Stardust of Yesterday

by Lynn Kurland

  So he’d walked away. Far away from New York and London and all the places where he’d hoisted the skull and crossbones. Leave it to Tony not to take his blunt and offensive resignation seriously.

  “I need a change of scenery,” he said to the contents of Jamie’s study. “To somewhere sunny, like the Bahamas.”

  Maybe Jamie had a few travel books on the shelf above his desk. Alex put off his shower a few minutes more in deference to Jamie’s private library. Surely there was some destination detailed there that would interest him. He had the time for a vacation. He certainly had the need for one.

  He ran a finger along the spine of each book above Jamie’s desk, mentally checking off the ones he’d read.

  Then he stopped.

  Trails Through Time. Now, this was a new one. Alex pulled the book down and opened it. He read the inside jacket. “In Trails Through Time author Stephen McAfee takes the reader on a marvelous journey down roads in Britain, from Roman times to the present day.”

  Interesting. Alex flipped through the pages, then stopped when something slipped out and landed on the desk with a soft plop. Alex put the book aside and reached for the folded piece of paper. It was very worn, as if it had been folded and unfolded dozens of times. He gingerly straightened it out, then looked at it in astonishment. It was a treasure map. Considering the day he was having, he was fairly impressed with his ability to recognize that.

  Not that he should have been surprised. He’d been an Eagle Scout, after all, and one famous for his mapmaking skills. Add to that the board and plunder skills he’d acquired after law school and he had the piracy category all sewn up. This was, however, one of the oddest maps Alex had ever seen in his long and illustrious career.

  There were the normal things, of course: requisite directional arrows, landmarks aplenty. In fact, the landmarks looked suspiciously like the surrounding countryside. Yes, Jamie’s mountains were there to the north. The castle sat prominently in the middle of the map, with the meadow below it due south. There was the forest to the west and another part of forest to the south. And that squiggle over there had to be the stream that fed into the pond not far from the garden. Alex stared at it for several minutes wondering what looked so strange.

  Then it hit him.

  There wasn’t just one X marking the spot. There were several.

  To another man, such a flagrant disregard for treasure-mapmaking standards might have only indicated slight befuddlement on the part of the mapmaker. But Alex wasn’t just another man. And the mapmaker was his brother-in-law, James MacLeod. And Jamie wasn’t befuddled, he was an honest-to-goodness, former mediev—

  Alex put on the mental brakes before he traveled any further down that well-worn path. Traveling down any path Jamie was associated with was hazardous to one’s health. Maybe Jamie had just been scribbling in his spare time.

  Unfortunately, those didn’t look like scribbles. Alex looked at the map again and frowned at what was very deliberately scrawled next to the X’s in Jamie’s bold handwriting.

  Medieval England.

  17th Century Barbados.

  The Future.

  It couldn’t mean what he thought it meant. The map was just Jamie’s doodles. People didn’t just walk over certain spots in the ground and up and disappear.

  Though Barbados didn’t sound too bad at the moment. At least it would be sunny there. And look, there it was, due north of Medieval England. Alex left the map sitting prominently on top of the book where Jamie couldn’t help but notice that Alex had seen it. He would realize he’d been caught, and Alex would enjoy the opportunity to give Jamie a thorough ribbing. Heaven knew he deserved it.

  Could it be true? Alex turned the possibility over in his mind. Barbados at least would be a pleasant change of scenery. What could it hurt to just go have a look and indulge in the fantasy for an hour or so? He had a great imagination. He could hang out under a tree and pretend he was loitering on some sunny beach. Maybe he’d even pretend he’d traveled there, just to see if he could rattle Jamie. Yes, the morning was starting to shape up nicely.

  Alex left the study, grabbed his coat, and headed downstairs. He was still covered with horse snot, but there was no sense in getting cleaned up now. He wouldn’t need his shirt much longer because he’d be sunning himself on a nice beach, watching bikini-clad women strut their stuff in front of him—or at least pretending to do so. Given the fact that he hadn’t seen blue Scottish sky in weeks, Barbados was starting to sound mighty nice.

  If there just wasn’t that disconcerting seventeenth-century business attached.

  Alex plowed into his brother at the bottom of the steps.

  “Hey,” Zachary said, annoyed, “watch it. You’re going to get me dirty and I have a date.”

  Alex steadied himself with a hand on the wall. Zachary had a date? Alex hadn’t had a date in eight months, and he was the owner of a huge portfolio and worked out every day to keep his body from turning to fat. Zachary was a semi-starving former student who ate junk food in front of the television and grew things on paper plates under his bed. How was this possible?

  “With whom?” Alex asked, stunned.

  Zachary smirked. “Fiona MacAllister.”

  Alex reeled like a drunken man.

  “Fiona?” he gasped.

  “Yeah,” Zachary said with a shrug. “You snooze, you lose, bro. And I wasn’t snoozing. I gotta go get cleaned up.” He gave Alex’s crusty shirt a pointed look before he mounted the stairs and disappeared out of sight.

  Alex shook his head. Fiona MacAllister was the grocer’s daughter. Alex had been planning to ask her out for weeks. He’d just been waiting until he thought she might be used to him. After all, he was a rich and powerful former corporate raider, and he hadn’t wanted her to want him just for his money.

  Alex pushed away from the wall. There was something very wrong in the world when his brother could get a girl to go out with him and he couldn’t.

  He made one last detour to the kitchen on the off chance that some undiscovered cache of junk food was hiding there. He rummaged through the pantry and found his secret box of Ding-Dongs still safely hiding behind a container of oatmeal and a bag of rice. It was a good thing Zachary never came close to anything resembling a raw ingredient. Alex indulged himself immediately and tucked a second snack into his coat pocket. One never knew what one might find for dinner on the beach. No sense in not being prepared.

  He shut the hall door behind him and put on his coat. As he walked across the courtyard to the stables, the rain increased with every step he took. It wasn’t a good sign, but he ignored it. Within minutes he had Beast saddled and was heading out the front gate.

  He turned back to the north to look at the mountains behind the estate, with their last dustings of snow. Spring was right around the corner. He could smell it. He followed his nose as it pointed him to the west where a little stream ran into the pond which sat serenely next to the garden. Jamie had certainly done a good job reproducing that stream on the map. And there lay Barbados just past Medieval England on the other side of the pond.

  Alex felt an uncomfortable tingle in the air and frowned. He could believe anything of the forest on the other side of the keep, but this bit of ground in front of him? There were no gateways to the past lurking under those boughs. Maybe his sister Elizabeth was just using the map for one of the romance novels she wrote.

  Alex urged his horse forward, wondering as he did so just what he thought he was doing out in the rain on a horse who had a cold, following directions on a map made by his lunatic brother-in-law. He was losing it. It was the only answer. His breakfast of fermented cottage cheese had obviously had adverse effects on his common sense. Even the thought of mentally spending a morning in Barbados was starting to sound unappealing. He would probably be better off calling a travel agent.

  But he had already come this far; there was no sense in turning back now. He continued on his way under the boughs of the rowan trees. The silence was pa
lpable. A chill went down his spine. Alex pulled his collar closer to his neck and gave himself a hard mental shake.

  All the same, he wondered just how Jamie had discovered all that business about those little gates.

  Probably better not to know.

  The trees thinned and suddenly gave way to an intimate little glade. The forest floor was carpeted with moss and clover and a large circle of plants. Elizabeth called it a faery ring. Alex looked narrowly at it. Was this the gate? Was it possible? He shook his head. It just couldn’t be anything more than a very simple ring in the grass.

  Right?