Linda Lael Miller Bundle (31 page)

Soon Vera’s mother did, indeed, arrive with a dress, and Elisabeth was so grateful that she forgot how the woman’s child had practically called her a witch that very morning. She bathed in the privacy of the spare room, and brushed her hair until it shone, pinned it into a modified Gibson-girl and put on the lace-trimmed ivory silk dress her neighbor had so generously offered. The fabric made a rustling sound as Elisabeth moved, and smelled pleasantly of lavender. Trista gathered wildflowers and made a garland for Elisabeth’s hair, and when the two of them reached the site Jonathan had chosen, next to the covered bridge, the doctor was waiting there with a handful of daisies and tiger lilies.

The townsfolk crowded the hillside and creek bank, and several schoolboys even sat on the roof of the bridge. Elisabeth marveled that she’d come so close to losing her life and then had gained everything she’d ever wanted, all in the space of a single day.

To be married by the very judge who would probably have handed down her death sentence was a supreme irony.

The ceremony passed in a sort of sparkling daze for Elisabeth; it seemed as though she and Jonathan were surrounded by an impenetrable white light, and the ordinary sounds of a summer afternoon blended into a low-key whir.

Only when Jonathan kissed her did Elisabeth realize she was married. When the kiss ended, she was flushed with the poignant richness of life. Instead of tossing her bouquet, she handed it to Trista and hugged the child.

“Now we’re a family,” Trista said, her gray eyes glowing as she looked up at her stepmother.

“We are, indeed,” Elisabeth agreed, her throat choked with happy tears.

After the ceremony, there was corn bread and coffee at the hotel. There hadn’t been enough advance warning for a cake, but Elisabeth didn’t care. What stories she’d be able to tell her and Jonathan’s grandchildren!

Trista would spend the night with Vera, it was agreed, and the Fortner family would leave on their trip the following morning. Once all the corn bread had been consumed and Jonathan and Elisabeth had been wished the best by everyone, from the judge who had married them to the man who swept out the saloon, the newlyweds retired to the room Jonathan had rented.

Beyond the window and the door, ordinary life went on. Buggies and wagons rattled by, and the piano player hammered out bawdy tunes in the saloon across the road. But Jonathan and Elisabeth were alone in a world no one else could enter.

She trembled with love and wanting as he slowly, gently undressed her, and it was an awkward process, since his right arm was still in a sling. “I’m going to have your baby, Jon,” she said in a breathless whisper as he unbuttoned her muslin camisole and pushed it back off her shoulders, baring her breasts. “I’m sure of that now.”

He bent his head, almost reverently, to kiss each of her firm, opulent breasts. “The first of many, I hope,” he relied.

Elisabeth drew in a quick breath as she felt his mouth close over her nipple. “I missed you so much, Jon,” she managed after a moment, tilting her head back and closing her eyes in blissful surrender as he enjoyed her. “I was terrified I would never see you again.”

He suckled for a long, leisurely time before drawing back long enough to answer, “I was scared, too, wondering if you escaped the fire.” He turned to her other breast, and Elisabeth moaned and entwined her fingers in his rich, dark hair, holding him close as he drank from her. If she never had another day to laugh and breathe and love, she thought, this one would be sweet enough to cherish through the rest of eternity.

Presently, he laid her down on the edge of the bed, running his hands along her inner thighs, easing her quivering legs apart for an intimate plundering. She felt her hair come undone from its pins and spread it over the covers with her fingers in a gesture of relinquishment.

Her soul was open to Jonathan now; there was no part of it he was not free to explore.

He knelt, his hands gripping the tender undersides of her knees, and nuzzled the moist delta where her womanhood nestled. “I love pleasing you, Elisabeth,” he said. “I love making you give yourself up to me, totally, without reservation of any kind.”

Elisabeth’s breath was quick and shallow, and she could barely speak. “I need you,” she whimpered.

Jonathan burrowed through and took her fiercely, and Elisabeth cried out, her body making a graceful arch on the mattress, her hands clutching and pounding at the blankets.

He consumed her until she was writhing wildly on the bed, until she was uttering low cries, until her skin was wet with perspiration and her muscles were aching with the effort of thrusting her toward him. He drove her straight out of herself and made her soar, and brought her back to earth with patient caresses and muttered reassurances.

She found him beside her on the lumpy hotel bed, after she’d returned to herself and could think and see clearly. Very gently, she touched his bandaged arm.

“Does it hurt much?”

He bent to scatter light kisses over her collarbone. “It hurts like hell, Mrs. Fortner. Just exactly how do you propose to comfort your husband in his time of need?”

She stretched like some contented cat, and he poised himself over her, one of his legs parting hers. “I intend to love him so thoroughly that he won’t remember his name,” she responded saucily, spreading her fingers in the coarse hair that covered his chest.

Jonathan groaned, touching his hardness to her softness, receiving warmth. Elisabeth guided him gently inside her, arching her back to take him deep within, and his magnificent gray eyes glazed with pleasure.

Slowly, slowly, she moved beneath him, tempting, teasing, taking and giving. With one hand thrust far into the mattress, the other resting against his middle in its sling and bandage, he met her thrusts, retreated, parried.

The release was sudden and ferocious, and it took Elisabeth completely by surprise because she’d thought she was finished, that all the responses from then on would be Jonathan’s. But her body buckled in a seizure of satisfaction, and he lowered his mouth to hers, as much to muffle her cries as to kiss her.

When the last whimper of delight had been wrung from her, and only then, Jonathan gave up his formidable control and surrendered. He was like a magnificent savage as he lunged into her, drew back, and lunged again.

Finally, with a loud groan, he spilled himself inside her and then collapsed to lie trembling beside her on the mattress, his chest rising and falling with the effort to breathe. Elisabeth draped one leg across both of his and let her cheek rest against his chest.

For a long time, they were silent, and Elisabeth even slept for a while.

When she awakened, there were long shadows in the room and Jonathan’s hand was running lightly up and down her back.

“I think you’ll miss your world,” he said sadly as she stirred against him and yawned. “Maybe you shouldn’t stay, Elisabeth. Maybe you should take the necklace and go back and pretend that none of this ever happened.”

She scrambled into a sitting position and stared down at him. “I’m not going anywhere, Jonathan Fortner. You’re stuck with me and with our baby.”

“But the medicine—the magic box…”

Elisabeth smiled and smoothed his hair, less anxious now. “In some ways the twentieth century is better,” she conceded. “They’ve wiped out a lot of the diseases that are killing people now. And life is much easier, in terms of ordinary work, because there are so many labor-saving devices. But there are bad things, too, Jon—things I won’t miss at all.”

His forehead wrinkled as he frowned. “Like what?”

Elisabeth sighed. “Like nuclear bombs. Jonathan, my generation is capable of wiping out this
entire planet
with the push of a single button.”

His frown deepened. “Would they actually be stupid enough to do that?”

“I don’t know.”

He sighed and settled deeper into the pillows. “Do you suppose all the rest of us would die, too, if they did? I mean, the past and the present are obviously connected in ways we don’t understand.”

Elisabeth was saddened. “Let’s hope and pray that never happens.”

Jonathan stroked her hair and held her close against his chest. “What else can you tell me about the twentieth century?”

“You’re bound to experience some of it yourself, since it’s only about eight years away,” she answered, entwining an index finger in a curl of hair on his chest. She bit her lip, remembering history that hadn’t happened yet. “But I’ll see if I can’t give you some previews of coming attractions. Around the turn of the century, America will declare war on Spain. And then, about 1914 or so, the Germans will decide to take over the world. France, England, Russia and eventually the United States will take them on and beat them.”

Jonathan stared pensively into her face, waiting for more.

“Then, around 1929, the stock market will crash. If we’re still around then, we’ll have to make sure we invest the egg money carefully. After that—”

He laughed and held her close. “My little Gypsy fortune teller. After that, what?”

“Another war, unfortunately,” Elisabeth confessed with a sigh. “Germany again, and Japan. As awful as it was for everybody, I think most of the scientific and medical advances made in the twentieth century happened because—well, necessity is the mother of invention, and nothing creates necessity like war.”

Jonathan shuddered. “Tell me the good things.”

Elisabeth talked about airplanes and microwave ovens and Disneyland. She described movies, electric Christmas-tree lights, corn dogs and Major League Baseball games. Jonathan laughed when she swore that a former actor had served two terms as President of the United States, and he absolutely refused to believe that men were having themselves changed into women and vice versa.

When Elisabeth was finished with her tales of the future, she and Jonathan made slow, sweet love.

Later, they ate a wedding supper brought to them by Big Lil’s daughter. They consumed the food hungrily, greedily, never remembering after that exactly what they’d been served. Then they made love again.

Early the next morning they rose, and Elisabeth put on the dress she’d been married in, since she had nothing else to wear. Jonathan kissed her, said she was beautiful and promised to buy her as many gowns as she wanted once they reached Seattle.

Elisabeth was nervous and distracted. Finally she brought up the subject they’d both been avoiding. “Jon, the necklace—where is it?”

He paused in the act of rebandaging his arm and studied her for a long moment. “I left it at the house,” he said. “Why?”

“There’s something I have to do,” she replied, her gaze skirting his, her hand already on the doorknob. “Please—tell me where to find the necklace.”

The expression in his eyes was a bleak one, but he didn’t ask the obvious question. “All right, Elisabeth,” he said. “All right.”

They drove out to Jonathan’s house—their house—in his buggy. “The necklace is in my study,” he said. “Under the ledger in the middle desk drawer.”

As she hopped down from the rig, Elisabeth surveyed the ladder propped against the partially burned house. Apparently, the repair work had already begun.

She hummed as she went inside, found the necklace exactly where Jonathan had said it would be, and brought it out into the sunshine with her. Her husband stood beside the buggy, watching her pensively.

“I’m about to show you how much I love you, Jonathan Fortner,” she said, and then she began climbing up the ladder.

“Lizzie!” Jonathan protested, bolting away from the buggy.

Elisabeth climbed until she reached the doorway that had once led from Trista’s room into the main hallway. Holding her breath, she shut her eyes tightly, closed her fingers around the necklace and flung it over the threshold.

She was pleased when she opened her eyes and saw that the pendant had vanished. Holding her skirts aside with one hand, made her way quickly down the ladder.

Elisabeth Fortner had found the century where she belonged, and she meant to stay there.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

A
unt Verity’s antique necklace lay in an innocent, glimmering coil of gold on the floor of the upstairs hallway. An hour before, when Rue Claridge had been carrying her suitcases upstairs, it had not been there.

Frowning, Rue got down on one knee and reached for the necklace, her troubled gaze rising to the mysterious, sealed door in the outside wall. Beyond it was nothing but empty space. The part of the house it had once led to had been burned away a century before and never rebuilt.

Aunt Verity had hinted at spooky doings in the house over the years, tales concerning both the door and the necklace. Rue had enjoyed the yarns, but being practical in nature, she had promptly put them out of her mind.

Rue’s missing cousin, Elisabeth, had mentioned the necklace and the doorway in those strange letters she’d written in an effort to outline what was happening to her. She’d said a person wearing the necklace could travel through time.

In fact, Elisabeth—gentle, sensible Elisabeth—had claimed she’d clasped the chain around her neck and soon found herself in the 1890s, surrounded by living, breathing people who should have been dead a hundred years.

A chill wove a gossamer casing around Rue’s spine as she recalled snatches of Elisabeth’s desperate letters.

A pounding headache thumped behind Rue’s right temple, and she let out a long sigh as she rose to her feet, her fingers pressing the necklace deep into her palm. With her other hand, she pushed a lock of sandy, shoulder-length hair back from her face and stared at the sealed door.

Years ago there had been rooms on the other side, but then, late in the last century, there had been a tragic fire. The damage had been repaired, but the original structure was changed forever. The door had been sealed, and now the doorknob was as old and stiff as a rusted padlock.

“Bethie,” Rue whispered, touching her forehead against the cool, wooden panel of the door, “where are you?”

There was no answer. The old country house yawned around her, empty except for the ponderous nineteenth-century furniture Aunt Verity had left as a part of her estate and a miniature universe of dust particles that seemed to pervade every room, every corner and crevice.

At thirty, Rue was an accomplished photojournalist. She’d dodged bullets and bombs in Belfast, photographed and later written about the massacre in Tiananmen Square, covered the invasion of Panama, nearly been taken captive in Baghdad. And while all of those experiences had shaken her and some had left her physically ill for days afterward, none had frightened her so profoundly as Elisabeth’s disappearance.

The police and Elisabeth’s father believed Elisabeth had simply fled the area after her divorce, that she was lying on a beach somewhere, sipping exotic tropical drinks and letting the sun bake away her grief. But because she knew her cousin, because of the letters and phone messages that had been waiting when she returned from an assignment in Moscow, Rue took a much darker view of the situation.

Elisabeth was wandering somewhere, if she was alive at all, perhaps not even remembering who she was. Rue wouldn’t allow herself to dwell on all the
other
possibilities, because they didn’t bear thinking about.

Downstairs in the big kitchen, she brewed a cup of instant coffee in Elisabeth’s microwave and sat down at the big, oak table in the breakfast nook to go over the tattered collection of facts one more time. Before her were her cousin’s letters, thoughtfully written, with no indications of undue stress in the familiar, flowing hand.

With a sigh, Rue pushed away her coffee and rested her chin in one palm. Elisabeth had come to the house the two cousins had inherited to get a new perspective on her life. She’d planned to make her home outside the little Washington town of Pine River and teach at the local elementary school in the fall. The two old ladies across the road, Cecily and Roberta Buzbee, had seen Elisabeth on several occasions. It had been Miss Cecily who had called an ambulance after finding Elisabeth unconscious in the upstairs hallway. Rue’s cousin had been rushed to the hospital, where she’d stayed a relatively short time, and soon after that, she’d vanished.

Twilight was falling over the orchard behind the house, the leaves thinning on the gray-brown branches because it was late October. Rue watched as a single star winked into view in the purple sky.
Oh, Bethie,
she thought, as a collage of pictures formed in her mind…an image of a fourteen-year-old Elisabeth predominated—Bethie, looking down at Rue from the door of the hayloft in the rickety old barn. “Don’t worry,” the woman-child had called cheerfully on that long-ago day when Rue had first arrived, bewildered and angry, to take sanctuary under Aunt Verity’s wing. “This is a good place and you’ll be happy here.” Rue saw herself and Bethie fishing and wading in the creek near the old covered bridge and reading dog-eared library books in the highest branches of the maple tree that shaded the back door. And listening to Verity’s wonderful stories in front of the parlor fire, chins resting on their updrawn knees, arms wrapped around agile young legs clad in blue jeans.

The jangle of the telephone brought Rue out of her reflections, and she muttered to herself as she made her way across the room to pick up the extension on the wall next to the sink. “Hello,” she snapped, resentful because she’d felt closer to Elisabeth for those few moments and the caller had scattered her memories like a flock of colorful birds.

“Hello, Claridge,” a wry male voice replied. “Didn’t they cover telephone technique where you went to school?”

Rue ignored the question and shoved the splayed fingers of one hand through her hair, pulling her scalp tight over her forehead.

“Hi, Wilson,” she said, Jeff’s boyish face forming on the screen of her mind. She’d been dating the guy for three years, on and off, but her heart never gave that funny little thump she’d read about when she saw his face or heard his voice. She wondered if that meant anything significant.

“Find out anything about your cousin yet?”

Rue leaned against the counter, feeling unaccountably weary. “No,” she said. “I talked to the police first thing, and they agree with Uncle Marcus that she’s probably hiding out somewhere, licking her wounds.”

“You don’t think so?”

Unconsciously, Rue shook her head. “No way. Bethie would never just vanish without telling anyone where she was going…she’s the most considerate person I know.” Her gaze strayed to the letters spread out on the kitchen table, unnervingly calm accounts of journeys to another point in time. Rue shook her head again, denying that such a thing could be possible.

“I could fly out and help you,” Jeff offered, and Rue’s practical heart softened a little.

“That won’t be necessary,” she said, twisting one finger in the phone cord and frowning. Finding Elisabeth was going to take all her concentration and strength of will, she told herself. The truth was, she didn’t want Jeff getting in the way.

Her friend sighed, somewhat dramatically. “So be it, Claridge. If you decide I have any earthly use, give me a call, will you?”

Rue laughed. “What?” she countered. “No violin music?” In the next instant, she remembered that Elisabeth was missing, and the smile faded from her face. “Thanks for offering, Jeff,” she said seriously. “I’ll call if there’s anything you can do to help.”

After that, there didn’t seem to be much to say, and that was another element of the relationship Rue found troubling. It would have been a tremendous relief to tell someone she was worried and scared, to say Elisabeth was more like a sister to her than a cousin, maybe even to cry on a sympathetic shoulder. But Rue couldn’t let down her guard that far, not with Jeff. She often got the feeling that he was just waiting for her to show weakness or to fall on her face.

The call ended, and Rue, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, put on a jacket and went out to the shed for an armload of the aged applewood that had been cut and stacked several years before. Because Rue and Elisabeth had so rarely visited the house they’d inherited, the supply had hardly been diminished.

As she came through the back door, the necklace caught her eye, seeming to twinkle and wink from its place on the kitchen table. Rue’s brow crimped thoughtfully as she made her way into the parlor and set the fragrant wood down on the hearth.

After moving aside the screen, she laid twigs in the grate over a small log of compressed sawdust and wax. When the blaze had kindled properly, she added pieces of seasoned wood. Soon, a lovely, cheerful fire was crackling away behind the screen.

Rue adjusted the damper and rose, dusting her hands off on the legs of her jeans. She was tired and distraught, and suddenly she couldn’t keep her fears at bay any longer. She’d been a reporter for nine eventful years, and she knew only too well the terrible things that could have happened to Elisabeth.

She went back to the kitchen and, without knowing exactly why, reached for the necklace and put it on, even before taking off her jacket. Then, feeling chilled, she returned to the parlor to stand close to the fire.

Rue was fighting back tears of frustration and fear, her forehead touching the mantelpiece, when she heard the distant tinkling of piano keys. She was alone in the house, and she was certain no radio or TV was playing….

Her green eyes widened when she looked into the ornately framed mirror above the fireplace, and her throat tightened: The room reflected there was furnished differently, and was lit with the soft glow of lantern light. Rue caught a glimpse of a plain woman in long skirts running a cloth over the keys of a piano before the vision faded and the room was ordinary again.

Turning slowly, Rue rubbed her eyes with a thumb and forefinger. She couldn’t help thinking of Elisabeth’s letters describing a world like the one she’d just seen, for a fraction of a second, in the parlor mirror.

“You need a vacation,” Rue said, glancing back over her shoulder at her image in the glass. “You’re hallucinating.”

Nonetheless, she made herself another cup of instant coffee, gathered up the letters and went to sit cross-legged on the hooked rug in front of the fireplace. Once again, she read and analyzed every word, looking for some clue, anything that would tell her where to begin the search for her cousin.

Thing was, Rue thought, Bethie sounded eminently sane in those letters, despite the fact that she talked about stepping over a threshold into another time in history. Her descriptions of the era were remarkably authentic; she probably would have had to have done days or weeks of research to know the things she did. But the words seemed fluent and easy, as though they’d flowed from her pen.

Finally, no closer to finding Elisabeth than she had been before, Rue set the sheets of writing paper aside, banked the fire and climbed the front stairway to the second floor. She would sleep in the main bedroom—many of Elisabeth’s things were still there—and maybe by some subconscious, instinctive process, she would get a glimmer of guidance concerning her cousin’s whereabouts.

As it was, she didn’t have the first idea where to start.

She showered, brushed her teeth, put on a nightshirt and went to bed. Although she had taken the necklace off when she undressed, she put it back on again before climbing beneath the covers.

The sheets were cold, and Rue burrowed down deep, shivering. If it hadn’t been for the circumstances, she would have been glad to be back in this old house, where all the memories were good ones. Like Ribbon Creek, the Montana ranch she’d inherited from her mother’s parents, Aunt Verity’s house was a place to hole up when there was an important story to write or a decision to work out. She’d always loved the sweet, shivery sensation that the old Victorian monstrosity was haunted by amicable ghosts.

As her body began to warm the crisp, icy sheets, Rue hoped those benevolent apparitions were hanging around now, willing to lend a hand. “Please,” she whispered, “show me how to find Elisabeth. She’s my cousin and the closest thing I ever had to a sister and my very best friend, all rolled into one—and I think she’s in terrible trouble.”

After that, Rue tossed and turned for a while, then fell into a restless sleep marred by frightening dreams. One of them was so horrible that it sent her hurtling toward the surface of consciousness, and when she broke through into the morning light, she was breathing in gasping sobs and there were tears on her face.

And she could clearly hear a woman’s voice singing, “Shall We Gather at the River?”

Her heart thundering against her chest, Rue flung back the covers and bounded out of bed, following the sound into the hallway, where she looked wildly in one direction, then the other. The voice seemed to be rising through the floorboards and yet, at the same time, it came from beyond the sealed door of the outside wall.

Rue put her hands against the wooden panel, remembering Elisabeth’s letters. There was a room on the other side, Bethie had written, a solid place with floors and walls and a private stairway leading into the kitchen.

“Who’s there?” Rue called, and the singing immediately stopped, replaced by a sort of stunned stillness. She ran along the hallway, peering into each of the three bedrooms, then hurried down the back stairs and searched the kitchen, the utility room, the dining room, the bathroom and both parlors. There was no one else in the house, and none of the locks on the windows or doors had been disturbed.

Frustrated, Rue stormed over to the piano on which she and Elisabeth had played endless renditions of “Heart and Soul,” threw up the cover and hammered out the first few bars of “Shall We Gather at the River?” in challenge.