Ripped (17 page)

Chapter Eighteen

I Do Not Know say the Great Bells of Bow

I
n
front of them
, the stone church showed pinpoints of flickering light through its stained-glass windows. High above, fast-moving clouds whirled across the sky with such dizzying speed it made the church steeple appear to be in motion and the clouds, stationary.

Katie had spotted the churchyard with its moss-covered headstones long before the four-wheeler slid into the shadows at the curbside. And it would have been a pleasant enough ride from Twyford Manor through the cobbled streets of London had Toby not scowled at her the whole time.

Katie thought about the jellied eel she had made with Toby. If her plan worked, it would be nothing short of a miracle. Her spirits lightened just thinking about it. But as she climbed out of the swaying carriage, drops of condensation fell from the coach's roof ledge and splattered her face. Collin laughed when she looked up at him sputtering. He adroitly avoided the drips by leaping onto the ground, with Toby following close behind.

With an exaggerated flourish of gallantry, Collin offered Katie his pocket handkerchief, but she wiped her face with the sleeve of her velvet jacket instead and scurried on down the brick path.

A man in clerical robes walked with absentminded briskness toward a group of people huddled near a gravestone in the far corner of the churchyard. A small boy dressed all in black stared thoughtfully down at the newly turned earth, a bouquet of violets clutched in his tiny hands.

As Katie and Toby strode along the path, Collin hung back, swirling and jabbing his umbrella in the air like a sword. “Those winged cherubs, there,” he said, poking at a carved angel on a headstone, “seem dreadfully solemn, don't you think? I ought to be a stone mason. I'd teach these somber blighters a thing or two. See that one over there? Instead of a skeleton holding a scythe, I'd have a mermaid strumming a lyre.”

Katie bit back a smile.

“This place positively
reeks
of death and bereavement,” Collin chortled. “Needs to be livened up, I tell you! Death isn't half as bad as it's made out to be. Dying is all part of the game, don't you see? All part of life. The flip side of the coin. Heads you win, tails you lose. We're all going to come a cropper sooner or later. We're all going to throw tails on the coin of life.”

Collin grinned and tapped his chin. “The profundity of my insights often astounds even me. The coin of life . . . like the fountain of youth, or good versus evil. It's all one and the same, don't you know? Mustn't wax maudlin over the inevitable, eh?”

As Collin jabbed his sword-stick umbrella around the churchyard, Katie glanced at Toby, whose dark eyes stared back at her with cold skepticism. With his boxer's nose and the thin scar slashed across his cheekbone, Toby's face reflected an angry disdain. She didn't blame him. Not after last night. Not after what she'd promised. And yet . . . if her plan worked, Toby would have to honor his end of the bargain. It was a risk, but she might be able to pull it off. If not—as Collin had so aptly put it last night—Katie would be in the soup.

Well, here goes
, she thought.
Nothing ventured,
nothing gained. But once ventured, she could lose everything . .
 .

•

A
s
they crossed the churchyard
toward the iron gate leading to the London Stone, Toby stared at Katie and felt a jolt in his gut.

Last night had been long and frustrating for Toby, and he was not blessed with a patient nature. He knew he should have informed Major Brown right away that Katie knew intimate details about the dead girl's murder, yet he had kept quiet. Something about this American twist 'n' swirl knocked him totally off balance. He had known her for only a few days, but already she had the ability to tie his emotions in knots. That she had this unearthly hold over him wasn't an easy admission for Toby to make. He prided himself on his ability to keep his emotions in check. But the viselike grip she held him in had happened so suddenly, so overwhelmingly, Toby hadn't realized that his feelings for someone—
anyone
—could be so explosive, so all-consuming. He'd been furious when he caught her in Collin's bedchamber last night, but had masked his emotions by being overly harsh with her. Yet he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he had to steel himself against the clasp she wielded over him. He was determined not to make the same ill-fated mistake as his mother, who had fallen in love above her station—and his father, who had fallen in lust below his. Keeping a level head was an attribute that Toby held as dear as life itself.

Toby noted that Katie's face was ghostly pale, outlined against the harsh grey of the large stone. Legend had it that the London Stone could grant three wishes for those who were pure of heart. But legend also claimed that the stone was the very one that King Arthur had pulled his sword from.

Toby watched as a spray of damp curls fell across Katie's forehead. When she looked at him it was with an expression of fear, and the gut-wrenching spark in those eyes seemed to glaze over, as if she were about to swoon. He reached his hand out to steady her.

Clutching her arm, Toby thought about the jellied eel he had made with her, and the message he'd left in the stuffed vulture in the Duke's study. He laughed at the lunacy of it. There was no denying that the girl tugged at his heartstrings like none other. Why else would he have agreed to such foolishness?

She might be an accomplice to a murder. She might be any number of things. But of one thing Toby was sure:
He must never show the girl what he felt about her or she'd possess a power over him that would destroy him.
He knew this as surely as he knew she was no more clairvoyant than he was. Less so, probably, for he came from a long line of fortune-tellers and soothsayers. His own mother was the seventh child of a seventh child and possessed second sight. This girl was gifted, but not with second sight. Toby would stake his life on it. In a manner of speaking, he already had. If by twelve noon she could not tell him what he'd written on the parchment he put into the stuffed vulture, which he'd then sewn shut again, Toby would cease doing Katie's bidding. If, on the other hand, she succeeded, Toby vowed he'd follow her anywhere.
Even to hell and back.

They reached the London Stone, whose opening was dubbed “The Raven's Claw” because it was jagged and uneven and just wide enough for a claw or a small finger. He watched as Katie's gloved hand closed around the spikes of the grating around the London Stone. Then she peeled off one of her kid gloves and poked her hand through the bars. A moment later she was jabbing her index finger into the Raven's Claw fissure, and for an instant Toby's world exploded. A kaleidoscope of colors flashed across his eyes, and he felt that all the air in his body was being sucked out of him. A deafening explosion rang out. Thunderbolts of light flashed around the Stone, then pierced his eyes. A red-hot poker of pain ran up his arm. He had no choice but to let go of Katie's arm. Then he heard a faint whisper of a voice:
Beware of what you wish for . . .

Part IV:

Katie Seeks Proof

Chapter Nineteen

Best to Come Home say the Bells of Winterloam

K
a
tie heard the explosion
and then felt it. It was so loud that when the noise finally died away, it left a ringing against her eardrums like a high-pitched tuning fork.

Her head throbbed. She yanked hard to free her arm from the grip of the iron grating surrounding the London Stone, but like a steel trap at the mouth of a cage, the wire mesh clamped painfully around her arm, digging into her flesh and cutting off her circulation. The pain was unbearable. She took a deep breath and hurled her body backward to pull free of the iron jaws.
Beware of what you wish for
. . . echoed in her brain.

I want to go home! I need to go home!
she wished with all her might.
Take me back to Madame Tussauds in the twenty-first century
, she begged as if the Stone had ears and could grant her wish.

Another deafening explosion sent new shockwaves through her body. White-hot heat seared her arm. Shadows darted around the Stone, then around her head, blurring her vision. She was falling, down, down, down into the rabbit-hole abyss of blackness, and a moment later it was over.

The pain was gone. Bright light flooded the room. The room? Had she made it? Was she back in Madame Tussauds? Katie squinted her eyes and tried to peer around, but the light was blinding. And what was that smell? Peanut butter? Chocolate? And something antiseptic, like the disinfectant used in hospitals … or museums.

Wax museums
.

Katie forced herself to open her eyes.

“Katie,” came Toby's voice so close to her ear it made her jump. She glanced down. Her hand and arm were free. And the velvet jacket she'd been wearing was gone. She felt blissfully light and unencumbered by petticoats and heavy clothing. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. “
Katie
,” Toby repeated.
But which Toby was it,
Katie wondered.

She heard a sound as if someone had just kicked a tin can across a tiled floor, and it rattled and thrummed somewhere near her feet. But when she looked down, there was nothing near her sneakered feet.
Sneakers!
The joy of wearing high-tops surged through her, almost overwhelming her with happiness. With her free hand she reached up. Gone was the cloche bonnet with the enormous satin bow tied under her chin.

“
Katie
!”
came Toby's voice so loudly this time she had to clamp her hands over her ears.

“Stop shouting!” she cried, feeling a wave of nausea. But she also felt light as air without the layers of bulky clothing—the overskirt, the underskirt, the petticoats, the flounced bustle.

“Not shouting, Katie.” Toby looked at her oddly, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “You crossed over, didn't you, Katie? The Stone is a portal, and you did it, didn't you?”

Katie swallowed hard and nodded. The boy towering over her, with his strong dimpled chin and crooked smile playing around the corners of his wide mouth, didn't have a boxer's broken nose or a scar slashed across his cheek. And this boy was a good deal taller than the one she'd left in the churchyard, but they looked so similar. “How . . . long . . . have . . . I . . . been . . . gone?” she managed to choke out.

“You haven't been gone. That's just it. That's the way it works.”

“How do you know?” Katie asked, her voice still weak.

“Because I made it happen, too. Last year. After my father died. The Stone was being exhibited in the Victoria and Albert, not here. But there's something you need to know, Katie. Something very important.”

Katie grabbed his arm. “Can I get back? Can I
go
back?”

He nodded. “But only three times. Then it's over. You can't do it again. But it's more complicated than just going back and forth . . . it's about changing the past and—”

“Stop!” Katie put up her hand. She felt another overwhelming sensation of queasiness rising from the pit of her stomach and up her throat. “Wait,” she managed to gasp out. She took several deep breaths until the room around her, with its disinfectant smell, stopped spinning.

“I-I wondered about changing the past,” she managed to pant out, still doubled over and breathing in great gulps of air.

“You'll be okay, Katie. Just breathe slowly. I know you're reeling. I've been there. It's awful. Just give yourself a minute.” Toby—
the twenty-first century Toby
—did something that made her straighten slowly back up. He began rubbing her back in small circles the way her mom did when Katie was little and had the wind knocked out of her.

Breathing in odd, heavy bursts now, Katie told him she'd traveled back to Victorian England during the time of Jack the Ripper.

“But I have so many questions,” she said. “What I need to know is . . . can I . . . change the past?” Painfully, Katie pulled her arm out of the wire-mesh cage surrounding the Stone.

“Okay. Here's the deal—” the other Toby said.

“Don't you mean, jellied eel?” Katie shot back under her breath, trying for levity. If she didn't make a joke, she'd start to cry.

As it was, she had to blink back tears.

“Exactly,” Toby said. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling panels illuminated his wide grin as he loomed over her. “But it's not a jellied eel you're going to like—”

“Try me. I need to know everything. I need to know
why
this happened.
How
this happened. And . . . can I change the past?” She asked plaintively, running a hand over the top of her hatless head, feeling normal hair—not woven with strands of pearls, or twisted into a high knot, or braided so tightly to her skull as to cause migraines.

“Can I change the past?” Katie repeated.

She felt a cold tremble running through her body when Toby said simply, “You can change small things, inconsequential things. But you can't alter history. At least I couldn't.
And I tried
. But there's something you have to know,” he continued in a distressed voice. “Something crucial.”

“I'm all ears,” Katie told him, but turned her back on him as she scooped up her backpack in the corner where she'd left it.
I
'
ve got to get back to Grandma Cleaves
'
s house!
“You can tell me
everything
on our way to my grandmother's. There's something I've got to do. Where's Collin?”

“Last I saw him he was heading for the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. He wanted to get a picture of himself standing next to Neil Diamond.”

“Neil Diamond! Puh-leeze!”

“What?”

“Neil Diamond? He's ancient.”

“Collin said it's for his mother. Neil Diamond's her favorite singer.”

Katie nodded and smiled. “I forgot. Aunt Pru loves all those old-fogey singers.”

“Hey. You're from Boston. I thought ‘Sweet Caroline' was the Red Sox anthem?”

Katie grinned. She threw her arms around Toby's neck and squeezed so hard she almost couldn't breathe herself. “I'm home, I'm home, I'm home! And I love ‘Sweet Caroline.'”

“Yeah. And my favorite group, Courtney and the Metro Chicks, does a wicked spoof on that song.”

I know
, Katie thought.
I helped write it!
“Let's go,” she whispered, starting to get all choked up again.

“What about Collin?”

“No time. We've got to get back to my grandmother's house. I'll explain on the way. And you can fill me in on everything you know about the London Stone. And, by the way, where did you go when you traveled back in time?”

“Scotland. Eighteen fifty-five.”

“How come? I mean, why then?”

“I went back to the time of Madeleine Smith. She killed her lover with arsenic . . . or was accused of killing her lover. I thought I knew how she did it. I'd been doing research on the case. It's a sort of unsolved murder. Famous case. I thought I had it all figured out. But I didn't. I was way off base.”

“Did you meet any of your ancestors?”

“Yup. Madeleine Smith's doomed lover for one.”

Katie met his gaze. “So does the London Stone just take people back to famous murder mysteries?”

“No. It does more than that. It grants your innermost wish. That's why I told you beware of what you wish for, because it might—”

“Come true. I remember. But the wish I wished for can't come true.”
I want to say goodbye to my parents!
“So no worries.”

“There's one other thing you need to know, Katie. It took me a long time to figure it out. The short story, ‘The Raven's Claw,' is what made me realize—”

Toby stopped midstride and took a deep breath. “The most important thing you need to know is that your last wish will be to undo the others.”

“What? That doesn't make sense.”

“Whoever wrote ‘The Raven's Claw' must have gone back in time himself using the London Stone. The short story is a parable, a warning. The protagonist in the story strokes the Raven's Claw, and is granted three wishes. But what happens is so horrific that he uses his last wish to undo the others.”