Hudson? Lawrence? Wearily he blinked eyes blurred by too much desk work. Who did he know by that name? He couldn’t think, then realized. These would be members of Helen Larkin’s family. He got up and went to show them in.
They were solemn but friendly, Helen’s daughter and a young girl who looked around the office with keen interest. Serena Hudson, Helen’s daughter who he remembered had been named for her grandmother, was a graceful woman with silvering hair whom he knew to be in her fifties but looked ten years younger. She smiled and introduced the girl accompanying her as not her daughter, but her granddaughter, Bobbi Lawrence.
“My daughter Stacie planned to come, but at the last minute she was unable to get away from work.”
“Stacie,” he found himself repeating the name.
“That’s right.” Serena Hudson settled into a chair and motioned to her granddaughter to do the same. “She was named for my aunt. My mother told such wonderful stories of her sister that she remained alive for all of us, though, of course, we’d never met her. Mother grieved for Stacia all her life.”
He’d never seen as much as a picture of Stacia Larkin so he had no idea if these two women resembled her. Certainly neither of them had the red hair that Hart had claimed she possessed.
“It’s horrible to think mother was right all along,” Serena Hudson said. “She was so afraid her sister was still in that little town when it was flooded.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Alistair inserted with some discomfort.
“We will eventually. When we stopped to contribute our DNA for testing, they did say it could take months before they could give us any answers, but after so many years, we simply feel fortunate at the possibility.”
Alistair didn’t feel that he would welcome such concrete news. If Hart was right—and yet how could she be? It had to be a mistake; those bones could belong to anyone after sixty four years. Most likely some drowning victim.
And then he reminded himself of the bullet in the skull. No way did that fit in with an accidental death.
“We thought while we’re here we’d like to retrace our roots,” Serena Hudson went on. “You know visit the old sites mother talked about, go to the cemetery where my great-grandparents are buried. And if possible, talk with people who knew my family back in the Medicine Stick days.”
“Yeah,” the teenager spoke for the first time, sounding anything but enthused, “a real blast from the past.”
“Bobbi,” her grandmother reprimanded gently.
The girl flashed a grin that somehow reminded him of someone. “Yes, Granny, dearest,” she responded mockingly. In spite of the girl’s sassy tone, it was evident to Alistair that grandmother and granddaughter were on the best of terms.
“Well, anybody around back then and old enough to have memories of those times would be getting on in years,” he said cautiously, not feeling that Hart would be anxious to contribute her supposed recollections. “But most of them settled in the nearest town. That’s Mountainside. I can give you a few names to start off.”
They thanked him and asked to be notified once he’d heard from the state about the DNA results. Serena told him they would be staying at the lodge out by the lake while they were visiting and she gave him as well her cell phone number and an address where she could be reached in California.
Chapter Sixteen
For only the second time since she’d returned home Hart drove out to the lake that evening, feeling the need to be alone and to reconnect with her memories of being Stacia. At least this time she wasn’t likely to see the remains of a woman dead since the ‘40s.
The wind had finally died down and the air was crisply cold with leaves on the trees already showing signs of the first frost of the season. She parked her car and strolled down to the area where the far end of the town now lay half exposed in the shallow water, knowing this would have been where her own home lay.
The state had paid them a paltry sum for taking their home. Modest as it was it hadn’t been worth much, not even in 1947’s dollars, but she guessed her parents had a hard time replacing it as a center of family living that had been full of memories of their children’s growing up years.
Helen had been excited at the thought of moving away to glamorous California where the cousins lived, but Stacia hadn’t been so sure. Strange as were the things that went through her head, she wasn’t sure she was ready for life’s mainstream. Maybe out there they’d decide she was crazy and they would lock her away no matter how much her loving family protested.
Closer examinations of her memories took her no closer to the drowning date for the town. It was still six months away, even though they’d talked about it all the time. They had six months to choose a new home and a new way of life, something that wasn’t easy to plan with so little money.
The boys talked about following different opportunities to find work and Stacia began to worry about them all splitting up and going separate ways. Still half a year was a long way off. Anything could happen.
Now Hart stood at the edge of the shallow green water and stared down at the wavering reflection to which she could not quite accustom herself.
She wondered if this was the way it felt to grow really old so that when you looked at yourself in the mirror, you wanted to deny that the wrinkled, shrunken person shown there was yourself.
“Sure isn’t very pretty, is it?” a young voice jarred into her trance, making her turn hastily. At first she thought it was her sister standing there, a young Helen the way she’d seen her not so long ago.
But no! This girl had darker hair with no touch of red shining in sunlit streaks though her eyes were brown. And though the features bore a close enough resemblance to if her nearly Helen’s twin, there was an edge about this face that her sister’s had not shown at that age.
She smiled, feeling shaky. “It can be beautiful when there’s enough water.”
“And the old town is completely covered up?”
Beginning to feel more secure on her feet, Hart tallied another difference. This girl spoke with a crisp, unfamiliar accent very different from Helen’s slow Oklahoma drawl.
She was imagining things, missing her family so much that she was seeing likenesses where none existed.
“You live here?” the girl asked.
“In a nearby town,” Hart tried to sound friendly though she wished nothing more than that this child would go away and leave her to the privacy of her thoughts. “Mountainside.”
“We drove through there. I like the way it’s sidled right into the mountain.”
Hart smiled. “Me too.”
“I’m Bobbi Lawrence,” the girl said. “From California, but my great-grandmother lived here.”
Oh Lord! No wonder this girl looked like Helen. This must be her niece, Helen’s daughter.
She stared at the fourteen-year-old. No, that was impossible. Medicine Stick was buried in water fifty four years ago. This girl was too young to even be Helen’s granddaughter.” Her heart ached at the amount of time that separated her from her little sister. “You must be kin to the Larkins,” she said.
“My great-grandmother was Helen Larkin. She died when I was little, but I remember her.”
Hart almost gasped. She was standing here talking to someone who had actually known Helen.
She tried to find words. “What was she like, your grandmother?”
“Okay. Nice. She was a cool person and she liked kids. She always took my side.” Bobbi grinned, displaying a gap between her two front teeth that Hart found most endearing because Helen had one too.
“Did she have a good life?”
“Sure. I guess so. As far as I know. Granny said she thought she’d die when Grandfather died, but that after a while she picked up and went on. She was a survivor, Granny said. She thinks I should learn from that. The girls in our family are strong, she says.”
Hart nodded. “We’ve had to be,” she agreed softly and when the girl looked at her strangely didn’t
bother to try to explain.
“We’re going to visit with some people Grandmother Helen knew when she was young. Somebody named Mayleen and a Mr. and Mrs. Forrester. I’m waiting for Granny now; we’re meeting the sheriff there. Do you know the sheriff?”
“As a matter of fact,” she said. “I’m married to him.” When Serena Hudson joined them, Hart once again was startled to see a family likeness that nobody now alive would remember. Serena looked very much like Stacia and Helen Larkin’s mother for whom she’d been named.
She told the two of them that she would follow them to the location where they were to meet Helen’s old friends, that way she could join her husband.
How Alistair would laugh if he knew she was using her supposed relationship with him to horn in on this occasion. But she had to spend more time with Helen’s daughter and great-granddaughter and had, as well, a propelling sense that she must see again the aging neighbors from Medicine Stick.
Take Three Tenses, past, present and future, somehow Hart Benson and Stacia Larkin had entered into some kind of strange dance with time and until she found some answers, she could not go on with her own life.
His life had little in common with a television show police procedural. For one thing, those guys seemed to focus on one highly dramatic case at a time. Out here in western Oklahoma, most of the time they were short on drama and had to be expert at diverting attention from one problem after other, not only in the same day, but sometimes within the same hour.
So Alistair’s mind worked through the details of the most recent Drug Taskforce raid while he drove to the meeting at the Forresters’ where he hoped he hoped to find some answers in the case of the lake murder and to his personal life as well.
If he could at least find out that the bones in the lake matched a Jane or John Doe identification, then Hart could relax and quit imagining impossible happenings.
He guessed it had all occurred because she’d lost her memory. Hell, he’d be imagining things too if all he could recall was the happenings of the last few weeks.
He was obviously the last to arrive for the meeting, though he was right on time. A silver Toyota Avalon, probably Mrs. Hudson’s rental car, was parked next to his wife’s little Nissan.
Somehow he wasn’t surprised. It seemed almost as though Hart was destined to meet the California visitors.
Sibyl Forrester, her white hair in a chic cut and her bony form definitely dressed up in a pants suit in honor of her guests, greeted him with a bustling air of excitement. She led him into the crowded living room where Serena Hudson and Hart were already seated and listening as the teenaged granddaughter Bobbi Lawrence excitedly questioned the elderly man who was their host.
“Did you really know my Granny’s mother?” she battered him with one question after another in such rapid fashion that he hardly had a chance of replying. “People say I look like her? Do you think that’s true? Did you know Granny’s Aunt Stacia? Grandma Helen always said she was drop dead gorgeous but I suppose that was an exaggeration . . .”
Raymond Forrester might be a little disconcerted at this young tornado who had entered his calm household, but he interrupted her to say, “No exaggeration. Stacia Larkin turned heads all right.”
Mayleen Carson added eagerly, “I wanted to grow up to be just like her.” She giggled almost like the girl she’d been back when she’d known Stacia, her face looking suddenly younger than her sixty eight years. Mayleen acted almost as though she were at a party, Alistair thought. But then he supposed this was the most exciting thing that had happened to the three seniors in years. They were part of a murder investigation and yet one hopefully enough remote not to be painful.
It had been a long time since they’d last seen Stacia Larkin.
Hart quaked inside and had to struggle to keep her unease from being evident to others. She was glad Alistair had come, his strong, confident form seemed a barricade between her and all the emotion of the too recent past.
Things that had happened over decades ago as far as these others were concerned were hardly further away than yesterday to her.
Silly little Mayleen Smith who had giggled too much and been ridiculously boy crazy was now this dowager in her sixties who was presenting herself to Bobbi as an old friend of Helen’s. She and her sister both had considered the girl to be Medicine Stick’s number one nuisance, trailing after them in a fashion that would be called stalking these days. She’d hardly been able to turn a corner without seeing Mayleen one step behind her, her lanky hair styled in a failed version of her own hairdo.
She remembered thinking the girl might be almost pretty if she didn’t pile on so much makeup, such red, red lipstick and dark-smudged eye color. Still she’d have to outgrow her simpering ways and the way she behaved more and more foolishly anytime a good-looking boy or young man was around.
Now she wasn’t sure she liked Mayleen any better than she ever had. She still simpered at both old Mr. Forrester and even at Alistair who was young enough to be her grandson.
Too bad she wasn’t more like Sibyl Forrester who though no beauty had a certain dignity that became her latter years. She’d been one of the young married crowd when Stacia last remembered her. She’d taught at the high school after she’d come back from teacher’s college while her husband Ray had coached basketball and baseball and taught history. All the girls had thought Raymond Forrester dreamy, she remembered Helen reporting. They both were about her age.
Which meant she should be an old person too, but somehow she’d skipped here, missing years of her life so that she’d gone from being twenty four year old Stacia to living in the body of twenty six year old Hart. While her contemporaries were senior citizens, she was still at the beginning of life.
Sibyl offered hot coffee and homemade cookies. Hart accepted a cup of coffee but shook her head at the cookies. Stacia had loved sweets, but todayHart only nibbled at the treat. Sometimes she thought she was losing herself and becoming a blend of the two women.
She sat silently, listening intently as the others talked, but not contributing to the conversation. She guessed few people had the opportunity to hear themselves discussed so openly by others.
“Stacia had long red hair and brown eyes and peachy skin.” Mayleen sighed. “And yet while less attractive girls got married young, she stayed at home and made the guys drool. Sometimes I think now that her folks were over-protective, though of course, things were different then. Most of the girls I knew married just to get away from home.” She giggled again, sounding like the girl Stacia had known. “That’s like jumping from the frying pan into the fire, going from parents who watch every step you take to cooking and cleaning all day for a husband who watches you even closer.”
“Did you marry young, Mayleen?” To her horror Hart realized it was her voice asking that very personal question which hardly seemed appropriate coming as it did from a young woman to an older matron.
“Young, old and in between,” Sibyl Forrester commented caustically.
“I’ve not been lucky in marriage,” Mayleen responded plaintively. “Married three times, divorced three times.” She didn’t giggle this time. “Still looking for Mr. Right.”
Serena only looked mildly shocked and Hart guessed she was wondering how they could get back to the subject of her family. Young Bobbi, on the other hand, seemed to be enjoying herself hugely.
“Did you hate her because she was so gorgeous?” the teen asked with what seemed to be her characteristic bluntness. “Because I would have.”
“Certainly not,” Mayleen retorted indignantly. “All the girls liked her.”
“I felt sorry for her,” Sibyl Forrester said quietly. “She was pretty, of course, but I always suspected there was something a little . . .off about Stacia mentally. We were in class together and she was bright enough, always had her nose stuck in a novel, but then there were times when she would just stare into the clear air.”
“Now Sibyl,” Raymond Forrester protested. “You sa
id she always made good grades.”
“Not that. Not school, but real life. She’d be this really outgoing person, everybody’s friend, and then she would turn quiet and shy, hardly speaking to anybody and looking embarrassed if attention focused on her. I think today they would probably say she was bi-polar.”
Well, really! Hart was more amused than angry. What an old witch! How would Sibyl feel if one minute she was Stacia being a part of things with the other kids and the next Hart was looking out of her eyes with different perceptions and personality?
For the first time she began to feel a kind of kinship with that other woman. It had been hard enough for her to adjust but for the introverted Hart it must have been a nightmare.
She could even remember a time when she thought this was something everybody experienced. If from the time you were little, you suddenly switched into another person’s life, naturally you just thought that was the way things were.
Before you knew better, you even asked others who they were when they weren’t themselves. Luckily she was just identified as having a wild imagination and by the time it was getting worse, she’d known not to say too much. Still, she knew she’d worried her parents.
Chapter Seventeen
Alistair felt sorry for the Californians. They’d come to hear old stories about the people from whom they’d descended and instead they were being told that one of them probably had mental problems.
He wasn’t too surprised at Mayleen Carson. Everybody in town knew she was a gossip who just said whatever came into her head. Mayleenisms were famous among the local residents.
But he’d thought Sibyl Forrester more discreet. Surely she must realize this could be painful for Helen Larkin’s daughter.
“Tell me about my great-grandmother,” Bobbi Lawrence demanded. “Was she a wild child too?”
“Oh, Stacia was never wild,” Mayleen protested.
“Not that anybody knew,” Sibyl said tartly, adding quickly. “But Helen Larkin, your great-grandmother, well nobody had anything bad to say about her.”
Wrong Face in the Mirror: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series) Page 11
