Linda Lael Miller Bundle (20 page)

“Bye-ee,” Elisabeth chimed sweetly, just as another message began to play.

“Elisabeth? It’s Janet. Just wanted to say I had a great time visiting. How about coming to Seattle next weekend? Give me a call.”

Elisabeth turned off the machine and went slowly up the stairs. On a whim, she continued up a second flight to the attic.

There was one way to find out if she’d walked in her sleep that night and found a man’s coat to use as proof of the unprovable.

The attic door squeaked loudly on its hinges, and Elisabeth thought to herself that the shrill sound should have awakened the dead, let alone a sleepwalker. A flip of the switch located just inside the door illuminated the dust-covered trunks, bureaus, boxes and chairs.

Even from where she stood, Elisabeth could see that neither she nor anyone else had visited this chamber in a very long time. There were no tracks in the thick dust on the floor.

Taking the necklace out from under her sweater, Elisabeth returned to the second floor and stood opposite the sealed door. Her heart was beating painfully fast, and the pit of her stomach was jittery. “Be there,” she whispered. “Please, Jonathan. Be there.”

Elisabeth tried the knob, but even before she touched it, she knew it wasn’t going to turn. Obviously, she could not enter the world on the other side of that door at will, even wearing the necklace. Other forces, all well beyond Elisabeth’s comprehension, had to be present.

“I have to tell you about the fire,” she said sadly, sliding down the wooden framework to sit on the hallway floor, her knees drawn up, her forehead resting on her folded arms. “Please, Jonathan. Let me in.”

She must have dozed off right there on the floor. She came to herself with a start when she heard her name being whispered.

“Elisabeth! Elisabeth, come back! I
need
to talk to you!”

Elisabeth glanced wildly toward the fanlight at the end of the hall and saw that it was still light outside. Then she scrambled to her feet.

“Trista?” She reached for the doorknob, and it turned easily in her hand. On the other side of the door, she found the child who was a lifetime her senior.

Trista was sitting on the floor of her room, next to the big dollhouse, and her lower lip protruded. “I’m being punished,” she said.

Elisabeth knelt beside the little girl and gave her a heartfelt hug, hoping she wouldn’t feel the trembling. “What did you do?”

“Nothing.” Jonathan’s daughter handed Elisabeth a tiny china doll as she sat beside her on the rag rug, and Elisabeth smiled at its little taffeta dress and painted hair.

“Come on, Trista,” she said. “Your father wouldn’t restrict you to your room for no reason.”

“Well, it wasn’t a very
good
reason.”

Elisabeth raised her eyebrows, waiting, and Trista’s little shoulders rose and fell in a heavy sigh.

“I couldn’t help it,” she said. “I told my friend Vera about you, and she told everybody in the county that Papa had a naked woman here. Now I have to come straight to my room after school every day for a solid month!”

Elisabeth touched the child’s glossy dark pigtail. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble. I do, however, feel duty bound to point out that I wasn’t naked—I was wearing a football jersey.”

“You didn’t get me into trouble,” Trista said. “Vera did. And what’s a football jersey?”

“A very fancy undershirt. Is your papa at home, Trista?” Elisabeth couldn’t help the little shiver of excitement that passed through her at the prospect of encountering Jonathan again, though God knew he probably wouldn’t be thrilled to see
her.

Glumly, Trista nodded. “He’s out in the barn, I think. Maybe you could tell him that a month is too long to restrict a girl to her bedroom.”

Elisabeth chuckled and kissed the child’s forehead. “Sorry, short person. It isn’t my place to tell your father how to raise his daughter.”

With care, Elisabeth unclasped the necklace and put it in a little glass bowl on Trista’s bureau. “You’ll keep this safe for me, won’t you?”

Trista nodded, watching Elisabeth with curious eyes. “I’ve never seen a lady wear pants before,” she said. “And I’ll bet you haven’t got a corset on, neither.”

Elisabeth grinned over one shoulder as she opened the door. “That’s one bet you’re bound to win,” she said. And then she was moving down the hallway.

The pictures of glowering men in beards and steely eyed, calico-clad women were back, and so was the ghastly rose-patterned runner on the floor. Elisabeth felt exhilarated as she hurried toward the back stairway, also different from the one she knew, and walked through the kitchen.

There was a washtub hanging on the wall outside the back door, and chickens clucked and scratched in the yard. A woman was standing nearby, hanging little calico pinafores and collarless white shirts on a clothesline. She didn’t seem to notice Elisabeth.

Wife? Housekeeper? Elisabeth decided on the latter. When Jonathan had snatched the necklace from Elisabeth’s neck during her first visit, he’d spoken of his spouse in the past tense.

When she stepped through the wide doorway of the sturdy, unpainted barn—which was a teetering ruin in her time—she saw golden hay wafting down from a loft. A masculine voice was singing a bawdy song that made Elisabeth smile.

“Jonathan?” she called, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dimmer light. The singing instantly stopped.

Jonathan looked down at her from the hayloft, his chest shirtless and glistening with sweat, a pitchfork in one hand. His dark hair was filled with bits of straw. Something tightened inside Elisabeth at the sight of him.

“You.” His tone was so ominous, Elisabeth took a step backward, ready to flee if she had to. “Stay right there!” he barked the moment she moved, shaking an index finger at her.

He tossed the pitchfork expertly into the hay and climbed down rough-hewn rungs affixed to the wall beside the loft. Standing within six feet of Elisabeth, he dragged his stormy-sky eyes over her in angry wonderment, then dragged a handkerchief from his hip pocket and dried his brow.

Elisabeth found the sight and scent of him inexplicably erotic, even though if she could have described her primary emotion, she would have said it was pure terror.

“Trousers?” he marveled, stuffing the handkerchief back into his pocket. “Who are you, and where the devil did you disappear to the other night?”

Elisabeth entwined her fingers behind her back, hiding the crazy, nonsensical joy she felt at seeing him again. “Where I come from, lots of women wear—trousers,” she said, stalling.

He went to a bucket on a bench beside the wall and raised a dipperful of water to his mouth. Elisabeth watched the muscles of his back work, sweaty and hard, as he swallowed and returned the dipper to its place.

“You don’t look Chinese,” he finally said, dryly and at length.

“Listen, if I tried to tell you where I really came from, you’d never believe me. But I—I know the future.”

He chuckled and shook his head, and Elisabeth was reminded of his medical degree. The typical man of science. Jonathan probably believed only in things he could reduce to logical components. “No one knows the future,” he replied.

“I do,” Elisabeth insisted, “because I’ve been there. And I’m here to warn you.” She swallowed hard as he regarded her with those lethally intelligent eyes. Somehow she couldn’t get the words out; they’d sound too insane.

“About what?”

Elisabeth closed her eyes and forced herself to answer. “A fire. There’s going to be a terrible fire, the third week of June. Part of the house will be destroyed, and you and Trista will will disappear.”

Jonathan’s hand shot out and closed around her elbow, tight as a steel manacle. “Who are you, and what asylum did you escape from?” he snapped.

“I told you before—my name is Elisabeth McCartney. And I’m
not
insane!” She paused, biting her lip and futilely trying to pull out of his grasp. “At least, I don’t think I am.”

He dragged her into the dusty, fading sunlight that filled the barn’s doorway and examined her as though she were a creature from another planet. “Your hair,” he muttered. “No woman I’ve ever seen wears her hair sheared off at the chin like that. And your clothes.”

Elisabeth sighed. “Jonathan, I’m from the future,” she said bluntly. “Women dress like this in the 1990s.”

He touched her forehead, just as he had once before. “No fever,” he murmured, as though she hadn’t spoken at all. “This is the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“I guess they didn’t cover this in medical school, huh?” Elisabeth said, getting testy because he seemed to see her as more of a white mouse in a laboratory than a flesh-and-blood woman. “Well, here’s another flash for you, Doc—they’re not bleeding people with leeches anymore, but there’s still no cure for psoriasis.”

Jonathan’s grip on her arm didn’t slacken. “Who are you?” he repeated, and it was clear to Elisabeth that her host was running out of patience. If he’d ever possessed any in the first place.

“Margaret Thatcher,” she snapped. “Damn it, Fortner, will you let go of my arm! You’re about to squeeze it off at the elbow!”

He released her. “You said your name was Elisabeth,” he said in all seriousness.

“Then why did you have to ask who I am? It isn’t as though I haven’t told you more than once!”

He crossed the barn, snatched a shirt from a peg on the wall and slipped his arms into it. “How did you manage to vanish from my house last week, Miss McCartney?”

Elisabeth waited for him in the doorway, knowing she’d never be able to outrun him. “I told you. There’s a passageway between your time and mine. You and I are roommates, in a manner of speaking.”

Jonathan placed a hand on the small of Elisabeth’s back and propelled her toward the house. There was no sign of the woman who had been hanging clothes on the line. The set of his jaw told Elisabeth he was annoyed with her answers to his questions.

Which wasn’t surprising, considering.

He steered her up the back steps and through the door into the kitchen. “They must have cut your hair off while you were in the asylum,” he said.

“I’ve never been in an asylum,” Elisabeth informed him. “Except in college, once. We visited a mental hospital as part of a psychology program.”

Jonathan’s teeth were startlingly white against his dirty face. “Sit down,” he said.

Elisabeth obeyed, watching as he took a kettle from the stove and poured hot water into a basin. He added cold from the pump over the sink and then began to wash himself with pungent yellow soap. She found she couldn’t look away, even though there was something painfully intimate in the watching.

By the time he turned to her, drying himself with a damask towel, Elisabeth’s entire body felt warm and achy, and she didn’t trust herself to speak. The man was so uncompromisingly masculine, and his very presence made closed places open up inside her.

Jonathan took his medical bag from a shelf beside the door, set it on the table with a decisive thump and opened the catch. “The first order of business, Miss McCartney,” he said, taking out a stethoscope and a tongue depressor, “is to examine you. Open your mouth and say awww.”

“Oh, brother,” Elisabeth said, but she opened her mouth.

“A
re you satisfied?” Elisabeth demanded when Dr. Jonathan Fortner had finished the impromptu examination. “I’m perfectly healthy—physically
and
mentally.”

There were freshly ironed shirts hanging from a hook on the wall behind a wooden ironing board, and Jonathan took one down and shrugged into it. Elisabeth tried to ignore the innately male grace in the movements of his muscles.

He didn’t look convinced of her good health. “I suppose it’s possible you really believe that,” he speculated, frowning.

Elisabeth sighed. “If all doctors are as narrow-minded as you are, it’s a real wonder they ever managed to wipe out diphtheria and polio.”

She had Jonathan’s undivided attention. “What did you say?”

“Diphtheria and polio,” Elisabeth said seriously. But inside, she was enjoying having the upper hand for once. “They’re gone. No one gets them anymore.”

The desire to believe such a miracle could be accomplished was plain in Jonathan’s face, but so was his skepticism and puzzlement. He dragged back a chair at the table and sat in it, staring at Elisabeth.

She was encouraged. “You were born in the wrong century, Doc,” she said pleasantly. “They say more medical advances were made in the twentieth century than in all the rest of time put together.”

He was watching her as if he expected her head to spin around on her shoulders.

Elisabeth was enjoying the rare sense of being privy to startling information. “Not only that, but people actually walked on the moon in 1969, and—”

“Walked on the moon?” He shoved back his chair, strode across the room and brought back a dipperful of cold well water. “Drink this very slowly.”

Disappointment swept over Elisabeth when she realized she wasn’t convincing him after all. It was followed by a sense of hopelessness so profound, it threatened to crush her. If she didn’t find some way to influence Jonathan, he and Trista might not survive the fire. And she would never be able to bear knowing they’d died so horribly, because they were real people to her and not just figures in an old lady’s autobiography.

She tasted the water, mostly because she knew he wouldn’t leave her alone until she had, and then turned her head away. “Jonathan, you must listen to me,” she whispered, forgetting the formalities. “Your life depends on it, and so does Trista’s.”

He returned the dipper to the bucket, paying no attention to her words. “You need to lie down.”

“I don’t….”

“If you refuse, I can always give you a dose of laudanum,” Jonathan interrupted.

Elisabeth’s temper flared. “Now just a minute.
Nobody
is giving me laudanum. The stuff was—is—made from opium, and that’s addictive!”

Jonathan sighed. “I know full well what it’s made of, Miss McCartney. And I wasn’t proposing to make you dependent and sell you into white slavery. It’s just that you’re obviously agitated—”

“I am
not
agitated!”

His slow, leisurely smile made something shift painfully inside her. “Of course, you’re not,” he said in a patronizing tone.

Now it was Elisabeth who sighed. She’d known Jonathan Fortner, M.D., for a very short time, but one thing she had learned right off was that he could be mule stubborn when he’d set his mind on a certain course of action. Arguing with him was useless. “All right,” she said sweetly, even managing a little yawn. “I guess I would like to rest for a while. But you’ve got to promise not to send for the marshal and have me arrested.”

She saw a flicker of amusement in his charcoal eyes. “You have my word, Elisabeth,” he told her, and she loved the way he said her name. He took her arm and led her toward the back stairs, and she allowed that, thinking how different Dr. Fortner was from Ian, from
any
man she knew in her own time. There was a courtly strength about him that had evidently been lost to the male population as the decades progressed.

He deposited her in the same room she’d had during her last visit, settling her expertly on the narrow iron bed, slipping off her shoes, covering her with a colorful quilt. His gentle, callused hand smoothed her hair back from her forehead.

“Rest,” he said hoarsely, and then he was gone, closing the door quietly behind him.

Elisabeth tensed, listening for the click of a key in the lock, but it never came. She relaxed, soaking up the atmosphere of this world that apparently ran parallel to her own. Everything was more substantial, somehow, more vivid and richly textured. The ordinary sound of an errant bee buzzing and bumping against the window, the support of the feather-filled mattress beneath her, the poignant blue of the patch of sky visible through the lace curtains at the window—all of it blended together to create an undeniable reality.

She was definitely not dreaming and, strangely, she was in no particular hurry to get back to her own century. There was no one there waiting for her, while here, she had Trista and Jonathan. She would stay a few days, if Jonathan would let her, and perhaps find some way to avert the disaster that lay ahead.

When the door of her room opened, she was only a little startled. Trista peered around the edge, her Jonathan-gray eyes wide with concerned curiosity. “Are you sick?” she asked.

Elisabeth sat up and patted the mattress. “No, but your father thinks I am. Come and sit here.”

Shyly, Trista approached the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress, her small, plump hands folded in her lap.

“I’ve heard you practicing your piano lessons,” Elisabeth said, settling back against her pillows and folding her arms.

Trista’s eyes reflected wonder rather than the disbelief Elisabeth had seen in Jonathan’s gaze. “You have?”

“I don’t think you like it much,” Elisabeth observed.

The child made a comical face. “I’d rather be outside. But Papa wants me to grow up to be a lady, and a lady plays piano.”

“I see.”

Trista smiled tentatively. “Do you like music?”

“Very much,” Elisabeth answered. “I studied piano when I was about your age, and I can still play a little.”

The eight-year-old’s gapped smile faded to a look of somber resignation. “Miss Calderberry will be here soon to give me my lesson. I’m allowed to leave my room for that, of course.”

“Of course,” Elisabeth agreed seriously.

“Would you care to come down and listen?”

“I’d better not. Something tells me your father wouldn’t want me to be quite so—visible. I’m something of a secret, I think.”

Trista sighed, then nodded and rose to go downstairs and face her music teacher. She had the air of Anne Boleyn proceeding to the Tower. “Your necklace is in the dish on my bureau, just where you left it,” she whispered confidentially, from the doorway. “You won’t leave without saying goodbye, will you?”

Elisabeth felt her throat tighten slightly. “No, sweetheart. I promise I won’t go without seeing you first.”

“Good,” Trista answered. And then she left the room.

After a few minutes, Elisabeth got out of bed and wandered into the hallway. At the front of the house was a large, arched window looking down on the yard, and she couldn’t resist peering around the curtains to watch a slender woman dressed in brown sateen climb delicately down from the seat of a buggy.

Miss Calderberry wore a feathered hat that hid her face from Elisabeth, but when Jonathan approached from the direction of the barn, smiling slightly, delight seemed to radiate from the piano teacher’s countenance. Her trilling voice reached Elisabeth’s ears through the thick, bubbled glass.

“Dr. Fortner! What a pleasure to see you.”

In the next instant, Jonathan’s gaze rose and seemed to lock with Elisabeth’s, and she remembered that she was supposed to be lying down, recovering from her odious malady.

She stepped back from the window, but only because she didn’t want Miss Calderberry to see her and carry a lot of gossip back to the fine folks of Pine River. It wouldn’t do to ruin whatever might be left of the good doctor’s reputation following Vera’s accounts of a naked lady in residence.

When Trista’s discordant efforts at piano playing started to rise through the floorboards, Elisabeth grew restless and began to wander the upstairs, though she carefully avoided Jonathan’s room.

She made sure the necklace was still in Trista’s crystal dish, then peeked into each of the other bedrooms, where she saw brass beds, chamberpots, pitchers and basins resting on lovely hardwood washstands. From there, she proceeded to the attic.

The place gave her a quivery feeling in the pit of her stomach, being a mirror image of its counterpart in her own time. Of course, the contents were different.

She opened a trunk and immediately met with the scent of lavender. Setting aside layers of tissue paper, she found a delicate ivory dress, carefully folded, with ecru-lace trim on the cuffs and the high, round collar.

Normally, Elisabeth would not have done what she did next, but this was, in a way, her house. And besides, all her actions had a dreamlike quality to them, as though they would be only half-remembered in the morning.

She took the dress out of the trunk, held it against her and saw that it would probably fit, then she stripped off her slacks and sweater. Tiny buttons covered in watered silk graced the front of the gown, fastening through little loops of cloth.

When she had finished hooking each one, Elisabeth looked around for a mirror, but there was none in sight. She dipped into the trunk again and found a large, elegantly shaped box, which contained a confection of a hat bursting with silk flowers—all the color of rich cream—and tied beneath the chin with a wide, ivory ribbon.

Elisabeth couldn’t resist adding the hat to her costume.

Holding up her rustling skirts with one hand, she made her way cautiously down the attic steps and along the hallway to her room. She was inside, beaming with pleasure and turning this way and that in front of the standing mirror, when she sensed an ominous presence and turned to see Jonathan in the doorway.

He leaned against the jamb, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up to reveal muscle-corded forearms folded across his chest.

“Make yourself right at home, Miss McCartney,” he urged in an ill-tempered tone. An entirely different emotion was smoldering in his eyes, however.

Elisabeth had been like a child, playing dressup. Now her pleasure faded and her hands trembled as she reached up to untie the ribbon that held the hat in place. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, mortified, realizing that the clothes had surely belonged to his wife and that seeing someone else wearing them must be painful for him. “I don’t know what came over me….”

Jonathan stepped into the room and closed the door against the distant tinkle of piano keys, probably not wanting their voices to carry to Trista and Miss Calderberry. His eyes were narrowed. “When I first met you, you were wearing my wife’s necklace, and when it disappeared, so did you. Tell me, Elisabeth…do you know Barbara?”

Elisabeth shook her head. “H-how could I, Jonathan? She—I live in another century, remember?”

He arched one dark eyebrow and hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his black woolen vest. “Yet, somehow, my wife’s necklace came to be here. Without Barbara. She never let it out of her sight, you know. She claimed it had powers.”

A hard lump formed in Elisabeth’s throat, and she swallowed. If Barbara Fortner had known about the necklace’s special energy and had used it, she could have crossed the threshold into the modern world….

“This is all getting pretty farfetched,” Elisabeth said, squaring her shoulders. “I didn’t know your wife, Jonathan.” She looked down at the lovely dress. “I truly am sorry for presuming on your hospitality this way, though.”

“Keep the dress,” he told her with a dismissive gesture of one hand. “It will raise a lot fewer questions than those trousers of yours.”

Elisabeth felt as though she’d just been given a wonderful gift. “Thank you,” she breathed softly, running her hands down the satiny skirt.

“You’d better hunt up some calico and sateen for everyday,” he finished, moving toward the door. “Naturally, women don’t cook and clean in such fancy getup.”

“Jonathan?” Elisabeth approached him as he waited, his hand on the doorknob. She stood on tiptoe to kiss his now-stubbly cheek, and again she felt a powerful charge of some mystical electricity. “Thank you. But I won’t need special clothes if I go back to my own time.”

He rolled his eyes, but there was a look of tenderness in their depths. “Something tells me you’re going to be here for a while,” he said, and then his gaze moved slowly over Elisabeth, from her face to the incongruous toes of her sneakers and back again. His hands rested lightly on the sides of her waist, and she felt a spiritual jolt as he looked deeply into her eyes, as though to find her soul behind them.

It seemed natural when his lips descended toward hers and brushed lightly against them, soft and warm and moist. A moment later, however, he was kissing her in earnest.

With a whimper, Elisabeth put her arms around his neck and held on, afraid she would sink to the floor. The gentle assault on her senses continued; her mouth was open to his, and even through the dress and the bra beneath, her nipples hardened against the wall of his chest. A sweet, grinding ache twisted in the depths of her femininity, a wild need she had never felt with Ian, and if Jonathan had asked her, she would have surrendered then and there.

Instead, he set her roughly away from him and avoided her eyes. Trista’s labored piano playing filled their ears.

“There’s obviously no point in keeping you locked up in your room,” he said hoarsely. “If you encounter Miss Calderberry, kindly introduce yourself as my wife’s sister.”

With that, he was gone. Elisabeth stood there in the center of her room, her cheeks flaring with color because he’d kissed her as no other man ever had—and because he was ashamed to have her under his roof. She wanted to laugh and cry, both at the same time, but in the end she did neither.

She crept down the back stairway and out the kitchen door and headed in the direction of the stream where she had picnicked by herself almost a hundred years in the future. The scent of apple blossoms filled her spirit as she walked through the recently planted orchard. Birds sang in the treetops, and in the near distance, she could hear the rustling song of the creek.