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.
Chapter Six
The ice melted as the day progressed and as the pace of work slowed, Alistair felt increasingly fatigued. He’d had little sleep the night before and had taken time only to grab a fast-food hamburger and fries as breakfast and lunch. By dark the night would begin to freeze the melting slush on the roads, but he knew he would have to leave the patrolling to other members of his staff.
It was time to go home. He drove slowly, feeling a sense of failure over the still missing prisoner. The old man had probably collapsed in some obscure corner, he thought now, overcome with the shock of his freedom. They’d probably find his body one of these days.
His exhausted mind rested on one thought. Soon he’d be home with Hart and they’d find refuge in each other’s arms. He didn’t know why it was that they were edgy these days and liable to fall into dissent. Their quarrels seemed to spring out of nothing and flare into fierce anger. They said unforgivable things to each other and then were sorry and made love fiercely instead of apologizing.
Last November he would have sworn that if they’d been blessed with more time together, they would never exchange a cross word, but would rejoice in each other’s company. It had been as though one of them was dying from a hopeless disease and a miracle had happened. He’d watched her shot dead and then he’d found her again, up the mountain waiting for him and they’d come together with all the expectations of a normal life ahead.
And now they couldn’t seem to spend more than a few hours together without blazing into bitter, painful argument. He loved her with his whole heart and yet could not live at peace with her. Nor she with him.
There was only one answer. The only time when they seemed to belong together, to melt into passionate agreement was when they made love. When he got home, he would say no more than a greeting, but would take her into his arms and show her the love he had so much trouble speaking.
It wasn’t until he was moving up the long drive that he remembered their guest. Young Bobbi Lawrence would be in the house with his wife and there would be no opportunity for the privacy he so desired.
To Hart’s surprise, Bobbi made no mention of her fainting spell and the smoky kitchen was explained to Alistair by her simply saying she’d let her attention wonder and burned the morning’s bacon. To make up, she’d cooked her husband’s favorite chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and salad, taking care that Bobbi kept her company in case of another mishap.
Now that it had happened again, she would be fearful of a reoccurrence. Once last fall, she’d been driving and had barely gotten to the side of the road before
she slipped into that other life. So many things were dangerous, not only to yourself but to others, when you were likely to fall into sudden unconsciousness.
Back when Hart had been alive, she had no such fears. When one took on the other’s life, then she was in charge and could avoid sudden accidents, but after the other woman’s death she’d ended up in one misadventure after another, including being flung over a hundred miles away to lie at risk in a city street.
She’d hoped that was all behind her now that the answer to Hart’s murder had been found and her killer meeting justice of a sort. But now life seemed to be posing her a new problem, one she would have to face alone.
So it was that when a weary-looking Alistair commented that she didn’t look as if she were feeling well, she snapped back, “You don’t look so great yourself.”
Surprisingly Bobbi tried to intervene. “You’re both tired,” she said tactfully and handed the bowl of salad to Alistair. “My granny is coming tomorrow. She says she’ll rent a car in Oklahoma City and be out here by afternoon to take me off your hands.”
“That’s good,” Alistair said.
“Alistair!” Hart exclaimed. “That’s like telling Bobbi you can’t wait for her to leave.”
“I will be glad to see her restored to her family. They’re worried about her.”
“I’m not leaving,” Bobbi said, her mouth set in a firm line. “Now that I’m here, I’m going to try to talk Granny into staying a while.”
Alistair’s forehead ridged. “Don’t you have to go to school?”
“I’ll make it up later.” Bobbi carefully cut a small piece from her steak.”
“Schools must be more liberal in California. Here they don’t allow you to go running off whenever you like.”
Hart looked at her husband with surprise. It wasn’t like him to be so negative, especially not with a child. On the other hand, Bobbi didn’t seem to be at all disturbed by his attitude.
“I don’t do public school,” she said. “I go to a private school and work with a tutor. Granny will probably arrange something if we stay here long enough.”
Hart knew from what the girl had already said to understand she had things to work through. Real things, like she’d had as a child. Somehow she was connected to Hart, or Hart’s memories, and she needed to be here in this place. Surely Alistair could understand that.
“We could ask Bobbi’s grandmother to stay here with us too,” she suggested. Bobbi’s grandmother. Helen’s daughter. Her sister’s daughter and she was anxious to know her better.
Alistair looked at her as though she’d lost her mind, then got to his feet and walking with the authoritative sound of cowboy boots against a wood floor, left the room. She heard the front door slam behind him and knew he’d gone outside.
She tried to hide her anger and embarrassment. “He’s had a couple of rough days,” she said, feeling the apology was inadequate. Sometimes she felt she didn’t know Alistair very well at all.
“It’s okay.” Bobbi seemed almost glad he’d gone. “He doesn’t get it, but you do. I know you. I mean I deep down know you, Stacia.”
It took only a flash of an instant for her to remember she wasn’t Stacia, not anymore. “I’m Hart,” she said gently. “Stacia was your great-grandmother’s sister.”
A look of confusion twisted the girl’s round, dimpled face. “Oh, Yeah,” she agreed. “Sometimes I get names mixed up.”
Hart pretended interest in her breakfast. She could hardly admit to the girl that she knew well enough how mixed up she must feel. She seemed to have some of Hart’s memories; that was frightening clear. But she didn’t want Helen’s great-granddaughter to go through anything like what she’d experienced as a child when she might be red-haired Stacia in the 1930s and ‘40s one minute, and the next dark-haired Hart in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Now she understood it, knew she was always herself even in Hart’s body, but there had been times when she’d questioned her own sanity. And her poor parents, increasingly convinced that something was wrong with her, had become more and more protective as she grew up.
Much as she wanted to know how much of Hart had been brought back in this girl born so many years after she’d been killed, for Bobbi’s sake, she could not encourage her to believe this had actually happened.
Better for Helen’s great-granddaughter if she turned her back on memories of Hart forever.
“I’m sure you’ll be happy to see your grandmother again,” she said, then became guiltily aware she was acting the way the grownups in her family had when she was so troubled at what was happening to her.
She remembered a time when she’d been in her sixth grade class at Medicine Stick Grade School. Fourth, fifth and sixth had been in the same room with only one teacher. Mrs. Holland, the teacher, had been working with the fourth graders while fifth and sixth graders were doing their assignments. Stacia was reading something about the planets and trying to memorize their order from the sun. Mercury was closest, she was thinking, and was extremely hot. One of the boys said you’d have to make your home in an air conditioned dome to live there and she was imagining what it would be like.
And then she was in another classroom, this one noisier and less formal and when she looked down at her hands, they were smaller and younger and had some sort of polish on the nails.
The teacher looked right at her and said, “Hart, you always get your problems done first. Come up to the chalkboard and show the others what you did with the fifth problem that everyone is finding so difficult.”
The teacher looked straight at her. This was not a new experience. She had been Hart before, but always found it disconcerting. Also Hart might be good at math, but she, Stacia, hated to even think about numbers. She just hoped they switched back before she got to the board.
She picked up the chalk and, quick as that, was in her own familiar classroom again with her science book in front of her and nobody paying attention to what she did.
That was only one of many memories she had of switching lives, but this couldn’t be what was happening to Bobbi. The fourteen-year-old called her Stacia, her true name, now and then. She worried over memories of a time she couldn’t possibly remember. And, today, as he’d confided to Hart within Alistair’s hearing, she’d seen a man long dead, who had ridden up on a horse and opened the door to a locked house so she wouldn’t be left freezing outside.
Bobbi had been born into her family, not Hart’s. And Hart was dead.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Bobbi’s flippant remark eased through her abstraction.
“Not worth a penny,” she responded in a similarly light tone.
They finished eating and, after Alistair got a call that sent him out of the house and roaring down the road in his official car, they loaded the dishwasher and went into the living room to watch a program chosen by the girl.
Chapter Seven
This was official business and he had no reason to feel guilty because he hadn’t told his wife the call concerned his missing prisoner. No need to get Hart upset until he knew for sure they’d found Nolan Jeffers.
She seemed to feel almost as though the old man was close family, somebody she needed to look after, and from where he sat it seemed to him that Hart had too many concerns on her mind.
As soon as he got the chance, he was going to talk to her about going back and seeing that psychiatrist in Oklahoma City again. She had some problems she needed to work out. Hell, they both did!
Each day he felt the relationship between them crumbling a little more, increasingly falling apart. And he struggled, ended up saying the wrong thing and driving her further away from him. How could he love her so much and seem to be losing her in spite of his efforts?
A man not given to much introspection, Alistair tried to avoid thinking about those minutes last November when he’d thought he saw the long-vanished little town of Medicine Stick in front of his eyes and a woman that seemed to him to be Hart being shot by a wo
man crazed with jealousy.
Damn, he thought again. That woman hadn’t even looked a bit like Hart. She’d been taller, bigger, and her coloring had been entirely different. The woman he imagined . . .the woman who had seemed so real there for a moment . . .
Being a man who could have seen an unidentified flying object occupied with little green men right in front of his eyes and would have been convinced there was an ordinary, prosaic answer to his vision, he had largely talked himself out of those few lost minutes down by the lake. He’d been stressed, worried beyond belief about Hart and her safety, and he’d let his imagination run away with him.
That’s all it was. If he started to believe anything else, he would resign his job, knowing he no longer had the judgment to work at safeguarding the public.
He was a reasonable man and he knew well enough that talks of switching bodies and jumping back and forth between past and present just didn’t happen. He would waste no more time thinking about things like that and he would see that Hart didn’t either.
But good Lord, Serena would be heading back here tomorrow, asking more questions about Stacia and her death and getting Hart all worked up. He didn’t want either her or Bobbi in his house a minute longer than was absolutely necessary. He and Hart deserved some normalcy.
He didn’t turn on his siren, but with flashing lights approached the little town of Mountainside which lay within his territory of Wichita County. Even with his lights on, he drove watchfully as the town had more than its share of senior citizens who sometimes forgot to look carefully before backing their cars and even more of young drivers who did everything too quickly and with no expectation of encountering others.
He drove past the post office and the little city hall, then Pizza Plus, a couple of empty buildings with the fading lettering indicating long-defunct businesses to pull to a stop in front of the newly restored antique shop where his wife had once lived in a loft apartment.
Wakening the Past: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series Book 2) Page 4
