Page 22 of Killing Time

Our room had a phone — something I guessed wasn’t typical for these times — but I hadn’t spied a phonebook anywhere. Maybe they kept them in the lobby or at the front desk.

“He might be listed in the phonebook,” I suggested, and Seth tilted his head.

“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know much about them. I’d say a third of the households in Jerome back in 1926 had phones, but no one talked about phonebooks much because everyone pretty much knew everyone else.”

That made sense. Even in an era of texts and emails and video calling, it looked to me as though most of the McAllisters still preferred to communicate in person whenever they could, and only fell back on their phones when they didn’t have any other options.

“Well, it’s worth a try,” I replied. “If we strike out on the phonebook thing at the hotel, I’m sure some of the businesses downtown probably have them. But let’s try here first.”

My instincts were proved correct, because the clerk at the front desk — the same man who’d checked us in earlier and already knew us as Deborah and Seth Richards, here from Phoenix on our honeymoon — immediately pulled the book in question out from under the counter and handed it over to us.

“You can’t take it up to your room,” he said, sounding apologetic. He was probably about twenty years older than Seth and I, with brown hair smoothly combed away from his face and friendly hazel eyes. “But I can give you a notepad and pen so you can jot down anything you need.”

“That would be fine,” I assured him, and waited while he grabbed those two items and laid them down on the counter next to the phonebook.

Seth picked up the pen and paper the clerk had provided and took them over to a seating area a few feet away, with two loveseats and two chairs grouped around a coffee table. Once we had both sat down on the couch, I picked up the book and started rifling through the pages.

One thing was certain — the Wilcoxes had definitely been fruitful and multiplied since the 1880s. There were several pages of them, outnumbering just about every last name I saw except maybe Johnson and Smith. My finger ran down the page, then stopped at a listing.

Jasper Wilcox, 2138 E. Hutcheson Drive.

The address was followed by a phone number, and I wrote it down as well, even though I didn’t think I’d be picking up the phone and giving Jasper a call any time soon.

“Bingo,” I said, and shot a triumphant grin at Seth. “Found him.”

“What about the other Wilcoxes?”

“There are way too many to write down,” I replied, and handed the phone book over to him so he could see for himself.

He grimaced. “You weren’t kidding.”

“Nope. But I guess it couldn’t hurt to see if any other relatives live on the same street.”

It turned out there were two — Matthias Wilcox and Isaac Wilcox.

Were they some of the goons who’d accompanied Jasper on his kidnapping mission?

Impossible to say with the information we had on hand at the moment. However, I guessed they must be men who were highly placed in the clan, or they wouldn’t be living on the same fancy — well, I assumed it must be, sinceprimasandprimusespretty much never lived in slums — street toward the north end of downtown. In my own time, it was an area of older homes that had been carefully preserved and where the houses rarely went up for sale, since they were passed down from generation to generation.

That sure seemed to me like the sort of place where Jasper would have landed after he — or his father, or his father’s father — had decided to sell the big Victorian Jeremiah had onceowned. The current neighborhood where Jasper lived was more secluded, farther away from the hustle and bustle of downtown, and I guessed that would suit him just fine.

A man who engaged in kidnapping and God knows what other dark deeds would definitely want to live someplace where his activities wouldn’t be scrutinized by his neighbors.

“Okay, we found him,” I said as I closed the phone book and shoved the piece of paper with all the addresses and phone numbers in my pocket.

“Now we just have to figure out what to do next.”

6

DOPPELGÄNGER

Seth and Devynnreturned to their hotel room after they’d handed the phonebook back to the front desk clerk, since they knew they’d have much more privacy there. While he was glad that they’d found Jasper — and that he was living much farther from downtown than the Wilcoxprimusesused to, which could only be a good thing — he knew they were a long way away from tracking down the place where Ruby had been hidden.

“I doubt she’d be at his house,” he said, and Devynn nodded, then came over to sit down next to him on the bed. Having her this close to him made his blood thrill all over again, but he knew they needed to stay focused on the matter at hand and save those sorts of activities for once they were alone tonight and had done everything they could.

“I was thinking the same thing,” she replied. Her gaze moved away from him to the window, which framed the snow-dusted San Francisco Peaks and gave a stunning view of downtown. That downtown was much bigger than it used to be, the buildings now mostly brick and some kind of concrete block rather than the wooden structures they’d been in the 1880s, but the grid of the streets wasn’t completely unfamiliar.

Somewhere in the wooded hills that rose north of downtown, Jasper Wilcox’s home now lay.

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