Wrong Face in the Mirror: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series) (3 page)

He went into the kitchen to get cold tea and ham for a sandwich from the refrigerator, then turned on the television to watch something mindless as he ate.

For the first few days Hart simply accepted the life she’d been designated, going to work at the prison, coming home to the meals Nikki prepared and sleeping in the little bedroom that actually belonged to Christy who now bunked with her sister. Tommy, who delivered oilfield equipment across the U.S. in his truck, was gone most of the time so she had little chance to ask the questions that were building in her mind.

She told herself she was getting better when no more incidents of strange sightings from the corners of her eyes occurred. But then she overheard her brother and his wife arguing.

“I’m not a housemaid,” Nikki protested in a vehement voice, “nor a cook. I didn’t sign on to look after your sister as well as you and the girls. This house is crowded enough with just us and now Mandy and Christy are fighting all the time
because they don’t have their own rooms.”

She could hear only the low mumble of Tommy’s response, but could not distinguish the words. Apparently it was like the evening in the restaurant when Nikki wanted to be heard, especially by her sister-in-law.

Humiliated, Hart wished she’d just come out and said she didn’t want Tommy’s sister living in her home. Her first thought was to go right in and confront the two of them and let them know she was more than willing to go on her own.

After
all she must have lived someplace before. But then she remembered. Most likely she’d lived with the husband who wanted nothing to do with her.

She’d like nothing more than to move out. Here she was constantly aware of Nikki’s suppressed resentment and Tommy’s uneasiness in her presence. She was fond of the little girls and even if she was occupying one of their bedrooms, they seemed eager for her company.

Right now it looked as if Mandy and Christy were her only friends in the little town. Now that Toby Michaels had gone ahead and retired, she didn’t even have anybody with whom she could chat.

She felt lonely and cut off and wondered about what kind of person she’d been that nobody came to visit or called to inquire how she was doing. Did this mean she hadn’t any friends?

Considering her options, which weren’t many, she went to Pizza Plus after work and ordered a cola and some breadsticks. When Cully brought them to her, she asked, “You wouldn’t know of a little place for rent around here would you? I couldn’t afford much, but I’d really like to give my niece her room back.”

The teen girl stopped as though considering.  “Mrs. Harris hasn’t rented your loft.” She grinned. “Nobody else seems to like that place.”

“Loft?” Hart asked. “Mine?”

“Oops!” Cully giggled cheerfully. “I forget. They say you can’t remember. Well, that’s where you used to live after you came back from school. It’s the apartment over the junk shop.”

Hart wasn’t enlightened and supposed that was clear to Cully because she went on. “Ye Old Antiques,” she explained further.

“Just down the street?”

Cully nodded.

“I couldn’t afford much rent. I only work part
time and don’t make much.”

Cully laughed. “You’re kidding, aren’t you? Everybody knows your grandmother left you a boatload of money. You could buy your own house if you wanted. Everybody always wondered why you wanted to live in that little apartment.”

Cully left without explanation, coming back immediately with an ancient looking key dangling from her hand. “Mrs. Harris left the key with my boss when she went into the nursing home. Said to rent the place if we could. This’ll let you in, it’s been closed since she left, and the stairs to the loft are in the back of the store.” After a couple of seconds, she added apologetically, “If you really can’t remember the place where you lived for over a year.”

The front door of the old
stone-faced building, separated from its neighbor by only a narrow alley, did not open easily. It was only when she raised the door a little by gripping on to the knob that the key turned so that she was able to push the door to a creaking opening.

The scent of dust and age enveloped her as she stepped inside, along with a surprising coolness considering the heat of the day outside on the cracked but sunny sidewalk.

She paused, stunned by the sheer volume of the contents of the old shop. The far wall was lined with shelves containing vintage toys, most of them little tractors and farm implements ranging from green John Deere products to red ones produced by Farmall.

She was surprised that she recognized either brand. What a tricky thing memory was—she couldn’t remember her own name but she knew at least two kinds of tractors.

Other shelves were crowded with a mishmash of dishes and household equipment. She saw an old hand churn for making butter and a table model Victrola music player with its trumpet like attachment for expelling sound.

Old furniture crowded the main floor, while pioneer style full-sized farm implements rested in the back. A nearby counter displayed an assortment of old costume jewelry with a heavy heaping of turquoise rings and bracelets, some of them striking her as quite beautiful.

Everything was shrouded in dust and cobwebs and the place stank of rodents. She hoped the inhabitants were only mice and not rats.

The name painted on the front said ‘Ye Old Antique Shop’
but Colby had called it a junk shop. Hart grinned. She figured it was somewhere between the two with a whole like more emphasis on the junk part. Still some of the items were intriguing.

But she couldn’t live here. Nobody could live here.
In spite of that conviction she found her way to the narrow wooden stairs in the back and went up to what Colby had called the loft.

She opened the door at the top of the stairways and stepped into a place she almost recognized, blinking in surprise at what she saw.

It was a spacious apartment, with a huge, high-ceiling central room and a neat little kitchen with newish looking appliances in a kind of alcove on one end forming the principle day-time space.

It was decorated in soft blues with knotty-pine paneling halfway up the walls, and
an old-fashioned wallpaper patterned with tiny blue flowers above. The blue motif was dramatically challenged by flashes of crimson in the huge pillows on the sofa and a vase of vivid silk tulips on a low able, reflected in a large impressionistic oil painting that also displayed touches of red.

She didn’t remember being in this place, but it was decorated to her taste. The room welcomed in her
in a way Tommy and Nikki’s house had failed to do.

What surprised her was that it was fresh and clean. No cobwebs festooned the hanging light fixture in the center of the room or draped the furniture. The thick layers of dust that covered everything downstairs
were absent here. The room looked freshly dusted and even smelled of lemon furniture polish. She doubted a mouse would dare stroll in on its thick rugs.

Puzzled she explored further to find a cozy bedroom with a large bed covered with a patchwork quilt and a dresser with a
decorative mirror.

The bathroom was large and well equipped, looking more modern than anything else in the house with the latest in fixtures and
tiles. Thick towels hung from the rack, scented soaps were on the dressing table and by the bathtub.

Maybe she was in the wrong place. These rooms looked as though the
occupant had only left this morning.

She peered into the closet and found a woman’s clothing
: jeans, shirts, a couple of dresses, all of which looked as though they would fit her. She slipped her feet into a pair of summer white sandals. They were her size.

But she’d been gone for months and these clothes smelled freshly washed and ironed, dainty and ready to wear.

Shaken, she retreated to the comfortable quilt-covered bed and leaned back against thick pillows. Like the clothing in the closet, quilt and pillows smelled clean, fresh and faintly scented.

It was as though the apartment
had been waiting for her.

Hart kept creeping into his thoughts all day in spite of all his efforts to dispel her from his life. It was the usual busy day with a fatal wreck on one of the back roads where a youngster had flipped his car, a call for assistance from a snakebite victim down near the river, a reported drug house in Mountainside, assorted misdemeanors and a domestic violence report from a household where such calls came with too much regularity.

While he was counseling Tiffany Stewart that her boyfriend seemed to be on a pattern of escalating violence
that could lead to real disaster for her or her little daughter, he kept thinking of Hart. Well, the truth was, he spent way too much time thinking about her and trying to figure out how things had gone so wrong.

A quiet, rather introverted man who did not easily establish close relationships, he had let his guard down all the way for the
lively, thoughtful woman who had made him fall deeply in love for the first time in his life.

The days they’d spent together would always remain as a thorn in his soul, not because they had been troubled, but because they seemed to have been set in a golden haze of such content as he’d never known, only to end in disaster.

Tiffany was shaking her head at him and assuring him confidently that she was sure Chris had only lost his temper a little and it was probably her fault for egging him on and he would never be a real danger to her and little Marie. He just needed a cooling off period.

She grew visibly angry when he refused to immediately release her boyfriend, telling her that he would be spending a spell in the county jail while he awaited a hearing on the matter of the black eye and bruised cheek so clearly visible on her face.

He’d just finished this counseling session and was feeling frustrated that the incidents would continue to happen until Chris hurt either her or the little girl badly enough that he would be sent away for a good long time,  when a call came from out at the lake. Deputy Joe Harding informed him that a body had been found in the lake.

“Drowning?” Alistair asked, doubtful that with the long
drought that there was enough water left in the lake to drown anybody.

“Don’t think so. Looks like a really old body, just bones left actually, but he was
left inside one of the old houses with a bullet hole in his head. Looks like murder or suicide.”

Alistair immediately got into his car and headed toward the man-made lake that normally provided recreation for visitors from miles around, but now was so  low that the little town that had been covered with water when the  lake was built was now beginning to poke it’s head above the dank, shallow water.

The lake had been named for the town of Medicine Stick, now buried for well over half a century, and as a boy Alistair had spent many an afternoon fishing from its shore.

He covered the miles from the county seat town to the lake quickly, driving into the low, rocky mountains
where the state park encompassed the lake, a picturesque visitors’ lodge overlooked its waters, and a variety of camping spots were available for visitors.

Medicine Stick State Park was a beautiful spot on the map, doubly attractive in contrast with the spreading plains that surrounded it
’s sparsely wooded acres and the mountains that geologists said once had been high as the Rockies but were so ancient and worn by time that now they could be more rightfully termed hills.

Originally occupied by
Native American tribes dating back so far that even their names were lost in time, the mountains had long been considered sacred by the Indians and Alistair, who boasted Kiowa heritage, had always felt a particular connection to this location.

The lake wasn’t looking its best. Three years with very little rain had brought southwestern Oklahoma to a
calamitous state. Old-timers said without exaggeration that things were at least as bad as they’d been in the dustbowl thirties, the only difference being that most of the land was now used as grazing for cattle instead of plowed for cotton farms and so blowing dust was not the problem it had been back then.

The lake was like a huge, spreading puddle. Many of the fish had died and visitors stay
ed away from the shallow, dirty water and Alistair could hardly imagine an occasion that would have taken anybody into the water to discover a leftover murder victim.

He wondered if Joey hadn’t let his imagining run away with him a bit when he mentioned the word murder. Still people weren’t likely to
close themselves away in a building under the water. Especially not with what Joey thought was a bullet hole in the head.

He pulled to a stop on the sandy beach where one of the county cars was parked along
with one marked as belonging to the park ranger and several bikes, got out and went over to where his deputy and Marcia Thompson, the park ranger, were talking with three teenaged boys in shorts and bathing suits. It figured. Nobody but a kid would risk going into these murky waters.

He didn’t know any of the boys and listened quietly while Joey identified them as part of a group from out of state camping in the park.

The one next to Joey, a boy of about fourteen with stunned-looking eyes and an anxious expression, blurted out, “You look like an Indian.”