Wakening the Past: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series Book 2) (3 page)

“Well! That’s all right then.” Obviously he didn’t know what to say, no doubt making even less sense of the girl showing up here than she had. “Both of you stay inside. Don’t try to drive anywhere because the roads are going to get slick. Don’t know when I’ll be able to get home.”

He forgot to tell her goodbye or even say he loved her, and ended the call.

She wondered if the abrupt conclusion to the contact was because he was
too busy with an escaped prisoner to worry about or because he was disturbed at Bobbi’s presence here.

After all, they both remembered that she’d once called Hart ‘Stacia,’ almost as if she had some knowledge of the strange switch that had occurred between the
real Hart Benson and Stacia Larkin back in 1947. 1947, long before the girl had been born.

Alistair Redhawk and his deputies
along with the city police patrolled the streets of Wichita, still looking for any sign of the old man who had vanished from the courthouse today. Accustomed to working long hours under pressure, his feelings were divided tonight with his new wife isolated out at their country home by the bad weather already making its entry into the area.

He wouldn’t have minded if they could have been caught out at the ranch together, at least for the few hours of the night, and he smiled at the thought of the two of them cuddling next to the fire. Of course he would have had to be out early, assisting stranded motorists who elected to try to travel in impossible weather, but the little time they would have had together would have been cherished.

Rain was beginning to freeze as it struck his windshield and he was glad to see that the streets were largely empty, but he couldn’t help worrying about the old man out here somewhere tonight, no more capable of looking after himself than a little kid. He feared too for the residents who might encounter a confused, possibly terrified man who had once, long ago, shown himself capable of violence.

He doubted this story would have a happy ending.

When Hart ended the call with her husband, she looked thoughtfully
to where Bobbi Lawrence sat silently in her big chair.

“You want soup?” she asked.

Bobbi nodded.  “I’m starving.” She followed her hostess into the kitchen, accepting a bowl of the soup ladled from the kettle on the kitchen range and a hunk of bread. Hart poured her a glass of milk and then, carrying the drink, motioned her back into the living room, placing the milk on the coffee table in front of the sofa, than returning to her own food. The sound of rain blowing against the house had changed to an icy clatter and though the room was warm, she felt a sympathetic shiver run down her back.

“Good to be inside tonight.” She thought of Alistair. His work always demanded he be out in bad weather. They’d been married
in February over a year ago now, but through this latest winter they’d gone through more than one storm, her alone in the country, him on the road in his car or at the office in the courthouse in Wichita.

It
would soon be past the season for this kind of weather, she thought resentfully; spring should be close at hand now. But she remembered a blizzard back in early April and right now it wasn’t quite March.

“I heard you say you told my family I was here.”

She looked up from her concentration on the soup. “First thing I did. They were frantic.”

“I left a note. Anyway, they know I can look after myself.”

“Good Lord,” Hart commented without rancor, “You’re fourteen. When I was fourteen I’d barely been out of my home town.”

“That would be Mountainside?” Was there mockery in that question
?

Her hometown had been Medicine Stick, gone now for decades. She could hardly admit that to this girl who seemed to know more than she should.
She changed the subject. “How did you get here, Bobbi?”

“Big airplane, little airplane, cab.”

That was succinct enough. “I’m surprised you had the money.”

“Not a problem.” The look the girl gave her was a mixture of resentment and something like amusement, which was surprising since she didn’t think she’d said anything remotely funny.

“I’ll make up the bed in the guestroom for you.” The sentence was barely out of her mouth when the lights in the kitchen flickered, came up again and then abruptly shut off. She heard the soft purr of the electrical heating stop as well.

She’d been here before. Right after Christmas they’d
gone without power for three days. Now with only the fire for light the house lay silent in near darkness.

“What’s going on?” Bobbi asked, sitting straight up.

“Power outage. Wind and ice are a bad combination; we most likely have lines down.”

“I don’t like being in the dark.”

“It’ll be all right. May come right back on and if not, we have candles and battery lights. The worst part is that the kitchen range and the heating system are electric. That’s why we keep stocked up on wood for the fireplace.”

“That’s positively primitive.”

Hart decided this wasn’t a good time to point out that in her girlhood a pot-bellied wood stove was their source of heat for the entire household of six people and that Mom had cooked on a kerosene stove.

The power hadn’t come on by ten p.m. and Bobbi complained loudly that she couldn’t go to bed without watching television for a while first, finally departing for the back bedroom, flashlight in hand, with plans to call her friends in California.

Minutes later when Hart heard a shriek she thought something awful had happened to the girl and dashed down the long dark hall to find Bobbi deep in the mass of quilts heaped on her bed, the flashlight sending a thin stream of light across her lap. “My phone won’t work. I can’t call anybody!”

This was hardly unexpected. “Means the towers are down. Wind and ice aren’t good for communications either.”

“When will they be working again?”

“I really can’t say.”

“Well, Hart, call somebody and complain.”

Hart gleefully broke the bad news. “We don’t keep a land line, Bobbi. If the cell phones are down, then we’re on our own.”

Bobbi’s expression was so appalled that Hart almost felt sorry for her, even though back when she was a kid, the only phones in town had been at places like the school and the store and those hadn’t worked particularly well.

This, she thought, could be an educational experience for the girl. “Turn off your light and go to sleep. You won’t miss electricity if you’re not awake.”

She went to bed, feeling a whole lot more sorry for poor Mr. Jeffers than she did for Bobbi Lawrence.

Dawn shone dimly on an ice-coated world turned miraculously overnight into a thing of beauty with winter bare tree branches coated in the glittering substance and roads treacherously slippery. A rash of accidents kept city police and the OHP troopers busy while Alistair and his deputies patrolled the county roads that were their jurisdiction.

Fortunately the wrecks this morning had mostly been a matter of sliding into ditches with no serious injuries. Alistair told himself grumpily that if he didn’t have to be out, he’d be home with his wife in front of the fireplace, but everybody seemed to think that by not showing up for work they might be considered not essential and so went on as though the roads were passable.

Bobbi Lawrence’s family had called repeatedly for reassurance when they could not reach either her or Hart at the ranch and seemed to have trouble understanding why he, in the largest town in the county and with top-notch equipment, could receive calls while the two in a remote country setting were cut off from communication.

As soon as the pressure of work
slowed, he promised Dr. Stacie Hudson-Lawrence that he would get out to the ranch house to check on her daughter, adding, “I’m sure she’s fine with my wife looking after her.”

“This is so unlike Bobbi,” the doctor insisted. “She’s always been so responsible.”

Then it’s time she break out, he felt like saying. No fourteen-year-old has a right to be that responsible. He wondered how well Bobbi’s parents really knew her. The kid had struck him as being up to all kinds of mischief and smart enough to keep her folks from finding out.

He grinned at the thought. Well, she would have met her match in Hart.

The humor faded from his face and his mind as he thought of his wife. They’d been so happy to find each other again, at least he’d been, but now they were running off the tracks. Something was wrong between him and Hart and he couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

By mid
-morning the ice was beginning to be cleared from the main roads by the flow of traffic and his deputies were reporting that Nolan Jeffers seemed to have vanished from the earth. He decided to make a quick trip home to check on Hart and their uninvited guest.

Hart had told Bobbi there wasn’t any central heat, phone service or warm food, but she’d forgotten to mention that the hot water heater also operated by electricity and was reminded of that failure when she heard a shriek from the direction of the guest bath.

Oops! Nothing like an icy cold shower to start the morning bouncing.

No coffee this morning, but the milk in the closed refrigerator was still cold and would stay that way if she put it outside on the porch. Before setting it out though, she poured cereal into a bowl, placed a glass of milk next to it, leaving it on the table for when Bobbi came in.

That happened by the time she was halfway through her own cereal. Bobbie appeared, her hair wet, but dressed in jeans and a shirt, though still bare-footed.

“Breakfast,” she said, indicating the cereal and milk.

“How long can this go on?” Bobbie asked despairingly.

“In December it was several days. Lots of county lines for the co-op to see to.”

The sun was out and the ic
icles hanging from the eaves were already beginning to drip, but she didn’t feel it was necessary to explain these facts to the teenager.

What had Bobbi been thinking to run off, leaving the members of her family scared to death?

Hearing the sound of a car out front, she ran to the window and saw her husband’s car pulling up in into the yard. Underneath everything, she’d been worried about him, knowing he was out on dangerous roads doing his job, just as he always would be during bad times. Sometimes she thought she hadn’t fully considered this business of being married to a lawman. His profession had seemed romantic and exciting when they first married, but now after everything that had happened, she wondered if she could live the rest of her life with this constant undercoating of fear.

No matter. Right now, at this moment, he was safe. With a glad cry she ran to the front door and threw her arms around him as he came into the house.

He hugged her before asking, “Long night?”

“It was okay. We had plenty of wood and some candles. Heat and light what more could we want?”

“I heard wolves howling.” The sound of Bobbi’s voice behind them startled them both into pulling apart.

“Those were only coyotes, Bobbie,” Hart told her.

She made a show of shivering. “They sounded vicious.”

Looping his right arm around his wife, Alistair addressed her sternly. “You’re in big trouble, young lady. I wouldn’t be surprised if your mom and dad aren’t already boarding a plane heading in this direction.”

She considered that as she followed them into the living room. “Not my mom and dad. They can’t leave their patients suddenly like that. They’ll send Granny.”

Hart looked so stricken that she quickly added, “It’s not that they don’t love me. It’s just that they have important responsibilities and Granny’s always been the one who looks after me. We’re good buddies, Granny and me.”

Alistair nodded his understanding. “My Granddad and I were always especially close. Something about skipping a generation, I guess.”

“Does he live here?”

It was an odd question. Obviously he and Hart were the only occupants of the house. “He died long ago when I was about twelve.” Funny how he couldn’t say that even after all the years that had passed without feeling a sense of loss.

“Oh. But did he live here?”

Alistair frowned. “This was his ranch, though there was a smaller house during his lifetime.” He nodded to the west. “Over near the shelter belt. My mom and dad built this house.”

She nodded as though he had satisfied some carefully considered question. Strange child, he thought.

He told them he could only stay for a few minutes, long enough to bring more wood in, though he reported seeing electrical crews working on the lines only half a mile away who said power should be back on at the farm within the hour. The cooperative that operated the cell phones was indicating a state wide outage and would make no predictions
as to when they would be up, but he told Bobbi she needn’t worry about her family as he’d been in contact with them.

Her look of disgust told him that she hadn’t been so much worried about calling her mom and dad as her friends.

He wished she would go away for a little so he could spend the few minutes he had home snuggling with Hart, but she seemed determined to hang close so the three of them brought in more logs to stack in the wood box in the living room and then he had no choice but to head back out on the roads.

“What about Mr. Jeffers?” Hart asked as she kissed him goodbye.

He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.

Alistair hadn’t been gone ten minutes when the power came back on. The lights in the kitchen gave the first clue and after that Hart heard the low hum of the central heat beginning to function.

Bobbi raced to turn on the television in the living room and snorted with disbelief when all the stations seemed to be carrying live broadcasts of the statewide ice storm.

Hart placed bacon strips in a cast iron skillet to begin making a second, more palatable breakfast for the girl who hadn’t eaten a bite of her cereal and relaxed a little when she heard the distinctive ring tone of Bobbi’s phone. Good! Things were getting back to normal.

She began to turn over the quickly sizzling bacon strips, their scent
starting to fill the kitchen and her memory. Since last November, she’d had no more of experiences such as this she began to feel overwhelming her morning with all its supposed normality.

Almost she had trusted that it would not happen again, that she’d seen the last of her long gone family members now that the soul called Hart was gone and she was left to stand in her place.

Given no time to safeguard herself against the quick cooking bacon or the fact that she was standing over the kitchen range, Hart saw the scene building out of the corner of her eye of another kitchen, this one equipped with a kerosene range, where her mother, her hair drawn up in a net as it always was when she was cooking, was stirring something in a large pot.

Then that kitchen from the past swallowed up the one at the ranch house where she lived with her husband and Mom was complaining gently, “We might as well move on. There’s no point in staying ‘til the last minute, but your father believes some miracle will happen and they won’t flood the town and we’ll go on here in Medicine Stick the way we always have.”

Stacia sliced and buttered a thick loaf of the bread she and her mother had baked that morning, sniffing the good smell that bread they bought in the store could never simulate. She was Stacia in Stacia’s body, her hair red and her eyes brown, as she could see clearly in the reflection in the mirror over the dresser. And yet she remembered that other life where she switched with Hart to live with Alistair in that other time.

Hart, the real Hart, was dead and gone and this was no ongoing movement of life back in 1947, but an endless loop into which she stepped, reliving with full knowledge of both lives, but only moving through something that had already happened without the ability to change or improve anything. She had
attempted last November to prevent Hart’s death and failed.

She drew in a deep breath and tried to regard this as a gift, a visit to the people she dearly loved who had lived out their own lives long before her
years as Hart Benson began to unwind.

She had a chance to see Mom, a precious chance to once more be within the house where she’d grown up and soon, if it was an ordinary day, Dad and the boys would be returning from their work to eat dinner with their womenfolk. She wondered where Helen was and thought how surprised she would be to hear that her own great-granddaughter was currently a guest in her sister’s home.

The thought faded. Somehow it was against the rules. If she opened her mouth to tell Helen about Bobbi, the words wouldn’t come out. Or, even if she could speak, Helen would stare at her with disbelief and Mom would be frightened that her older daughter was once more slipping away into mad imaginings just as she had when she was a little girl and talked of living a life elsewhere in another child’s form.

“We’ve company coming for supper,” Mom said. “An old friend of mine. Her husband died and she moved back to Mountainside with her little boy. They’re living
near her family.”

Mom was always bringing people home to feed them. In much of America, times were better with the war over and business booming. Even the farmers were doing better in these wetter years of the ‘40s, but unlike others Serena Larkin did not forget the hungry ‘30s and with what little her family had, tried to help her needy neighbors.”

“We went to school together until she ran away to get married. Ona was a feisty little thing, but she knew how to manage. I’m sure she and little Nolan will do just fine once they land on their feet.

Stacia’s mouth went dry, but she continued to put the bread on a plate, then covered it with a napkin and put it on the table. Then she began to assemble the banana pudding they were to have for dessert.

“Nolan and Ona,” she said. “What’s their last name?”

“The man she married was named Jeffers,” Mom said, half absentmindedly as she
fried chicken and contemplated whether she’d added enough potatoes to stretch the meal for the whole family and guests. “So they’d be Ona and Nolan Jeffers. The boy’d be five or six now, I reckon. Ona had long given up on having a child when he was born.”

Stacia knew she’d walked through this moment before, but it had been such a small moment, one of thousands of evenings she’d helped her mother put supper on the table. Nothing particular about it would have stood out in her memory.

Never in all the months she’d known Nolan Jeffers had she ever guessed that she’d met him before when he was a little boy.

There had to be meaning and reason to this. She hadn’t gone back in time even once since the night when Hart had been shot and died and now, here she was, at a few months before that
horrible event. She could set the time because it was in the six months from when they’d known they would be forced to leave Medicine Stick and the night when the town had been drowned under the lake.

She had been brought back to remember the time when she’d met Nolan Jeffers and his mother.

Bobbi made the mistake of answering a phone call from her mother. After five minutes of listening to well expressed recriminations from her verbally gifted parent, she mumbled something about having to go and ended the call.

She then buried the phone under a sofa cushion and went looking for Hart. “Granny will be flying out tomorrow,” she said, frowning as she followed a thin trail of black smoke and the stench of burning bacon into the kitchen, breaking into a run as she saw Hart collapsed in a puddle on the floor. “Hart!” she yelled, but had the presence of mind to deal with the flaming mass on the stove first.

Grabbing an oven mitt, she
took the skillet by its handle and pushed it off the fire, turned off the burner and then picked up a nearby kitchen towel to beat out the skillet full of flames.

That done, she dragged Hart out of the kitchen and into the adjoining dining room where the air was relatively clear of smoke. The woman lay limp as a dead thing.

She hadn’t grown up with two doctors as members of her household for nothing. She checked to see that Hart was breathing and her heart beating, then tried to decide what to do.

To her relief, long dark lashes lifted from a pallid face and blue eyes stared uncomprehendingly up at her. “You burned the bacon,” she
told Hart.