Linda Lael Miller Bundle (29 page)

Elisabeth wasn’t about to touch that one. After all, she’d made a few unscheduled departures herself, and it hadn’t been because she didn’t care about Trista. “Maybe she was homesick, being so far from her family.”

The housekeeper didn’t look up from her work, but her reply was vibrant, like a dart quivering in a bull’s eye. “She had you, right close in Seattle. Seems like that should have helped.”

There was nothing Elisabeth could say to that. She carried her cup and saucer to the sink and set them carefully inside. Beyond the window, with its pristine, white lace curtains, the gloomy sky waited to remind her that there were forces in the universe that operated by laws she didn’t begin to understand. Far off on the horizon, she saw lightning plunge from the clouds in jagged spikes.

If only the rain would start,
she fretted silently. Perhaps that would alleviate the dreadful tension that pervaded her every thought and move.

“I’d like to leave early today, if it’s all the same to you,” Ellen said, startling Elisabeth a little. “Don’t want to get caught in the rain.”

Elisabeth caught herself before she would have offered to drive Ellen home in her car. If she hadn’t felt so anxious, she would have smiled at the near lapse. “Maybe you’d better leave now,” she said, hoping Ellen didn’t have far to go.

Agreeing quickly, the housekeeper put away the ironing board and the flatirons and took Jonathan’s clean shirts upstairs. Soon she was gone, but there was still no rain and no sign of Jonathan.

Elisabeth was more uneasy than ever.

She climbed the small stairway that led up to Trista’s room and knocked lightly.

“Come in,” a youthful voice chimed.

Smiling, Elisabeth opened the door and stepped inside. Her expression was instantly serious, however, when her gaze went straight to the pendant Vera was wearing around her neck. It took all her personal control not to lunge at the child in horror and snatch away the necklace before it could work its treacherous magic.

Vera preened and smiled broadly, showing a giant vacant space where her front teeth should have been. “Don’t you think I look pretty?” she asked, obviously expecting an affirmative answer. It was certainly no mystery that her children had grown up to be adventurous; they would inherit Vera’s innate self-confidence.

“I think you look very pretty,” Elisabeth said shakily, easing toward the middle of the room, where the two little girls sat playing dolls on the hooked rug. She sank to her knees beside them, her movements awkward because of her long skirts.

Vera beamed into Elisabeth’s stricken face. “I guess I shouldn’t have tried it on without asking you,” she said, reaching back to work the clasp. Clearly, she was giving no real weight to the idea that Elisabeth might have objections to sharing personal belongings. “Here.”

Elisabeth’s hand trembled slightly as she reached out to let Vera drop the chain and pendant into her palm. Rather than make a major case out of the incident, she decided she would simply put the necklace away somewhere, out of harm’s way. “Where did you find this?” she asked moderately, her attention on Trista.

Her future stepdaughter looked distinctly uncomfortable. “It was on top of Papa’s dresser,” she said.

Elisabeth simply arched an eyebrow, as if inviting Trista to explain what she’d been doing going through someone else’s things, and the child averted her eyes.

Dropping the necklace into the pocket of her skirt, Elisabeth announced, “It’s about to rain. Vera, I think you’d better hurry on home.”

Trista looked disappointed, but she didn’t offer a protest. She simply put away her doll and followed Vera out of the room and down the stairs.

Afraid to cross the threshold leading into the main hallway with the necklace anywhere on her person, Elisabeth tossed it over. Only as she was bending to pick the piece of jewelry up off the floor did it occur to her that she might have consigned it to a permanent limbo, never to be seen again.

She carried the necklace back to the spare room and dropped it onto her bureau, then went downstairs and out onto the porch to scan the road for Jonathan’s horse and buggy. Instead, she saw the intrepid Vera galloping off toward home, while Trista swung forlornly on the gate.

“There was
supposed
to be a wedding today,” she said, her lower lip jutting out just slightly.

Elisabeth smiled and laid a hand on a small seersucker-clad shoulder. “I’m sorry you’re disappointed, honey. If it helps any, so am I.”

“I wish Papa would come home,” Trista said. She was gazing toward town, and the warm wind made tendrils of dark hair float around her face. “I think there’s going to be a hurricane or something.”

Despite her own uneasiness and her yearning to see Jonathan, Elisabeth laughed. “There won’t be a hurricane, Trista. The mountains make a natural barrier.”

As if to mock her statement, lightning struck behind the house in that instant, and both Trista and Elisabeth cried out in shock and dashed around to make sure the chicken house or the woodshed hadn’t been struck.

Elisabeth’s heart hammered painfully against her breastbone when she saw the wounded tree at the edge of the orchard. Its trunk had been split from top to bottom, and its naked core was blackened and still smoldering. In the barn, Jonathan’s horses neighed, sensing something, perhaps smelling the damaged wood.

And for all of it, the air was still bone-dry and charged with some invisible force that seemed to buzz ominously beneath the other sounds.

“We’d better get inside,” Elisabeth said.

Trista turned worried eyes to her face. “What about Vera? What if she doesn’t get home safely?”

It was on the tip of Elisabeth’s tongue to say they’d phone to make sure, but she averted the slip in time. She wished she knew how to hitch up a wagon and drive a team, but she didn’t, and she doubted that Trista did, either.

She could ride, though not well. “Let’s get out the tamest horse you own,” she said. “I’ll ride over to Vera’s place and make sure she got home okay.”

“Okay?” Trista echoed, crinkling her nose at the unfamiliar word.

“It means ‘all right,’” Elisabeth told her, picking up her skirts and heading toward the barn. Between the two of them, she and Trista managed to put a bridle on the recalcitrant Estella, Trista’s aging, swaybacked mare. Elisabeth asked for brief directions and set off down the road, toward the schoolhouse.

Overhead, black clouds roiled and rolled in on each other, and thunder reverberated off the sides of distant hills. Elisabeth thought of the splintered apple tree and shivered.

As she reached the road, she waved at the man who lived in an earlier incarnation of the house the Buzbee sisters shared. Heedless of the threatened storm, he was busy hammering a new rail onto his fence.

Just around the bend from the schoolhouse, Elisabeth found Vera sitting beside the road, her face streaked with dust, sobbing. The pony was galloping off toward a barn on a grassy knoll nearby.

“Are you hurt?” Elisabeth asked. She didn’t want to get down from the horse if she could help it, because getting back on would be almost impossible, dressed as she was. It was bad enough riding with her skirts hiked up to show her bare legs.

Vera gulped and got to her feet, dragging one suntanned arm across her dirty face. Evidently, the sight of Elisabeth riding astride in a dress had been enough of a shock to distract her a little from the pain and indignity of being thrown. “I scraped my elbow,” she said with a voluble sniffle.

Elisabeth rode closer and squinted at the wound. “That looks pretty sore, all right. Would you like a ride home?”

Vera gestured toward the sturdy-looking, weathered farmhouse five hundred yards from the barn. “I live close,” she said. It appeared she’d had enough of horses for one day, and Elisabeth didn’t blame her.

“I’ll just ride alongside you then,” she said gently as lightning ripped the fabric of the sky again and made her skittish mount toss its head and whinny.

Vera nodded and dried her face again, this time with the skirt of her calico pinafore. “I don’t usually cry like this,” she said as she walked along the grassy roadside, Elisabeth and the horse keeping pace with her. “I’m as tough as my brother.”

“I’m sure you are,” Elisabeth agreed, hiding a smile.

Vera’s mother came out of the house and waved, smiling, apparently unruffled to see her daughter approaching on foot instead of on the back of her fat little pony. “It’s good to see you’re feeling better, Elisabeth,” she called over the roar of distant thunder. “You’re welcome to come in for pie and coffee if you have the time.”

“I’d better get back to Trista,” Elisabeth answered, truly sorry that she couldn’t stay and get to know this woman better. “And I suppose the storm is going to break any minute now.”

The neighbor nodded her head pleasantly, shepherding Vera into the house, and Elisabeth reined the mare toward home and rode at the fastest pace she dared, given her inexperience. As it was, she needn’t have hurried, for even after she’d put Trista’s horse back in the barn and inspected the unfortunate tree that had been struck by lightning earlier, there was no rain.

She muttered as she climbed the back steps and opened the kitchen door. The forlorn notes of Trista’s piano plunked and plodded through the heavy air.

The rest of the afternoon passed, and then the evening, and there was still no word from Jonathan. The sky remained as black and irritable as ever, but not so much as a drop of rain touched the thirsty ground.

After a light supper of leftover chicken, Elisabeth and Trista took turns reading aloud from
Gulliver’s Travels,
the book they’d begun when Trista had fallen ill. When they tired of that, they played four games of checkers, all of which Trista won with smug ease.

And Jonathan did not come through the door, tired and hungry, longing for the love and light of his home.

Elisabeth was beginning to fear that something had happened to him. Perhaps there had been an accident, or he’d had a heart attack from overwork, or some drunken cowboy had shot him….

Trista, who had already put on her nightgown, scrubbed her face and washed her teeth, was surprisingly philosophical—and perceptive—for an eight-year-old. “You keep going to the window and looking for Papa,” she said. “Sometimes he’s gone a long time when there’s a baby on its way or somebody’s real sick.”

Self-consciously, Elisabeth let the curtain above the sink fall back into place. “What if you’d been here alone?” she asked, frowning.

Trista shrugged. “Ellen would probably have taken me home with her.” She beamed. “I like going to her house because there’s so much noise.”

The old clock on the shelf ticked ponderously, emphasizing the quiet. And it occurred to Elisabeth that Trista had been very lonely, with no brothers and sisters and no mother. “You like noise, do you?” Elisabeth teased. And then she bolted toward Trista, her hands raised, fingers curled, like a bear’s claws.

Trista squealed with delight and ran through the dining room to the parlor and up the front stairway, probably because that was the long way and the pursuit could be drawn out until the last possible moment.

In her room, Trista collapsed giggling on the bed, and Elisabeth tickled her for a few moments, then kissed her soundly on the cheek, listened to her prayers and tucked her into bed.

Later, in the parlor, she sat down at the piano and began to play soft and soothing songs, tunes Rue would have described as cocktail-party music. All the while, Elisabeth listened with one ear for the sound of Jonathan’s footsteps.

T
he touch of Jonathan’s lips on her forehead brought Elisabeth flailing up from the depths of an uneasy sleep. The muscles in her arms and legs ached from her attempt to curl around Trista in a protective crescent.

For a moment, wild fear seized her, closing off her throat, stealing her breath. Then she realized that except for the rumble of distant thunder, the world was quiet. She and Trista were safe, and Jonathan was back from his wanderings.

She started to rise, but he pressed her gently back to the mattress and, in the thin light of the hallway lamp, she saw him touch his lips with an index finger.

“We’ll talk in the morning,” he promised, his low voice hoarse with weariness. “I trust you’re still inclined to become my wife?”

Elisabeth stretched, smiled and nodded.

“Good.” He bent and kissed her forehead again. “Tomorrow night you’ll sleep where you belong—in my bed.”

A pleasant shiver went through Elisabeth at the thought of the pleasures Jonathan had taught her to enjoy. She nodded again and then snuggled in and went contentedly back to sleep, this time without tension, without fear.

Jonathan couldn’t remember being more tired than he was at that moment—not even in medical school, when he’d worked and studied until he was almost blind with fatigue. He’d spent most of the past twenty-four hours struggling to save the lives of a mother and her twins, losing the woman and one of the infants. The remaining child was hanging on to life by the thinnest of threads, and there was simply nothing more Jonathan could do at this point.

In his room, he poured tepid water from the pitcher into the basin, removed his shirt and washed, trying to scrub away the smell of sickness and despair. When he could at least stand the scent of himself, he turned toward the bed.

God knew, he was so exhausted, he couldn’t have made love to Elisabeth even if the act somehow averted war or plague, but just having her lie beside him would have been the sweetest imaginable comfort. He ached to extend a hand and touch her, to breathe deeply and fill his lungs with her fragrance.

Wearily, Jonathan made his way toward his bed and then stopped, knowing he would lapse into virtual unconsciousness once he stretched out. Before he did that, he had to know Elisabeth wouldn’t get it into her head to vanish again.

Picking up a small kerosene lamp, he forced himself out into the hallway and along the runner to the door of the spare room, where she normally slept. The necklace, left carelessly on top of the bureau, seemed to sparkle in the night, drawing Jonathan to it by some inexplicable magic.

Although he knew he would be ashamed of the action in the morning, he scooped the pendant into his hand and went back to his own room, where he blew out the lamp and sank into bed.

Even in sleep, his fingers were locked around the necklace, and the hot, thunderous hours laid upon him like a weight.

Somewhere in the blackest folds of that starless night, Elisabeth awakened with a wrench. She had to go to the bathroom, and that meant a trip to the outhouse if she didn’t want to use a chamber pot—which she most assuredly didn’t.

Yawning, she rose and pulled on a robe—Ellen and Trista always spoke of the garment as a wrapper—and, after her eyes had adjusted, made her way toward the inner door and down the back steps to the kitchen.

There was no wind, she noticed when she stepped out onto the back step, and certainly no rain. The air was ominously heavy, and it seemed to reverberate with unspoken threats. With a little shiver, Elisabeth forced herself down the darkened path and around behind the woodshed to the privy.

She was returning when the unthinkable happened, paralyzing her in the middle of the path. As she watched, her eyes wide with amazement and horror, a bolt of lightning zigzagged out of the dark sky, like a laser beam from an unseen spacecraft, and literally splintered the roof of the house. For one terrible moment, the entire landscape was aglow, the trees and mountains like dazed sleepers under the glare of a flashlight.

Immediately, flames shot up from the roof, and Elisabeth screamed. The animals in the barn had heard the crash and had probably caught the scent of fire. They were going wild with fear. Elisabeth dared not take the time to calm them. She had to reach Jonathan and Trista.

She hurled herself through the barrier of terrified inertia that had blocked her way and ran into the house, coughing and shrieking Jonathan’s and Trista’s names.

The short stairway leading to Trista’s room was filled with black, roiling smoke. The stuff was so noxious that it felt greasy against Elisabeth’s skin. Breathing was impossible.

Beyond the wall of smoke, she could hear Trista screaming, “Papa! Papa!”

Elisabeth dragged herself a few more steps upward, but then she couldn’t go farther. Her lungs were empty, and she was becoming disoriented, unsure of which way was up and which was down. She began to sob, and felt herself slipping, the stairs bruising her as she lost her grip.

The next thing she knew, someone was grasping her by her flannel nightgown. Strong hands hoisted her into steely arms, and for a moment she thought Jonathan had found her and Trista, and that the three of them were safe.

But then Elisabeth heard a voice. She didn’t recognize it. She felt a huge drop of rain strike her face, warm as bathwater, and opened her eyes to look into the haunted features of Farley Haynes.

Looking around her, she saw the man from across the road, along with his five sons. The shapes of other men moved through the hellish, flickering light of the flames, and Elisabeth saw that they’d formed a bucket brigade between the well and the house. Frantic horses had been released from the endangered barn into the pasture.

The barn won’t burn,
Elisabeth thought with despondent certainty, remembering the newspaper accounts she’d read in that other world, so faraway.
Only the house.

Marshal Haynes set her down, and she stood trembling in the silky grass, her nightgown streaked with soot.

“Jonathan—Trista—” she gasped hoarsely, starting back toward the house.

But the marshal encircled her waist with one arm and hauled her back. “It’s too late,” he said, his voice a miserable rasp. “All three stairways are blocked.”

At that moment, part of the roof fell in with a fierce crash, and Elisabeth screamed, struggled wildly in the marshal’s grasp and then lost consciousness.

When she awakened, gasping, sobbing before she even became fully aware of her surroundings, Elisabeth found herself in a wagon, bumping and jostling along the dark road that led to town. She sat up, twisting to look at the man who sat in the box, driving the team.

She raised herself to her knees, hair flying wildly around her face, filthy nightgown covered with bit of hay and straw, and clasped the low back of the wagon seat. “Jonathan and Trista,” she managed to choke out. “Did you get them out? Did anyone get them out?”

Marshal Haynes turned slightly to look back at her, but the night was moonless and she could see only the outline of his tall, brawny figure and Western hat. The rain that had begun to fall after she’d been pulled from the house started to come down in earnest in that moment, so that he had to raise his voice to be heard.

“That’s somethin’ you and I are going to have to talk about, little lady,” he said.

Elisabeth remembered the sight of the roof of Jonathan’s house caving in, and she closed her eyes tightly, heedless of the drops that were wetting her hair and her dirty nightgown. Nothing mattered, nothing in the universe, except Jonathan and Trista’s safety. She knelt there, unable to speak, holding tightly to the back of the wagon seat, letting the temperate summer rain drench her.

Only when Farley brought the wagon to a stop in front of the jailhouse did Elisabeth’s state of shock begin to abate. Bile rushed into her throat as she recalled the events she’d read about—the fire, no bodies found in the ruins, her own arrest and trial for murder.

And despite the horror of what she faced, Elisabeth felt the first stirring of hope.
No bodies.
Perhaps, just perhaps, Jonathan had found the necklace and he and Trista had managed to get over the threshold into the safety of the next century.

The marshal hoisted her down from the wagon and hustled her into his office. While Elisabeth stood shivering and looking around—the place was like something out of a museum—Marshal Haynes hung his sodden hat on a peg beside the door and crouched in front of the wood stove to get a fire going.

“Now, I suppose you’re going to arrest me for murder,” Elisabeth said, her teeth chattering.

Farley looked back at her over one shoulder, his expression sober. “Actually, ma’am, I just brought you here to wait for the church ladies. They’ll be along to collect you any minute now, I reckon.”

The guy was like something out of the late show. “You’ll try me for murder,” Elisabeth said with dismal conviction, stepping a little closer to the stove as the blaze caught and Farley closed the metal door with a clank. “I read it in the newspaper.”

“I heard you were a little crazy,” the marshal said thoughtfully. His eyes slid over Elisabeth’s nightgown, which was probably transparent, and he brought her a long canvas coat that had been draped over his desk chair. “Here, put this on and go sit there next to the fire. All I need is for the Presbyterians to decide I’ve been mistreating you.”

Elisabeth’s knees were weak, and she couldn’t keep her thoughts straight. She sank into the rocking chair he indicated, closing the coat demurely around her legs. “I didn’t kill anybody,” she said.

“Nobody is claiming you did,” Farley answered, pouring syrupy black coffee into a metal mug and handing it to her. But he was staring at Elisabeth as though she were a puzzle he couldn’t quite solve, and she wondered hysterically if she’d already said too much.

The chair creaked as Elisabeth rocked, and the heat from the stove and the terrible coffee began to thaw out her frozen senses. “Jonathan and Trista are not dead,” she insisted, speaking over the rim of the cup. She had to cling to that, to believe it, or she would go mad, right then and there.

Farley looked pained as he finally shrugged out of his own coat and came to stand near the stove, giving Elisabeth a sidelong glance and pouring himself a cup of coffee. His beard-stubbled face was gray with grief, and his brown hair was rumpled from repeated rakings of his fingers and wet with the rain. His green-blue eyes reflected weariness and misery. “There’s no way anybody could have survived a blaze like that, Miss Lizzie,” he said with gruff gentleness. “They’re dead, all right.” He paused and sighed sadly. “We’ll get their bodies out tomorrow and bury them proper.”

Elisabeth felt the coffee back up into her throat in an acid rush, and it was only by monumental effort that she kept herself from throwing up on the marshal’s dirty, plankboard floor. “No, you won’t,” she said when she could manage it. “You won’t find their bodies because they’re not there.”

Farley sidled over and touched Elisabeth’s forehead with the back of one big hand, frowning. Then he went back to his place by the stove. “What do you mean they’re not there? Me and four other men tried to get in, and all the staircases were blocked. We couldn’t get to Jonathan and the little girl, and we damn near didn’t get to you.”

A headache throbbed under Elisabeth’s temples, and she could feel her sinus passages closing up. “Don’t think I’m not grateful, Marshal,” she said. “As for what I meant—well, I—” What could she say? That Jonathan and Trista might have disappeared into another time, another dimension? “I believe they got out and that they’re wandering somewhere, perhaps not recalling who they are.”

“I’ve known Jonathan Fortner for ten years,” Farley answered, staring off at some vision Elisabeth couldn’t see. “He wouldn’t have left that house unless he was taking everybody inside with him. He wasn’t that kind of man.”

Elisabeth felt tears burn her eyes. No one was ever going to believe her theory that Jonathan and Trista had taken the only escape open to them, and she would have to accept the fact. Furthermore, even though the man she loved, the father of the baby growing inside her at that very moment, had not died, he might well be permanently lost to her. Perhaps he wouldn’t be able to find his way back, or perhaps the mysterious passageway, whatever it was, had been sealed forever….

Farley fetched a bottle from his desk drawer and poured a dollop of potent-smelling whiskey into Elisabeth’s coffee. “You mentioned murder a few minutes ago,” he said, “and you talked of reading about what happened in the papers. What did you mean by that?”

Elisabeth normally didn’t drink anything stronger than white wine, but she lifted the whiskey-laced coffee gratefully to her mouth, her hands shaking. “There hasn’t been a murder. It’s just that you’re going to
think…
” Her voice failed as she realized how crazy any explanation she could make would sound. She squirmed in the chair. “You won’t find any bodies in that house, Marshal, because no one is dead.”

A metallic ring echoed through the small, cluttered office when Farley set his cup on the stove top and disappeared into the single cell to drag a blanket off the cot. “Put this around you,” he ordered, returning to shove the cover at Elisabeth. “You’re out of your head with the shock of what you’ve been through.”

Elisabeth wrapped herself in the blanket. By that time, her mixed-up emotions had undergone another radical shift and she was convinced that Jonathan would come walking through the door at any moment, his clothes blackened and torn, to collect her and prove to the marshal that he was alive. Trista, she decided, was safe at Vera’s house.

Farley stooped to peer into her face. “You didn’t set that fire, did you?”

She jerked her head back, as though the words had been a physical blow. “Set it? Marshal, the roof was struck by lightning—I saw it happen!”

“Seems to me something like that would be pretty unlikely,” he mused, rubbing his chin with a thumb and two fingers as he considered the possibilities.

“Oh, really?” Elisabeth demanded, frightened now because the scenario was beginning to go the way she’d feared it would. “Well, it split one of the apple trees in the orchard right down the middle. Maybe you’d like to go and see for yourself.”