A Rip Through Time(8)

Something happened in that lane. Two women were strangled a hundred and fifty years apart. On the same night. In the same spot. I don’t think I heard and saw an echo of the attack on Catriona. I think I saw the attack itself—through a rip in time. I heard her cries. I came running. And when I was attacked in the same manner, time tangled, and I fell into her.

Is Catriona in my body, lying in a twenty-first-century hospital bed? If I get back to where we switched places, can I reverse this?

I will get back there. Right now, though, there’s no escaping. During the day I played “confused and befuddled head-injury victim.” Which also gave me an excuse for staying in my bed, recuperating as I worked out my situation. Otherwise, I suspect, Mrs. Wallace would have put me to work as soon as I woke.

Once I’ve accepted time travel as the answer, I head straight to the front door before realizing I have no idea where I am and how to get back to that lane. My brain insists that isn’t a problem. Just pull out my phone and let the GPS guide me back to the Grassmarket. Yeah …

While the front door is locked, it doesn’t require a key to open from the inside, so it’s not as if I’m trapped. I’ll acquire more data before venturing out.

Mrs. Wallace has already declared I’ll resume my duties tomorrow. That’s fine. It’s the only way I’ll get the information I need to return to the lane where I passed through time. Playing housemaid is a necessary evil if I want to avoid being tossed into a lunatic asylum for my odd behavior.

Here, I have food and shelter and a job that can’t be all that difficult. Everyone expects me to be “a little off” after my injury. I’ll be as sweet and demure as any Victorian maiden, as quiet as they’ll expect from a servant girl, while I figure things out.

I have a mission, one with three simple steps:

Find my way back.

Get to Nan’s side before it’s too late.

Give the police everything I know to stop a killer.



* * *



It feels like the middle of the night when Mrs. Wallace bangs her fist on my door. I reach for my phone to check the time and my hand smacks down on an empty nightstand.

“It’s almost five,” she says as she sticks her head in. “Are you going to lay about until dawn?”

“Sorry,” I say, my voice thankfully muffled as I rephrase that. “Apologies, ma’am. I seem to have misplaced my alarm clock.”

Her broad face scrunches up. “Your what?”

“My…” I cough. “My, um…” How do Victorians wake up, if they haven’t invented alarm clocks? “Apologies, ma’am,” I repeat. “’Twill not happen again.”

Her eyes narrow, as if I’m being sarcastic. She shakes it off and says, “Get your lazy bones out of that bed. I’ll expect you dressed and downstairs in a quarter hour, or you’ll not be getting any tea.”

She smacks the door closed. I groan. It’s been clear from our brief interactions that Mrs. Wallace is not a Catriona fan. I don’t know whether it’s a personality clash or simply a product of the times, where women have so little power that they wield it against one another with unnecessary vigor.

Unnecessary vigor? I smile to myself. Even my internal dialogue is starting to sound positively Victorian. That’s the trick, really. Stilted speech. Five-dollar words—thanks to Dad, I know plenty of those. And for God’s sake, do not mention things before they were invented. Of course, the problem is that I don’t know when they were invented. For the thousandth time in two days, I find myself reaching for my phone to look it up. I’ve been able to do that since I was a kid, and now I feel lost without that easy access to a virtual universe of data.

You’re a detective, figure it out.

Yep, think before I speak. Err on the side of caution. I’m a maid. No one will expect me to say much. At least I’ve retained Catriona’s voice and accent. That will help. Otherwise each word should be uttered with care and forethought until I’m certain I’m not referring to an object twenty years before its time.

I do know one thing that hasn’t been invented. Central heating. As I discovered last night, while the house is mostly heated by coal, there are still a couple of wood-burning fireplaces. In my room, there’s a small coal one—a brazier—which I’m sure will do a lovely job once I figure out how to use it.

So my room is freezing, despite me closing the window. There’s no shortage of blankets, thank God, but once I throw back the covers, it’s like stepping into a walk-in freezer. I reach for my bedside lamp … only to remember it’s oil. My shaking fingers struggle to light it.

My room has gas lighting, but Mrs. Wallace caught me using it yesterday and gave me hell. Apparently, having gas lighting and being allowed to use it are two different things, at least if you’re a mere housemaid.

My quarters are the size of a college dorm room, with a narrow bed and tiny window. A dorm or a prison cell. It’s a private room, though, with a locking door, and from what I’ve seen of servants’ rooms in movies, I struck gold here.

I pull on my uniform easily enough. I practiced yesterday, so I wouldn’t take an hour getting ready this morning. The damned corset isn’t even the worst of it. There’s layer upon layer of clothing.

I might have been cursing those layers yesterday, but this morning I happily tug them on. At least they’ll keep me warm. Maybe that’s the point.