She’d like nothing more than to move out. Here she was constantly aware of Nikki’s suppressed resentment and Tommy’s uneasiness in her presence. She was fond of the little girls and even if she was occupying one of their bedrooms, they seemed eager for her company.
Right now it looked as if Mandy and Christy were her only friends in the little town. Now that Toby Michaels had gone ahead and retired, she didn’t even have anybody with whom she could chat.
She felt lonely and cut off and wondered about what kind of person she’d been that nobody came to visit or called to inquire how she was doing. Did this mean she hadn’t any friends?
Considering her options, which weren’t many, she went to Pizza Plus after work and ordered a cola and some breadsticks. When Cully brought them to her, she asked, “You wouldn’t know of a little place for rent around here would you? I couldn’t afford much, but I’d really like to give my niece her room back.”
The teen girl stopped as though considering. “Mrs. Harris hasn’t rented your loft.” She grinned. “Nobody else seems to like that place.”
“Loft?” Hart asked. “Mine?”
“Oops!” Cully giggled cheerfully. “I forget. They say you can’t remember. Well, that’s where you used to live after you came back from school. It’s the apartment over the junk shop.”
Hart wasn’t enlightened and supposed that was clear to Cully because she went on. “Ye Old Antiques,” she explained further.
“Just down the street?”
Cully nodded.
“I couldn’t afford much rent. I only work part time and don’t make much.”
Cully laughed. “You’re kidding, aren’t you? Everybody knows your grandmother left you a boatload of money. You could buy your own house if you wanted. Everybody always wondered why you wanted to live in that little apartment.”
Cully left without explanation, coming back immediately with an ancient looking key dangling from her hand. “Mrs. Harris left the key with my boss when she went into the nursing home. Said to rent the place if we could. This’ll let you in, it’s been closed since she left, and the stairs to the loft are in the back of the store.” After a couple of seconds, she added apologetically, “If you really can’t remember the place where you lived for over a year.”
The front door of the old stone-faced building, separated from its neighbor by only a narrow alley, did not open easily. It was only when she raised the door a little by gripping on to the knob that the key turned so that she was able to push the door to a creaking opening.
The scent of dust and age enveloped her as she stepped inside, along with a surprising coolness considering the heat of the day outside on the cracked but sunny sidewalk.
She paused, stunned by the sheer volume of the contents of the old shop. The far wall was lined with shelves containing vintage toys, most of them little tractors and farm implements ranging from green John Deere products to red ones produced by Farmall.
She was surprised that she recognized either brand. What a tricky thing memory was—she couldn’t remember her own name but she knew at least two kinds of tractors.
Other shelves were crowded with a mishmash of dishes and household equipment. She saw an old hand churn for making butter and a table model Victrola music player with its trumpet like attachment for expelling sound.
Old furniture crowded the main floor, while pioneer style full-sized farm implements rested in the back. A nearby counter displayed an assortment of old costume jewelry with a heavy heaping of turquoise rings and bracelets, some of them striking her as quite beautiful.
Everything was shrouded in dust and cobwebs and the place stank of rodents. She hoped the inhabitants were only mice and not rats.
The name painted on the front said ‘Ye Old Antique Shop’ but Colby had called it a junk shop. Hart grinned. She figured it was somewhere between the two with a whole like more emphasis on the junk part. Still some of the items were intriguing.
But she couldn’t live here. Nobody could live here. In spite of that conviction she found her way to the narrow wooden stairs in the back and went up to what Colby had called the loft.
She opened the door at the top of the stairways and stepped into a place she almost recognized, blinking in surprise at what she saw.
It was a spacious apartment, with a huge, high-ceiling central room and a neat little kitchen with newish looking appliances in a kind of alcove on one end forming the principle day-time space.
It was decorated in soft blues with knotty-pine paneling halfway up the walls, and an old-fashioned wallpaper patterned with tiny blue flowers above. The blue motif was dramatically challenged by flashes of crimson in the huge pillows on the sofa and a vase of vivid silk tulips on a low able, reflected in a large impressionistic oil painting that also displayed touches of red.
She didn’t remember being in this place, but it was decorated to her taste. The room welcomed in her in a way Tommy and Nikki’s house had failed to do.
What surprised her was that it was fresh and clean. No cobwebs festooned the hanging light fixture in the center of the room or draped the furniture. The thick layers of dust that covered everything downstairs were absent here. The room looked freshly dusted and even smelled of lemon furniture polish. She doubted a mouse would dare stroll in on its thick rugs.
Puzzled she explored further to find a cozy bedroom with a large bed covered with a patchwork quilt and a dresser with a decorative mirror.
The bathroom was large and well equipped, looking more modern than anything else in the house with the latest in fixtures and tiles. Thick towels hung from the rack, scented soaps were on the dressing table and by the bathtub.
Maybe she was in the wrong place. These rooms looked as though the occupant had only left this morning.
She peered into the closet and found a woman’s clothing: jeans, shirts, a couple of dresses, all of which looked as though they would fit her. She slipped her feet into a pair of summer white sandals. They were her size.
But she’d been gone for months and these clothes smelled freshly washed and ironed, dainty and ready to wear.
Shaken, she retreated to the comfortable quilt-covered bed and leaned back against thick pillows. Like the clothing in the closet, quilt and pillows smelled clean, fresh and faintly scented.
It was as though the apartment had been waiting for her.
Hart kept creeping into his thoughts all day in spite of all his efforts to dispel her from his life. It was the usual busy day with a fatal wreck on one of the back roads where a youngster had flipped his car, a call for assistance from a snakebite victim down near the river, a reported drug house in Mountainside, assorted misdemeanors and a domestic violence report from a household where such calls came with too much regularity.
While he was counseling Tiffany Stewart that her boyfriend seemed to be on a pattern of escalating violence that could lead to real disaster for her or her little daughter, he kept thinking of Hart. Well, the truth was, he spent way too much time thinking about her and trying to figure out how things had gone so wrong.
A quiet, rather introverted man who did not easily establish close relationships, he had let his guard down all the way for the lively, thoughtful woman who had made him fall deeply in love for the first time in his life.
The days they’d spent together would always remain as a thorn in his soul, not because they had been troubled, but because they seemed to have been set in a golden haze of such content as he’d never known, only to end in disaster.
Tiffany was shaking her head at him and assuring him confidently that she was sure Chris had only lost his temper a little and it was probably her fault for egging him on and he would never be a real danger to her and little Marie. He just needed a cooling off period.
She grew visibly angry when he refused to immediately release her boyfriend, telling her that he would be spending a spell in the county jail while he awaited a hearing on the matter of the black eye and bruised cheek so clearly visible on he
r face.
He’d just finished this counseling session and was feeling frustrated that the incidents would continue to happen until Chris hurt either her or the little girl badly enough that he would be sent away for a good long time, when a call came from out at the lake. Deputy Joe Harding informed him that a body had been found in the lake.
“Drowning?” Alistair asked, doubtful that with the long drought that there was enough water left in the lake to drown anybody.
“Don’t think so. Looks like a really old body, just bones left actually, but he was left inside one of the old houses with a bullet hole in his head. Looks like murder or suicide.”
Alistair immediately got into his car and headed toward the man-made lake that normally provided recreation for visitors from miles around, but now was so low that the little town that had been covered with water when the lake was built was now beginning to poke it’s head above the dank, shallow water.
The lake had been named for the town of Medicine Stick, now buried for well over half a century, and as a boy Alistair had spent many an afternoon fishing from its shore.
He covered the miles from the county seat town to the lake quickly, driving into the low, rocky mountains where the state park encompassed the lake, a picturesque visitors’ lodge overlooked its waters, and a variety of camping spots were available for visitors.
Medicine Stick State Park was a beautiful spot on the map, doubly attractive in contrast with the spreading plains that surrounded it’s sparsely wooded acres and the mountains that geologists said once had been high as the Rockies but were so ancient and worn by time that now they could be more rightfully termed hills.
Originally occupied by Native American tribes dating back so far that even their names were lost in time, the mountains had long been considered sacred by the Indians and Alistair, who boasted Kiowa heritage, had always felt a particular connection to this location.
The lake wasn’t looking its best. Three years with very little rain had brought southwestern Oklahoma to a calamitous state. Old-timers said without exaggeration that things were at least as bad as they’d been in the dustbowl thirties, the only difference being that most of the land was now used as grazing for cattle instead of plowed for cotton farms and so blowing dust was not the problem it had been back then.
The lake was like a huge, spreading puddle. Many of the fish had died and visitors stayed away from the shallow, dirty water and Alistair could hardly imagine an occasion that would have taken anybody into the water to discover a leftover murder victim.
He wondered if Joey hadn’t let his imagining run away with him a bit when he mentioned the word murder. Still people weren’t likely to close themselves away in a building under the water. Especially not with what Joey thought was a bullet hole in the head.
He pulled to a stop on the sandy beach where one of the county cars was parked along with one marked as belonging to the park ranger and several bikes, got out and went over to where his deputy and Marcia Thompson, the park ranger, were talking with three teenaged boys in shorts and bathing suits. It figured. Nobody but a kid would risk going into these murky waters.
He didn’t know any of the boys and listened quietly while Joey identified them as part of a group from out of state camping in the park.
The one next to Joey, a boy of about fourteen with stunned-looking eyes and an anxious expression, blurted out, “You look like an Indian.”
Long ago, Alistair had learned not to take offense, though he could have told the kid that an awful lot of Oklahoma’s residents were at least part Native American. Anyhow, he was proud of his heritage. “Kiowa,” he said briefly. “I’m Sheriff Alistair Redhawk.”
“Alistair doesn’t sound like an Indian name,” the boy objected as though all his illusions had been shattered.
“Scots,” Alistair enlightened him. “Also part of my family background.” He looked at the deputy. “What’s going on here, Joey?”
The boy, Joey had said his name was Tim, spoke first, his tone excited. “We were diving . . .well, not exactly diving, more like wading around because the water’s so shallow and we looked in what was left of an old building under the water and found this skeleton.”
“Old stucco building,” Joey added, his round face earnest. “Crumbling with time, but still enough left to tell what it was.”
The other boys nodded agreement with their friend’s description. “Downright spooky,” a small lad with a heavily freckled face added, “Like something you’d see in a Halloween fun house.”
The boys were caught between having a really exciting time and being a little scared. Alistair made sure his deputy had names and brief statements from each of them and then sent them to their folks. They left, looking back reluctantly as they headed toward their bikes.
After a rather tense day at work, Hart decided to drive through Medicine Stick Park to unwind a little before going home. She’d set this evening as the time when she would tell Tommy and Nikki that she was moving out. She’d found out that Mrs. Harris, the owner, had arranged for the cleaning of the apartment once she’d heard Hart was returning. The loft was rented, Hart had stocked the refrigerator; she was hoping she might be able to sleep in her own place tonight.
She was fairly sure Nikki wouldn’t be displeased to see her go, but Tommy might object. He didn’t seem to feel she could manage on her own.
She would drive through a peaceful little park that she’d probably been too many times in her life even though she couldn’t remember those occasions. This, she was sure, would help to settle her mind so that she could prepare for the confrontation with her brother.
Not many people were camping at this time of year, though it was actually more pleasant than it was a few days ago when a dome of summer heat was settled over the southern plains.
Like the rest of this part of the state, the park grounds were suffering from the prolonged dry spell with grass drained of color and trees looking thin of foliage with only scanty leaves remaining in place.
She couldn’t remember what the lake should look like, but as she drove up toward the lodge, she could clearly see that the water was devastatingly low and the water looked a sickly green.
Then she saw ahead fully clothed men wading out into the water while a woman watched from shore. Three official looking cars were parked further in and she identified one of them as the sheriff’s car.
She wondered if someone was in danger, perhaps a child out in the water, and she should stop and offer to help. She really wanted to drive past, telling herself that the scene was in professional hands, but somehow instead she found herself driving her car to a stop by the others and getting out to at least offer assistance.
A woman in a uniform of some sort turned to watch her approach. A park ranger, Hart guessed. “Can I be of help?” she asked politely. “Is something wrong?”
“We don’t need gawkers,” the woman responded curtly. “Just go back to your car and drive on.”
Hart barely heard, though she did start to turn around and go back, but with the motion, she glimpsed the scene from the corner of her eye. It seemed as though the lake was gone and a little town, more of a village really, lay in front of her. She saw a white-painted stucco building and a girl waving urgently to her as though something was wrong.
Abruptly swinging around so that she could see full faced and with a direct gaze, the illusion did not disappear, but became a reality into which she started walking.
The pretty red-haired girl still waved to her, motioning her forward so that almost beyond thought, she obeyed. From somewhere at a great distance she heard a voice calling, “Wait a minute, Miss. You can’t just walk into the lake. That’s a crime scene.”
Strangely enough she heard the sound of her own feet moving through shallow water at the same time she saw only a sandy road ahead, her attention focused on the girl summoning her.
“Stacia,” she said as she drew closer, not knowing where the name came from, but somehow aware that th
e pretty girl’s name was indeed Stacia and was someone she knew quite well. As she watched, the smile faded from the girl’s face and she collapsed to the ground, falling hard against the wall of the building. “Stacia!” she called, running forward, only to be jerked to a stop.
She blinked her eyes and found she was standing in murky lake water halfway up to her knee and was held in strong masculine arms that restrained her. The girl she’d called Stacia was gone and instead there lay, only half exposed by the shallow water, what looked like a human skeleton huddled against the wall of a cracked and broken building.
“Stacia,” she said for a third time, her voice soft in her distress, and she turned away from that sight of all that was left of what had been a living breathing human person and pressed her face against the hard badge on a man’s chest. She felt sick as though she might soon start to vomit and felt the man’s arms steady her so that she did not sink down into the water.
He lifted her in his arms, carrying her from the murky lake and putting her down on the seat of a vehicle. She looked around, grateful that she could only see what was actually there.
Then she heard Alistair Redhawk’s voice asking gently, “Who was Stacia, Hart?”
She stared up at his granite face. Only his eyes betrayed concern. She shook her head. “I don’t know anybody by that name.”
Chapter Five
Alistair had no idea why she was lying, but both Joey and the park ranger were looking at her with open suspicion. He couldn’t help feeling a little protective considering that she looked sick and pale as though she’d just had the shock of her life.
He could understand that if she’d been confronted by a possible murder victim’s fleshly body, but the fact that only a skeleton remained and the death had probably happened back before the little town was flooded with water made her reaction a little over the top.
He didn’t know what to believe about Hart anymore. She had fooled him so completely before that he couldn’t even trust his own reactions.
Wrong Face in the Mirror: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series) Page 3
