Wakening the Past: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series Book 2) (12 page)

But fourteen-year-old Bobbi Lawrence was a whole lot more than a statistic. He was betting on that resourceful young woman.

“What does my mother think? She knows Bobbi better than anyone
; does she think this is a runaway?”

He found himself being more honest than he intended. “That’s not her opinion. She thinks Bobbi was taken away by an armed stranger.”

Oops! He really shouldn’t have said that. How could he explain the source of Serena Hudson’s conviction?

He could hardly say that his own wife believed she had a psychic connection with the girl. Just this afternoon, he’d had to insist that Serena and Hart be kept to the lodge under protective custody when he’d caught th
em about to leave in a second car they’d rented to go looking on their own. He’d had to put one of his deputies in charge of them so that he was free to run the real search.

“My mother isn’t a woman to panic,” Dr. Lawrence sounded almost
belligerent, but he’d learned long ago that people with missing children could react in a variety of ways.

“I’m not accusing her of anything, but if you’ll just sit quiet and allow us to do our job . . .”

“Not likely,” she snapped. “This is my daughter and my business, Sheriff. You won’t leave me or my mother out of the search for Bobbi.”

He smothered a sigh and led her to the lodge room where Hart and Serena rested, a guard outside their door.

Serena seemed calm and poised. She’d eaten a few bites of her lunch as though willing to keep up her strength and even talked about ordering dinner. Unexpectedly she’d pulled out knitting needles, mentioning that her grandmother had taught her to knit when she was a little girl, and began work on a sweater she was making for her granddaughter.

Hart suspected she had to keep busy and could feel in spite of the quiet face and the composed behavior, the tension that radiated from Serena Hudson.

She f
elt and sympathized with that anxiety. She suspected that the man who held Bobbi, the two men actually, were not in their right minds. No telling what they would do to her and their other captives.

She’d seen a trace of the little boy she’d once known in the gunman’s face and figured out who he was. She was fairly sure that the two men were Terry Maxwell and his brother Bill and that this was all about the long ago murder for which Nolan Jeffers had gone to prison.

She didn’t know how to knit, had nothing in the lodge room to occupy mind or body, and Joey Harding, the deputy outside the door, couldn’t be cajoled into letting her leave, not when his boss had given him orders to the contrary.

She would have to think of a plan soon, even if it was as awkward and dangerous as knott
ing sheets together and escaping out the window and down the wall. The only thing was that she was afraid Serena would insist on going too and no woman so stressed about her granddaughter should start climbing down multi-storied walls.

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard any
more from Bobbi?” Serena queried as though she were asking about the weather.

Hart shook her head. She’d tried to force the contact until her head screamed with pain, but it hadn’t happened.
When she felt the past creeping up on her again, visions she could only see out of the corner of her eye flashing into reality, she reached out eagerly, lying flat on the bed for greater security. “Don’t worry, Serena,” she said abruptly, “I’ll be back.”

And then she was in the bed where she’d slept from her teen years, her sister Helen asleep in the bed next to hers. “Wake up, Helen,” she said. “We’ve got to talk.”

Helen was a sound sleeper. She had to raise her voice and call out several times before the girl stirred.

She blinked bleary eyes, regarding Stacia-Hart with disfavor. “For goodness sake, Stacia. It’s the middle of the night.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ve got to talk. It’s about your granddaughter.”

Helen flopped onto her side, her face turned from Stacia. “Not funny,” she muttered. “Go back to sleep, you idiot. You’ve been dreaming.”

Stacia got out of bed, wincing when her feet touched the cold floor as she crossed to Helen’s bed, reaching down to grab her shoulders and give her a hard shake. “Listen, Helen,” she insisted.

Helen moaned and turned back to face her. The conflict between here and there with her sister still in her late teens in this
time and long gone in the other, stirred Stacia’s mind unbearably. She choked down the feeling. “Tell me what you know about Terry Maxwell’s family.”

“Terry Maxwell? That little boy?”

She nodded, taking in her little sister’s beloved face, her heart aching for the time together that had been lost. “He came here with Mom’s friend and her little boy, the Jeffers.”

Helen, taking her
cue from Stacia, went serious. “Messed up family. Terry and his mother were beaten up by their father. Most likely the older boy too.”

“Why doesn’t someone help them? Why isn’t it stopped?”

“Come on, Stacia, you know how it is. The mother depended on her husband to keep herself and the boys going. She’d lie to your face that she’d run into a door or fallen down the stairs. Poor thing was probably glad to die.”

“But the boys?”

“What can anybody do?” Helen pleaded. “They’re his sons.”

“And how does Nolan Jeffers come into this?”

Helen shrugged. “Doesn’t really. His mom tries to keep him away from them, but she says Terry keeps showing up at their house to play with Nolan and she doesn’t have the heart to turn him away. At least she can see he gets a good meal now and then. Nolan tries to look after Terry at school, too. The other kids pick on him.”

It was much as she’d thought. So Nolan had grown up trying to look after his friend and Bill and Terry Maxwell had no doubt been warped from years of their father’s abuse.

So who had really killed their father? And if it wasn’t Nolan why had he kept silent all those years in prison?

“You all right, Stacia?” Helen asked quietly, now seeming fully awake.

Stacia settled quietly back on to her own bed. “Sure, I’m fine.” Her mind was elsewhere, the words her sister spoke barely registered on her consciousness.

“But your nightmare, you said you were dreaming of my granddaughter?”

Stacia smiled. “I dreamed you had a fourteen-year-old granddaughter who reminded me a whole lot of you and yet was different as well. She was in danger and I was trying to keep her safe.”

Helen yawned. “I just have one question.”

“And what’s that?”

Helen
rested her head dreamily on her pillow. “Who was her grandfather?”

Stacia laughed softly. “You’ll just have to figure that out for yourself,” she said, and turning away from Helen, willed herself once more into the future.

A loud knock sounded at the door just as Stacia slipped once more into Hart’s body.
She watched as Serena calmly put her knitting down and went to open the door.

She saw a woman with light hair and commanding presence in the doorway, Alistair standing behind her.

“Mother,” the woman said, but she and Serena did not embrace. Her mother waved her inside and Alistair followed.

Funny, Hart thought, up until now she’d
thought of her sister’s descendants as her own, but this woman cast a chill around her. Even though she must be Serena’s daughter and Bobbi’s mother, she felt no connection.

“My daughter, Dr. Stacie Hudson-Lawrence,” Serena introduced her. “Stacie, this is my good friend Hart Redhawk.”

Stacie nodded. “Sheriff Redhawk’s wife,” she said, than brushing all other thought aside frowned at her mother.

“I did the best I could,” Serena said, only mildly defensive, “but you know Bobbi. She has a mind of her own.” This last was said more in pride than reproof.

Alistair excused himself and left the three women alone. Hart got up to pull out a chair for the visitor and without seeming to really notice her, Dr. Lawrence sat down. “How could you let this happen, Mother? I’ve had to let down so many people to come here.”

As though Bobbi was not her daughter, but her mother’s, Hart thought. How strange? And yet she was obviously upset, obviously concerned.

Serena sat quietly in her own chair, not attempting to defend herself. “The sheriff is doing all he can to find her.”

Dr. Lawrence glanced at Hart as though
if herself of the connection between her and the sheriff. “Surely, Mrs. Redhawk, you can see that entirely too much fuss is being made. My daughter is willful and her grandmother spoils her. It’s apparent to me that she has simply run away once again.”

Hart decided to let Serena deal with her daughter. Perhaps she was only clinging to this belief out of denial of the real danger her daughter could be in at this very moment. If it gave her comfort, more power to her.

The ringtone on her phone was a welcome interruption. She flipped it open and answered, “Hi, this is Hart.”

“Hart, this is Tommy. I know you are all tied up in this search for the missing girl, but could you spare me a minute. It’s really important.”

“Tommy.” She sighed. Hart’s older brother. Her brother now, left as almost a legacy by the other woman’s death. “Sure, Tommy. Are you here in the lodge?”

“In the lobby. I’ll wait for you here.”

She was almost glad of the interruption. “My brother needs to see me for a couple of minutes downstairs,” she told Serena. “Be right back.”

Serena nodded her understanding and Hart was glad to leave the room, allowing Serena and her daughter their own confrontation in privacy.

Not that the meeting ahead was one she was looking forward to. Trouble from Tommy always meant money problems. Her half-brother had an addiction to gambling and got himself into a world of trouble by risking money he couldn’t afford to lose at the local casinos. She had no doubt that once more he’d come to beg a loan from the money Hart had inherited through her mother’s family.

And she knew how hard it was to say no, even when she
realized it wasn’t good for him to have her underwrite his dangerous addiction.

He was in the lobby, the big, round-faced man with the cotton-white hair, but he wasn’t alone. Mandy and Christy, his little daughters were with him.

Christy screamed with delight at the sight of her aunt, causing others in the room to stare as the two girls, as blonde as their dad, ran into her arms.

Hart felt no reservations about these two little girls. They might have been the real Hart’s relatives, but they were hers too and had treated her as a favorite ever since she’d come into their lives.

She settled herself in a big chair with Christy in her lap and the older Mandy seated on the wide arm at her right and listened as they told her all the latest happenings at school and among their friends. When the talk subsided a little, Tommy gave them each a couple of dollars and told them to go into the restaurant for ice cream cones while he talked to their aunt.

The grin faded from Hart’s face as she watched them scurry away and looked to Tommy’s face. He looked so sad, so worried. Why did he have to make life so hard for himself? It was difficult for her to understand this
addiction that plagued his life.

They had as much privacy as was to be managed here  with the only others remaining in the room over by the desk talking to the clerk. She waited for what he had to say.

She knew how hard this was for him. Usually his wife spoke for him, recognizing he’d rather do anything than ask his sister for help.

She had no wish to torture him. He might be a weak man or even a sick one, but she knew he was basically kind with many good qualities and total commitment to his family. Finally she had to speak. “Tommy, you told me you wouldn’t gamble anymore.”

“I mean what I said, but somehow, Hart, I just drift back into it and now Nikki’s saying she’ll leave me if I don’t get things straightened out. They’re threatening to take my truck and our house. We won’t have a home for the girls.”

She was caught. It would take someone wiser than she to solve Tommy’s problems. In the meantime all of Hart’s money was piled up somewhere and maybe she would have wanted Tommy to have as much of it as he wanted.

But she was guiltily aware that she was encouraging his addiction. Drat, but she didn’t have time right now to devote to this with Bobbi missing.

She made a quick decision with nothing like Solomon-type wisdom. “I’ll give you the money, Tommy, but you’ll have to put the house in Nikki’s name. That way, no matter how you mess up, she and the girls will have a home.”

He nodded, looking forlorn. “That’s more than fair, Hart.”

“Meet me at the bank at ten tomorrow morning,” she said, hoping she’d have found Bobbi by then and wouldn’t have anything more awful than Tommy’s financial affairs to worry about. “Bring the papers for the house.”

He nodded and got to his feet. “The truck will still belong to you,” she told him, offering what comfort she could. He nodded and started to walk away.

“Tommy, consider getting some kind of help. This doesn’t have to be a way of life.”

He nodded again without looking back at her and she

guessed he was only agreeing to please her and not because he had any conviction that help was possible.