Hand Rosina and the Travel Agency

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4835-3432-9
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

After more than a century of conducting tourists to the past and back again, sixteen-year-old Rosina is tired of working for the Travel Agency, a powerful twenty-fourth-century enterprise that is in the business of time travel. Rosina compares living and working with her fellow teenage time travelers to being stuck with your high school classmates for centuries, and is beginning to wish the Agency had never recruited her from Victorian England. Then Rosina's boyfriend, the exasperating but intriguing Ned York, reveals his surprising true identity, and asks her to join him on a dangerous mission. Rosina agrees, with unforeseen results.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hand, Jill

Leseproben

We drove into San Francisco at dusk, and I was struck by how it was both familiar and strange at the same time. It was like meeting someone you once knew after the passage of many years, and after the first moment of shock, recognizing them despite the wrinkles and the gray hair. Except in this case, the aging process had been reversed and tall, shining buildings now stood where before the earthquake there had been dilapidated wooden tenements and poky little shops. Here and there was a familiar structure that had survived the disaster. I recognized some of the Victorian houses between Mission and Dolores, and there was the adobe Misión San Francisco de Asís, the oldest surviving structure in the city, dating to the late 1700s. There was the tall, cast-iron fountain at the intersection of Market Street, where Kearney and Geary connect, that I remembered from my last visit, but mostly it was the contours of the land that were familiar, the precipitous dips and steep hills that I recalled from my visit in 1906. Lombard Street was still a bobsled run, and I clutched my door handle in panic, hanging on for dear life, as the Studebaker sped along its serpentine curves. Ned told me not to be scared, boasting, “I’m an excellent driver. I can drive anything with a motor or that’s pulled by something with four legs. I remember this one time, I was driving a client in a chariot somewhere out in the boondocks in Gaul, and the road was all twisty-turny, like this one here. Well, wouldn’t you know it? The side of the road gave way, and there was nothing between us and a fifty-foot plunge down an embankment. My client was screaming and I was yanking on the reins as hard as I could and cursing at the horses, who were rearing up on their hind legs and going nuts. Everything worked out okay, although my client had to change his toga.” He said it had been a fun trip. They’d encountered some bandits who jumped out of a cluster of trees and menaced them. Ned had brandished a sword, laughing like a maniac, and had shouted that it was a good day to die. The bandits ran off like the devil was at their heels. Ned made it sound like a lark – ha ha! Jolly good fun! -- but I was beginning to think he was far too reckless to be a safe traveling companion. “You know,” he said, patting the steering wheel, as we whipped around another hairpin turn, and I clung harder to the door handle, “I’m thinking of naming this car Bess, after my first pony. I used to hang off Bess any which way, and kick her in the ribs to make her run, and she hated to run, but she never once threw me. Good old Bess.” I asked if he had persuaded Bess, and he said he hadn’t, looking surprised at the thought. Animals couldn’t be persuaded. He wished they could, because dogs were always biting him. He said his mother’s dogs had been particularly unpleasant in that regard. “Vicious little yapping things they were, with mad, red-rimmed eyes and teeth like a weasel’s. They used to lie in wait for me behind the arras, and dash out and bite me. Then, when I’d give them a swift kick, they’d go yelping to my mother and she’d yell at me for mistreating her sweet little lambs,” he said grumpily. The next day, we found an apartment for rent at 891 Post Street, in a neighborhood on the border between Nob Hill and the Tenderloin. Weirdly, we learned from one of the other tenants, a spidery lady who worked as a tap dance instructor by day and held séances in her apartment at night that were attended by people so ethereal and other-worldly that they might as well as been ghosts themselves, that it was the building where Dashiell Hammett had lived in the nineteen twenties, where he’d written his first three novels. I thought it was a bizarre coincidence, but Ned just shrugged and said if you stick around long enough, everything seems to be connected in some way. You keep running into people who could be the doppelganger of someone you’ve already met. Like the super at 891 Post Street. He could have been the twin of Chuck, the pool attendant back at the Lawrenceville station, who’d run afoul of loan sharks due to his predilection for mind-sharing. Harvey was the super’s name, and he was every bit as sullen and lazy as Chuck. It took him a long time to answer when we rang the doorbell labelled Ring For Superintendent, and when he came trudging to let us in, he was carrying a pulp magazine with a picture of a cowering blonde woman on the cover, being menaced by a bug-eyed monster. Dripping green letters screamed: MARTIANS CRAVE HUMAN BRIDES!!! As Harvey took us up to the third floor in a cage elevator that clanked and rattled alarmingly, he warned us that we weren’t to break the plumbing, fixing us with an accusing glare as if he suspected we were the sort of people who liked to amuse ourselves by tampering with the plumbing. We couldn’t keep a dog, not even a small one. He said he’d find out if we had a dog, so don’t think we could sneak one in. We weren’t to have loud parties or lose our keys, because he was too busy to keep letting people in who lost their keys. The vacant apartment smelt of cats and mothballs, as if some lonely old spinster had lived there for years, subsisting on canned soup and stale crackers. The walls had great festoons of cobwebs in the corners and badly needed repainting. When I pointed this out to Harvey, he said he was too busy to paint. If we wanted to spend our own money to buy paint, that was fine, but we would have to do the work ourselves. Then he stomped off with a warning that the rent was due on the first of the month and it had better not be late. “Nice guy,” said Ned. “I can tell we’re going to be buddies.” We peered cautiously into the bathroom, which had hexagonal floor tiles that looked like they may once have been white, and a claw-foot tub in need of a good scrubbing. It looked like there were mushrooms growing inside it. The kitchen was tiny, with barely enough room to move between the stove and the sink. There was a small bedroom, which I claimed. Ned could sleep in the Murphy bed that swiveled out from behind a metal panel on one wall in the living room, or he could hang from the ceiling like a bat, for all I cared. Ned saw me checking to see if there was a lock on the bedroom door. He chuckled, “Are you afraid I’ll creep in during the night and ravish you? I’m too much of a gentleman to try that, and besides, I wouldn’t want to get punched in the jaw again.” I suggested we go out and buy some used furniture. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in the place, aside from an ancient card table with a broken leg. I was beginning to miss my cozy rooms at the Lawrenceville station, where there was laundry service and a housekeeping staff to make my bed and restock the bathroom with clean towels. I’d shifted for myself many times while on assignment, but that had only been for a short time – a month or so at the most – and who knows how long Ned and I were going to have to be here in the past? What if 1947 turned into 1948 and 1948 became 1949 and we were still here? What if (horrible thought) we were stuck in the past forever, forced to pull up stakes and move every decade or so when it became obvious to the people around us that we weren’t aging normally? We’d just have to adjust, that was all. We’d buy stock in IBM and General Electric and other blue chip companies that did well in the mid-twentieth century. Ned would know which baseball teams would win the World Series and which horses to bet on in the Kentucky Derby. Financially, at least, we should be all right, but the thought of the two of us being trapped in the past, without other travel agents to talk to had me spooked. What was Lucia doing right now? Or Titus, or Sorrow? They would be worried about me. Damn Ned York anyway. Ned sidled over to where I stood in the kitchen, staring bleakly at the layers of grime caked on the stove, and said I looked glum. Did I want a hug? When I said no, he offered to let me punch him again, if that would cheer me up. It was tempting, but I refused. What we needed to do was to get moving: buy furniture, clean this place up, and figure out what to do next. “You know,” said Ned, as we were descending in the elevator, “This place isn’t so bad. San Francisco is pretty civilized now. You should have seen it when Jim Riley and I were here during the Gold Rush. There were all these unwashed gold miners running around, shooting off guns and passing out drunk everywhere. They had bull and bear fights down by the old mission, and a pound of coffee and a loaf of bread cost, like, ten dollars. One thing, this had always been a great town for restaurants. Let’s buy you a bed and some tables and things and then we’ll go have dinner at the Tadich Grill, what do you say?” I said that would be fine. I needed a wrist watch, too. It made me uneasy not knowing what time it was without a functioning internal chronograph. “Okay, sure,” Ned agreed. “We’ll get you a nice Lady Bulova. Or wait! I think old Trudi bought a gold watch with diamonds all over it. I’ve got it in the car, along with the rest of her stuff, if you want it.” How nice of him to offer me a stolen wristwatch. I said we’d better go to a bank and get a safe deposit box to keep our plunder in. Ned agreed, saying we’d take care of it tomorrow, after we found an office where we’d set up our private detective agency. “And I need a trench coat and a fedora,” he said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “You can’t be a private detective without a trench coat and a fedora.” “No, definitely not,” I said, thinking that nobody in their...