Chapter 65 Chicago, 1927—Rick #3
“Yes. Yes, of course.” He nodded slowly, gaze flicking again toward the glowing phone before returning to the memory. “Jane and I examined it together. We discovered it opened—like a locket.”
“Like mine?” Skye asked.
“Yes, but this one had a Celtic inscription. As soon as I spoke the words, a fog filled the room. We couldn’t escape it. I threw the brooch, hoping that it would release us. It didn’t. We tumbled inside the fog, and when it stopped, we were in New York City in the year 1898.”
The room went silent. Even the clock seemed to hesitate between ticks. Skye’s fingers clenched around the edge of the sofa cushion, eyes wide, searching her father’s face. “What are you saying, Papa?”
Alistair turned toward her, his expression somewhere between wonder and disbelief. “That we traveled through time. I know it sounds impossible,” he said quietly, “but it’s true.”
Skye pressed her lips together, brows furrowing as she studied his face. “Like a Connecticut Yankee?”
It took Rick a minute to connect Skye’s question to Mark Twain’s novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The tale of a man flung through centuries by an inexplicable fate.
“Something like that,” Alistair said.
“But that’s fiction, Papa,” she insisted. “Are you telling me it’s possible to time travel?”
“Ask Mr. O’Grady,” Alistair said, his tone gentle but firm, passing the question as though the truth had begun to burn his hands.
“Under the right conditions,” Rick said carefully, “it’s possible.”
Skye turned to him, eyes wide, skin drained of all color. “Are you like the Connecticut Yankee?”
“Yes,” he said, meeting her gaze. “You’re asking if I’m from another time—and the answer is yes. I’m from the twenty-first century.”
She blinked, lips parting slightly. The silence between them stretched, heavy with disbelief. “Papa,” she whispered, her voice faint, “you’ve kept this from me for my entire life. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Alistair’s shoulders dropped, his voice lined with regret. “In hindsight, I should have. But we didn’t believe you would ever see the future. Why burden you with our past if it would never touch you?”
Rick watched as color slowly returned to her cheeks, her breathing shallow but steady—realization dawning behind her eyes. Then, he asked a question he already knew the answer to, but he needed Alistair to say it out loud. “What did you do in New York City?”
Alistair sighed, a long exhale that seemed to carry decades of fatigue.
“I found work with Willis Woodard and T. B. Harms, the music publishers. Everything began well enough. But not long after I started, someone stole a large sum from the company. I had nothing to do with it, but someone named me the culprit. Before I knew it, a stranger approached me—a man I had never seen before—offering money and train tickets to Chicago. He told us to use Sheena’s given name.
Said if we didn’t, the police would find me. ”
“What was that?”
“Marshall,” Alistair said softly, placing a comforting hand on her shoulder.
“That’s why Mr. Bowes just called you Mr. Robertson,” she said, her eyes widening with insight. “That’s your real name.”
He dropped his hand. “He wanted me to remember who I was and where I came from.”
Skye’s face twisted in confusion and disbelief. “You were accused of a crime you didn’t commit, and you ran instead of clearing your name? That doesn’t sound like you, Papa.”
“I know, but your mother and I had no identification and couldn’t prove who we were. Since our Scottish accents were so strong, people assumed we were recent immigrants. We didn’t even have a marriage license on record. Most of all, we were afraid of what would happen if the police arrested us.”
Skye leaned forward, perched on the edge of the sofa, hands clenched in her lap. “What did you do?”
“We followed the man’s advice and boarded the train,” Alistair said.
“When we arrived in Chicago, another man—different, but clearly connected—helped us secure housing. Not long after, he arranged a position for me at the bank. A minor job at first, nothing significant. But I knew, even then, that a debt would come due one day. And when it did…”
His eyes clouded, voice lowering to almost a whisper. “I was a vice president by then. The men who had lifted us up returned. They wanted their repayment.”
“What did they want?” Skye asked, her eyes filled with defeat.
Alistair drew a long, uneven breath. “At first, their requests seemed inconsequential,” he said quietly.
“They asked me to exchange counterfeit bills for real ones—small amounts, nothing that would raise suspicion. Then they asked for a list of my clients who were struggling financially.” He looked down, the memory heavy in his eyes.
Within weeks, those same men had enough money to clear their debts.
They rose again—comfortable, confident—never understanding the true cost of their success until it was far too late. ”
“You stole for those people. You compromised your morals for men like Mr. Bowes.” Skye’s words cut through the air like glass. Her gaze was empty—emotionless, and somehow that was worse than anger. “Did Mama know?”
“She knew all of it, and it was her idea to keep a record of all illegal transactions, and a list of the men involved, along with their addresses and bank account numbers. She believed that if the police ever caught up with us, we could negotiate with them.”
“You’d give the police the names of the men you helped,” Skye said, her voice trembling, “to save yourselves?”
Alistair grimaced. “We knew eventually the police would arrest us, a jury would find us guilty, and we’d face the consequences.
But we weren’t going down alone. We had evidence of the people involved.
While we waited for judgment day, we remained quiet and continued with our business.
We didn’t want to go to jail. We didn’t want to lose you, our home, our standing in the community, our reputations.
You wouldn’t have wanted that. It would have destroyed all of us. ”
Skye straightened, eyes bright with restrained fire. “Don’t you dare excuse your behavior by saying it was for me,” she said. “I would have lived on the streets if it meant we stayed honest.”
Alistair lifted his gaze, pain flickering there. “But you would’ve seen us as failures. And that—” his voice cracked before he recovered—“that would have destroyed your mother and me.”
Her reply came like flint striking stone. “No, Papa. You mean you couldn’t bear to look in the mirror and see a failure. Don’t put that on me.”
Rick’s voice broke the tension, soft but deliberate. “Why didn’t you start a band here?” he asked. “You were a talented musician, and Sheena—she was an extraordinary vocalist. You could have done that without involving yourself with criminals.”
Alistair gave a bitter laugh with no humor in it. “Capone’s men already controlled most of the clubs, the recording houses, the publishing routes. The entire music scene was a puppet show with gangsters behind the curtain. It wouldn’t have been much different.”
Skye froze, her mouth falling slightly open, her eyes darting between them. “You were a musician?” she asked, her voice barely audible.
“We left our lives in Scotland behind, along with our name, our musical talent, our friends, our families. All of it. We had a new life. And we had you. But when you started singing, we realized how gifted you were, and we couldn’t hold you back.
We wanted to encourage you, but we couldn’t suddenly start playing the piano and singing. It was too late for us.”
He paused, swirling what little whisky remained in his glass. “In Scotland, we were ordinary. Playing small gigs, chasing a dream that would never come true. Here… at least we had a name. Respect. Stability. That’s what we traded everything for.”
Skye stared down at her hands, her fingers trembling slightly, then folded them together as if to stop the shaking. “Respect,” she repeated quietly. “At what cost?”
Rick didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The question hung in the air like smoke—thin, gray, impossible to clear.
“You wanted me to have the success you denied yourself,” Skye said softly, voice trembling with anger and hurt. “How could you do that?”
Alistair’s head dipped as if the accusation had weight.
“We knew if you found out about us, it would hurt you deeply, but we couldn’t find a way out of the mess we’d created.
” Alistair emptied his glass and refilled it.
Then he looked at Rick with a mix of anger, disappointment, and resignation.
“Why did you wait so long to come for us?”
Rick tugged at his lower lip, buying time to think. There was no easy way to explain years of tangled timelines, chance discoveries, and the strange fate that tied them all together. Finally, he asked, “Do you recognize the name Elliott Fraser?”
Alistair blinked. “Of course,” he said at last. “I never thought I’d hear it again.
” His voice grew distant, reflective. “His father and grandfather were rich—and mean enough to frighten half the parish. The rest of us envied them while quietly resenting them. The boys might have hated Elliott for his privilege if they hadn’t pitied him.
Poor child—alone with those people after his mother ran off with Roger Graham… and died.”
“You tried to stop Roger, didn’t you?” Rick asked.
Alistair’s gaze flicked up sharply. He drew a long, heavy breath and let it out slowly. “I didn’t think anyone knew that.”
“It’s not common knowledge,” Rick said.
Alistair sank into the nearest chair, his composure unraveling at the edges.
For a moment, he looked his age—and a few years beyond it.
“Yes,” he admitted finally. “I tried. Roger was drunk, raving about leaving that night. When I stepped between them, he hit me square across the jaw. I went down hard. The next thing I heard was that their car had crashed. Roger and Aileen were dead.”