Linda Lael Miller Bundle (23 page)

“Something about this doesn’t ring true,” Janet said, but she was weakening. Elisabeth could hear it in her voice.

“I—I really fell hard for him,” she said.

“Who is he? What does he do?”

Elisabeth took a deep breath. “His name is Jonathan Fortner, and he’s a doctor.”

“I’d like to meet him.”

Elisabeth stifled an hysterical giggle. “Yes—well, he and I are taking off for a vacation. But maybe I can arrange something after I—we get back.”

“Where are you going?” Janet asked quickly, sounding worried again.

“San Francisco.” It was the first place that came to mind.

“Oh. Well, I’ll just come to the airport and see you off. That way, you could introduce Jonathan and me.”

“Umm,” Elisabeth stalled, biting her lower lip. “We’re going by car,” she finally answered. “I promise faithfully that I’ll call you the instant I step through the doorway.”

Janet sighed. “All right but, well, there isn’t anything wrong with this guy, is there? I mean, it’s almost like you’re hiding something.”

“You’ve pried it out of me,” Elisabeth teased. “He’s a vampire. Even as we speak, he’s lying in a coffin in the basement, sleeping away the daylight hours.”

The joke must have reassured Janet, because she laughed. A moment later, though, her tone was serious again. “You’d tell me if you weren’t all right, wouldn’t you?”

Elisabeth hesitated. As much as she loved Janet, Rue was the only person in the world she could have talked to about what was happening to her. “If I thought there was anything you could do to help, yes,” she answered softly. “Please don’t worry about me, Janet. I’ll call you when I get back.”
If I get back.
“And we’ll make plans for my visit to Seattle.”

Mollified at least for the moment, Janet accepted Elisabeth’s promise, warned her to be careful and said goodbye.

She showered and put on white corduroy pants and a sea green tank top, along with a pair of plastic thongs. Then after a hasty trip to the mailbox—there were two postcards from Rue, one mailed from Istanbul, the other from Cairo, along with a forwarded bank statement and a sales flier addressed to “occupant”—Elisabeth made preparations to return to Jonathan and Trista.

As she looked at the copies of the June 1892 issue of the
Bugle,
however, she began to doubt that Jonathan would see them as proof of anything. He was bound to say that, while the printing admittedly looked strange, she could have had the articles made up.

Elisabeth laid the papers down on the kitchen table and went up the back stairs and along the hallway to her room. In the bathroom medicine cabinet, she found the half-filled bottle of penicillin tablets she’d taken for a throat infection a few months before.

The label bore a typewritten date, along with Elisabeth’s name, but it was the medicine itself that would convince Jonathan. After all, he was a doctor. She dropped the bottle into the pocket of her slacks and went back out to the vanity.

Aunt Verity’s necklace was lying there, where she’d left it before taking her shower that morning. Her fingers trembled with mingled resolution and fear as she put the chain around her neck and fastened the clasp.

Reaching the hallway, Elisabeth went directly to the sealed door and clasped the knob in her hand.

Nothing happened.

“Please,” Elisabeth whispered, shutting her eyes. “Please.”

Still, that other world was closed to her. Fighting down panic, she told herself she had only to wait for the “window” to open again. In the meantime, there was something else she wanted to do.

After riffling through a variety of scribbled notes beside the hallway phone, she found the name and number she wanted. She dialed immediately, to keep herself from having time to back out.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice answered.

Elisabeth had a clear picture of Chastity Pringle in her mind, standing in that quilting booth at the craft show, looking at the necklace as though it was something that had slithered out of hell. “Ms. Pringle? This is Elisabeth McCartney. You probably don’t remember me, but we met briefly at the craft fair, when you were showing your quilts—”

“You were wearing Verity’s necklace,” Chastity interrupted in a wooden tone.

“Yes,” Elisabeth answered. “Ms. Pringle, I wonder if I could see you sometime today—it’s important.”

“I won’t set foot in that house” was the instant response.

“All right,” Elisabeth agreed quietly, “I’ll be happy to come to you. If that’s convenient, of course.”

“I’ll meet you at the Riverview Café,” Chastity offered, though not eagerly.

“Twelve-thirty?”

“Twelve-thirty,” the woman promised.

The Riverview Café was about halfway between Pine River and Cotton Creek, the even smaller town where Chastity lived. Elisabeth couldn’t help wondering, as she stared blankly at a morning talk show to pass the time, why Ms. Pringle was being so cloak-and-dagger about the whole thing.

At twelve-fifteen, Elisabeth pulled into the restaurant parking lot, got out of her car and went inside. Chastity hadn’t arrived yet, but Elisabeth allowed a waitress to escort her to a table with a magnificent view of the river and ordered herbal tea to sip while she waited.

Chastity appeared, looking anxious and rushed, at exactly twelve-thirty. She was trim and very tanned, and her long, dark hair was wound into a single, heavy braid that rested over one shoulder. She focused her gazeon Elisabeth’s necklace and shuddered visibly.

Elisabeth waited until the waitress had taken their orders before bracing her forearms against the table edge and leaning forward to ask bluntly, “What was your connection with my Aunt Verity, and why are you afraid of this necklace?”

“Verity was my friend,” Chastity answered, “at a time when I needed one very badly.” The waitress brought their spinach and smoked salmon salads, then went away again. “As for the pendant…”

“It was yours once,” Elisabeth ventured, operating purely on instinct. “Wasn’t it…Barbara?”

The woman’s dark eyes were suddenly enormous, and the color drained from her face. “You know? About the doorway, I mean?”

Elisabeth nodded.

Barbara Fortner reached for her water glass with an unsteady hand. “You’ve met Jonathan, then, I suppose, and Trista.” She paused to search Elisabeth’s face anxiously. “How is my little girl?”

“She believes you’re dead,” Elisabeth answered, not unkindly.

Barbara flinched. Misery was visible in every line of her body. “Jonathan would have told her something like that. He’d be too proud to admit to the truth, that he drove me away.”

Elisabeth’s hands tightened on the arms of her chair. Her entire universe had been upended, but here was a woman who understood. Whatever Elisabeth’s personal feelings about Barbara might be, she was relieved to find a person who knew about the world beyond that threshold.

“Did he divorce me?” Barbara asked quietly, after a long moment.

Elisabeth hesitated. “Yes.”

Jonathan’s ex-wife took several sips of water and then shrugged, although Elisabeth could see that she was shaken. “How is Trista?”

Elisabeth opened her purse and took out the folded copies of the newspaper articles. “She’s in a lot of danger, Barbara, and so is Jonathan. They need your help.”

Barbara’s face blanched as she scanned the newspaper accounts. “Oh, my God, my baby…I knew I should have found a way to bring her with me.”

A quivering sensation in the pit of her stomach kept Elisabeth constantly on edge. She was aware of every tick of the clock, and the idea that it might already be too late to help Jonathan and Trista tormented her. “Sometimes I can make the trip back and sometimes I can’t,” she said in a low voice. “Do you know if there’s some way to be sure of connecting?”

Tears glimmered in Barbara’s eyes as she met Elisabeth’s gaze. “I—I don’t know—I only did it a couple of times—but I think there has to be some sort of strong emotion. Are you going back?”

Elisabeth nodded. “As soon as I can manage it, yes.”

Barbara sat up very straight in her chair, her salad forgotten. “You’re in love with Jonathan, aren’t you?”

The answer came immediately; Elisabeth didn’t even need to think about it. “Yes.”

“Fine. Then the two of you will have each other.” She leaned forward, her eyes pleading. “Elisabeth, I want you to send Trista over the threshold to me. It might be the only way to save her.”

Barbara’s statement was undeniable, but it caused Elisabeth tremendous pain. If she put the necklace on Trista and sent her through the doorway, she would disappear forever. Jonathan would be heartbroken, and he’d never believe the truth. No, he’d think Elisabeth had harmed the child, and he’d hate her for it.

And that wasn’t all. Without the necklace, Elisabeth would be trapped in the nineteenth century, friendless and despised. Why, she might even be blamed for Trista’s disappearance and hanged or sent to prison.

She swallowed hard. “Jonathan loves Trista, and he’s a good father. Besides, your daughter believes you died in Boston, while visiting your family.”

Barbara’s perfectly manicured index finger stabbed at the stack of photocopies lying on the tabletop. “If you don’t send her to me, she’ll burn to death!”

Elisabeth looked away, toward the river flowing past. “I’ll do what I can,” she said. Presently, she met Barbara’s eyes again, and she was calmer. “How could you have left her in the first place?” she asked, no longer able to hold the question back.

The other woman lowered her eyes for a moment. “I was desperately unhappy, and I’d had a glimpse of this world. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was like a magnet.” She sighed. “I wasn’t cut out to live there, to be the wife of a country doctor. I had a lover, and Jonathan found out. He was furious, even though Matthew and I had broken off. I was afraid he was going to kill me, so I came here to stay. Verity took me in and helped me establish an identity, and I left the necklace with her because I knew I’d never want to go back.”

“Not even to help your daughter?”

Color glowed in Barbara’s cheeks. “I don’t dare step over that threshold,” she said, almost in a whisper. “I’m too afraid of Jonathan.”

Although Elisabeth would never have denied that Jonathan was imposing, even arrogant and opinionated, she didn’t believe for a moment that he would ever deliberately hurt another person. He was a doctor, after all, and an honorable man. She changed the subject.

“How long have you been here, in the twentieth century?”

Barbara dried her eyes carefully with a cloth napkin. “Fifteen years,” she answered. “And I’ve been happy.”

Elisabeth felt another chill. Fifteen years. And yet Trista was only eight—or she had been, when Elisabeth had seen her last. She gave up trying to figure out these strange wrinkles in time and concentrated on what was important: saving Trista and Jonathan.

“If I can find a way to protect Trista while still keeping her there, that’s what I’m going to do,” she warned, rising and reaching for her purse and the check. “Jonathan adores his daughter, and it would crush him to lose her.”

Barbara lifted one eyebrow, but made no move to stand. “Are you really thinking of Jonathan, Elisabeth? Or is it yourself you’re worried about?”

It was a question Elisabeth couldn’t bear to answer. She paid for the lunches neither she nor Barbara had eaten and hurried out of the restaurant.

B
y the time Elisabeth arrived at home, she was in a state of rising panic. She
had
to reach Jonathan and Trista, had to know that they were all right. She glanced fitfully at the telephone and answering machine on the hallway table, not pausing even though the message light was blinking.

Could you please connect me with someone in 1892?
she imagined herself asking a bewildered operator.

Shaking her head, Elisabeth went on into the kitchen and tossed her purse onto the table. Then she crossed the room to switch the calendar page from April to May. She was still standing there staring, her teeth sunk into her lower lip, when a loud pounding at the back door startled her out of her wonderment.

Miss Cecily Buzbee peered at her through the frosted oval glass, and Elisabeth smiled as she went to admit her neighbor, who had apparently come calling alone.

“I don’t mind telling you,” the sweet-natured spinster commented after Elisabeth had let her in and offered a glass of ice tea, “that Sister and I have been concerned about you, since we don’t see hide nor hair of you for days at a time.”

Elisabeth busied herself with the tasks of running cold water into a pitcher and adding ice and powdery tea. “I’m sorry you were worried,” she said quietly. She carried the pitcher to the table, along with two glasses. “I don’t mean to be a recluse—I just need a lot of solitude right now.”

Cecily smiled forgivingly. “I don’t suppose there’s any lemon, is there, dear?”

Elisabeth shook her head regretfully. Even if she’d remembered to buy lemons the last time she’d shopped, which she hadn’t, that had been two weeks before and they would probably have spoiled by now. “Miss Cecily,” she began, clasping her hands together on her lap so her visitor wouldn’t see that they were trembling, “how well did you know my Aunt Verity?”

“Oh, very well,” Cecily trilled. “Very well, indeed.”

“Did she tell you stories about this house?”

Cecily averted her cornflower blue eyes for a moment, then forced herself to look at Elisabeth again. “You know how Verity liked to talk. And she
was
a rather fanciful sort.”

Elisabeth smiled, remembering. “Yes, she was. She told Rue and me lots of things about this house, about people simply appearing, seemingly out of nowhere, and other things like that.”

The neighbor nodded solemnly. “Sister and I believe that young Trista Fortner haunts this house, poor soul. Her spirit never rested because she died so horribly.”

Unable to help herself, Elisabeth shuddered. If she did nothing else, she had to see that Trista wasn’t trapped in that fire. “I can’t buy the ghost theory,” she said, sipping the tea and barely noticing that it tasted awful. “I mean, here are these souls, supposedly lost in the scheme of things, wandering about, unable to find their way into whatever comes after this life. Why would God permit that, when there is so much order in everything else, like the seasons and the courses of the planets?”

“My dear,” Cecily debated politely, “reputable people have seen apparitions. They cannot all be dismissed as crackpots.”

Elisabeth sighed, wondering which category she would fall into: crackpot or reputable person. “Isn’t it just possible that the images were every bit as real as the people seeing them? Perhaps there are places where time wears thin and a person can see through it, into the past or the future, if only for a moment.”

Miss Buzbee gave the idea due consideration. “Well, Elisabeth, as the bard said, there are more things in heaven and earth…”

Anxiety filled Elisabeth as her mind turned back to Jonathan and Trista. Would she return to 1892 only to find them gone—if she was able to reach them at all? “More tea?” she asked, even though she was desperate to be alone again so that she could make another attempt at crossing the threshold.

Trista’s friend, Vera, had apparently trained her daughters not to overstay their welcome. “I really must be running along,” Cecily said. “It’s almost time for Sister and I to take our walk. Two miles, rain or shine,” she said with resignation, frowning grimly as she looked out through the windows. Storm clouds were gathering on the horizon.

“I’ve enjoyed our visit,” Elisabeth replied honestly, following Miss Cecily to the door. She wondered what Cecily would say if told Elisabeth had had a glimpse of Vera, the Buzbee sisters’ mother, as a little girl playing on the school grounds.

A light rain started to fall after Cecily had gone, and Elisabeth stood at the back door for a long moment, her heart hammering as she gazed at the orchard. The beautiful petals of spring were all gone now, replaced by healthy green leaves—another reminder that two weeks of her life had passed without her knowing.

When thunder rolled down from the mountains and lightning splintered the sky, Elisabeth shuddered and closed the door. Then she hurried up the back stairs and along the hallway.

“Trista!” she shouted, pounding with both fists at the panel of wood that separated her from that other world. “Trista, can you hear me?”

There was no sound from the other side, except for the whistle of the wind, and Elisabeth sagged against the wood in frustrated despair. “Oh, God,” she whispered, “don’t let them be dead.
Please
don’t let them be dead.”

After a long time, she turned away and went back down the stairs to the kitchen. She put on a rain coat and dashed out to the shed for an armload of kindling and aged apple wood, which she carried to the hearth in the main parlor.

There, she built a fire to bring some warmth and cheer to that large, empty room. When the wood was crackling and popping in the grate, she put the screen in place and went to the piano, lifting the keyboard cover and idly striking middle C with her index finger.

“Hear me, Trista,” she pleaded softly, flexing her fingers. “Hear and wish just as hard as you can for me to come back.”

She began to play the energetic tune she’d described to Trista as a boogie-woogie, putting all her passion, all her hopes and fears into the crazy, racing, tinkling notes of the song. When she finally stopped, her fingers exhausted, the sound of another pianist attempting to play the song met her ears.

Elisabeth nearly overturned the piano bench in her eagerness to run upstairs to the door that barred her from the place where she truly belonged. She wrenched hard on the knob, and breathtaking exultation rushed into her when it turned.

Trista’s awkward efforts at the piano tune grew louder and louder as Elisabeth raced through the little girl’s bedroom and down the steps. When she burst into the parlor, Trista’s face lit up.

She ran to Elisabeth and threw her arms around her.

Elisabeth embraced her, silently thanking God that she wasn’t too late, that the fire hadn’t already happened, then knelt to look into Trista’s eyes. “Sweetheart, this is important. How long have I been gone?”

Trista bit her lip, seeming puzzled by the question. “Since last night, when you came in and kissed me goodbye. It’s afternoon now—school let out about an hour ago.”

“Good,” Elisabeth whispered, relieved to learn that days or weeks hadn’t raced by in her absence. “Was your father upset to find that I wasn’t here?”

“He cussed,” Trista replied with a solemn nod. “It reminded me of the day Mama went away to Boston. Papa got angry then, too, because she didn’t say goodbye to us.”

Elisabeth sat down on the piano bench and took Trista onto her lap, recalling her talk with Barbara Fortner in the Riverview Café. Sending Trista over the threshold to her mother might be the only way to save her, but Jonathan would never understand that. “Where is he now?”

Trista sighed. “In town. There was a fight at one of the saloons, and some people needed to be stitched up.”

Elisabeth winced and said, “Ouch!” and Trista laughed.

“Papa’s going to be happy when he sees you’re back,” the child said after an interval. “But he probably won’t admit he’s pleased.”

“Probably not,” Elisabeth agreed, giving Trista’s pigtail a playful tug. She looked down at her slacks and tank top. “I guess I’d better change into something more fitting,” she confided.

Trista nodded and took Elisabeth’s hand. They went upstairs together, and the little girl’s expression was thoughtful. “I wish Papa would let
me
wear trousers,” she said. “It would be so much better for riding a horse. I hate sitting sideways in the saddle, like a priss.”

“Do you have a horse?” Elisabeth asked as they reached the second floor, but continued on to the attic, where Barbara’s clothes were stored.

“Yes,” Trista answered, somewhat forlornly. “Her name is Estella, she’s about a thousand years old, and she’s a ninny.”

Elisabeth laughed. “What a way to talk about the poor thing!” The attic door creaked a little as they went in, and the bright afternoon sunlight was flecked with a galaxy of tiny dust particles. “Most little girls love their horses, if they’re lucky enough to have one.”

Trista dusted off a short stool and sat down, smoothing the skirts of her flowered poplin pinafore as she did so. “Estella just wants to wander around the pasture and chew grass, and she won’t come when I call because she doesn’t like to be ridden. Do you have your own horse, Elisabeth?”

Opening the heavy doors of the cedar-lined armoire, Elisabeth ran her hand over colorful, still-crisp skirts of lawn and cambric and poplin and satin and even velvet. “I don’t,” she said distractedly, “but my Cousin Rue does. When her grandfather died, she inherited a ranch in Montana, and I understand there are lots of horses there.” She took a frothy pink lawn gown from the wardrobe and held it against her, waltzing a little because it was so shamelessly frilly.

“Wasn’t he your grandfather, too, if you and Rue are cousins?”

Elisabeth bent to kiss the child’s forehead, while still enjoying the feel of the lovely dress under her hands. “Our fathers were brothers,” she explained. “The ranch belonged to Rue’s mother’s family.”

“Could we visit there sometime?” The hopeful note in Trista’s voice tugged at Elisabeth’s heart, and unexpected tears burned in her eyes.

She shook her head, turning her back so Trista wouldn’t see that she was crying. “It’s very faraway,” she said after a long time had passed.

“Montana isn’t so far,” Jonathan’s daughter argued politely. “We could be there in three days if we took the train.”

But we wouldn’t see Rue,
Elisabeth thought sadly.
She hasn’t even been born yet.
She stepped behind a dusty folding screen and slipped off her tank top and slacks, then pulled the pink dress on over her head. “I don’t think your papa would want you to go traveling without him,” she said, having finally found words, however inadequate, to answer Trista.

When Elisabeth came out from behind the screen, Trista drew in her breath. “Thunderation, Elisabeth—you look beautiful!”

Elisabeth laughed, put her hands on her hips and narrowed her eyes. “Thanks a heap, kid, but did you just swear?”

Trista giggled and scurried around behind Elisabeth to begin fastening the buttons and hooks that would hold the dress closed in back. “
Thunderation
isn’t a swear word,” she said indulgently. “But I don’t suppose it’s very ladylike, either.”

The light was fading, receding across the dirty floor toward the windows like an ebbing tide, so the two went down the attic steps together, Elisabeth carrying her slacks and tank top over one arm. She felt a sense of excitement and anticipation, knowing she would see Jonathan again soon.

In her room, Elisabeth brushed her hair and pinned it up, while Trista sat on the edge of the bed, watching with her head tilted to one side and her small feet swinging back and forth.

Downstairs, Elisabeth checked the pot roast Ellen had left to cook in the oven. She found an apron to protect her gown, then set to work washing china from the cabinet in the dining room. In a drawer of the highboy, she found white tapers and silver candle sticks, and she set these on the formal table.

“We never eat in here,” Trista said.

Outside, twilight was falling, and with it came a light spring rain. “We’re going to tonight,” Elisabeth replied.

“Why? It isn’t Christmas or Easter, and it’s not anybody’s birthday.”

Elisabeth smiled. “I want to celebrate being home,” she said, and only when the words were out of her mouth did she realize how presumptuous they sounded. Jonathan had made love to her, but it wasn’t as though he’d expressed a desire for a lifelong commitment or anything like that. This wasn’t her home, it was Barbara’s, as was the china she was setting out and the dress she was wearing.

As were the child and the man she loved so fiercely.

“Don’t be sad,” Trista said, coming to stand close to Elisabeth in a show of support.

Elisabeth gave her a distracted squeeze, and said brightly, “I think we’d better get some fires going, since it’s so dreary out.”

“I’ll do it,” Trista announced. “So you don’t ruin your pretty dress.” With that, she fetched wood from the shed out back and laid fires in the grates in the parlor and the dining room. Rain was pattering at the windows and blazes were burning cheerily on the hearths when Elisabeth saw Jonathan drive his buggy through the wide doorway of the barn.

It was all she could do not to run outside, ignoring the weather entirely, and fling herself into his arms. But she forced herself to remain in the kitchen, where she and Trista had been sipping tea and playing Go Fish while they waited for Jonathan.

When he came in, some twenty minutes later, he was wet to the skin. The look in his gray eyes was grim, and Elisabeth felt a wrench deep inside when she saw him.

“You,” he said, tossing his medical bag onto the shelf beside the door and peeling off his coat. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and his dark hair streamed with rain water. His shirt was so wet, it had turned transparent.

Elisabeth refused to be intimidated by his callous welcome. “Yes, Dr. Fortner,” she said, “I’m back.”

He glared at her once, then stormed up the stairs. When he came down again, he was wearing plain black trousers and an off white shirt, open at the throat to reveal a wealth of dark chest hair. But then, Elisabeth knew all about that wonderful chest…