Page 71 of Killing Time

Maybe.

Even though I’d grown up in Flagstaff, I’d never had much reason to come to this part of town — the Wilcoxprimuseshad moved on to entirely different houses by the time I arrived on the scene, and I didn’t have any friends or relatives who lived on this street, although I thought I’d driven down it once or twice over the years. Because of that, I had no idea whether the place was even still standing in the twenty-first century. I’d be a little sad if I found out it wasn’t, just because the house was beautiful and an architectural masterpiece.

It wasn’t the home’s fault that Jasper Wilcox lived here.

Anyway, if I’d known for sure the house had been torn down during the intervening years, then I would have tried sending myself far enough into the future that the walls and locks that contained me now would be gone.

But I didn’t know, and that meant I needed to do something a little less ambitious…but just as potentially fraught, thanks to the way I couldn’t seem to get my talent to do anything I needed it to.

Except when I’d had Jeremiah coaching me. Thanks to his help, I’d managed a couple of time jumps that were within a few minutes of their targets.

You had the amulet then,I told myself.Without it, you wouldn’t have been able to get even that close.

Maybe so. But the amulet was with Seth — thank God, because I wouldn’t have wanted it to fall into Jasper’s hands — and that meant I needed to get my damn so-called talent under control.

I’d marked the time when whoever it was had knocked at the door and left the tray behind. Fourteen minutes before noon.

If I could somehow manage to send myself back to that exact moment — or even the one or two immediately following, when I’d retrieved the tray from the hall — then the door would be unlocked. Yes, I’d have to deal with whoever was out there, but I had a feeling it was probably the housekeeper or cook or whomever kept the house running who’d actually set the tray down outside my door.

Jasper Wilcox just didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would offer personal room service.

So, okay. I’d go back to that time, open the door, and flee.

Into a snowstorm that was slowly beginning to ramp up, without a coat or boots or anything that might help me survive the weather.

I told myself that didn’t matter. Thanks to the research Seth and I had done, I knew exactly where Jasper’s house was located — and I also knew where Adam lived, which was only a quarter-mile away, give or take. As long as Jasper was physically out of his home when I made my escape attempt, I thought I should be able to make it to Adam’s place. It didn’t seem as if theprimushad any idea that his cousin had been involved in Ruby’s jailbreak, which meant I should be able to get Adam to drive me out of Flagstaff and down through Oak Creek Canyon until we reached the border of McAllister territory. In fact, I could probably get patched through to Jerome using a phone at the Texaco I’d spied on my way up here, the one in the spot where, someday in the future, the Indian Gardens restaurant would be located.

This all sounded very reasonable, and not a half-bad plan…except for the part where it was all predicated on me being able to get my time travel abilities to work properly.

I picked up the glass of lemonade that had come along with my lunch and drank it down. Most of the time, I preferred tea or just plain water, but I was thirsty and figured something to wet my throat was probably a good idea…even though I guessed its current dryness had much more to do with nerves than anything else.

Even though I already knew that looking out the window wouldn’t give me any helpful information, I couldn’t help glancing down at the backyard anyway. The snow had picked up a little but wasn’t accumulating yet.

Only a matter of time, though.

Time. It had always seemed like an enemy to me, something I should have been able to work like clay in my hand but instead was as stubborn as a stone wall.

But maybe that was the wrong way of looking at it. Maybe instead of thinking time was something I could control, I neededinstead to view it the way an experienced whitewater rafter might look at some rapids — to analyze the flow, to take note of the places where the water moved smoothly, uninterrupted by any rocks or shoals hidden just barely under the surface.

Why not? It wasn’t as if anything I’d tried so far had been of much use.

In this particular instance, I needed to find those spots where time wanted to flow backward. Intellectually, I knew that time was everywhere at once, that human brains assigned a linear flow to it because we couldn’t process it otherwise, but still, imagining a reverse flow in some places made it easier for my mind to grasp what I was trying to do.

Time flowing backward…moving toward the exact moment when the housekeeper or whoever it was had set down the tray outside my door and unlocked it just long enough so I could retrieve the food.

The clock on the table across the room had ticked steadily the entire time I’d been there. Now, it continued to do so, but with an odd, hiccupy sort of cadence, as though the sound had somehow reversed itself.

Reversed itself….

Because it was now moving backward, I realized. As I watched, the hands shifted counterclockwise, reversing the temporal flow.

Or that was how it looked to me. The best I could describe it, when my power asserted itself, somehow I was placed outside time’s currents, which was probably why I seemed to disappear into thin air even though I hadn’t actually gone anywhere in space.

Only in time.

Sound outside the door, possibly footsteps. The faintest rattle that might have been a key turning in the lock.

Holding my breath, I moved closer, telling myself this was the point where I needed to rejoin the flow, to jump in and put my arms out so I wouldn’t sink.

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