Jaclyn the Ripper Read Free Page A

looked both ways and headed across the rotunda toward the courtyard and West Pavilion, formulating a plan. She would stay in 2010 long enough to track down and cut up Wells. Then—with the special key—she’d have carte blanche to choose her victims regardless of history. Perchance she’d travel back to mid-nineteenth-century Turkey and, say, disembowel that do-gooder Florence Nightingale, who was tending to the flotsam and jetsam of the Crimean War. She smiled.
Perhaps a trip into the past will make me a man again, and I can rape her as well.
    Halfway across the rotunda, she heard footsteps and glanced up. A security guard was coming down the circular staircase. The woman tensed, ducked in the shadows, walked faster.
    â€œHey!”
    The woman spun around, started running back the way she had come.
    â€œHey!”
    Panicked, the woman looked for escape, finally saw an emergency exit beyond the men’s restroom. Without breaking stride, she hit the bar on the door and burst out on an expanse of stone.
    The alarms went off.
    The awful noise reverberated off the buildings, the stone, resounded in her ears. She vaulted over a wall, fell into a hedgerow, rolled, fell again and landed on a manicured lawn. Unmindful of her scratched and bleeding arms, she got up and ran for the safety of an arid hillside ragged with smog-dusted scrub.

11:42 A.M. , Sunday, June 24, 1906
    H. G. Wells and a soft-spoken constable from Sandgate talked at the front door, the constable raising his voice over the muffled roar of the surf from below the cliffs. The police had been looking, had made inquiries, yet had turned up nothing, and there was no evidence of foul play. The constable promised they’d go on searching, then said good day and Godspeed, his words lost in the wind. Upset and worried, H.G. watched him avoid a hodgepodge of croquet wickets on the lawn, mount his bicycle and start back to town.
    â€œWhat did he say, sir?” asked the housekeeper, wringing her hands in the foyer, though she had heard every word.
    â€œNothing we didn’t already know, Mrs. Vickers.”
    His wife was missing.
    No one had seen her since dinner the night before. They’d been having another festive weekend at Spade House. Joseph Conrad, George Bernard and Charlotte Shaw, the Henry Jameses, the Webbs, the Blands, and a host of others were down from London to welcome H.G. home from his first tour of America. They’d had the usual literary banter during the croquet games, the usual political arguments at tea, the usual speculative theories at dinner. The only cause for raised eyebrows hadbeen W. K. Chichester arriving late from a pub and demanding to know if Wells had witnessed the earthquake in San Francisco. No, H.G. had replied, he had been in Chicago. After Chichester’s recitation of a ruined city on fire, H.G. had tuned out the seismologist’s grandiose claims of having predicted the quake, turned a deaf ear to his prattle about using revolutionary scientific methods to predict even bigger earthquakes in the future. H.G. was tired of science. He was more interested in charades; he was more interested in seconds of bread pudding and cognac. He was
most
interested in finding his lover-shadow—that other consciousness, that perfect woman who mirrored everything he held good and true, who matched him sexually and intellectually, that soul mate he thought he had found in Amy. Alas, no. His lover-shadow had vanished shortly after they were married.
    Ironically, Amy’s charade had been the highlight of the evening. Full of fun, a picture of loveliness, she had taken center stage in the parlor, was urging clues from the guests, making them laugh and grumble, holding them spellbound as they attempted to guess the name of a modern novel. At that moment, H.G. had felt a surge of pride and love for her—like years ago when they’d been unabashed lovers.
    After the guests had run the gamut of obvious