The Traveler
Part 3
Wandering around after school one day, Jamie finds herself in an unfamiliar part of town. Lost and with night falling, she follows a white cat up to a rundown house filled with valuable antiques. An old man named Eddy lives there, and over tea and cakes, he tells her that he’s a time traveler. He says he brought the treasures back from his travels and that Caesar, the white Persian cat, accompanied him home from his first journey. When Jamie gets up to leave, Eddy says that he would be glad if she came to see him again. He gives her money so she can call home from a pay phone at a gas station, but she later realizes that he’s given her two ancient Roman coins.
She returns the next afternoon and finds Eddy sitting with an old music box. Inside is a tintype photograph of a woman and a man. The man is Eddy, young and strong. He tells Jamie that the photo dates from 1863 when he jumped through a doorway in time and landed in the alley behind the woman’s dress shop. They fell in love, but he stepped through another time portal and could never find his way back. He’s been trying to return to her ever since, at a terrible price, for each time he travels he ages five years.
On Sunday Jamie walked across the weedy, overgrown lawn to the tired
