Timekeeper (2 page)

Michele Windsor dreamt of an antique grand piano in a gilded music room. At first the piano stood alone—but moments later Philip appeared, seated behind the instrument with his fingers resting contentedly on the keys. He began a bluesy ragtime piece, his signet ring catching the light as he played with a passion that could bring chills to even the most callous of people. He seemed to be asking a question as he played, hoping to find the answer in the melody
.

Michele stepped out of her shadowy corner of the room and caught Philip’s eye. His face lit up and he gave her his slow, familiar grin, changing the tune to the song he always played for her, Schubert’s
Serenade.
Michele sat beside him, and after finishing the song, he raised her hand to his lips
.

“Didn’t I tell you I would find you again?” he whispered
.

Michele smiled and tilted her face toward his, tingling in anticipation of his kiss. In this moment, he was all that existed
.

Philip
.

Michele awoke from the dream, her body still warm from his touch. The sensation of cold linoleum prickled against her skin and she realized with confusion that she had somehow ended up on the floor.

“She’s awake!” a familiar voice cried out in relief. It took Michele a couple of moments, but she recognized the voice as belonging to her closest friend in New York, Caissie Hart. She felt strong hands gripping her shoulders and glanced up to see Ben Archer, one of the jock stars of the junior class, pulling her up to a sitting position.

“Michele, can you hear us?” Ben asked urgently.

“Wha—happened?” Michele managed to croak, her throat feeling like sandpaper.

“You passed out,” came the deep voice of Mr. Lewis, Michele’s history teacher. He stood above her, his face creased with concern. Through her blurred vision, Michele could make out the rest of the class crowding around behind him, all of them eyeing her curiously. She felt her face redden in embarrassment. It was bad enough being the new girl with the famous last name; now she could add “the girl who randomly faints in the middle of class” to her list of attributes. She had a feeling the stares and whispers were going to follow her even more than usual.

“It happened right after the new guy arrived,” Caissie whispered in Michele’s ear, giving her a funny look.

With a jolt, Michele remembered the boy who had walked into class minutes before. He’d been the spitting image of Philip Walker, bearing the same name and even wearing his ring.
It couldn’t have been him
, Michele thought desolately.
I must have imagined that the new guy was Philip
. Still, she felt her heartbeat quicken as she looked up, secretly hoping that Philip Walker might be somewhere among her classmates.

She immediately saw a lone figure standing off to the side. Michele gasped, covering her face with her hands in shock. She peered through her fingers, and he was still there—
Philip
. Time momentarily stood still as Michele’s disbelieving mind drank in every detail, from his beautiful piercing blue eyes to the thick dark hair that she had once run her fingers through, the tall and strong body that had held her close, and the lips that sent shivers down her spine with every touch. She hadn’t been imagining things—it
was
him! But how could he possibly be here, in Michele’s own time?

Weary from fainting, she tried to stand up but found that she could barely raise herself off the floor. Her body seemed frozen, but she could feel a hot current of electricity coursing through her.

“Philip,” she murmured, reaching out her hand. A few of the students snickered, while Ben turned to her with a bewildered look; Michele barely noticed. She stared at the resurrected Philip Walker, who inexplicably ignored her outstretched hand, not coming any closer. But he was watching her, his eyes searching.

“I’m going to take Michele to the nurse’s office,” said Caissie, hoisting her up to her feet. “I think that fall made her loopy.”

“I’ll help you,” Ben offered.

“No,” Caissie said a little too quickly. “We’ll be fine.”

Throughout the exchange Michele was barely present, unable to take her eyes off Philip. She felt an ache from being so close and yet unable to touch him. He was just
standing
there, making no effort to come near her, and Michele felt her first flare of doubt. What if she was imagining things? Could it be a mere coincidence that he looked just like her Philip, that the two of them shared the same name? But then she remembered the signet ring on his finger—and Michele felt certain that Philip Walker had found a way back to her, just as he had once promised.

Michele tried to protest as Caissie led her out of the classroom, but Mr. Lewis insisted. “You’re not coming back to class until the nurse confirms that you’re all right. I’ll be expecting a note from her.”

Michele didn’t know how she could bring herself to walk away from Philip only minutes after he had inconceivably appeared in her Time. She reluctantly followed Caissie, and as soon as they were in the hall and away from prying eyes, Caissie yanked her into the nearest restroom, her expression rattled.

“
What
just happened in there? I thought you were having a seizure or something! The new guy came in and two seconds later your eyes rolled back and you just … fainted.” She lowered her voice. “Was it because of his
name
?”

Before answering, Michele quickly threw open each of the bathroom stall doors to make sure she and Caissie were alone.
When she turned back to Caissie, her friend was staring at her as though contemplating whether Michele might have officially gone off the deep end.

“It’s not just his name, it’s
him
. Philip is back,” she said breathlessly.

Caissie sighed. “I was afraid that’s what you were thinking. Believe me, I get that it’s a weird coincidence for him to have the same name as your Philip, but that’s all it could possibly be—a coincidence.”

Michele shook her head. “It has to be him, Caissie. He looks
exactly
like Philip, and not only that, he’s wearing the same ring that Philip Walker gave me in the 1920s, the one you saw me wearing just last month—the ring that I somehow lost!”

“But Michele, you’re the only one who can travel through time. Philip never could,” Caissie gently reminded her. “And if the new guy really is your Philip, then why did he just stand there? It didn’t seem like he knew you at all.”

She swallowed hard. Philip’s return was a miracle—she couldn’t bear the thought that it might not be real. “Maybe he doesn’t want to let on to everyone else that we already know each other? I just need to talk to him. Come on!” With a shot of adrenaline, Michele grabbed Caissie’s hand and pulled her out of the bathroom.

“Wait.” Caissie stopped her. “Didn’t you hear Mr. Lewis? I really do have to take you to the nurse.”

Michele hesitated, and Caissie wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “It’s okay. He’ll still be here when you get back,” she said with a slight smile.

It was only when they reached the nurse’s office that Michele remembered what she had seen just before fainting: a dark cloaked figure sweeping past the classroom window, seconds after this new Philip’s appearance. Though she didn’t understand why, the sight had frozen her with terror.

After diagnosing Michele with “exhaustion,” the nurse insisted she rest for the remaining hour of class. While any other student would have been thrilled at the invitation to skip U.S. history, Michele could barely sit still with the knowledge that she and Philip were somehow in the same twenty-first-century building. But under the nurse’s watchful gaze, Michele had no choice other than to lie on the cot in the sterile starkness of the Berkshire High School infirmary, waiting for the hour to pass. She closed her eyes and the images and sensations of the past two months flooded her mind so vividly, it was as though she were reliving those days all over again. She felt the familiar pang of longing for her mom. There was so much she wished to tell her—if only she could find a way to bend the rules and save her.

It was still impossible for Michele to fathom how life could be forever, irrevocably altered in just twenty seconds. That was how long it had taken for another driver’s car to kill her mother, and in those twenty seconds, Michele’s former identity as a carefree California girl died with her. Marion Windsor had been more than just a mom—she was Michele’s best friend. Though Michele had wished death would come for her too,
and bring her back to her mom, it turned out that she was destined to travel even farther.

Marion’s will was another devastating blow. Instead of Michele moving in with one of her friends and finishing high school in her hometown, Marion had left clear instructions naming her estranged parents in New York as Michele’s next of kin. Less than a month after losing her mother, Michele was forced to move across the country to New York City, enroll in a snooty high school that catered to the offspring of Manhattan’s elite, and take her place as the youngest in the Windsor family line—a role she’d thought she would never have to fill.

Marion had hidden from the Windsor name—as legendary in New York as the names Astor, Vanderbilt, and Carnegie—ever since Michele was born. Michele always followed suit in keeping their identity a secret, until the fall afternoon when she moved into the mammoth Windsor Mansion on Fifth Avenue to live with her distant grandparents and an entire household staff. All the while, she wondered what could
possibly
have possessed her mother to send Michele to live with the people whom she herself had escaped.

The only thing she knew was that this great rift centered around her father. Walter and Dorothy Windsor were incensed when their daughter and only heir fell in love with an unknown boy from the Bronx, and they forbade her to marry the lower-class Henry Irving. Unable to face a life without him, Marion ran away with Henry to Los Angeles on the eve of her high school graduation. The Windsors retaliated by offering Henry one million dollars to leave her, and though they claimed he
refused their offer, Marion never believed her parents—for he sure enough disappeared, leaving Marion just before she discovered that she was pregnant. For sixteen years, Michele thought that was the whole story of her no-good, absentee father—until New York showed her the truth. Here, she discovered his powerful skeleton key, and learned of his true identity as Irving Henry … from the nineteenth century.

When Michele first picked up his key it had
responded
, transforming from an inanimate object into a moving and pulsing talisman, as if it recognized her touch. To her disbelief, the key sent Michele
back in time
one hundred years—and that’s where she met the stranger who had haunted her dreams for as long as she could remember. Philip Walker. The man she’d always assumed to be a figment of her idealizing imagination turned out to be an eighteen-year-old boy from 1910.

From the moment she met him at the Windsors’ Halloween Ball, he possessed her every thought and emotion with a dizzying intensity. The two of them, both lost in their own times, found the elusive place where they belonged whenever they were together. But the hundred years between them proved too great an obstacle. Their wrenching goodbye was still painfully fresh in Michele’s mind, and now that she was away from him, alone in the school infirmary, it suddenly seemed impossible that he could have found a way into the future.

Michele had moved to New York searching for traces of her mother everywhere she looked. Now, ever since her journey to the past, she found herself searching her modern world for the three of them: her father, her mother—and Philip. Could her
desperate dreaming have actually manifested one of them into her own Time?