the few relatives who knew her back then, she was always a strange girl who no one liked. It seems she and your father, however, were once very close.”

  Michele peered at the photo Walter was eyeing so grimly and covered her mouth with her hands in disbelief.

  The image revealed a girl with dark, soulless eyes, who looked neither young nor old. She was standing in the drawing room of the Windsor Mansion, wearing a long satin dress with a pronounced bustle, her head turned to the side. An upswept pile of black curls framed her sharp face.

  Michele staggered away from the album.

  “That’s her,” she choked. “Today—there was a—a ghost of a person following me. I didn’t get a clear look at her face, but I know it—that’s her.”

  “She’s done it, Walter,” Dorothy cried. “She’s come after Michele already.”

  Walter gripped Michele’s shoulders. “She can’t harm you for seven days. We know this from the last time she tormented us. She can follow you and frighten you, but she won’t have her full physical form and strength until she’s been in our time for seven days. That’s why we need to get you out of town immediately—”

  “Wait.” Michele looked from her grandfather to her grandmother, shell-shocked. “How do you know all of this? And … why? Why would someone from the 1880s want to hurt me?”

  She stopped short as her eyes caught the image on the opposite side of the page. She moved in for a closer look and a cold, clammy sensation settled in her stomach. In this snapshot, dated January 1888, Rebecca and Irving were huddled together on the steps of the grand sta
ircase, their smiles secretive.

  “This is the last known photo of them together,” Walter revealed. “Something happened later that year in 1888, something that caused Rebecca to turn on your father and hate him for the rest of her life—and beyond. To this day, we don’t know what it was.”

  “When Marion brought Irving home to meet us in 1991—he called himself Henry then—we thought he was nothing more than a polite teenager who just wasn’t in our daughter’s league. We never in our wildest dreams imagined he could be the same Irving Henry I’d known as a boy. We figured it was a harmless young romance and didn’t try to stop it. But he and Marion became serious. And that was when Rebecca showed up.” Walter’s face twisted in anguish at the memory. “Seeing that girl materialize in front of us, decades after her death—there was nothing more terrifying. And yet somehow she gained our trust. She was family, and a powerful time traveler at that. When she proved to us who Irving really was, showed us these very photographs and the secret he had kept from Marion, our first instinct was to believe Rebecca when she said that he would bring about the downfall of our daughter.

  “We knew Marion wouldn’t believe us if we tried telling her the truth, or maybe we feared that it wouldn’t make a difference to her—she loved Irving so much, we were scared that she would follow him anywhere, even to another time. So when Rebecca threatened us into helping her break them apart, we didn’t fight her.” Walter bowed his head in shame. “I’d been to Irving’s funeral. I knew he was supposed to have died in 1944—so it wasn’t hard to believe Rebecca when she said that he was an abomination, and that his union with our daughter would lead to terrible consequences. She told us that we had to separate them before they could have a child. She was obsessed with that, constantly warning us of what would happen if you were born.”

  Dorothy spoke up, her voice weak. “We tried to pay Irving to leave Marion. He wouldn’t accept the money, but when we finally broke the news that we knew who he was, and that Rebecca had been appearing at our home … well, he disappeared the day after that, without a word of warning. But it was all for nothing. Marion never forgave us, and we lost her so early. It was everything we were trying to avoid when we cooperated with Rebecca.” Dorothy buried her face in her hands. “And now, after seventeen years, she’s come back for you. It’s our worst nightmare. But we won’t ever listen to that despicable creature again. We know now that she was the real enemy all along.”