Beyond This Time: A Time-Travel Suspense Novel (7 page)

Once they’d settled on the sofa with their coffee, she couldn’t stand his silence any longer and blurted out, “So what do you think, Pop?”

“It reminds me of some things I heard back in 1963 when I worked at a church in Maceyville. I was living with my sister back then. My, my but we spent some good times together. Lettie Ruth was a rare gem, Kathleen. Filled with laughter and a never-ending supply of energy. I’ve always felt you were cheated a little bit that she couldn’t be around once you come along. You two would have gotten along like greens and cornbread.”

“She’s the sister that up and disappeared, right?” The Lettie Ruth mystery had been Kat’s childhood obsession. Of course she only became obsessed because no one in the family would talk about the woman, or why she’d disappeared.

The topic had been so hush-hush and top secret that ferreting out morsels of information became all the more tantalizing. Unfortunately, Kat continuously ran head on into a brick wall of adult silence. The subject was taboo, and no amount of snooping or whining generated any new data or enticed one single relative to spill the beans.

In twenty-nine years all Kat ever learned was that Lettie Ruth Rayson had never married, had been a nurse, and lived in Maceyville. Then in 1963 she’d vanished without a trace. Period. End of story.
Finis
.

“Is she was such an amazing person, how come the family doesn’t speak about her, Pop?” Kat probed. After all these years plus her time and effort, she’d be darned if she’d miss out on a rare opportunity to garner one more a tiny scrap of Lettie Ruth trivia.

He tilted his head to the side and rubbed his chin. “I suppose because it hurts too much.”

Since her Pop tended to be up front about most everything and loved long detailed explanations, she found his evasiveness peculiar. Her police antenna wiggled in the air as she wondered what information he was hiding. She also found it annoying, especially now that she was all grown up.

“Come on, Pop,” she cajoled. “You know something. You just admitted you were living with her when she disappeared.”

“I was indeed.” Rayson’s eyes glazed over.

She’d seen that faraway look before. As a girl she’d often found him in similar states when he mined deep into his own thoughts regarding Lettie Ruth. In the wee hours of the morning he would sit in the front room, holding his sister’s picture and crying. Kat always wondered what horrible memories he carried around inside his head.

“Pop?” she said quietly, fighting the urge to physically yank him away from his secrets. Right now he was as far gone from this time and place as her aunt. And it frightened her.

He shook his head and smiled.

She recognized the falsity of that smile when his dimples, so like her own, failed to show. His mouth must be rigid as steel for them to remain unseen, she thought. Kat knew from personal experience their dimples were impossible to hide. She’d spent most of her childhood trying to keep the sink holes from forming in her cheeks each time she smiled or laughed. Eventually she’d come to realize the futility of the task. Like Pop, she’d been blessed—or cursed—with the ‘what-darling-dimples-you-have’ syndrome.

Kat tucked her arm through his and gave a little squeeze. “Are you all right?”

“Of course I am,” he snorted. “You are a bigger worry wart than your momma.”

“It’s not worrying to be concerned about someone you love.”

“I hate causing you to fret so. I’m getting older, Kathleen, and on occasion I get caught up in the past.”

“Is the past where you went this time?”

“Yes,” he said. “To 1963. I was twenty-seven, fresh out of the Army and ready to start at the seminary come fall. And so full of myself I barely fit in my britches.” Rayson chuckled and his ample mid-section jiggled.

“How old was Lettie Ruth?” Kat asked, bringing the conversation back on point. And keeping her fingers crossed the question didn’t trigger another backward slide.

“Thirtyish,” he said vaguely.

“Did she disappear from New Orleans?”

“No, from Maceyville. On the fifth of April, 1963. It happened the Friday before Palm Sunday,” he said quietly. “The rest of the family still lived down in New Orleans, so I called them with the bad news.”

He looked so sad and haunted Kat wished she never broached the subject. “I’m sorry, Pop. I didn’t mean to bring all this unhappiness down on you.”

“I’m fine, child.” He glanced at her. “Sometimes I see Lettie Ruth in you.”

“How so?”

“Like you, Sister leaned toward an independent life. She left home to attend nursing school at Fisk University up in Nashville, and never came back to New Orleans. Instead, she moved to Maceyville and worked with Doctor Timothy Biggers.”

“Did she have her own house?”

“No, the doctor ran a clinic out of his home and she moved into some extra rooms on the third floor. It was during this period that she and a girlfriend got involved in all sorts of civil rights things. The Freedom Riders, lunch counter sit-ins, the voter’s registration campaign, why those two women even marched along the side of Dr. Martin Luther King. My big sister was a bona fide civil rights activist before she disappeared,” he said proudly.

Kat hated to burst his happy bubble, but the words
civil rights activist
and
disappeared
set were not compatible. “Pop, in those days activists didn’t just up and disappear. They were out right murdered.”

“What do you know about that, child?” His body suddenly sagged as though someone had dropped a load of cement on his shoulders.

“I’ve read the books, Pop. They teach classes on the movement in college.”

“But what do you
know
?”

“I know about the dogs and fire hoses. I know about the beatings and lynchings. I know the next year, in June 1964, three Freedom Summer Project volunteers were shot in the head by Ku Klux Klan members,” Kat declared.

“I knew them,” Rayson said, his voice taking on the respectful hushed tones of a funeral parlor. “They were good boys. Andrew Goodman came from Queens College, James Chaney, a twenty-one-year-old black man out of Mississippi, and Michael Schwerner, a New York social worker.”

“Do you think Lettie Ruth met a similar end?” If her aunt got involved in the movement, she probably ruffled a few feathers. And the local Klan wouldn’t hesitate to teach an independent black woman a lesson or two.

“Some things are for the knowing, and some for the telling, Kathleen.”

“What’s the big secret?” she snapped. “I’m a card-carrying Rayson, Pop. And I’m certainly not a child anymore. I deserve a straight answer.”

“And you’ll get one by the by,” Rayson said sharply. “But right this moment we’re goin’ to keep on discussing your experience … not Lettie Ruth.”

Kat recognized the stubborn set of his chin and settled for a simple nod. She’d let it pass for now, but they would return to this subject.

Rayson cleared his throat then began. “As I said, I came up from New Orleans to help out at the church in Maceyville. Soon as I stepped off the bus I saw Lettie Ruth was all worked up. She started jabbering away about some fool notion of studying up on the spirit world.”

“I thought we weren’t going to talk about your sister?” Kat asked.

“Don’t be pulling attitude on me girl. As I was saying, she had some fool notion about studying up on the spirit world.”

“Don’t you think that’s childish interest for a thirty-year-old woman? And a civil rights activist,” she added, still annoyed at the abrupt end to the Lettie Ruth discussion.

He laughed. “She was just full of fun and had an ornery streak as wide as the Mississippi River. I learned as a child to go along for the ride and enjoy it. She claimed to have heard about several folks interacting with the spirits. Her idea was for us to meet with them, afterwards we’d decide whether or not we believed in ghosts.”

“So what did you decide, Pop? Do you believe in ghosts?” Kat asked, jumping to the chase, her patience worn thin.

“Kathleen, some questions can’t be answered with a yes or no. I’ll tell you the stories we heard, then you make up your own mind.”

Kat drummed her fingers on the sofa cushion. “Pop, my mind is already made up. But I am curious as to what you believe.”

“My personal beliefs have nothing to do with what happened to y’all on that street.”

“Sweet Judas, Pop, can’t you give a body a straight answer? Do you believe in ghosts?” If he didn’t her theories about the man, and especially the phone call, didn’t have a prayer.

Rayson frowned. “Don’t be pulling attitude on me, girl.”

“I just asked a question.”

He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. “Yes, I do believe in ghosts, Kathleen. But that’s not the real question you’re askin’ me.”

Kat pushed her annoyance away and stuffed it between the sofa cushions. Any argument at this time would be less than productive. “And what might my real question be?”

“You’re asking if I believe your tale,” he said.

“Well, do you?”

“Of course I do, child. You’re not prone to lying. And I’ve seen plenty of strange things over the years. Now as I said, Lettie and I met the folks on their back porches,” Rayson said, easily picking up his rhythm as though there had been no interruptions. “We’d meet in their kitchens, sometimes if it was hot and muggy we’d go out and sit under the oaks or magnolias, and we’d drink sweet tea and listen to incredible tales.

“Miss Mattie De Carlo, the librarian, called him her Dancing Ghost. Prior to this encounter, she’d been in a wheelchair for ten years, the result of a fall down a flight of stairs.”

Although she could see Pop’s mouth moving, his voice disappeared in the roaring sound in her ears.
Mattie De Carlo
had died on Park Street in 1963. Kat’s nerve endings tingled. Her instincts were right. The connections did exist.

“Apparently this Dancing Ghost first appeared the previous Fall,” Rayson was saying.

“Do you remember where she lived?”

“The ghost?”

“No, Mattie De Carlo.”

Rayson thought for a moment, and then shook his head. “Somewhere near Aunt Della’s place I think. Why?”

“Because we were parked in front of—” Kat stopped herself. If she admitted what she and Mitch had really been doing, all the weird occurrences would come out. “Just go on with the story,” she said.

Rayson squeezed her shoulder and resumed his tale. “That particular evening, while reading in her wheelchair, a shadow suddenly fell across the page. Mattie told us she knew beyond doubt she was wide awake, and even recalled the exact hour ‘cause the mantle clock struck the hour, seven in the evening. Glancing up, she was quite startled to find a handsome young man standing beside her chair.”

Kat listened, impatient to hear how this ghost tale related to her own dilemma. Thirty-seven years in the pulpit had shaped Alvin Rayson’s conversational style so much that he’d become a master at weaving life’s experiences into a tapestry. A tapestry with a point. Pop preferred to let his listeners discover the parallels between his rhetoric and their situation. She hoped some form of enlightenment would eventually show its face.

“Without speaking,” Rayson continued, “the ghost placed a record on her old Victrola and cranked the handle. A beautiful waltz filled the room. He extended his hand, inviting her to dance. Mattie De Carlo initially withdrew from this apparition, fearful of any contact. But the Dancing Ghost, not easily discouraged, stepped closer. With an engaging smile and a gentle tug, he pulled her out of the chair.”

“She touched him?” Kat asked, thrilled by the first inkling of a connection between this story and her own experience. She remembered how the man on Park Street had passed through her Honda as though he was without substance. If she’d rolled down the window, reached her hand out toward him, would she have touched a flesh and blood man?