He stepped back from the door, satisfied. Possibly the body would be found, but this would deter suspicion at least for a while. He wasn’t planning to spend much time here.

He paused with one hand on the sun-hot wall of the shed.

There was a sound behind him, faint but unsettling—a rustle and chatter in the darkness.

Mice, Billy thought.

Rats.

Well, they can have him. He closed the door.

Billy’s first shot had blown the package of morning glory seeds out of the time traveler’s hand.

A stray corner of his beam sliced into the package and scattered its contents across the lawn. The charred paper—the words Heavenly Blue still brownly legible—drifted to earth not far from the birch stump where the time traveler lost his leg. The seeds were dispersed in a wide curve between the stump and the fence.

Most were eaten by birds and insects. A few, moistened by the next night’s rainfall, rooted in the lawn and were choked by crabgrass before the shoots saw light.

Four of them sprouted in the rich soil alongside the cedar fence.

Three survived into the summer. The few blossoms they produced were gaudy by August, but there was no one to see. The grass had grown tall and the house was empty.

It would be empty for a few summers more.

PART ONE — The Door in the Wall

One

It was a modest three-bedroom frame house with its basement dug a little deeper than was customary in this part of the country, pleasant but overgrown with bush and ivy and miles away from town.

It had been empty for years, the real estate agent said, and the property backed onto a cedar swamp. “Frankly, I don’t see a lot of investment potential here.”