Page 61 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“Raising daughters isn’t hard. Just put locks on all the doors and windows, and never take your eyes off them.”

—Jonathan Healy

On a sidewalk in Manhattan, trying to figure out how I’m going to explain this to Thomas

I TURNED AROUND AGAIN. Sally persisted in being gone.

There was no pizza on the sidewalk. If she’d been taken, it had been quick and clean enough that she hadn’t dropped the box, which was probably a good indicator for her survival. I still didn’t like it. I considered the virtues of yelling her name, and just as quickly abandoned them. Standing in a public place yelling is only the right choice if the goal is attracting as much attention as humanly possible. I didn’t want that. So instead, I tucked the bag under my arm and stepped back from the curb, leaning up against the wall outside the drugstore like I was waiting for a friend.

“Hey, Mary, if you could swing by, that’d be great,” I said, glad there was no one around to see me talking to the air. Sometimes it’s better if no one catches you talking to yourself.

Mary came around the corner about ten seconds later, walking straight toward me. She didn’t hurry or call my name, or anything else that might have attracted unwanted attention. Mary has always been even more dedicated to avoiding attention than I try to be. Her hair can make it hard for her, but she still likes to try.

“Hey!” she chirped, raising one hand in a wave once she was close enough that she didn’t need to raise her voice. It looked just like any teenage girl spotting a friend. I spared a moment to admire how much better she’d gotten at playing “normal” over the years. When I was a kid, her impersonation of the living had left a lot to be desired. Now, if I didn’t know better, I could almost believe it. “What’s up?”

Once she was next to me, she lowered her voice and said, “I know Very told you to call before you came back, but she meant when you were back on the block. Unless you’ve seen something?”

“Nope,” I said. “Sally was waiting outside with the pizza while I ducked into the drug store. She’s not armed, as far as I know. I came back out, and she was gone. Pizza’s gone, too, so if she was attacked, it was fast and the people who did it were dedicated to the idea that they didn’t want to attract attention.”

“Sarah just got back to the Nest, and she didn’t see any Covenant nearby,” said Mary. “Neither did I. The coast’s been clear for most of the day. That’s great for us, potentially terrible for whoever they’re targeting instead.”

“Since if we’re not taking it in the teeth, someone is,” I concluded. “I was only inside for about five minutes.”

“That’s a long time, in an abduction.”

“I know. You said you could hear Sally, but she was a little muffled. Is she family enough for you to find her?”

Mary frowned. “That’s a good question, actually. Adoptions are new ground for me, but whenever one of your weirdoes has gone off and gotten married, your spouses have eventually come into view, and I hear Thomas or Evelyn just as clearly as I hear you. James was muffled at first, but I can hear him perfectly well now. Poor kid’s been through a lot.” She closed her eyes, letting her chin drift toward her chest for several seconds before she opened them again and looked up at me. “Huh. She’s not far from here, and she’s not dead.”

“That’s a start,” I said, relieved. Mary’s ability to know where we were at all times had always been a tricky thing. When the crossroads were around, she’d been required to put them first, and that meant not helping directly without making a bargain—not generally something we wanted to consider for anything less than a life-or-death situation. And she wouldn’t help find someone who’d asked to be left alone, which I’d learned by the time I started high school, and gleefully exploited to keep my father from tracking me down every fifteen minutes.

Sally didn’t know to tell the family ghost not to tell us where she was. Mary couldn’t see Sally’s surroundings or anything like that, not without popping into the room and leaving me alone, but hopefully she could help me find her myself.

“Can you get us there?”

Mary hesitated before she nodded.

“Okay. Next question: can you let Verity know that Sally and I have been sidetracked a little, but it’s no big deal, and we’ll be there as soon as we can?”

Her eyebrows raised. “You want me to lie?”

“No, I want you to keep her from thinking something’s wrong.”

“Something is wrong.”

“And if we don’t keep her from realizing that, Thomas is going to come storming out to look for us, and then we’ll have to deal with Thomas when he thinks someone he cares about is in danger. That’s never been a fun time.” Thomas had been more than willing to break laws, bones, and social norms when he thought I was in danger. If he thought Sally was in danger . . .

I was his wife and he knew I could handle myself in the “real world.” Sally was effectively the first daughter he’d been allowed to keep and care for. I had no idea how many things he’d be happy to set on fire for her sake. I didn’t want to find out the hard way.

Mary sighed, then said, “I’ll be right back,” and walked briskly around the corner, going back the way she had come. I remained where I was, leaning up against the drugstore wall and pulling the first Coke out of my bag. I was going to need the sugar to get through whatever happened next.

The formula for Coke has changed several times since nineteen sixty-five. I considered that as I sipped the fizzy brown liquid. I’d been drinking Coke on and off across the decades, and while every change had been a surprise, none of them had really been a shock. Watching Thomas experience the scope of them all at once was going to be hilarious.

If you can’t treat your time-displaced husband as a comedy generator, who can you treat that way?

I watched the street while I drank my soda, looking for any sign that something out of the ordinary had happened here. I didn’t know modern New York well enough to know whether the amount of traffic I was seeing was normal or not.

It would have been easy enough for someone to pull up, grab Sally, and take off with her, if she hadn’t fought back. If she’d decided to get into the pizza before I came out with the Lactaid, her guard might have been down, but if that had been the case, why hadn’t she dropped the box? Unless she had been lured away somehow, but that raised an even-bigger question: who would want to grab her? I had thought Sally would be safe because there was no way the Covenant could connect her with us yet, but what if it had been someone else? There were ways to make all this make sense. I just needed to find them.