Page 28 of Killing Time

“Oh, thank goodness,” I said. “I was worried he might not work anywhere close to here.”

“No, it’s right there,” the man replied, pointing toward the big brick building less than a block away. Luckily, the doorway wasn’t visible from this angle, so I thought as long as I went in that general direction, he’d think I wasn’t doing anything more than returning the mythical cufflink to its rightful owner.

“Then I’ll go take it to him. Thank you so much for letting me know who he is and where he works.”

I flashed the newsstand operator a smile and then hurried off. The whole time, Seth had been standing on the other side of the street, keeping watch in case anything went wrong. When I began to walk toward San Francisco Street, he kept pace, and once I reached the corner, I went ahead and crossed to the other side, keeping up my part of the story that I was doing nothing more than going inside to return the lost cufflink to Adam Wilcox.

Once I knew I was past the line of sight from the newsstand, I crossed at the next intersection and met up with Seth.

“His name is Adam Wilcox, and he works at Northern Lumber,” I told him. “So we should try to look him up in the phonebook, too, just to see where he lives. I kind of get the feeling he’s harmless, though.”

My companion didn’t look too convinced. “I’m not sure you can call any Wilcox ‘harmless.’” I lifted an eyebrow at him, and he hastened to add, “Present company excluded, of course. I’m talking about the clan of the past, not your current family.”

I couldn’t take offense, not when I knew that was exactly what he’d meant. “It’s fine,” I said, then reached into my sweater pocket where I’d stored his cufflink. The amulet, of course, still resided in my dress pocket, since it had to accompany me wherever I went. Luckily, it seemed as though Seth had still been close enough to be within its field of effect even when across the street, since no Wilcoxes had appeared to demand what he was doing in their territory. “And here’s your cufflink. Thanks for the loan.”

“The man at the newsstand didn’t ask to see it?”

“Nope,” I said cheerfully. “He just wanted to help. And look — there’s a phone booth. Maybe there’s a phonebook in there.”

The booth was unoccupied, so I took a quick peek inside. Sure enough, a book identical to the one the hotel clerk had loaned us dangled from a little chain beneath the pay phone, so I hurriedly flipped to the section where I’d seen all the Wilcoxes listed just the day before.

“Adam Wilcox, 420 West Aspen Avenue,” I read aloud, while Seth pulled a pen out of his pocket and quickly jotted down the address on the same piece of paper that held the rest of our information on the Wilcox clan. “No wonder he walks to work — that’s not very far from downtown.”

Seth looked thoughtful. “Do you think he might be one of the men who helped Jasper steal Ruby?”

I hesitated for less than a second. “No. I mean, I didn’t get a very good look at them, but I got the impression they were a little older. Also, their hair was as black as Jasper’s, while this Adam Wilcox definitely isn’t that dark.”

If he really was Samuel’s great-grandson, was that slightly lighter hair a gift from his great-grandmother Grace, who’d been almost white-blonde? Maybe those genes had gotten diluted over the years, but I could still see how that branch of the family might not be quite as dark as the rest of the Wilcoxes.

In my time, there had been so many marriages to civilians and so much intermingling that, while the family still tended toward brunettes with brown eyes, we weren’t nearly as uniformly black-haired as the Wilcoxes in the past. Which was as it should be; even among the McAllisters, there were plenty like Seth who weren’t blond or red-haired at all, but a sort of mid-brown.

Everything came toward the middle eventually, I supposed.

But now we had another address we could look up in addition to Jasper’s. I stepped out of the phone booth and told Seth, “We can just keep walking along Route 66. When we get to Humphreys Street, we’ll cross over and cut up a block, and then we should be at City Hall.”

“Sounds good,” he replied as he looped his arm with mine.

Despite the traffic whizzing past on the highway, it still felt right to walk along next to him, to look at all the businesses we passed and remind myself of what they were in my time. The five-and-dime had turned into Crystal Magic, a fun New Age store, and that Chinese restaurant was now a vegan place, but some things were actually the same, such as the Irish pub, and, of course, the Weatherford.

City Hall looked very different, though, and was a big brick building rather than the series of sustainably sourced structures that occupied the same space in my day. It felt strange to have to go to the front desk to be directed to the correct place, rather than look it up on the automated kiosk in the lobby, but after the woman acting as concierge there told us we needed to go to the county assessor’s office on the second floor, I figured how we gotthe information didn’t matter so much as long as we ended up in the right place.

By then, it was almost eleven, well before we’d have to worry about everyone taking off for lunch. We’d decided it would probably be better for Seth to ask about the properties we were interested in, just because I couldn’t ignore the way people seemed to brush women aside in this era if there was a big, strong man standing nearby.

Well, at least I knew that battle had been mostly won by the time I came into the world.

He went up to the man working at the desk and asked about both Jasper and Adam’s properties. In my time, that information was a matter of public record and could easily be looked up on the internet, but I wasn’t sure whether things worked the same way in 1947.

Apparently, they did, because the clerk said he’d take a look and that we needed to give him a few minutes to go through the files.

“That was easier than I thought,” Seth said in an undertone as he stepped away from the desk and back to where I was standing.

“Usually, this stuff is available to the public if you know where to look,” I replied. “But I’m glad you didn’t have to explain why you wanted to see it.”

He shoved his hands in his trouser pockets. “Why would anyone want to see property records? Seems like pretty dry stuff to me.”

I couldn’t argue with that. “If they’d asked, you could have said it was to clear up a property line problem — like a neighbor building their wall a few inches past where their actual property ended or something like that. In my case, I helped a couple of friends look things up when they wanted to verify that a housewas really owned by the person advertising it for rent so they wouldn’t get scammed out of a bunch of money.”

Seth looked a little startled by that explanation. “That sort of thing really happens?”

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