The Fire (Northwest Passage Book 4)

by John A. Heldt

  Then he realized just as quickly that Asa was precisely the kind of man who could pull it off. He was a man who kept mostly to himself, who conducted business by appointment, and had a wife who was probably in on his secret – or at least part of it. Celia Johnson almost certainly knew about Asa's time travels but not necessarily his secret cache. Had she known about that, she would not have left it in the house for someone else to find.

  Kevin turned from Asa's digs on the west end of Garnet to an equally impressive residence on the east end. He could not see the front of the house, where a young teacher had once given him directions from a balcony, but he could see most of the back. He wondered what the woman was doing right now. He wondered what it would be like to teach with her in the same school.

  He had enjoyed interacting with Sarah at the interview but didn't know quite what to make of her smiles and friendliness. Had she tried to signal some kind of interest in him? If so, why did she continue to associate with the sleazy banker Preston Pierce?

  Kevin pondered the questions for a moment and then turned to something more important and immediate. He directed his attention to the person at his side, the charming country girl he desperately wanted to kiss.

  He lifted his arm and placed it around her shoulders. When Sadie responded by turning toward him, he pulled her close. He leaned in for a kiss but stopped when she started to speak.

  "Kevin?"

  "Yes, Sadie?"

  "Thank you."

  "For what?"

  Sadie fixed her gaze.

  "For coming back to Wallace and giving me a chance."

  "You're welcome," Kevin said.

  "Thank you also for helping me when I was down and doing so without judging me. Most men would have acted differently."

  "I'm not like most men."

  "I know."

  Sadie smiled sadly.

  "Is there something else?" Kevin asked.

  Sadie nodded.

  "Thank you for moving slowly," she said. "Thank you for being a gentleman."

  Kevin smiled at Sadie and laughed to himself. Talk about a curve ball. The day was sunny and the place was right, but the time apparently was not. The kiss would have to wait.

  CHAPTER 28: KEVIN

  Monday, March 14, 1910

  Eight hours into his first day as Shoshone County High School's newest educator, Kevin realized two things. The first was that you couldn't form a team without a teammate. The second was that the dead man's lesson plans didn't cut it.

  Samuel Garrison had fallen ill over the weekend, leaving Kevin to fend for himself before dozens of students in a classroom once managed by Lawrence Monroe. That by itself would not have been a problem had Monroe done a better job mapping out the month of March. The revered science teacher had never created a lesson plan more than a week ahead of the lesson. When Kevin had tried to implement the most recent plan he'd been given, a student had informed him that the material had been covered in February.

  A textbook Kevin had found in Monroe's desk hadn't helped much either. Published in 1900, it contained a number of outdated theories. By eleven o'clock the rookie instructor had resorted to scouring the school library for something he could not only use but also believe.

  The day had started well enough. Principal Morrison had given Kevin a second tour of the building and introduced him to each of the school's ten faculty and four staff members.

  Thomas Wainwright had greeted Kevin warmly, as had Ellen Bouchard, a gregarious French teacher who resembled Julia Child, and Sarah Thompson, of course. She had twice visited his classroom before the opening bell to see if he needed guidance or materials. Kevin, as it turned out, had needed a lot of both.

  As the day progressed, however, he had become more comfortable in his classroom. Taking his cues from instructors he'd had in junior high, high school, and college, Kevin had managed to teach students born in the nineteenth century things he had learned in the twenty-first century. By one o'clock, he had started to have fun.

  Of course, it was easy to have fun when you taught well-behaved students who seemed genuinely receptive to learning. On more than one occasion, he'd had to remind himself that he was teaching in a public high school in Idaho and not a preparatory academy back east.

  Dressed in jackets and ties, the boys, ages fourteen to eighteen, actually paid attention to what he had to say. None gossiped about loose girls, talked about the big game, or sent a text message to a friend in another class. That distraction was thankfully decades away.

  The girls, dressed in crisp white blouses, dark ankle-length skirts, and laced boots, were even more attentive and productive. They had asked questions twice as often as their male peers and generally completed their assignments in far less time. By the end of the day, Kevin was left wondering how science over the years had become largely the province of men.

  At 2:55 p.m. Kevin reclined in Lawrence Monroe's chair and watched his last class finish a science vocabulary quiz. He didn't know how many of the students knew the difference between gravity and velocity and inertia and displacement, but he knew they were smart.

  These were the children of gritty, hardened men who walked into dangerous holes six days a week to give them a better life. They had taught a man with an earth sciences degree more about pulling silver from the ground in one day than he had learned in twenty-two years.

  Kevin wondered how many of the boys would follow their fathers into the mines and how many girls would marry those boys before realizing their full potential. He hoped that at least one of the kids would jump on a train after graduation, live out his or her dreams, and make the world a better place.

  When the bell rang at three, the students got out of their chairs, placed their quizzes on Kevin's desk, and filed out of the door. Two boys stayed behind to ask the new teacher how he knew so much about things that weren't even in their textbooks. A girl asked if he would be staying on as a permanent replacement. Kevin gave them the kind of evasive answers that satisfied curious minds without saying much of anything.

  Five minutes later he walked to the back of the classroom and picked up a sheet of paper that had fallen to the floor. The sheet bore a pencil sketch of what looked like a flying saucer sitting on the surface of a cratered planet. A stick figure man standing next to the craft raised his arms to the sky. Kevin smiled. He had found his dreamer.

  He folded the artwork, slipped it in a shirt pocket, and re-shelved a few books in a case that spanned the back of the room. He sighed loudly when he put the last book away. What a day!

  When he turned to face the blackboard, he saw his contribution to the future of Wallace in several lines of chalk. When he turned to face the door to the hallway, he saw a woman.

  "It gets easier," Sarah said with a smile.

  "I'm sure it does."

  "It did for me," she continued. "I remember my first day. More than half of my students failed a test intended to determine what they had recalled over the summer. I thought I'd never get through to them, but I did . . . and so will you."

  "Thanks for the vote of confidence, Miss Thompson."

  "You're welcome, Mr. Johnson."

  "Please call me Kevin."

  "I will if you call me Sarah."

  "It's a deal."

  Kevin sat on his desk to rest his tired bottom but instantly got up. He didn't know all of the social protocols of 1910, but he was fairly certain that sitting down while a woman stood was a major faux pas. Sitting down in front of this woman certainly was.

  "I talked to a student in the hall, Emma Iverson. She told me that the new teacher is the best she's ever had. I'm inclined to believe that she's telling the truth."

  "You're just being nice."

  "Perhaps I am, but I don't mind being nice. Teaching is difficult work. Sometimes a little praise at the right time can make it seem less difficult."

  Kevin looked at Sarah closely. For a moment he didn't see a peer but rather the woman on the balcony. How nice she had looked that night. How ni
ce she had acted.

  He wondered what had happened to the woman he had met on Friday, July 22, 1910. Had she headed down a new path after meeting the smart-as-a-whip time traveler? Kevin doubted it, but he liked to entertain the possibility.

  "So what do I do now?"

  "You go home," she said. "Unless you're coaching the baseball team, you go home, get a good night's rest, and return in the morning for another day of public education."

  "You make it sound fun," Kevin said with a laugh.

  "It is fun, much of the time, and rewarding most of the time. If I had my way I'd do this until I died, but I know that won't happen."

  "Why? What's stopping you?"

  Sarah smiled.

  "You really are from the city."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Kevin asked.

  "It means that, in small towns, anyway, young single women don't teach until they are old. They marry, have children, and get on with the way of their mothers and grandmothers and the generations that preceded them."

  "Why can't you marry and teach?"

  "Oh, what a world that would be. Don't you agree, Mr. Johnson . . . Kevin?"

  Kevin suddenly realized the difference of a century. While some things had not changed in a hundred and three years, other things had. Forget Sarah's long-term career prospects. She couldn't even vote.

  Kevin started to say something when he saw Sarah look into the hallway and smile in a way that seemed more dutiful than joyous. Within a few seconds, the smile made sense.

  Preston Pierce, banker, bastard, and abuser of women, walked up to Sarah and placed a hand on her waist. He said a few words and then turned his attention to the man in the classroom.

  "Preston, there is someone I'd like you to meet," Sarah said with a more genuine smile. "This is Kevin Johnson. He was hired as a temporary replacement for Mr. Monroe."

  "We meet again, Mr. Johnson," Pierce said as he extended a hand.

  "You two know each other?"

  "I did some business at the bank three weeks ago," Kevin said as he released Pierce's hand. "I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Pierce before I left for Montana."

  "I see."

  Kevin smiled at Pierce and acknowledged the spears the banker hurled with his eyes. He wondered again what a kind soul like Sarah was doing with a bum like this. He didn't think it had anything to do with Pierce's money.

  Sarah looked at the faces of the men at her sides and furrowed her brows. Perhaps she sensed that the first Johnson-Pierce summit had not produced flowers and wine.

  "Well, we should probably go," she said to Pierce. Sarah turned to Kevin. "I'll see you in the morning, Mr. Johnson. Do get some rest. Tomorrow will go much better. I promise."

  "I'm sure it will," Kevin said. "You two have a nice evening."

  Kevin watched Pierce guide Sarah out the door and out of sight.

  He didn't want to see her go. He had enjoyed their conversation and looked forward to many more. He looked forward to working with someone who seemed to share his view of education and society.

  Kevin was happy to see Preston Pierce walk away. He didn't like the banker, bastard, and abuser of women. He hoped that he would never again have to meet the man, in any setting, but he suspected that they would cross paths again. In fact, the good times were just beginning.

  CHAPTER 29: KEVIN

  Thursday, March 17, 1910

  "So what do you know about this guy?"

  "He's a bloody scoundrel. Why do you care?" Andy asked.

  "I just do."

  Kevin picked up his step as he followed Andy through the ground floor of the Wallace Standard building. He stopped when his friend, the paper's ace reporter, reached his desk.

  "Take a seat. We can talk here."

  Kevin pulled up a chair, sat down, and scanned the headlines of a recent paper that occupied a corner of Andy's desk. Few articles reported news from Idaho. They instead reported anti-American riots in Bogota, Theodore Roosevelt's arrival in Khartoum, and the aftermath of avalanches in Washington and British Columbia that had killed more than a hundred fifty people. Readers, it seemed, cared more about the world than their own backyard.

  Kevin looked around the newsroom, or what amounted to a newsroom in a small newspaper in 1910, and saw seven cluttered desks, seven Underwood Standard typewriters, and no people. The other employees, the ones with lives, had apparently left for the day.

  "Do you ever take a break from this?" Kevin asked.

  "Take a break from what?"

  "Take a break from the news."

  "Why would I want to do that?"

  Andy smiled and shook his head but kept his eyes on his work. He picked up a pencil and made a few notations on what looked like the first page of a typewritten manuscript.

  "Well, let's see," Kevin said as he rubbed his chin. "If you took more breaks, then maybe, just maybe, you could enjoy life. What a concept!"

  Andy lifted his head and stared at Kevin for what seemed like an eternity. When he was done, he placed the pencil on his desk and rose from his chair.

  "Come with me," he said.

  "Come where?"

  "Just follow. I want to show you something."

  Andy led Kevin out of the newsroom to a short hallway that provided access to four small offices. When they reached the end of the corridor, he opened the door to a windowless room, where a man wearing headphones sat at a desk and scribbled words on slips of paper.

  "This is Charlie," Andy said. "He's our evening telegraph operator."

  Charlie, a thin, bespectacled man in his late twenties, smiled, waved, and then returned to an odd-looking machine that Kevin had seen only in the movies. A moment later, he placed the completed form on a pile, grabbed a new slip, and began recording another message.

  "Is this your link to the outside world?" Kevin asked.

  "It is until we get telephone service to Spokane," Andy said.

  Andy grabbed about a dozen of the slips, examined a few, and shuffled them into a stack. He handed the stack to Kevin.

  "What's this?" Kevin asked.

  "It's what I wanted to show you."

  "You wanted to show me this?"

  "Yes."

  Kevin flipped through the slips and saw two- and three-sentence news dispatches. One, from Daytona, Florida, reported that Barney Oldfield had set a record by driving a car 131 miles per hour. Another, from Prussia, announced the passage of a suffrage bill.

  "OK. This is interesting, but so are a lot of things."

  Andy put a hand on Kevin's shoulder.

  "What do you see?" he asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "What do you see in those slips?"

  "I see news reports."

  "What else do you see?"

  "I see paper that will end up in a garbage can tomorrow."

  "I'll tell you what I see," Andy said. "When I look at those slips, I see a world in constant motion, a world that doesn't stop for a moment of leisure."

  Kevin chuckled.

  "That's pretty funny coming from a guy who hangs his hat at Maggie Ryan's and the Shooting Star."

  "Touché," Andy said with a laugh of his own.

  Andy retrieved the slips from Kevin and returned them to the table. He gave Charlie a quick wave, led Kevin out of the room, and shut the door.

  "My point, Kevin, is that there's a lot going on out there. If I want to be a part of it, or at least be a part of something bigger and better than Wallace, Idaho, I'm going to have to work longer and harder than the next guy."

  "OK. OK. I get it."

  "Now, I know you didn't come here to ask me about my job. How are things at the school?"

  "They couldn't be better. Morrison has cut me loose."

  "He's done what?"

  "He's allowing me to teach my classes the way I want to teach them, at least for now. He's given me a great deal of latitude."

  "Well, that's a good thing."

  "It is."

  "So why are you here instead of back
at the house?"

  "I just wanted your opinion of Preston Pierce."

  "I gave it to you," Andy said.

  He led Kevin into the empty newsroom. A moment later, the two returned to their chairs and Andy went back to his manuscript.

  "I'll say it again if you want me to," Andy said. "Pierce is a scoundrel. He's the most corrupt and vile person I've ever met. He's also one of the most powerful men in this town. You should steer clear of him."

  Kevin frowned.

  "That's easier said than done. He stops by the school every day to pick up Sarah Thompson. I can't even walk to the office after three without seeing his smug face."

  "What's it to you?" Andy asked. "What's she to you? I thought you fancied our fair Sadie. Have you started to stray from the maiden you rescued?"

  Kevin began to shake his head but stopped. He wasn't at all sure what he thought or felt when it came to the women in his life. He did like Sadie and wanted to pursue something with her, but he found it increasingly difficult to purge Sarah from his mind.

  "No, I still like her," Kevin said. "I just can't stomach the sight of Sarah with that guy. She deserves better. Everyone deserves better."

  Andy lifted his eyes from the article, cocked his head, and looked at Kevin as if he had just said something profound. He put his papers in a leather folder and then stared at his visitor.

  "Maybe you're right, Kevin. Maybe I should take a break."

  "Don't stop because of me. If you have work to finish, then finish it. I can bore you with my problems any day."

  "You could, my friend, you could, and you probably will."

  Kevin chuckled.

  "Then why not keep at it?"

  Andy closed his folder.

  "Because your lady problems sound far more interesting than a story I can finish tomorrow."

  Andy pushed himself away from his desk.

  "Is that all?" Kevin asked.

  "No. That's not all."