Page 41 of Never Leave Me
“Yes,”—Dr. Lionel spoke with his back facing her as he waited for a laptop to shut down—“1382 seems to be the year that started the resurgence of miracles in Canterbury. And it’s also a time when some of Canterbury’s oldest buildings and structures were in existence—like this castle. Thus, you must go to 1382, locate the original wellspring of holy water at St. Sepulchre Priory, and provide us enough to continue our studies on how to replicate it.”
As the screen went dark, Dr. Lionel closed the laptop, pushed in the desk chair, and then crossed to the door.
“We’ll give you the dose shortly. I’ll expect your first shipment within a week.” Dr. Lionel didn’t wait for her response but exited, closing the door behind him with a finality that left a cold grip on her heart.
Shipment? As if she was nothing more than a FedEx truck.
Jasper stared at the closed door, his expression etched with turmoil.
It reflected the turmoil raging inside her. Were they both pawns in this dangerous game? “You wanted the final ampulla for your father, didn’t you?”
“Dr. Lionel promised that if I helped him, my father would be one of the first to benefit from the ultimate cure.”
“That’s why you started working for Lionel in the first place and betrayed Mercer?”
“Arthur wouldn’t have offered to help my dad in a million years.” Jasper spat her father’s name like it was a contagious illness. “He was so selfish, so focused on healing you. I knew he’d never be willing to share the cure when he found it.”
She couldn’t respond. As much as she loved her dad, she couldn’t deny Jasper’s accusation. Her dadhadbeen consumed with finding the ultimate cure to heal her mom. After Mom died, his obsession with finding the cure had moved to her.
“So now you think Dr. Lionel’s wasting the holy water on me when it could heal your father?”
“Exactly.”
Even if she still resented Jasper for betraying her and Marian, she felt sorry for him. “There’s still a chance. If I find more water.”
“If.”
“Then you don’t think time crossing is possible?”
“It’s a long shot.”
“What if I told you that after I swallowed the holy water, I saw Marian living in the past? That I was in the same room as her? That I heard her voice? That I saw she was pregnant?”
Jasper’s eyes narrowed. “Did it really happen?”
“Yes. She was the one who put the holy water in Chesterfield’s vault. There’s no other explanation for how it got there, not after Harrison searched so thoroughly for so many weeks.”
Jasper held her gaze as if testing the truth of her words.
Though Ellen had tried hard to rationalize everything away over the past year, she finally had to accept that the complexities of space and time were beyond the human mind’s capability of understanding.
The past, present, and future intertwined somehow. Entanglement. That’s what Harrison had called the phenomenon. The infinite God saw all of eternity at once with no beginning and no end. If that was the case, surely she could view time with a different perspective too and allow for more than she’d ever thought possible.
11
“WERESEARCHEDTHEFLOORPLANSof the original Reider Castle.” Jasper led Ellen through the dark passageway. “And we believe the safest place to hide the holy water is in a narrow closet at the base of the dungeon steps.”
Jasper lifted the latch on a door built into the side of the stairway. The door was only about three square feet in size and led into what looked like a crawl space.
Ellen squatted next to him.
“See the missing stone?” He shined the light on a spot on the opposite wall.
She nodded.
“There’s a small nook big enough for half a dozen ampullae or bottles.”
“Do you know if the hiding spot was there in 1382?”
