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A middle-aged Chinese woman shuffled over to the table and scowled a question at Cassie, inviting an order. Cassie asked for a café au lait.
“So you believe me, then?” Cassie asked, once the server had left the table.
The Bookseller nodded. “Well, all the things that you said would happen, happened. So you were either from the future or you’re psychic. Or a very good guesser. Either way it was worth another conversation. And I did like you that first time we met, five years ago. You have an energy I enjoy.”
“I’ve never been accused of having an energy before, but I’ll take it.” The server returned to the table and placed a coffee down in front of Cassie.
The Bookseller took a bite of a beignet, spilling powdered sugar over herself. She brushed it off. “You should eat one,” she instructed. “You’re too thin.”
“I’ve never been accused of that either,” Cassie said, but she took a beignet and ate it in a few bites. It was delicious. It made her think of Drummond and the croissants they had eaten in Lyon. She would be seeing him again soon, she knew, and that created a buzz of excitement in her stomach she didn’t quite understand.
As she chewed, she watched a gaggle of barely dressed young women totter along the street toward the busker. As they drew near him they started dancing in the street to the sound of his tuba, whooping and laughing and drawing a blast of a horn from a car trying to pass.
“You said you would help me,” Cassie said to the Bookseller, licking sugar off her fingers.
“You remember our agreement?” the Bookseller asked.
“I do. You will send someone to protect my friend.”
“Izzy,” the Bookseller said, and Cassie was impressed the woman didn’t need to check a note or be prompted to remember the name. “I remember.”
“She’s important to me,” Cassie said. “I want to make sure she is safe.”
“I understand. Tell me where and when.”
Cassie took a sip of her coffee and then brushed some sugar from her lap. “I’ll send you an email closer to the time with the details. Give me an email address.”
The Bookseller nodded.
“I left her asleep in bed,” Cassie explained, turning her eyes to the street again. “Someone needs to watch and make sure she is okay. And then, in the morning, when she’s up, take her somewhere to keep her safe.”
“Understood.”
“And I want to borrow whatever book you have that will help me with Dr. Barbary.”
The Bookseller said nothing for a while, looking into her coffee cup, rotating it on its saucer. Cassie listened to the tuba, to the chatter of tourists at nearby tables talking about the Garden District and cemeteries and how bad the gumbo had been.
“What you are asking,” Lottie said, pulling Cassie’s attention back to her. “It’s not a small thing. You understand?”
Cassie shrugged. “What I’m giving is not a small thing either.”
“If it really exists,” the Bookseller said.
“You know it does, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. We’re past this already, and I have to get back to New York.”
The Bookseller smiled. “I do like your attitude, girl,” she said. “So self-confident.”
“That’s something else I’ve never been accused of,” Cassie murmured. Beyond the sound of the tuba and the chatter in the café, Cassie heard a bell ringing somewhere behind her, maybe from a boat on the wide Mississippi. She didn’t know if boats cruised so late at night. She imagined it would be lonely, out there in the dark.
“So tell me this,” the Bookseller said. “If you manage to recover your book from Hugo Barbary, why don’t you just travel back in time and stop him from throwing you into the past? Why don’t you just make it so that all of this didn’t happen?”
Cassie smiled. She and Mr. Webber had spent many nights discussing time travel. “I don’t think time travel works like that,” she said.“Somebody once told me that you can’t change the past, you can only create the present you live in.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Once you’ve done a bit of time travel, you begin to see,” Cassie said. “Things always turn out the way they happened. I don’t think I could stop that happening to me. And more importantly, I don’t know if I would want that now.”
“Oh?” the Bookseller asked.
