It would be stolen time, but he didn’t have any seriously sick patients and the two young women whom he’d trained as nurses lived in town and could render immediate care in case of an emergency. He had to have some answers and meant to go out of his way to find them
The girls screamed with delight and ran to find Cynthia. She wouldn’t meet his gaze as she listened to them demand a picnic, but she could hardly refuse in the face of their enthusiasm.
Mrs. Myers declined to go, saying she would see to things at home, but she went into the kitchen with the female contingent to pack a basket with food and drink while he went out to hitch Hero to the buggy.
Within minutes the girls came running out, holding the picnic basket between them while Cynthia followed, having changed her funeral garb for a more cheerful plaid skirt with a white blouse and sensible walking shoes.
“I’m a little reluctant to leave town,” she confessed as he helped the girls scamper up into the buggy. “We might be needed.”
“We‘re entitled to some time for ourselves. They can just put a stop to all emergencies while we go for a drive.”
“I’m willing to stay so you can go with the girls.”
That suggestion didn’t accord with his plan. He wasn’t going to be of use to anyone if he didn’t get this matter with Cynthia settled. A lovelorn doctor wasn’t much good to the people of Lavender.
“The girls need both of us,” he suggested, rather unfairly, knowing that she lived in fear of letting Betsy down in some way. “And in case you haven’t noticed, our people are very resourceful. They can look after themselves for a couple of hours.”
She allowed him to assist her into the buggy and up on the driver’s seat where they could both sit, though she looked as though she would rather have been inside with the two girls. He clicked the reins at the mare and they set off down the brick paved street, headed toward the edge of town.
Evan couldn’t help feeling as if he were walking toward his own doom. What if she said that she couldn’t make a commitment, that she didn’t love him enough. Would he be able to live with that?
Well, he had once before, but even as the thought crossed his mind he recognized the reality that the young love he’d shared with Eddie’s mother had never been like this. He’d grow older, lived with unspeakable responsibility, almost given up hope of any personal life other than what his daughter and father offered him.
And now hope had bloomed within him again like spring after winter. He’d never even imagined caring for any woman as he did Cynthia. She was the other half of him, his reason for going on.
And she might refuse him.
And it would be his fault for deliberately pushing her to the decision point.
Chapter Nineteen
More was going on here than just a picnic, Cynthia thought as she listened to the giggles and chatter of the girls within the buggy. Eddie and Betsy were getting along better these days, but you never knew when they’d break into a loud disagreement. They were as different as could be.
Betsy had settled into school nicely, making excellent grades and winning a large circle of friends. Eddie stood outside that circle, ruffling more feelings than ever, though she did have a couple of good friends. In spite of all that stress between them, Betsy could be counted in their number.
Nevertheless between the two of them they kept the Stephens-Burden household in a constant state of disruption.
Her thoughts came back to the two of them, just she and Evan, riding in relative privacy through a fall Saturday afternoon. They hadn’t, as they normally would have, stopped at the Clark farm or at any of the other farms along the way where they would usually paid a visit during such a ride.
It was apparent that today was just for them and, considering their earlier conversation, she was made uneasy by Evan’s continued silence. If he had something to tell, why didn’t he come right out and say it.
Her mind searched wildly for something to say to break the uncomfortable silence, but came up empty. “The girls seem to be getting along better,” she finally managed.
He nodded.
They passed a cotton field where only a few worked, tradition being that Saturday afternoon was time for hired labor to go to town. “Looks like a good crop this year.” She’d heard that often enough. Townspeople and those from the country alike rejoiced over the bountiful harvest.
“Tiz,” he agreed.
She supposed he was angry or hurt by her inability to voice a commitment to him and to Lavender. She just wasn’t quite ready yet.
“Where are we going to picnic?”
Usually he would have allowed that choice to her, but today he said, “Down by the creek.”
Several creeks ran toward the river that edged the community’s land, but she didn’t have to ask which one he meant.
She allowed the silence to fall without further interruption, her heart cold. He was taking her back to the spot where she and Betsy had crossed over. This would be the first time she’d been back since she’d seen Michael’s face from the other side.
As they drove through the miles in between, her heart seemed to beat with slow deliberation. He was compelling her to face a place and a choice she didn’t want to make.
Even the girls inside the buggy were quiet as they drew up toward the creek, a lazy streak of water that turned away from the road to go back to Seth Rogers’ place and others of the more remote farms.
She wondered if Betsy felt the strangeness of this place as much as she did. She wanted to call out to Evan to stop, that it was dangerous to go any further, but her lips seemed bonded shut.
“Nobody can go across that,” he said with sudden harshness, looking straight ahead. “Nobody. That’s what Grandpa said.”
She thought about that. “Maybe he was just talking about the people already inside.”
“In all the years, you are the first to come inside.”
“And maybe we can be the first to leave?” she asked with deceptive calm, her heart beginning to pound madly.
“I don’t want you to leave. I want you to stay here and be my wife.”
“That’s what I want too.” She reached out to place her smaller hand over his big one, holding the reins with him. “I don’t want to leave. Not yet anyway.”
She felt his hand jerk and knew she’d said the wrong thing. He was asking for forever, but she was promising no more than right now.
Cynthia held her breath as they made the turn by the creek. Nothing. She saw only woodland stretching both to the south and east. The road that had shimmered before her eyes the last time she was here was nowhere to be seen. She drew in her breath in relief.
Evan drew Hero to a stop near the grassy bank of the creek. The little stream was only a few yards wide, but she guessed it ran deep, sparkling in the late afternoon sun.
The beauty of the afternoon began to wrap around her, releasing the tension. Michael was nowhere to be seen so she could relax.
Evan was more himself too as he loosened Hero from her connection to the buggy, leaving her free to crop at grass still green as it waited for the first hard freeze of the year and to drink copiously from the fresh creek water.
The girls scrambled from the buggy, Eddie leading the way and began running around, calling to each other. Cynthia smiled to see them. They were as young and lively as the frisky colts she’d seen frolicking on the Clark farm.
“Look, Mom, look!” Betsy came running with a small bouquet of wild flowers and, a minute later, Eddie summoned her to see tadpoles swimming in a little puddle at the edge of the creek.
Evan spread a blanket on the grass while she got the basket from the buggy and together they began to put out the foods Mrs. Myers had packed for them. They had slices of ham and roast chicken for sandwiches, thickly cut homemade bread, pickles and hard-boiled eggs and half a sponge cake. Water and milk, still cool from the cistern, had been added to accompany the feast.
She started to call the girls, but Evan stopped her by seizing hold of
her right hand. “I’m sorry for pushing you. Guess I’m afraid of losing you. I’m not going to turn into a Michael and abuse you and Betsy.”
She squeezed his hand, than carried it to her mouth for a kiss. “You don’t have to tell me that. I know, Evan, I know.”
“Then why . . .” He broke off the question he’d been about to ask. “I’m just going to make the most of the time we have together,” he said instead.
She melted against him and he closed his arms around her. “I don’t ever want to leave you,” she whispered.
“Look at my dad and your mom,” she heard Eddie yell. It would be Eddie, Cynthia thought with amusement, who had not been overly gifted with either tact or subtlety.
“Papa and Mama,” Betsy said more softly, her words striking her mother in the heart. Maybe her daughter did feel at home here.
Time and place were tied so irrevocably together. A person was born in a place and followed the trail of time, growing up, growing old and finally dying. Oh, they might travel across the country, or even to places foreign to them, and they watched change unfold slowly until when they were old everything seemed different.
But they did not, as she and Betsy had done, step as though in big league boots across the decades so that in one minute they were in the world of space travel and freeze dried foods and in the next Victoria reigned in England and Chester A. Arthur was the president the people of Lavender could remember.
When Evan said ‘the war,’ he meant the civil war, the battle between brothers with the southern and northern states. When that term came to her mind, she thought of terrorists and the twin towers, or any one of the tragic wars of the twentieth century from World Wars I and II, to the Korean conflict, the Vietnam war through to the Gulf conflict and Iraq.
He’d kept to his grandfather’s plan to keep deadly influenza locked away from the world, but he couldn’t know that in the second decade of the 20th century it had broken out to ravage the world.
He had his own memories, just as she had hers and she didn’t know if they could ever bridge that gap, and yet to Betsy, age eight, it seemed only to be about the family she’d never had before. She and Evan were mama and papa, the words Eddie used for parents.
She became conscious that Evan was insistently repeating her name: “Cynthia? Cynthia? Cynthia?”
She looked up into his rugged face and smiled. “Sorry,” she said as lightly as she could. “Guess I got lost for a minute there.”
The girls were eating now, eagerly attacking the picnic meal as though they were starving. Evan handed her a sandwich and a small bottle of milk and she looked at the food, feeling so choked with emotion that she couldn’t eat a bite. Still she took the glass and the sandwich from him, but then put them down on the blanket and got up stroll around the bend of the creek and toward the east.
People told her that what happened when they tried to go this way was that they just circled around endlessly, ending back at the same spot near the crop. It took you around, not out, but she found herself staring into where a modern paved road should lead her to the rest of the world. She’d left the rental car there all those months ago. She wondered if it had been found and returned to the company and if so what they had thought to find their belongings still inside.
She thought of Moss and Lynne, her brother and sister-in-law, and how worried they must be. No doubt they’d guessed that her departure was an attempt to hide Betsy in a safe place, but they’d wonder why she hadn’t even sent word that the two of them were all right.
She heard the sound of someone moving up to her, than saw the flash of her daughter’s tumbled golden curls as she rushed past.
“Uncle Moss!” she yelled. “Aunt Lynne!”
No doubt Betsy ran toward something only she could see. No vision appeared to Cynthia. No road on the other side. No people who shouldn’t be there.
Suddenly she was terribly afraid. Betsy was running away. Following a road that her mother couldn’t see.
She ran after her daughter, her longer legs quickly closing the distance between them. Cynthia felt the moment when the two of them together seemed to be sucked into warmer air, swallowed in a great gulp. Then she ran into her brother’s waiting arms and heard the wailing of a baby.
Chapter Twenty
One moment Evan was seated on the ground, taking a bite of Mrs. Myers’ delectable chicken sandwich and wondering why Cynthia had chosen to walk away from the three of them. The two girls lay on the blanket, already eating cake that had been sent for dessert, accompanied by bottles of milk.
Then Betsy jumped to her feet, calling, “Hello! Hello!”
Her mother didn’t seem to hear, didn’t turn to look at her daughter, but Betsy ran, a small, rather plump figure chasing around the bend of the creek and forward, dashing after her mother, then running past her.
She called two names. Evan couldn’t quite hear well enough to catch what they were. He leapt to his feet and started after them even as he watched Cynthia break abruptly into a run to catch up with her daughter.
It was already too late, he knew that, but still he kept running even as he saw them, hand in hand, both vanish. He continued running in the direction they’d gone, but only found himself circling back to the creek bend and the picnic blanket where his daughter sat, her milk spilled on her dress.
“Papa!” she yelled. “What happened to them? Where did they go?”
He only wished he had the answer. Eddie was too grown up to be carried around the way he had when she was younger, but he didn’t let that bother him. He picked her up in his arms and went again in the direction where Cynthia and Betsy had disappeared and when he found himself circling back, halted, put his struggling daughter on her feet as he yelled their names over and over.
“Papa, we’ve got to go after them,” Eddie said. “They might need us.”
He kept trying, walking round and round futilely, Eddie grasping his hand. They stayed until the afternoon merged into evening and then into dark night. Finally he hitched the mare back to the buggy and, leaving their picnic scattered on the ground, drove slowly back to town by moonlight.
Eddie, who rarely cried, sobbed quietly at his side but he had no comfort to offer her.
Betsy ran immediately to her uncle who grabbed her up in his arms, half swearing and half praying, Cynthia wasn’t quite sure which. But she, more aware than her daughter of what had happened, turned to look in the direction from which they’d come. No road appeared that would take them toward Lavender and she couldn’t see either Evan or Eddie.
Dear Lord, what had they done? Breaking from a dead stop into a run, she tried to dash across the barrier she knew was there. “Evan?” she called. “Evan, help me get back to you.”
It wasn’t until her brother caught up with her and grabbed her into his arms that she began to weep. “He’s gone. They’re gone.”
Moss held her closer. “Cynthia, it’s Moss. You’re here with me and Lynne. Everything’s okay. You’re safe now.”
If only he knew. She hugged him, glad to see him in spite of everything and went willingly enough to where Lynne stood, a baby resting in one arm while the other circled her niece.
Cynthia loved this petite sister-in-law with her heart-shaped face and long lashed eyes as if they’d been born sisters so she couldn’t help but be delighted, even in the midst of her sorrow. Then her eyes focused on the blue blanketed infant and she reached out eagerly to take the bundle into her own arms.
“A boy?” she asked, peeling back enough of the blanket so she could see a dimpled-cheek baby smiling up at her. This was no newborn. He looked to be several months old and almost immediately, once he’d decided hers was a friendly face, struggled to be held in an upright position. She placed him against her shoulder, remembering how it had felt to hold Betsy that way, and patted his back comfortingly.
Finally she was able to look beyond him to see that both Moss and Lynne were grinning at her. “A boy,” Moss confirmed. “His name is Jeremy Ru
ssell.”
Betsy let go of Lynne’s hand. “Hello, Jeremy Russell,” she whispered into his little face. “I’m Betsy and we’re cousins.”
The baby cooed and gurgled at her.
“We’d better get him out of this wind,” Lynne commanded in motherly fashion. “I don’t want him to come down with the sniffles.”
She led the way to a shiny new SUV where Cynthia, still holding the baby, climbed into one of the passenger seats and Betsy settled herself beside them.
“How old is he?” Cynthia asked. “When was he born? How much did he weigh? Oh, I so wanted to be there when he arrived!”
Moss laughed while his wife supplied the requested information. “Four months old. And he weighed in at a whopping eight pounds ten ounces.”
“Wow,” Cynthia told him. “You are a big boy.”
Moss started the motor, jerking her attention away from the baby. “No,” she protested. “We can’t leave. Not yet.”
He left the motor running, but turned in his seat so he could see her face. “Michael won’t give you any trouble, Cyn. The police are keeping a close watch on him. He’d be very glad to see the two of you as he’s been expecting to be charged with your murders any day now.”
“Murders?” Cynthia decided she wasn’t in fit shape to be holding her nephew and placed him in the infant seat next to her, strapping him in carefully. “Why would anybody think we were murdered?”
“Michael tried to get you declared deceased after you vanished and the authorities investigated enough to learn that he was considered a threat. Especially after your abandoned car was found out here. It was only the lack of physical evidence that has kept them from charging him already.”
Cynthia closed her eyes. “I’m so sorry that we worried you, but I was sure you’d know that I’d just taken Betsy to a safe place.”
He grinned at her. “Most of the time that was what we thought, but there were times . . .” He shook his head to indicate those moments of fearful doubts.
After about an hour when the baby became restive, Cynthia finally gave in and they left the site. After several months in the world of the 1890s, Betsy seemed especially entertained by the luxuries of the SUV, which included a screen on which she viewed Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, almost as fascinated with the first movie she’d seen in months as she was with her new little cousin.
Letters From Another Town: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series Book 2) Page 14
