But Alistair kept pushing between them and she could sense that Hart wasn’t truly happy with him. In spite of that, she’d felt she had no choice but to leave them alone and go back to Granny.
But she was nearly grown up now. It wasn’t fair to always lean on her grandmother, who had raised her own family long ago. So in the few steps from Hart’s door to Granny’s, she changed her mind.
She wasn’t sleepy anyway. She’d just go down to the lobby and sit by herself in one of those big chairs and try to think things through.
Unfortunately she found she wasn’t the only one with that idea. A round little woman with a worried face already sat in one of the big chairs, leafing through a magazine as though she weren’t really concentrated on either photos or text.
“Hi,” she said as Bobbi chose the chair further away. “Having trouble sleeping?”
Bobbi heard that patronizing sound in her voice of an adult speaking to a child. She felt compelled to offer no more than a nod, then picked up a magazine of her own to hide behind. Maybe this woman would go away soon and leave her the privacy she needed.
The woman smiled at her. “I have two little girls of my own.”
This was just too much. “I’m fourteen,” she said coldly. “I’m not a little girl.”
The woman sighed. “I know all about fourteen,” she said, “I coach teens.”
Bobbi got the impression that she didn’t find coaching a rewarding profession.
“And I teach math.”
Bobbi considered math a bore. It had no plot, just a lot of numbers. Oh, her mother had tried to teach her differently. Math and science were the pathways to a good future, according to her mother, the way she’d gone to a distinguished education and an even better career.
So Bobbi had decided to hate math even more, just to show her mother.
“My girls are Mandy and Christy,” the woman went on, seeming to feel a desperate need for conversation. “Mandy and Christy Benson. I left them alone tonight with their dad. That way he can’t go out.”
Bobbi tried to look as disinterested as she felt. Why was this person burdening a total stranger with her family situation? Because she can’t talk to anyone she knows, a voice inside her head answered her own question.
Well, she had enough problems of her own. Bobbi got up and hurried away. She could think of no place to go except outside. As she stepped out, she hugged herself in her own arms for warmth. Maybe she should go back for a coat, but no, she didn’t want to wake Granny, who would just insist she stay in the room and go to bed.
Tonight she couldn’t bear to be confined. Too many voices were speaking in her head.
Even though a cold wind blew, the rain had stopped and she decided to chance a few minutes away from the wide veranda that lined the front of the lodge. Maybe that wind would blow the echoes out of her head.
Christy and Mandy, the names of the two little girls flitted through her brain, seeming familiar. Then she realized that she’d heard the names from Hart. Christy and Mandy Benson, Hart’s nieces, daughters of her brother. That strange little woman must be Hart’s sister-in-law. What was she doing sitting in the lobby at this time of night when she had a home in Mountainside?
Memories that weren’t her own flicked through her brain. He has as much right to the money as you! You owe us that much help at least. The words in her head were spoken in that woman’s voice, but she hadn’t said them tonight, nor to Bobbi.
She’d said them to Hart before . . . and she’d been so very angry. Perhaps she’d come here to do Hart harm.
What was her name? Bobbi tried but couldn’t seem to remember. This past she was recalling was fuzzy and vague with only lines spoken by various voices popping into her head.
Even though she was cold, she felt as though she were breaking out in a sweat. Things were getting worse. Soon the voices inside her would push her right out of her own head. She had to have help. She had to get back to Hart who must know some of the answers because the main voice was hers.
Out of the circle of lights around the lodge, she seemed to be steeped in darkness. The dark waters of the lake glittered in faint starlight just down the mountain. That was the place where Stacia had lived and died. Not Stacia. Not really, she realized. Stacia was the woman sleeping inside with her husband. Only the body was Hart. The woman was Stacia.
The woman who had died down there had been Hart. She was who Bobbi had been before. Almost she could remember dying down there, a memory that was more like a nightmare that vanished when you awakened, leaving only the knowledge that something fearful had happening.
Without conscious will, Bobbi stumbled down the mountainside to the lake, barely aware that she shivered violently in the cold.
So anxious to begin searching for Bobbi, Hart almost didn’t pause when she saw the woman struggling upward in the big chair by the fireplace as she passed the lobby on her way to the front entrance.
Then she stopped and turned back, more than a little curious as to why her sister-in-law was sleeping in a hotel lobby. “Nikki?” she asked quietly. “Is everything all right?”
Her sister-in-law glared, her eyes heavy with sleep and her face red-lined from where it had rested against the chair’s cushions. She bushed heavy bangs back into the mass of short, thick hair. “Much you care.”
Hart wished she hadn’t stopped. She never heard anything from Nikki but angry recriminations. Still, she couldn’t help being concerned about the man she thought of as her half-brother and the two little girls she’d come to love. “Are Tommy and the girls all right?”
Nikki took a tissue from her purse and blew her nose. She looked as though she might have been crying before she fell asleep. “They were okay when I left home last night.”
The need for finding Bobbi as quickly as possible tugged at her so she tried to hurry Nikki along. She didn’t much care why Tommy’s wife had spent the night out here, not if her family members were all right.
“Well, I’ve got to go. A young friend of mine is missing and we’re about to start a search.”
She turned to leave the room before she could be attacked by anymore of Nikki’s customary venom. Her marriage had its own problems, but she liked to believe that Hart was the source of all her trouble.
“If you’re talking about that little girl who was wandering around the lodge last night, I had a bit of a talk with her.” She raised expressive eyebrows. “If one of my girls behaved that rudely, I’d have something to say, believe you me. Here we were conversing nicely and up she scoots out the door without a by your leave. Kids these days aren’t taught matters.”
Her heart jolting, Hart turned back. “You saw Bobbi last night?”
Nikki nodded. “About midnight. She sat in that chair.” She pointed across the room. “And then she got up and went outside without even a sweater on, cold as it was. I heard the front door open and close.”
“You didn’t see her after that?”
“No, and I was awake for hours thinking about Tommy and our problems. That’s why I came out here, you know. A neighbor came out for dinner and said she saw you check in, but the clerk wouldn’t tell me your room number so I just decided to wait here all night so I could catch you this morning.”
“And Bobbi went outside?” Hart turned and headed toward the entrance.
“I told you I need to talk to you.”
Hart ignored the quarrelsome voice trailing after her. No wonder the night clerk wouldn’t give Nikki Benson her room number. No doubt her feelings about her brother’s sister were well enough known in the community.
Well, she would sort Nikki out later. Right now she had to find Bobbi and make certain she was all right. “Later,” she called over her shoulder as she went outside.
The day was clear and cold with a strong north wind blowing so that Hart buttoned her coat up to her chin and tucked her hands in her pockets as she started down the cliff to the lake.
This wasn’t the kind of weather that attracted visi
tors lakeside so she had the site to herself. Not even a boat was out on the water today and enough water had come downstream in the last days of rain to fill the lake to a more normal area. It looked very different than it had last fall when the lowered water level had revealed traces of the little town of Medicine Stick, which had been covered over by water when the lake was constructed back in the 1940s.
Hart swallowed hard and tried not to think of the day when she’d come out here just in time to watch Alistair and his deputy investigate a skeleton found in one of the decaying buildings.
Even less did she want to remember whose bones those had been. She concentrated on finding Bobbi.
The girl was nowhere in sight, though, of course, she could be hiding in the shrubbery near the lake. She began to walk toward the nearest cluster of cedars, but as she moved forward she began to see things out of the corner of her eye that could not be there.
This had happened so many times that she no longer panicked. Once it would have meant she was heading back to her own body, leaving Hart Benson to this one. But Hart was gone and when she left these days, Hart’s body went empty and unconscious.
If she collapsed out here, she might die of the cold. Hart struggled to hang on, guessing she didn’t have time to get back up to the lodge and so heading toward the protection of the cedars. At least they would shelter her form the icy wind.
The enlarging scene behind her and to her left was quickly coming to swallow her up. Strangely it wasn’t a familiar view of the streets or inside the rooms of Medicine Stick. She had only time to grab hold of a cedar branch, blinking to try to bring the scene into clearer view and then it took her in and she was there, no longer hanging on to a tree branch, but in a warm room where three men were hovering over a free-standing heater and drinking coffee.
Surprisingly she was not back in the past, nor back in the body that had once been hers.
She was hovering outside of human flesh, an observer, but not a participant in the scene.
Bobbi Lawrence, her eyes wide and frightened, was huddled onto a sofa next to an elderly woman. Nolan Jeffers was one of the three men standing next to the fire, but one of the other two held a rifle loosely in his right hand, his coffee cup in his left.
She took a quick look around the room, wondering how to rescue Bobbi, when she was swept away and found herself once more out in the cold, hanging on to a tree branch.
Bobbi. She had seen Bobbi. Whatever there was in the child of Hart still provided a connection between them.
The girl’s wide, frightened eyes seemed to stare at her, pleading for help.
Chapter Fifteen
The momentary sense that she wasn’t alone with these strangers vanished, leaving Bobbi feeling more lost than ever.
Last night she’d been standing outside the lodge, looking down at the lake and hardly aware of the car that had pulled past her. Then the car backed abruptly and a man with a gun was telling her to keep quiet and get into the car or she’d be shot.
Once in a lifetime was enough. Well, two lifetimes maybe, but somewhere in the back of her mind Bobbi remembered what it felt like being shot, then fading into oblivion.
She’d gone quietly, wondering why anybody would want to take her. Another man was behind the wheel; he looked to be a little younger than the one who’d stuck the gun in her face, but neither looked anything but old to her fourteen-year-old eyes.
What was this? The senior citizens’ gang? The hand holding the gun trembled so violently that she hoped that even if he shot, he would miss and the bullet would go harmlessly past her head.
Then she remembered the sheriff had been looking for an older guy escaped prisoner. “You must be Nolan Jeffers,” she said triumphantly. “What do you want with me?”
“You were just handy,” the man with the gun said. “We would rather have a younger kid. And no, neither of us is Nolan and maybe you’d better just shut up.” He looked to the man now driving them away from the park. “This is gonna work, Terry, don’t worry. Having a hostage is like an insurance policy.”
The driver grunted. “Don’t see what else we can do. We’re kind of forced into a corner. And don’t use my name.”
Bobbi thought uneasily of all the stories she’d heard on television about things people did to kids. “Let me go,” she begged, “my grandmother will be so worried.”
“Don’t be afraid,” the man with the gun said. “We don’t mean you no harm.”
“No,” the man he’d called Terry agreed. “We just want to right a terrible wrong.”
She’d recognized the small town of Mountainside as they drove into its streets. Even in the darkness, it would have been hard to miss the low mountains that hung over the town and the stone cottage which seemed to be their destination lay on the street next to the closest mountain.
They took her inside and gave her into the custody of a white-haired old lady with a sweet face and soft voice who somewhat lulled Bobbi’s fears. She saw her to a little bedroom that smelled of flowers and lent her an old-fashioned night gown in which to sleep.
When she was left alone to change, Bobbi quickly checked the one window as a possible escape hatch, but it was fixed so firmly that she suspected it was nailed in place.
It was such a small window that she doubted she could squeeze through it to freedom even if she could get it open.
She’d wakened early and ate the good breakfast provided by the woman who had made pancakes, little sausages and hot chocolate (coffee for the men), then showered and put back on the clothing she’d been wearing since the night before.
All this time, the gaunt little man sat on the sofa in the living room, the gun at his side. The other man who had brought her here, the driver the other one had called Terry, played checkers with another, a slender white-haired man with a slim, kindly face. None of them looked in the slightest like a kidnapper, but she learned that the slim man was the escaped killer, Nolan Jeffers.
She’d been sitting there, trying to think what to do when her sense that Stacia was present had her looking around. In her own mind, she didn’t so much see the physical differences between the two women as she, Stacia, and me, Hart.
She was Hart. Somehow she knew that, though emotionally she hadn’t even come close to assimilating that fact.
She had not seen Stacia, but only felt her presence.
“Would you like some more hot chocolate?” the old lady asked.
Bobbi shook her head. If the men didn’t seem like kidnappers, this woman was like . . .like your favorite Sunday School teacher. She was slightly plump with a still-pretty face and hair white as snow. “Thanks anyway, ma’am,” she said.
The woman laughed. “Don’t call me ‘ma’am. Makes me feel old.”
But you are! At fourteen, Bobbi thought of her parents as aging and her approaching-sixty grandmother as old. These people were all years older than Granny and had to be considered ancient.
The woman smiled. “I’m Mrs. Harris,” she said. I own the antique shop downtown.” She looked around at the others, pointing at each one in turn as she said his name. “That’s Bill and the ones playing checkers are Terry and Nolan. We’ve all been friends since we were younger than you are now.”
Bobbi tried to smile. Never had the generation gap seemed wider. “You need to let me go,” she said.
Terry spoke up. “We can’t do that. You’re here to help right a terrible wrong. And once you understand what’s going on, you’ll be glad to help us.”
“But my grandmother will be so worried.”
The elderly woman’s face crinkled with concern. “Oh, dear. Terry we can’t have the grandmother worried. Just think how I would feel if one of my grandchildren went missing?”
The man called Terry looked up from his game. “Maybe we can get a note to her. Tell her the girl’s all right and not to worry.”
“Come on, Terry. You just can’t go around picking up people off the street. Not me and B.J. or this young lady either. It’s just n
ot right.”
This came from the one called Nolan, the one whom Bobbi guessed was the killer.
“It really isn’t wise,” Mrs. Harris said, “holding us all like this. Now I’m sure you wouldn’t really shoot anyone, Bill, but still . . .”
Bill picked up the gun and waved it in the air. “Don’t test me, B.J.,” he said. “A man can only be drove so far.”
Up until now, Bobbi had thought this a comedy, but something about Bill’s face as he spoke convinced her otherwise. He and Terry were the captors, she guessed, while she, Mrs. Harris and Nolan were the captives.
She wasn’t sure either Bill or Terry was entirely sane.
Having started a room by room search of the lodge, Alistair stepped outside to survey the area when he saw his wife running up the slope toward him. He went to meet her and immediately wrapped her in his own coat. Her lips were blue with cold and she shuddered as he put his arm around her and walked her up to the doorway.
“I saw her,” she insisted. “I saw Bobbi.”
He halted long enough to look back in the direction from which they’d come. “Where?” he asked. “I don’t see her anywhere.”
“Not here. She was inside in a warm little room with other people and one of them was Mr. Jeffers.”
Shock, he decided, and ushered her firmly into the lobby where he sat her down on the sofa and sent the desk clerk for hot tea. Somehow it seemed to him that tea would be better for her than coffee.
She grabbed his arm. “I’m telling you I saw her, Alistair, and there was a man with a gun . . .”
“Jeffers,” he concluded, thinking he needed to humor her.
“No, I think he was a prisoner too, him and the white-haired woman. There were two other men and they were holding Bobbi and the others at gun point. We’ve got to find them before something awful happens.”
Gratefully he accepted the steaming cup of tea the clerk brought from the restaurant. “Drink this,” her ordered, “you’re half frozen.”
Wakening the Past: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series Book 2) Page 9