Dusk greeted me as I stepped from the porch into the evening air. The sun stayed out longer in the summer here, sometimes as late as ten at night, so the air was still warm and streaks of red and orange filled the night sky. After spending most of the day in my room, it felt good to be out in the fresh air stretching my car-cramped legs.
My stomach rumbled in response to missing dinner, but I wasn’t about to go back inside and share the table with my grandfather, the monosyllabic wonder.
Reaching for the gate, I jumped when the screen door screeched loudly behind me.
Gran appeared, her white hair sticking out through the crack in the door. “There’s a storm coming in. You kids don’t stay out too long,” she warned, wagging her finger in my direction.
I glanced up at the cloudless sky and tried not to roll my eyes. “We’ll be OK, Gran. Don’t worry,” I assured her.
* * * *
Far down the drive, I noticed the taillights of Dave Slater’s truck. As he turned onto the highway, I felt my emotions sway between disappointment and relief. He had definitely made the night interesting... in a peculiar sort of way.
Heavy, humid air kissed my cheeks and the grass tickled my bare feet as I made my way to the barn. Corey was already there, swinging on the thick ropes of twine, his body soaring far out past the open barn doors and into the hazy night. His happy screams were infectious, and I couldn’t help but smile at his crazy antics.
I plopped down on the first row of hay bales, content to spend the rest of the evening sulking as long as I remained far away from my father.
Darting through the bales like a hamster on steroids, Corey called out, challenging me to catch him.
At first, I ignored him, not wanting to show even the slightest bit of interest, but after his third or fourth plea, I found myself plotting his demise and planned my attack.
He made his way up to the rafters. I waited until Corey’s back was turned before making a mad, slippery dash to a wooden ladder that led to the loft. Once at the top, I lunged repeatedly after Corey, crashing into piles of loose hay, raising clouds of dust into the air. Corey giggled maniacally, and the two of us jumped through the open hatch to the bales below, shrieking in mock horror when our legs sank knee deep into the bales.
I paused, breathless. The first real smile I’d had in a week crept across my face. Corey sat across from me pulling sprigs of hay from his hair. I was glad none of my friends were here to witness my temporary display of juvenile behavior. They would never understand how I could have so much fun with just Corey and some hay. It almost made me forget I had been miserable only moments before. Almost.
Corey grabbed a rope. “Want to play chicken?” he challenged.
Chicken was basically a game of courage and stupidity. Two swingers, each on their own ropes, had to swing directly at each other from opposite corners of the barn. The first one to jump off in fright was the chicken and the loser. Once, I had gotten twenty-two stitches above my eyebrow when I refused to let go in a duel against one of my country cousins. I slammed into a barn pole and spent the rest of the day in the ER, but it didn’t stop me from playing again the next day.
But that was ages ago. Back to a time when I actually enjoyed coming here.
Thunder rippled through the sky, shaking the barn’s frame. I could feel a sudden change in the air; the hair on my neck seemed to pop with an electric current and the skin on my arms tingled.
The first drops of rain plinked against the tin roof and Corey’s head whipped in my direction, his eyes round and afraid. Corey had always been scared of storms, but his fear had increased ever since our neighbor’s house was struck by lightning and burnt to the ground. That was three years ago, and Corey lived it over and over again with the beginning of every storm.
Offering him a smile of reassurance, I couldn’t help but falter in my steps as Gran’s warning played in the back of my mind. I decided to end our night of fun before the storm could worsen, making our trek back to the farmhouse a soggy, traumatizing task. I grabbed the base of the wooden ladder leading up to the loft. Trying to distract Corey, who was hypnotized with fear as he stared through the open barn door to the flashes of lightning beyond, I yelled, “Race you to the house! You have to jump through the hatch, go across the bales, swing on the rope, and last one to the house owes the other a candy bar.”
Forgetting the storm for a moment, Corey’s eyes lit up at the prospect of any sort of candy. He scurried up the ladder, quick as a mouse. “I like Snickers,” he said cockily, doing his best imitation of a tough guy swagger; his skinny legs looking more like a chicken’s than a little boy’s.
I smirked. Corey didn’t have a chance, but I admired his determination. Leaning over, I grasped the heavy metal ring of the hatch. I planned on jumping through and pulling the hatch closed behind me, saving me a trip back up the ladder later.
Another clap of thunder and a flash of lightning made Corey scream in terror. Without a second thought, he jumped through the opening, darted through the maze of bales, and was through the barn poles of the entrance before I could think to say “go”.
I rolled my eyes heavenward. “Cheater!” I yelled at his retreating shadow. Thunder rumbled in response.
Without his little wiry body around, the atmosphere of the barn changed drastically. An eerie feeling began to swirl in the pit of my stomach. Alone in the darkening barn, it no longer felt like a safe haven for play, but a keeper of things that went bump in the night. The base of my scalp prickled again and sweat popped out on my brow. The farmhouse looked so far away, the isolation upping my feelings of nervousness.
“Quit being a baby,” I muttered to myself, as I barked out a fake laugh that sounded forced and tight. My eyes flickered to the dark corners of the hayloft. Sometimes animals took refuge in barns during storms. Animals of all shapes and sizes.
Thunder shook the roof and I bit my lip to keep from screaming. I was not going to give into my fears and act like a little seven year old. I was fifteen for crying out loud.
A pair of tiny beady eyes appeared under the fringes of a pile of loose hay, not far from where I stood. The last of my false bravado vanished and I let loose a piercing shriek. Turning to the hatch, I jumped through the square opening just as a flash of lightning illuminated the sky. For a moment, the entire barn lit up like fireworks, so bright that I could see each individual stalk of hay and every twisted knot on the wide barn poles.
Then all was dark again.
Like Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole, it too felt as if I fell for an eternity. Except my feet never touched the barn floor.
I must have jumped too far. Helpless, my arms waving madly, I tried to twist my body in midair.
My head bounced against something hard and a wave of nausea ran through my body, engulfing my mind and swallowing my senses. Dizziness took over and then luckily… a blissful nothing.
Chapter Two
Mistaken Identity
The smell was overwhelming. Sort of a warm, gamey, animal smell mixed with... ugh... manure. It permeated my senses and threatened to suffocate me. Even in the stifling darkness, I could tell I was sitting on dry, crackly hay, its pointy stalks poking through the thin cotton of my T-shirt. The familiar rough wood grain of the barn walls pressed against my cheek. Heavy snorts of breath startled my slow process of puzzle solving into hyper-drive. There were positively, absolutely no animals in the barn when I had last been able to see. Right before the storm.
I tried to move, but the pounding in my head countered every motion, sending me back into a fetal position of pain. I ran my hands up and down my body, feeling for injury; my heart pounding loudly in my ears as I tried not to think about what was breathing in the mysterious dark corners. Nothing felt broken or even scratched. It was only my head that felt like it had been cracked in half, its pieces swollen and throbbing.
A pinprick of light pierced the darkness, sweeping the floor of the barn in a wide arc. As the light came to rest on my
face, I winced at the stab of pain that shot to my skull.
A dark shadow approached. “Sarah! My goodness! She’s in here, Louis!”
The words bounced around my brain in a jumble. “Well, when you didn’t come in for cake, I should have known something was wrong.” The voice was a woman’s, accented heavily in that Minnesota-Norwegian twang.
I felt a hand grab my arm. “Are you all right, Sarah? What happened?” the woman prodded.
Pushing the light from my eyes, I staggered to my feet, holding on to the wall for support. “I think I hit my head when I jumped through the hatch,” I muttered, motioning to the square door above. And, did you just call me Sarah, twice?
Everything felt off… strange, fuzzy, like in a dream. The jackhammer in my head wouldn’t stop and I placed a hand against my temple in a futile effort to still the constant pounding. I followed the woman from the dark barn, uncomfortable with how close she was walking next to me; so close we were practically touching. I didn’t want to seem rude or ungrateful, the woman had found me after all.
No one else had the decency to even come looking. Where were Corey and Dad? They were probably clueless to my situation. Probably too caught up in a “riveting” game of cribbage or Lincoln logs. My thoughts dripped with sarcasm, tinged with a little bit of hurt. I knew Dad and I hadn’t exactly gotten along lately, but to not even notice I was missing? That stung worse than one of his lectures any day.
I noticed the rain had stopped, the ground already dry, which meant I’d been unconscious for a long time. Heat rose up my neck, coloring my cheeks. I could have been seriously injured – maybe even dead! And no one cared. Fuming, I didn’t notice the woman walking in front of me had stopped, and I rammed face first into her backside.
Staring into the shadows of a nearby shed, the woman addressed a large round figure in boots and coveralls. The face remained in the shadows, making whoever it was seem like a ghost, a silhouette in clothing. A faint murmur followed by a grumbling of rough speech came from the shadows.
“What’d you say, Louis?” the woman called back.
“I said she left the gate open and I have to go out and round up the cows. Send Bobby and Rodney out to help,” the gruff voice answered.
“I’ll save you some cake.”
A few grunts came in return, and the woman continued across the field, not bothering to check if I followed.
I kept waiting to come across someone I recognized. I couldn’t figure out why these people were out wandering the grounds of my grandparents’ farm, acting as though they belonged here. My eyes strained to see something familiar, but the grounds were dark and shadowed, the sky shrouded in a blanket of thick, black clouds.
The woman in front of me held open the gate to the farmhouse yard. “For your birthday, your father and I wanted to make sure you had some shoes for school, so…” she prattled on, something about selling corn for extra money, but my mind had already stopped processing, stalling on the former words—my birthday? This lady had it all wrong. And, remembering she had called me Sarah sent chills coursing through my body. It was all too creepy.
“I think you’ve made some kind of mistake,” I said, pausing on the path, not daring to enter the yard for fear I would cross over into the land of no return. “My name is Kate. I’m just visiting my grandparent’s farm for the summer. Corey and I… we were swinging on some ropes when the storm came. I tried jumping through the hatch and hit my head…” I trailed off, noticing how the woman looked at me, her face twisted in a curious manner.
Instead of affirming my story, she patted me on the shoulder as if to humor me, like I was three years old and needed her to believe some made-up charade. “Why don’t we go in and get you cleaned up. There’s a nice warm cake fresh from the oven. Your brothers and sisters have been waiting patiently for you to come in,” she said, concern etching her features as she looked closer at my face. She shined the flashlight into my eyes once more and I instinctively held my hands up in defense.
“Your pupils aren’t dilated,” she murmured. “You’re sure you feel OK?”
I didn’t know what to do, so I said nothing. I felt fine, other than my mammoth headache, but the whole... I don’t know... scenario didn’t feel fine. The woman seemed harmless enough, but then again, so had the woman in the movie, Misery. I began to wonder if I had hit my head hard enough to have temporary amnesia.
Did I wander off into the back woods to another farm? Was that even possible?
I had to believe anything was possible at this point. But I knew something wasn’t right. And it still didn’t explain why this woman, strange as she was, treated me like I belonged here, like I was part of her family.
Weary, I followed her toward the dark shell of a home. Entering a screened porch, I noticed several pairs of work boots and layers upon layers of reeking coveralls hanging in the corner. A tiny slice of light shone beneath the heavy doorframe that led inside.
Nervous, I wiped my hands on my jeans. What the hell was I doing? Willingly going into a strange house with strange people who could be murderers? Or kidnappers? God, this is what they wrote books about all the time. I could be gracing the front page of the newspapers tomorrow, my face printed on every milk carton.
Still, when I thought about my situation, what other options did I have?
I stepped through the door into a kitchen full of animated children of all ages and sizes. My heart jumped into my throat. I knew it. I’ve walked right into some sort of human trafficking ring. I made a move to turn around, but the woman closed the door firmly and ushered me into the center of the room.
This was the real first chance I’d had of seeing her face in the light. There was something about her eyes – and her nose. Strangely familiar. My head pounded and I shrugged away the odd sensation and took in my surroundings, walls of confusion hitting me from all sides. The room, with its drab pale colors looked like a black and white photo right out of one of Gran’s old albums. There must have been some sort of template all families in rural Minnesota used to decorate their homes, because this family had the same wooden clock hanging above their refrigerator, a framed print of the Last Supper above the dinner table, and an old black woodstove in the corner.
Weirdly enough, this family’s wood stove was operational, a full orange glow coming from its depths. Square cotton towels hung from a line above the stove, and a metal pan rested on top, where a fluffy white cake sat cooling. The rest of the kitchen was simple and bare of any modern conveniences. The sink, which consisted of some wood plank sides and a metal bin, didn’t have any plumbing beneath it, just a dirty five gallon bucket. Then I knew I was dreaming. Nobody in their right minds lived without indoor plumbing.
“Dean, get your sister some water from the reservoir on the stove. She’s banged herself up a bit.”
I snapped to attention as the woman’s voice broke into my thoughts. Dean? That was my father’s name. A boy – Dean, I could only presume – hopped from the table and ran to scoop some water into a bowl. His gangly, skinny body was somehow familiar; his freckled face and straight brown hair sparking a memory I couldn’t quite place. Numb, I took the bowl from Dean and leaned against the sink for support. I realized every eye was on me and I felt like some freak show at the circus.
“Can we have cake now?” one of the children pleaded. A chorus of similar pleas echoed the request.
“Sarah, can we serve your cake while you clean up? I made angel food – your favorite.” The woman moved briskly through the kitchen grabbing plates and forks, setting the cake on the table in front of the children who all looked at the dessert like lions ready to pounce on their prey.
I was just about to correct the woman for calling me Sarah again, when I spied my reflection in an oval mirror tacked above the sink. A lone trickle of blood ran just behind my ear and down my neck. I felt the telltale signs of a lump on the back of my head. It hurt at the slightest brush of a finger. Other than that, I looked the same. I felt the same. So why did e
veryone act as if I belonged here, as though nothing were out of the ordinary?
Dipping a tattered rag into a bowl of water, I wiped my face clear of the barn’s dusty grit. Water trickled down the sides of the basin, dropping with a plunk! to the bucket below.
Amazed at the large family living in such inadequate standards, I wondered why social services or the police hadn’t gotten involved. It was apparent, as I watched the children, though, that they were happy and content, teasing and joking with one another around the table. They didn’t seem to have any idea at all what they were being subjected to, or what they were missing.
The woman spoke up, jarring me from my thoughts again. “Rodney, Bobby, take your cake out and help your father round up the cows.”
The two largest boys, broad shouldered but thin, grabbed a handful of cake each and wordlessly headed for the door.
A young girl, with a face eerily similar to mine, but slightly rounder, cleaned up the cake crumbs and collected the plates. The cake had been devoured in less than five minutes.
“Louise, when you’re finished, take Laura and Linda, change them up and put them to bed. Joyce and Janice, wash your face and get to bed, it’s late,” the woman ordered.
Rodney, Bobby, Louise, Laura, Linda, Janice, Joyce, Dean? They have all the same names as my aunts and uncles. This is weird. I felt swirls of panic in my stomach. I managed to edge closer to the door, accepting a piece of cake from Louise in the process. Everyone was moving, talking, not even noticing my hesitant retreat. If I could make it through the door, I was a fairly good sprinter. I knew I could make it to the woods before anyone could catch me. I had to get out of the Twilight Zone before I went crazy.
Leaning casually against the small, boxy fridge, I waited for the right moment when I could slip through the door. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted a calendar stuck to the side of the fridge, a magnet shaped like a tractor holding it in place. It was simple and ordinary, no cute kittens or dogs wearing hats on the monthly picture. Even the dated squares were plain and consecutively empty, all except for one, June fifteenth. A name, scrawled in miniature script fit neatly in the bottom of the square – Sarah Jane Christenson, 15.
Linked Through Time Page 2
