Page 3 of Flirting with Forever

“You have a considerable line out there.”

“Excellent,” said Peter, who, in fact, couldn’t have cared less. “But…”

“But what?”

“I admit I am concerned, most concerned, about the appropriateness of each patron as far as our limits are concerned. Might you be willing to size them up, so to speak, from a jump risk point of view?”

Mertons’s forehead creased, and he shuffled through the papers before finding one in particular. “I assume they’re the same people you saw when you lived this day in your life before.”

“Quite likely, aye.” Peter carried the prints to the storage room. “But the point is one can’t be sure. We assume the writer will be disguised, but what if there is more than one man with access to the unsecured time tube? What if there is a conspiracy to unravel the time fabric?”

Mertons paled. “You’re right. There’s a Robert de Manville on this list here whose name is giving me pause.”

“Robert de Manville.” Peter frowned. “I don’t remember him. Seems a very likely candidate, Mertons.”

Mertons sighed. “I explained you wouldn’t remember everyone. It is just as if you were seventy, and returned to the neighborhood in which you lived when you were a child. Some faces you’ll remember. Some you won’t. It is not a reliable means by which to judge. You must exercise caution and foresight at all times—all times, Peter. Give me a moment. I shall examine the group versus the appointments you had for the day from our records and offer you my thinking.”

“Take all the time you need.”

* * *

And Mertons, feeling more than his usual sense of trepidation, did. Though Robert de Manville, upon rigorous cross-examination, proved unremarkable and the woman with the crimson frock and pockmarks gave him no pause, the man with the hooded eyes beside her—her husband, or at least the man who purported to be—alarmed Mertons almost enough to announce Mr. Lely was accepting no more clients for the day. But he took down a thorough description of the man, so thorough, in fact, the elaborate chime of Peter’s Ottoman clock entered his consciousness as only a distant, barely noticed melody.

When he felt he’d observed enough to make a judgment on the security of the mission, he stepped back into the office and said, “I would like to offer a caution on—Peter?”

The desk was empty, and the door to the storage room was ajar.

“Er, I say, Peter?” He raised his voice a degree. “I would like to offer a stiff note of caution on a man named John Howell and his wife. I’m not certain, of course, but you must not take risks.”

Peter did not reply. Mertons frowned and started toward the storage room. “Remember, this writer has enough heartless calculation to fool his readers, destroy the reputation of a gifted man, and thus far elude the Guild. I would call that more than a temporary irritant, Peter. I would call that”—in the storage room Mertons found nothing but curtains fluttering at an open window, and his warning sputtered to a close—“a cold-blooded villain.”

Two

Administrative offices of the Carnegie Museum of Art Pittsburgh, present day

There are certain things that drive a woman to immediate action, Campbell Stratford thought as she felt the pop. A flesh-cutting panty hose run is one of them.

“Oh. My. God!” She shoved the manuscript pages aside, knocking over an orange Crush with one hand and a three-inch stack of security audit reports with the other. “How did I ever get a grown-up job?”

“Since when is curating a grown-up job?” said Jeanne, her assistant and longtime friend, as she grabbed a handful of napkins.

Campbell found the scissors and flung her leg on the desk. A run the size of the Grand Canyon with the approximate pain of an electrified garrote had laddered between her legs and, like a hosiery Sherman’s army, was about to march down her thigh.

“Avert your eyes!” She thrust the blade under the taut nylon lashes and jerked. The pain stopped, but the laddering shot to her knee. “Wite-Out!”

Jeanne hooked the bottle out of her desk organizer with the efficiency of a surgical nurse and lobbed it across the room. “Better hurry,” she said, glancing down the hall. “Packard and Ball are on their way to the stairs.”

“Crap. Since when is noon ‘early afternoon’?” Woodson Ball was the Mount Everest of potential donors, and according to his email to her, he shouldn’t have been here until at least one. Cam had planned to use her lunch hour to gobble a hot dog and scour reference books for the one detail about Anthony Van Dyck that would make her long-overdue manuscript spark to life. Spark sourcing at noon. Mountain climbing at one. Why can’t we stick to the schedule, folks? I got a promotion I’m after here.

She whipped the top off the Wite-Out and pulled the brush free, sending a fine spray of white across the year-end pledge report and most of the front of her pencil skirt. Moaning, she applied the ooze to the hole now eating past her knee, then leaned in and blew for all she was worth. “You haven’t seen Anastasia, have you?”

“I thought she traveled in a cloud of black smoke. That’s quite an image, by the way. It could definitely get you the front page on officesluts-dot-com.”

“Does it pay anything?”

“Hey, it covers the rent.”

Now Cam had a gummy clot of white at the end of a long, pale rectangle of exposed flesh. Actually what she had was a gummy clot of white, an unfinished manuscript, a big donor who seemed to be working on Greenland time, and a desk that smelled like the game room of a Chuck E. Cheese’s.