Saving Lucas Biggs by Marisa de los Santos

Author:Marisa de los Santos
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

Margaret

1938

AUNT BRIDEY HAD THE O’MALLEY eyes, all right, as I had plenty of opportunity to observe, since the second she opened her door to find us standing there, she jutted her head forward and slapped a stare on me so hard, I stumbled backward and just about fell.

“You hold still!” she snapped.

I obeyed. Then she whipped off her glasses, hunched to get eye level with me, and stared some more before she whipped her glasses back on (turns out it’s possible to do this) and eyed me head to toe, using those thick lenses like a Cub Scout uses a magnifying glass to focus sunshine on a bug and fry it.

“Giiirrll,” said Aunt Bridey, shaking her head and stretching out the word like chewing gum, “I’m in the middle of pickling okra! This had better be good.”

“It is,” said Joshua, quickly.

“I mean,” said Aunt Bridey, ignoring him completely and narrowing her eyes at me, “if you just did what I think you just did, then somebody better be about to die!”

“How about three people?” I blurted out. “Would three people be enough? Two in 1938 and one in 2014?”

“And here I was,” sighed Aunt Bridey, raising her eyes imploringly to the sky, “thinking I was done hearing my relatives say things like that.” She gathered herself together. “Except I guess the only relative who said them was me. All right. Sit down. Tell me who.”

At Aunt Bridey’s kitchen table, I said, “Theodore Ratliff.”

“Now? In my time?” asked Aunt Bridey. “In 1938?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Tomorrow night.”

“Who else?”

I swallowed and glanced at Josh, who would be hearing this part for the first time.

“Nobody, if we save Ratliff,” I said. “But if we don’t . . . Aristotle Agrippa.”

Josh shot me a stunned look.

“What? Why?” he asked.

“And who,” pressed Aunt Bridey, ignoring Josh, “in 2014?”

So far, I hadn’t mentioned my dad to Josh either, figuring that the less he knew about a future he’d one day be walking around in, the better. But since he was in this with me, it seemed only fair to give him at least a bare-minimum, no-details idea of what was at stake. I took a breath.

“My father,” I said.

Joshua opened his mouth probably to ask questions, but then shut it, which I appreciated.

“I think he’ll be . . . your great-nephew, when he’s born, in 1968,” I told Aunt Bridey.

“You’d better give me the whole story,” she sighed, turning off the fire beneath her pot of okra with a shrug of resignation.

“You know I can’t give you the whole story,” I said.

“Tell me what you can,” instructed Aunt Bridey.

So I told her about Elijah Biggs’s dirty, double-crossing ways, about the murder of Theodore Ratliff and the faked suicide-murder of Aristotle at the infirmary, and how these awful things would lead to other awful things that I couldn’t tell her and Josh about, which would lead to my father’s life being in terrible danger in ways that I also couldn’t tell her and Josh about.

“But some of the things have to do with Luke,” I said, looking right at Josh.

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