She turned her attention back to the house. Smoke rose from the chimney, a few chickens scratched about in the edge of the woods, and several scrawny horses ambled lazily about inside a split-rail enclosure attached to a lean-to that adjoined the house. A clothesline strung between two saplings sported several sets of red long Johns, flying as proudly as flags in the breeze. Nearby, a big black tub simmered over a wood fire, giving off the distinctive, eye-smarting odor of lye soap.
None of this should have struck Cluney as particularly odd. Deep in these mountains of Eastern Kentucky, some men still wore long Johns, some women still did their wash outside in boilers, nor were chickens in the yard anything of particular note. But something about the entire scene was all wrong. To begin with, by her calculations the date was Tuesday, May 19, 1992. Yet the few leaves left on the trees were the bright scarlet and gold of late fall rather than the lush green of spring. Surely, she hadn’t slept right through the summer!
“Well, we’ll just find out about this,” Cluney told her hound.
Smiling to let these mountain folk know she was friendly, but squaring her shoulders to let them see she was tough, Cluney marched up to the rough plank door and knocked. She waited long moments before anyone opened, then found herself staring into the weathered face of a woman who was probably in her fifties, but who wore the work-hardened look of someone much older.
Cluney was about to introduce herself and beg for help when the woman gripped her arm and pulled her inside.
“Well, Lord save us!” the stranger cried. “If I ain’t happy to see you! Get yourself right on in here, girl. There’s more work for the both of us than you could shake a stick at. I thought you’d never show up. I sent word to Tilda over a month ago that you was needed.”
“Excuse me?” Cluney said, trying to pull away from this stranger, who had obviously mistaken her for someone else.
The woman’s smile faded and she gave Cluney a closer look, then a severe frown. “Don’t tell me you’re not my Cousin Tilda’s youngest, come to help out with the soldier boys?”
“Soldier boys?” Now it was Cluney’s turn to frown. “I don’t understand, ma’am.”
The woman leaned closer to Cluney and whispered, “Me and my husband figured we’d best not tell it around that we’re taking in Yanks and Rebs to tend. Kentucky being a border state and split on its opinion of the struggle, things could get a mite touchy was it general knowledge. But I say, a wounded boy is a wounded boy. Besides, you strip ’em down to their union suits and you can’t tell one from another. I thought sure, though, that your ma would explain to you that I needed your help with the nursing.”
When Cluney made no reply, the woman asked, “Did your brother Lem bring you in the wagon? Tilda said she’d try to send me some supplies.”
Cluney kept blinking rapidly, sure that this whole scene would soon dissolve before her eyes. But it didn’t. It seemed as if she was caught up in a dream in which she was expected to play a major role, but had been given no script. She’d have to wing it, she decided.
“I came last night,” Cluney answered at length, “in my van with B.J.”
The older woman clapped her hands to her cheeks and her gray eyes danced with happy lights. “Land sakes! That is good news! I didn’t know your brother Bobby Joe had come home from the war. Last I heard from Tilda, he was missing after that battle down to Virginny. Holler at him to come on in here and have some coffee and fried squirrel. I’m afraid that’s about all we got right now. And even at that, the coffee ain’t real, just parched corn boiled up. But it passes well enough for what we’re lacking.”
“Please, ma’am,” Cluney begged. “I’m not your Cousin Tilda’s daughter. And I don’t know any Bobby Joe. I came up here with my girlfriend, B.J. Jackson. We drove to the falls last night to see the moonbow. I don’t know what happened, but I seem to be lost. I can’t find B.J. or my van or anything familiar.”
Mary Renfro looked disappointed, then impatient, then suspicious. “Two women got no business coming up this mountain alone at night. Don’t you know there’s bushwhackers hereabouts?” She eyed Cluney’s tight jeans curiously. “Course, I guess that’s why you’re dressed up like a boy—to fool ’em, should you run into any. But it still ain’t fittin’.”
“I only wanted to see the moonbow,” Cluney explained lamely.
The woman made a sound of disgust. “That blamed moonbow last night sure enough stirred up more than its share of trouble. The poor major! But never mind that foolishness, just tell me this. Did you or didn’t you bring supplies? We’re getting desperate, I can tell you.”
Cluney shook her head. “I had some things in my van, but now it’s gone, like I said.”
Suddenly, the woman’s thin face brightened. “Oh, never you mind. We won’t fret a minute about that now that you’re here to help out. I don’t know where you come from and I can’t say as I’m carin’. All I know is the good Lord sent me another pair of hands, and it’s high time we put His gift to use. You can watch over the major and I’ll send Free out to hunt us up some game.” She turned and headed toward the back of the sparsely furnished house. “Step lively now. We best be getting to work. We’ve wasted enough time jawing like two old broody hens.”
“Ma’am?” Cluney said, not at all sure she wanted to follow this stranger anywhere. “Could you tell me who you are and exactly where I am?”
The woman turned so suddenly that the hem of her long, ragged skirt flared, showing a bit of worn leather boot. “I swan! I just don’t know where my wits are today. Forgive my lack of manners.” Extending her hand like a man, she said, “I’m Mary Refro and this here’s the house my good man built me with his own two hands and the help of the Lord. You’ve heard of my husband, I reckon,” she added with more than a touch of pride. “The Reverend Lewis Renfro? Baptist, of course. Why, we’ve been on this land for thirteen years, since way back in 1850. Everybody hereabouts knows us.”
Cluney’s mouth dropped open, but she couldn’t utter a word. Her head was spinning. Maybe everyone in the midnineteenth century knew the Renfros, but, to Cluney’s knowledge, this was the first time she’d slipped out of the twentieth century to go visiting this far away. From what the woman had just said, the year must be 1863.
1863? Her history teacher’s keen mind kicked in. The Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation. If this was the autumn of’63, that meant Lee’s army and the Union forces of General Meade were now at a stalemate in Northern Virginia, while the Federal forces under General Rosecrans in Tennessee and General Ambrose Burn-side in Kentucky were marching south on Chattanooga and Knoxville. Knoxville was only about seventy miles away. Cluney tried to imagine the long-dead generals, whom she had read about so often, alive now and waging war at this very moment.
That war explained the “soldier boys” Mary Renfro had mentioned earlier. But nothing explained what Cluney herself was doing here or how she’d gotten here or, more importantly, how she would get back.
Her first impulse was to say to the woman, “You’re joking, right? You’re a friend of B.J.’s and the two of you set me up.” But somehow Cluney knew that this was no joke!
Panic seemed the normal course of action. Still and all, Cluney’s natural curiosity and her enthusiasm for history made her want to stay here, at least for a time. If she was hallucinating, let the hallucination continue, she thought. She’d often wished she could send herself back into some earlier period to see and feel the living history that she read in dry books and tried to make come alive for her students. If she was only dreaming, that was fine, too. At least her dream seemed to be historically accurate.
Shaking the woman’s hand firmly, Cluney said, “I’m happy to meet you, Mrs. Renfro. I’m Cluney Summer-land from Baldy Rock.”
Mary looked at her visitor more closely and gave her a warm smile. “Well, I declare! We got some relations over to Baldy—third cousins, twice removed on my husband’s ma’s side. You reckon we’re kin?
”
“Most folks in these mountains are, by blood or marriage,” Cluney replied evasively.
“Then, too, we got a real good friend lives on Baldy Rock. Ever’ time I think we ain’t gonna have a morsel of food to put on the table, here he comes up the mountain with a wagonload of victuals in the nick of time. Mayhap you know him…”
A loud call for help from the back of the house interrupted her. “Miz Mary, come quick! It’s the major!”
With Cluney right at her heels, Mary Renfro whirled about and raced for the door at the far end of the main room.
The moment they reached the bedroom, Cluney noted the tall, kind-faced, young black man and guessed he must be the one her hostess had referred to earlier as “Free.” She nodded to him as she hurried in, but he seemed not to notice. Indeed, the man had good cause for calling for help. On the bed was one of Mrs. Renfro’s patients, swathed in bandages and thrashing about as if he was having some sort of fit.
“What happened here?” Mary demanded as she rushed over and tried to restrain the man.
“I don’t rightly know, ma’am,” Free admitted, his eyes wide with alarm. “One minute he was sitting up in bed and I was feeding him broth, and the next he hollered that he couldn’t see nothing. Then he claimed he heard his dog howling—that old hound the raiders kilt—and he about went wild.”
“Hand me that bottle of laudanum, Free,” Mary ordered calmly. “We got to get him quiet or he’ll hurt hisself worse.”
Cluney stood by helplessly, wishing there was something she could do. Free got the medicine, then held the major down while Mary spooned it into his mouth. With all the thrashing about, most of it ran down his chin.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Cluney asked. “Maybe if I lifted his head a bit.”
The moment Hunter Breckinridge heard Cluney’s voice, he stopped fighting. Mary quickly slipped him another dose and all of it went in this time.
“Where is she?” the major asked, sitting up in bed and reaching his arms out in front of him like a blind man feeling his way.
“Where’s who, Major Breckinridge?” Mary asked, gently trying to press him back down to the pillows.
“Larissa!”
“Now, Major, don’t you start fretting about your wife. You’ll just get yourself all worked up again. You need to rest.”
Still staring blindly about the room, he called, “Larissa? Are you there? You are! I know you are!”
“There, there, Major,” Mary soothed. “You lie down now and try to sleep awhile. I brought a nice lady to sit with you. She’s right pretty, too. You just tell her if you need anything. I’m going to send Free out to shoot us some supper.”
Major Breckinridge was slipping away as the laudanum took effect. But even as he drifted off to sleep, he kept murmuring his wife’s name over and over again. When Cluney took the chair beside his bed, he reached out and grasped her hand.
“You just call now, Cluney, if you need me,” Mary whispered before she left the room.
Cluney never heard her. Transfixed, she stared down at Major Hunter Breckinridge. All she could think of was that the dry, hot hand holding hers in a grip like steel was the same hand that had penned the beautiful and loving words to his wife Larissa in the old journal.
Still, holding his hand, she dug into her purse to find his precious diary, but it was gone. It must have slid far under the seat of the van at the same time her pocketbook got dumped. Now that treasure was lost to her somewhere off in the far-distant future.
Even as the sad thought crossed her mind, she glanced across the room to spy that very leather-bound book lying closed on the desk. Next to it lay several turkey quills, a pot of ink, and a stained blotter. Her heart raced. She glanced down at the face of the sleeping man.
“You really are Hunter Breckinridge,” she whispered in awe. So many thoughts were spinning through her head that she felt quite dizzy.
Still staring at him, she realized that he looked exactly as she had imagined, heart-stoppingly handsome even though his fine features were pale now and sharply chiseled. His hair was dark and thick. A stubble of bluish beard shadowed his square jaw. His darkly furred chest was bare except for the linen strips binding his left shoulder. His hands were large, with long fingers and neat, square nails. She could tell he had once been a man as strong as the mountains. But the war had taken its toll. Her heart went out to him.
Suddenly, she heard Miss Redbird’s voice in her head. “He needs you and there’s not much time.”
She knew in that moment that Hunter Breckinridge was, indeed, the man who needed her, and it seemed that there certainly wasn’t much time. He was gravely wounded; she could tell that just by looking at the pallor of his flesh. How terribly, terribly sad that he had lost so much—that only imagining he heard the baying of a favorite hound could send him into such an emotional state.
Just then Cluney heard the door to the room creak. She saw a damp, black nose nudge through. The next moment, the old hound who had befriended her slunk in and across the room, eyeing her as if asking permission to enter. He licked their joined hands, then climbed onto the bed, settling himself close against the major’s side.
Hunter stirred in his sleep. A slight smile softened the pain-hard lines of his face. Still clinging to Cluney’s hand, he reached out his other to stroke the hound’s head. The dog let out a long, satisfied sigh and inched even closer to its master.
“Good boy, Trooper.” Hunter’s words were only the barest whisper. Breathing heavily, he finally managed to get out one more word. It was a name, his wife’s name.
“Larissa.”
Cluney thought she had never heard a man speak a woman’s name with such tenderness, such passion, such love, such pain. She bit her lip to hold back tears, and all the while she clung desperately to his dry, fever-hot hand.
“I’m here,” she whispered. Then, shocked by her own words, she lapsed into watchful silence.
She had to figure out what had happened to her and what she was going to do. She thought back over the events of only yesterday. No, not yesterday! If the Civil War was truly still in progress, her yesterday was far, far off—over a century in the future. Was she really here or did she only think she was back in the nineteenth century? She was supposed to have left for California today. She’d said her goodbyes, met B.J. for supper, then the two of them had come to the falls to see the moonbow.
But that wasn’t all she’d done yesterday. Her eyes went wide suddenly when she recalled Wooter Crenshaw’s warning about the moonbow: “You oughten to go. Best stay away from the falls tonight.”
What had Wooter been trying to tell her—that if she went to the falls she wouldn’t be herself after seeing the moonbow? Or that she would be herself, but no longer in the right place and time?
She had seen the moonbow! She remembered now. She had seen it as never before, as if she were inside its glow, viewing the world through a shimmer of silver.
“But things like this don’t happen,” she murmured. “Not to a sane, ordinary schoolteacher, anyway.”
The major’s hand had slipped from hers as his body relaxed in sleep. She rose for a moment and went to the journal. Glancing first toward Hunter to make sure he was still sleeping, she opened his diary and read at random.
“The same,” she whispered, a shiver going through her. “It’s the very same book. He’s the very same man.”
Larissa … my darling… where are you?”
Without Cluney’s reassuring touch, Hunter had grown restless again. She hurried back to her chair beside his bed and took his hand in hers.
“Here! I’m here,” she told him. But where exactly is here? she wondered. And who exactly am I?
Chapter Eight
B.J. went home as the ranger told her to, but she got little rest, no sleep. She flopped down on the made-up bed, her nerves tense. For a couple of hours, she tossed and turned, trying to remember exactly what she’
d seen at the falls. She recalled the light almost blinding her, but nothing much after that. It was almost as if the brilliant glare had erased part of her memory. If she could just think what it was she had forgotten, she felt sure she’d know where to find Cluney.
Still dressed in her jeans, sweater, and red cowboy boots—the same clothes she’d had on at the falls—she lay sprawled on her bed, staring at the silent telephone. It was almost noon, but still there was no word on Cluney’s whereabouts.
“Damn!” she muttered, shoving herself up from the rumpled spread. “I can’t lie around here and do nothing. I’ll go crazy!”
She grabbed her car keys and headed for the door, but the ringing phone stopped her—all but stopped her heart, in fact. She dived across the bed to answer it.
“Hello!” she shouted.
“Miss Jackson?”
“Yes, this is B.J. Jackson.”
“This is Sonny Taylor, the ranger from up at the falls?”
His tone asked for recognition. “Yes, yes! I remember you. Any news?”
“I’m afraid not, ma’am. It’s right puzzling. Sheriff Elrod asked me to call and see if you’d mind coming down to the station house to answer some questions about last night.”
B.J. gulped and swallowed several times before she spoke, but her voice still betrayed her panic. “You don’t mean I’m a suspect?”
“Of course not, ma’am. We got no body nor any proof of foul play—-yet,” he added ominously. “The sheriff just wants to clear up a few details, is all.”
“I was just heading out,” B.J. told him. “I can be at the sheriffs office in ten minutes.”
“Good,” Ranger Taylor answered. “I’ll see you shortly then.”
The town that had sprung up after Whitley College was founded as a place to educate coal miners’ children was little more than a whistle stop. The students liked to joke that if you were passing through and blinked your eyes at the wrong time you’d miss the whole damn place. So, even though she caught the town’s single red light, B.J. still made it, in only eight minutes, to the sheriffs tiny station house—one office, one empty cell, and a less than sanitary unisex John.
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