Chapter One
1934
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A pair of cold, deep-set eyes stared out from under the floppy, black felt hat. The tall, sinister-looking, weather-beaten man had been waiting for what seemed like an eternity. If everything went as planned, the power would be his to control. The plan had been set in motion. Now, if only the two girls will fall into my trap.
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1964
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Ring! "Aarrgh..." It can't be morning already! Ring ... ring. With much effort, I opened one eye and yelled, to no one in particular, "I'll get it!" Stumbling out of my bedroom into the hallway, I grabbed the phone, hoping it was Cynthia telling me our trip was off because she'd contracted bubonic plague overnight or even something less severe like a painful hangnail.
"So, are you ready, Gus?" asked the demanding voice on the other end. My heart sank. The message was loud and clear. Cynthia didn't have a hangnail, and the plague had apparently skipped her house last night.
"Did you hear me, Gus? Are you ready?"
"Uh ... no. Not really," I mumbled, pulling the extra-long phone cord into my bedroom, fighting the urge to hang up.
There was a pause. "Augusta Lee! You're not backing out are you? After all, you're the one who wanted to follow your grandmother to the circus to keep her out of trouble."
Oh, there it was. Augusta Lee. She only called me that when she wanted to get under my skin. Don't get me wrong. I loved my grandfather, Augustus Leegrand, but did I have to be named after him?
"No. I'm not backing out." I grumbled. "I just overslept." Well, that wasn't a total fib. I figured if I didn't get out of bed, I wouldn't have to face the day.
With a death grip on the phone, I pulled the covers over my head, shutting out the morning sun as it invaded my room like some alien laser beam trying to snatch me from my bed. There was still time to back out, but I didn't want to look like a coward to my best friend. Oh, I knew she'd eventually pester me into going, but hanging over me was this strange, creepy feeling that we should just stay home.
Plans to go to the circus with our grandmothers were made one week earlier, but it wasn't to be your typical grandmother-granddaughter outing. You see, our grandmothers, Clara and Bess, were just about the same age as Cynthia and me. Now, before you think I'm still sound asleep and simply having one doozy of a nightmare, let me explain how our four young lives became connected.
A few weeks earlier, Cynthia and I had been ordinary twelve-year-olds, riding bikes, playing softball with our neighborhood friends, and on occasion getting into our fair share of trouble. We were also blessed with our fair share of curiosity, which brought us more than we bargained for one rainy, summer afternoon. That was the day Cynthia and I discovered the magic.
Bored out of our minds, we had ventured up to Cynthia's attic. Her three-story house had been in the family for generations, and was our source of entertainment and exploration ever since we learned to climb steps. But, it took on a whole new meaning when the attic became our ticket to adventures, even beyond our wildest imaginations.
Behind the clutter of old furniture, dusty cardboard boxes, and more cobwebs than in the haunted house at the Harrison County Fair, we discovered a magic trunk. A trunk that led us into another time-back more than fifty years-into the lives of our twelve-year-old grandmothers.
The prospects of yet another adventure into the unknown with Clara and Bess had sounded like fun a few days ago. Now, it didn't seem like such a great idea. Mainly because, after we had taken a couple of routine trips into 1914, our third journey found us as passengers on a very large cruise ship on the Atlantic Ocean-and we had almost gotten Cynthia's great-aunt, Belle, not to mention ourselves, killed!
No, I wasn't sure I was ready to risk another perilous journey into the past. But, how could I convince Cynthia?
I sighed. "I'll be ready in fifteen minutes." Hanging up the phone, I resigned myself to taking at least one more trip, silently praying that Clara and Bess didn't cause as much trouble as Belle had. I wasn't in the mood to have to confront someone as evil as Belle's former fiancé, Andre, who had tried to throw her off the ship.
I grabbed yesterday's clothes off the floor, dressed, and quickly gave up on making my unruly, copper-red hair do anything socially acceptable. Pounding down the stairs, I flew into the kitchen, crammed a doughnut into my mouth, and ran out the door. "Immf ... wemmeeeeng!" I muffled a powdered sugar explosion 'goodbye' to my mother. The door slammed behind me before she could ask where I was going.
Cynthia was waiting on her front porch.
"It's about time!" She tapped a pink-sneakered foot on the porch bricks. "And don't try to say you spent too much time choosing the perfect outfit." She sniffed, giving me a sarcastic once-over.
Perfectly dressed in crisp white shorts and pink plaid blouse, her shiny ponytail tied with a matching satin ribbon, she looked as if she had been primping for hours. "You'd better hope we don't miss our ride."
Standing there in cut-off jeans, faded T-shirt, and licking my fingers in a useless effort to plaster down my hair, I said, "I've ... uh ... been ... thinking about that. How are we going to get to the circus without being seen? You know the only way we became invisible was when we took the magic stairway."
A mysterious stairway had appeared to us twice in the attic-once when we discovered special clues in a dream about a loud, annoying bell, and again when we came across an old steamship ticket. It seemed that the stairway was our ticket to places beyond the reach of the trunk.
"Yeah, that could be a problem," Cynthia mused. "Maybe if Clara and Bess are hiding in the crate with the organ your great-grandfather's taking to the circus, we can take their place and sit next to him. He won't know the difference since we look exactly like the two of them when we go back in time."
"One little problem," I reminded her. "Our grandmothers aren't deaf. Won't they get suspicious when they hear us talking, especially since we'll be impersonating them?" Before she could answer, I added, "Anyway, don't you remember Bess telling Clara she wasn't allowed to go on these trips with her father? If they have to hide in the crate, what makes you think he'd let us go?"
Cynthia chuckled sheepishly. "Oh, yeah. Good point."
"What? What was that? My ears must be plugged. Did you actually say I had a good point?" I teased.
Standing on the porch didn't seem to be giving us any answers, so we walked into Cynthia's house, up the stairway to the second floor, and opened the attic door. Although we were beginning to take time travel for granted, there were still butterflies in our stomachs-especially mine-as we climbed the dusty stairs.
"Remember how terrified we were the first time we came up here?" I laughed nervously. "We were sure there were ghosts, goblins, and giant tarantulas waiting for us, but the real excitement was in that old trunk."
The attic looked pretty much the same as it had the last time we were there, complete with the old trunk from the days of Cynthia's great-grandmother, Anna ... except for one thing.
"How'd this get here?"
Blocking the trunk was an old train track attached to a large piece of plywood. A small village, surrounded by snow-covered mountains and blue painted lakes, was still intact, although a long-ago train wreck had derailed the locomotive and most of the cars. The train, which had once belonged to Cynthia's great-grandfather, and had been since passed down to her brother, wasn't an ordinary train ... it was a circus train, complete with clowns, elephants, and canvas tents that were set up just outside the little town.
"Remember how Kenny would growl at us never to touch it or we'd be sorry?" I blissfully thought about all the times we had pestered Cynthia's brother.
"Yeah. Maybe he thought he was one of those stupid toy lions in his circus."
I shrugged, still wondering why it was there, then bent down, and pulled the heavy plywood away from the trunk.
"Well," I said under my breath, as we stood facing our time machine, "this is it."
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