Wrong Face in the Mirror: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series)

by Bartholomew, Barbara

  He had the idea a lot of things seemed funny to Bobbi. “Hart seemed all right when you saw her?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Sure. Surprised to see me, but okay.” She went back to her book.

  He had no way of knowing if she’d gone walking before or after the encounter with Nikki in the restaurant, but taking a flashlight from his car, went looking.

  She’d probably just gone off by herself to think over what had happened with Nikki. She was so anxious to do her best by her admittedly difficult little family, no doubt she’d been devastated by Nikki’s public tirade.

  He followed the walking path that led up the mountain the easy way, avoiding climbing across the huge slippery boulders of the mountain.

  The wind was building up from what had been a mild November day. The forecast for a cold front was coming true and he was grateful that only snow flurries were expected, nothing more extreme. He became increasingly concerned about Hart. She had to be somewhere around here; she couldn’t have gone far without her car. She couldn’t have just vanished.

  Though it had happened once before. He’d never forget those awful days when he’d no idea what had happened to her. Others might have been caught up in their suspicions he’d done her harm, but he’d known that wasn’t true, that whatever had happened to his wife had nothing to do with him.

  He was afraid she was somewhere suffering and in pain, or in the hands of someone who would do her untold harm. He was afraid she was dead. Surely his Hart would contact him if she was able to do so. But she’d said she loved someone else.

  Maybe that someone had come by the lodge and she’d gone off with him. He closed his eyes, remembering last night and told himself that couldn’t be true. He believed with all his being that she loved only him.

  “Hart!” he called as loudly as he could so that she could hear him over the wind. A reply came as though a whisper from a faraway a distance. “Alistair. Help me.”

  His light went out.

  He stumbled in darkness, his arms outstretched to avoid the trees, hurrying as fast as he could in the direction from which he’d heard her call.

  “Who was that?” Sibyl demanded nervously, the pistol wavering wildly in her hand.

  “Alistair!” Hart called desperately.

  “Shut up,” Sibyl whispered the command, grabbing her arm and pressing the mouth of the gun against her throat. She steered her away from the sound behind them of someone stumbled through the woods, trying to find them. She began to push her down the slope toward the town that now lay in darkness before them, the cold of the gun against the side of her throat, Sibyl’s grip hard on her arm.

  “What’s happened to the town?” she whispered. “Where are the lights?”

  “They turned off the power at midnight. You know that. Everybody’s gone and at dawn they’ll open the dam so the water begins to flow downstream. Medicine Stick will be no more.”

  The idea was frightening, smothering to think of all that water pouring down on her home.

  “Everybody’s out. They had the Guard out to check building by building. The homes are empty, the streets are abandoned.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I knew you would be here.” Sibyl continued to push her down the slope, past the area where the lodge stood in the present day, and down the rougher incline that led to Medicine Stick. “I heard my husband calling to arrange the date with you. I locked him in the cellar at my aunt’s house and came up here.”

  She couldn’t hear Alistair, either the sound of his voice or of his thrashing through the trees trying to get to her. He couldn’t be here anyway. This wasn’t his place or time and he wouldn’t even recognize the woman named Stacia.

  Only the howl of the wind disturbed the silence of the abandoned town, that and the clatter of a loose board as they walked past the house where she’d lived with her family. Surely they would have missed her. Surely they wouldn’t have left without her.

  Sand stirred in the street and she breathed in the grit as the cold wind blew through her cotton dress and on her bare legs. They must be walking right up to the disaster point when whatever happened took place. Stacia knew she had to fight for her own life and for that of Sibyl’s husband who must be locked up in the cellar in back of their house. “You don’t want him to drown?” she asked abruptly.

  “I’ll go back for him after it’s over. He knows I would never hurt him.”

  Stacia wasn’t sure she actually heard a man’s frantic but muffled yells, almost lost in the wind, and wondered if it was Sibyl’s husband calling for help.

  “Sibyl,” she tried to sound very, very reasonable. “You know Raymond I have never been interested in each other. Not in the slightest.”

  “I thought that. There were others, but not you. I thought you were a good person. And then you changed.”

  Stacia’s heart dropped. She had indeed changed. Trading places with Hart certainly hadn’t been deliberate, but she’d gone forward and fallen in love with Alistair and hadn’t wanted to come back. Maybe the same thing had happened here. Had the reserved, thoughtful Hart found herself desperately loving Sibyl’s husband.

  “It was right after Christmas that you changed. You were quieter, didn’t laugh as much. My husband always liked quiet girls and he started noticing. He even said how pretty you were. I never thought he liked redheads.”

  Oh my! What had studious, shy Hart set off here in Medicine Stick? What would her parents and Helen have thought if their Stacia got involved with a married man?

  It wasn’t me, she wanted to say. It was never me. But they couldn’t hear. Right at this moment they would be settling uneasily into two homes in Mountainside, taking up temporary residence before moving to California. And at each house, her family members would think she was at the other. And then tomorrow when they couldn’t find her, they’d hope she was with friends.

  And later when they couldn’t find her at all, they would fear she’d been injured or trapped some way back in Medicine Stick, drowned when the waters were released.

  Her sister would spend a lifetime wondering what had happened to her, a burden so pervasive that she’d passed it on to her daughter Serena.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  The wind died down and tiny snowflakes began to fall as Alistair plunged downward until he found himself standing on the sandy shore which had been filled with lake water in better days. In the dim light of the slivered moon, he could see the humped shape of the old building not too far away, looking strangely like a stranded whale with its edges rounded away by time and water.

  He had the unreasonable feeling that Hart was out there somewhere, he could almost sense her presence, and stood listening for her call.

  Droplets of wind-blown water showered across him, dampening his hair and clothes so that he began to shiver as temperatures started to fall. He couldn’t give up. He couldn’t go back.

  Somewhere Hart was in desperate trouble and needing him. He had to find a way to get to her.

  Stacia stood in her own body, her hair whipping in the wind as Sibyl brought her to a stop in front of the darkened structure that was Millers’ Store. She was extremely conscious that this was where she’d seen the image of herself lying dead in the street.

  She couldn’t just let this happen. Something had to be done to stop Sibyl, yet she felt frozen somewhere between disbelief and fear.

  “Sibyl, you’re making a mistake here,” she tried to protest.

  “Shut up,” Sibyl said matter-of-factly. “You’re messing up my life and I won’t have it anymore. It’s all right. You won’t mind once you’re dead and nobody will know. I’ve got it all worked out. I’ll stuff you inside the old store so you won’t float to the surface once the water fills in. Nobody will ever know what became of you.”

  Thoroughly out of her mind, Stacia accessed with rising fear. She’d thought Hart had died here, but they were getting close to the timeline if water was to pour in here at dawn. Maybe she wouldn’t be ab
le to escape. She couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t Stacia who would meet her end at Sibyl’s hands.

  She was so scared that her brain wouldn’t work right. She wasn’t ready to die, not when she and Alistair were just rediscovering each other. Not that she wanted Hart to be killed either.

  This was crazy. Within minutes, if she lived that long, she would be as out of it as Sibyl Forrester.

  Thin clouds obscured the moon so that the scene on the lonely little street was lit only dimly. Stacia trembled, knowing she had progressed through her memories of the past to the final moment. When this was over, if she survived, her own memory would be intact. Everything she had experienced would be alive in her mind.

  Events were moving swiftly, but in her mind the replay was in slow motion. Sibyl stood only feet away, the pistol now steady in her hand, her eyes showing a maddened determination. “With you gone, he’ll be mine again,” she said.

  Under the circumstances Stacia couldn’t feel sorry for this woman who was dooming herself to a lifetime where she would never be sure of the man she loved. She would never be secure because she herself was creating the doubts and fears inside her own mind.

  With sudden conviction, Stacia knew that the woman she’d never met, Hart Benson, would not have entered into an affair with another woman’s husband, no matter what her feelings were, no matter what kind of pressure he put on her.

  With that knowledge, she desperately wanted Hart to live and threw herself at Sibyl, grabbing for the gun.

  She heard Alistair’s anguished voice calling behind her, “Hart!” and then the gun went off with a loud bang.

  She felt herself pushed forcefully from her own body and knew that Hart was there, as determined to save her as she had been to save Hart.

  And then for one terrible instant, she was outside, in neither body, and she watched as the red-haired woman crumpled to the ground and sank into the limpness of death.

  Sibyl started screaming.

  Alistair Redhawk was a man solidly grounded in reality and wasted no time telling himself he was imagining things as he walked into what should have been a lake and watched a woman with a gun shoot the woman he loved.

  He yelled her name and rushed forward. He knew his Hart was there even though he didn’t recognize the form. Everything in him told him it was her as he fought to get to her, to save her.

  He heard the shot fired, saw her fall. “No!” the word was one long anguished yell and then he was standing in lake water and black-haired Hart was slumped at his feet, her face down in the water.

  He grabbed her up and raced for the shore. She wasn’t breathing. She wasn’t breathing. That thought raced through his brain as he threw her down on the sand, not bothering to be gentle, but trying to slam life back into her. He started resuscitation, desperately expending well trained and experienced efforts to save the woman who meant everything to his life.

  And then she was gone, not even there, and the strange evening was over and a dim wintry sun was breaking dawn in the east.

  For a minute it seemed he was in a jail cell and Tommy Benson was yelling at him that he’d killed his sister and in that instant, he knew that this was the moment that had flung Hart across space and time to a distant city where she’d lain in a coma recovering from the shock of seeing herself and the twin with whom she’d shared so much shot and killed, then nearly drowning herself.

  With tears in his eyes, he knew he would find her again because it had already happened.

  For just an instant he’d been allowed a glance into the past as if it was necessary for the future between him and the woman he called Hart.

  Like doubting Thomas he had not been able to fully believe without proof and now that evidence had been given to him.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Hart stood waiting for him just at the point where the path led upward from the lake to the grounds of the lodge. It was snowing harder now and a light coating of white lay on the ground. When he took her into his arms, she was shivering and he knew that just as he’d been only minutes before back there in 1947, so had she.

  It had just happened. And it had happened sixty four years ago in the past. Right now he couldn’t even try to reconcile those two facts.

  Murmuring meaningless words of comfort, he led her back up the hill to the lodge and, knowing she wasn’t ready to face others, took her to her room where he ordered breakfast and coffee.

  He urged her into a hot shower and when she showed no reluctance, joined her, only to have her sob against his bare chest. “I tried to warn her, but it was too late. She died, Alistair. Hart died.”

  He didn’t know what to say. For him it was Stacia who had died. He’d first known the woman in his arms as Hart and she would always be so in his own mind. This lovely woman with her blue-black hair and striking blue eyes was his wife, though what mattered most was the person inside her. And, to his confusion, she thought of herself as Stacia.

  That other body was long gone and he wondered at her ability to deal with the twin knowledge of her past. Whatever happened the two of them were in this together.

  After he’d toweled her dry and helped her into clothing and dressed himself, they sat down to a hot breakfast of waffles and bacon and with several cups of hot coffee.

  Color begin to come into her cheeks and she stopped shaking, but she didn’t even try to talk until after that second cup of coffee.

  “It was Sibyl Forrester,” she said. “She thought Hart was having an affair with her husband.”

  “I know. I saw her shoot you . . .Stacia. Maybe she was right and her husband and Hart were involved . . .” He found it hard to believe the woman he’d known all his life as an upstanding citizen could have lived with such guilt since she was in her twenties.

  “Hart would never do that.”

  “Be fair. She told me that she was in love with someone. Maybe the guy was Ray Forrester.”

  “She might have loved him, but she would not have said so, would not have acted on it. My guess it was someone else back there in Medicine Stick that she loved. But the one thing I know is that Sibyl Forrester was out of her mind that night on the street. She could have imagined the whole thing.”

  There was no point to arguing, though he thought she was being somewhat naïve. “No matter. She committed intentional murder and I think she’s still after you. My suspicion is that for some reason she staged the burglary at her own house and set your loft on fire.”

  Hart frowned. “An old lady like that?”

  “Sibyl Forrester has always been a very resourceful woman. She taught for years, than served as principal at the grade school. After she retired, she bossed half a dozen volunteer committees.” Even as he said it, it seemed hardly rational to believe that a mentally unbalanced woman could do those things.

  “But Alistair, she didn’t know I was me. Why would she try to kill Hart?”

  He shook his head. “I know, but it’s what happened. I’m as sure of that as I am that it’s November.”

  Two days later when they were back in their own home, Alistair told her that they needed to go together to call on the Forresters. “I’m sorry to put you through this, but I think your presence could have a powerful affect. We’ve got to do something; we just can’t her have going around thinking she can kill you.”

  Hart’s impressions of Sibyl Forrester were confused. On the one hand, she remembered all too clearly that strong and scary woman pointing a gun at her, but she also knew there was the straight-backed but rather shrunken white-haired woman whom she met when she was with Serena and Bobbi. The woman she wanted to throw the book at was that one in Medicine Stick.

  When she tried to explain this, Alistair took her into his arms. “Honey, she tried to kill you only a few days ago in Mountainside when she set your place on fire. And Mrs. Harris deserves the truth as well, she lost some valuable property and she’s not well off.”

  Hart sniffed, trying to keep back any fugitive tears. “Then go arrest her. C
harge her with arson at least.”

  “I can’t do that. We don’t have an ounce of proof. But after all these years of holding on to the secrets of the past, surely it’s eating her up inside. Maybe the right confrontation will force the truth out of her.”

  Somehow she doubted it. But she guessed she owed this much at least to Hart who, she was now convinced, had deliberately stepped in to save her life. Hart deserved some measure of justice even after all these years.

  Finally she stepped back to say, “Let’s go now. I want to get it over with before I talk myself into not going.”

  She wore her usual jeans and a bright blue pullover that he said made her eyes look even more vivid than usual and he was dressed totally sheriff in a light brown uniform, an important western style hat, boots and badge. Admiring him, she couldn’t help but think that he could have played the role in the movies.

  She just hoped Sibyl took him seriously. It was the only chance they had.

  When they pulled up at the Forrester home, a strange car was parked outside. “Rental car,” Alistair commented. “Probably belongs to Serena and Bobbi. They’re still trying to track down Stacia.”

  She nodded. “Wish there was some way I could tell them.”

  “They’d never believe you, honey.”

  “Suppose not.”

  Leaves were falling from the Bradford Pear trees in the front yard, obscuring the recently frosted grass. Dry as it had been the last few years, Hart figured they must pump a lot of water on this yard to keep it healthy.

  Her gaze rested on a stone angel fountain that reminded her of a decoration, sans fountain, that had rested in the Forrester’s back yard in Medicine Stick. These two had lived on all through the years, enjoying the normal ups and downs of life, having left Hart dead under the water. It wasn’t fair; she deserved some repayment.