That Other Katherine

by Linda Lael Miller

  That Other Katherine

  Linda Lael Miller

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  For yet another Kathy, Kathy Miller. Thanks for planting rose bushes,

  cooking turkey dinners, and being a first-class stepmother to Wendy.

  Chapter 1

  Seattle, Washington

  1991

  Katherine Hollis. Her name was Katherine Hollis. She thought.

  Katherine listened to the steady beeping of the hospital machines, the low murmur of the nurses' voices as they attended her. Poor creature… terrible accident… coma…

  She became aware of the pain suddenly, the crushing, ceaseless pain, and at the same time, she realized it had been there all along. She seemed to be climbing some kind of inner stairway, with each step bringing her closer to full consciousness.

  Katherine tried to remember the accident, but not even a flicker of memory lighted her way. She had no idea who would be standing there if she peeked behind the name she'd recalled.

  The pain was agonizing, and Katherine wanted to cry out, but she couldn't. For all its suffering, her body felt lifeless and cold, as rigid as a statue, while her spirit seemed to be gaining strength with every passing moment, a flame burning brighter and brighter. An explosive sensation of joy flared within her, completely separate from the misery of traumatized bone and muscle.

  She felt a tear pool along the lashes of her right eye.

  The voice Katherine heard then was masculine and hoarse with emotion. "Look—she's crying. She could be waking up, couldn't she?"

  Katherine felt a strong hand close around one of her own while the voice caressed her soul. Jeremy. A few ragtag memories trickled back. That was her brother up there in that other dimension, that place of wakefulness and reason, trying to hold on to her.

  Her heart constricted. She would have given practically anything for the chance to say goodbye, but her lips might as well have been made of marble. She couldn't even manage a flutter of her eyelids.

  I want to live, Katherine thought desperately, with the last strength left to her. There are so many things I didn't get a chance to do!

  The machines began to make strange noises, and then there was a burst of activity all around her.

  "I'll get the doctor…"

  "…crash cart…"

  "Please, Mr. Hollis… no time… waiting room…"

  "No! Kathy…" That was Jeremy's voice, frantic and young. Jeremy, whom she'd pulled behind her in a red wagon when they were both children, over a bumpy sidewalk with weeds growing between the cracks…

  In the next instant Katherine was enveloped in light more brilliant than the dazzle of a thousand spring suns. It was a moment more before she realized that a subtle change had taken place in the form and substance of her body.

  She was the same and yet different, standing on an arched bridge that seemed to be fashioned of multifaceted crystal.

  "I don't want to die," she said firmly, knowing there was someone in the light to hear her argument and weigh it. "I never fell in love, or made a wreath of spring flowers for my hair, or wore a long dancing dress, or had a baby…" She paused, then finished plaintively, "Oh, please."

  That was when Katherine heard the other voice calling, pleading, storming the very gates of heaven. It was a lusty feminine shriek.

  "No more… please… oh, God, help me… let me die…"

  There was an interval then of fathomless peace, followed by a wordless answer from the glorious, unutterably beautiful light. I have heard.

  Immediately after that, Katherine was caught up in a spinning storm of iridescent fire. She tumbled end over end through a crystal tunnel and then landed with a sudden, solid thump.

  Joy filled her. She was back inside her body; she could feel her heartbeat, the moist tension of her skin, the movement of her fingers. Even better, she was fully conscious, and she could see.

  A frown creased her sweat-dampened forehead. She wasn't in the hospital; this room had high ceilings with plaster molding and pale pink wallpaper striped in silver, and instead of the standard railings on the sides and foot of the bed, there were huge bedposts with carved pineapples on top.

  Her stomach was bare, and it resembled an overripe watermelon with skin stretched over it. Her bare knees were drawn up, her legs apart, and there was an old man standing in the V, looking ponderous.

  She decided she was having some kind of crazy dream, fraught with Freudian meanings.

  She didn't recognize the body or the room. None of what she was seeing could possibly be real…

  She screamed. Except the pain. That was totally authentic.

  "What the hell is going on here?" she cried when she got her breath back.

  The white-haired man looked up from whatever medical intimacy he'd been performing, his florid face a study in Puritan disapproval. "Now, Katherine, there is no need to use profanity. I should think you would be trying to redeem yourself, rather than make things worse."

  "This hurts," she babbled, panting. "This whole situation was sprung on me with no warning… no preparation… I never got to go through Lamaze training… I want morphine!"

  "Mrs. Winslow," the doctor replied with testy patience, "during the war, I treated men who'd had their legs and arms shot off. Not one of them carried on the way you have today."

  "They weren't having babies!" Katherine blurted, and then she screamed again. It seemed that the whole lower half of her body had become one giant muscle, about as much under her control as a runaway train would have been. "Oh, God… nobody told me it would feel like this!"

  "Kindly stop bothering the Almighty," said the man. "It would have behooved you to consult Him a little earlier, it seems to me."

  Katherine recalled the voice she'd heard from the crystal bridge, calling out to heaven for mercy.

  Her body… this body she didn't recognize… tensed again, violently. Her cotton nightgown clung to her skin, transparent with perspiration.

  "Push," the doctor instructed crisply, his face taut with concentration. "Mary!" He barked the name over one shoulder, and the door popped open, revealing a pale young woman in long skirts.

  "Yes, Dr. Franz?" The girl's eyes were the size of soccer balls, and she was wringing her hands nervously.

  "Fetch Gavin," ordered the physician. "Immediately. Tell him his child is about to be born, just in case he's interested!"

  The fitful maid rushed off to obey.

  Katherine was braced on her elbows, tears streaming down her face. "Why are you people in costume?" she managed to gasp out, after her next contraction. "Who's Gavin?"

  Dr. Franz arched one bushy eyebrow. "There is no need to add insult to injury, Mrs. Winslow, by pretending you don't know your own husband."

  "I don't have a husband." Katherine panted, clutching the bedclothes as another pain began to gain steam on the inside of her pelvis. "And my name isn't Winslow. It's Hollis. Katherine Hollis."

  "Nonsense," said the doctor briskly. "You're Katherine Simmons Winslow. I've known you since you came to Seattle—heaven help the hapless place."

  The thrusting sensation in Katherine's abdomen was building to another crescendo, and yet the tears on her face were ones of happiness. She was alive! She didn't know where she was, or how she'd gotten there, but she was alive!

  An impatient knock sounded at the door, but Katherine was too busy with the current contraction to pay much attention. When a dark-haired m
an appeared beside the bed, however, she was thunderstruck by his good looks and by her own sense of shattering recognition. She'd seen his face in her dreams a thousand times—she recalled that if little else.

  "Nice of you to make an appearance, Gavin," grumbled Dr. Franz. "There now, Katherine, one more good push."

  Reluctantly, it seemed, Gavin reached down and took her hand between both his own. Even in that state of great confusion and greater pain, she felt a jolt at his touch.

  Her torso arched high off the mattress, taking no command from her mind. She clung to Gavin's hands, and her primitive cry, half groan and half scream, echoed against the walls of the strange, old-fashioned room. The anguish of childbirth peaked, and then there was relief, a sensation of something slipping from her. Soon after that she heard the angry squall of an infant.

  She saw Gavin's steel-gray eyes dart toward the newborn, then shift away. He looked down at her with what seemed to be a mingling of contempt and furious hurt.

  "You have a son, Gavin," Dr. Franz announced, as though Katherine had had nothing to do with the process.

  Gavin's strong jawline flexed, relaxed again. His gaze scored her face. "Kathy has a son," he corrected, and then he let her hand fall to the mattress, turned abruptly, and left the room.

  "Let me see the baby," she pleaded hoarsely. Later, she would try to reason things out. For now, she just wanted to see this child she'd given birth to but never conceived.

  He was tiny and red and messy, and she couldn't imagine even a Christmas angel being more beautiful.

  "Hello, handsome," she said, feeling joyous exhaustion as an infinitesimal hand closed around her finger. The far side of the crystal bridge already seemed more dream than reality now, something imagined. "I hope we can be friends. In case you haven't noticed, I'm not very popular around here."

  Dr. Franz was doing painful things, things it seemed better not to think about. An Indian girl in a drab calico dress, long like the maid's, took the baby and left the room. Katharine was suddenly too drowsy to protest.

  Several women came in, all looking like fugitives from an episode of "Little House on the Prairie," with their hair upswept and the hems of their dresses brushing the floor, and helped Katherine from the bed. Brisk hands washed her and pulled a clean nightgown over her head, and the sheets were crisp and fresh when she lay back down on them.

  "You're to take this," one of the women said, pouring liquid from a brown bottle into a spoon. "Dr. Franz left it for you."

  Katherine obediently opened her mouth and accepted the medicine, which tasted like lawnmower fuel smelled. Then she settled back against the fluffy pillows, barely able to keep her eyes open. "Gavin hates me," she said, sighing and yawning at the same time.

  There was only one woman in the room then; she had gray-streaked brown hair and pale green eyes, and although her expression was stern, there was a softness about her mouth. "It isn't as though you haven't given him cause," was the answer. "But you've also given him a son. A man will forgive a great deal for such a gift."

  Katherine closed her eyes, too weary to go on, and was soon dreaming. Although she caught glimpses of the light and the crystal bridge, she didn't wander close, and when she awakened it was to see her son sleeping in an ornate antique cradle next to her bed. Her heart caught when she noticed Gavin crouching on the hearth, lighting an early evening fire.

  "Gavin?"

  His broad shoulders tensed beneath the fine white fabric of his shirt, and he did not turn to look at her. He rose to his full height, well over six feet, and gripped the mantelpiece with strong, sun-browned hands. The light from the gas-fed fixtures on the walls flickered in his dark hair and on the shining black leather of his riding boots.

  Katherine phrased her question carefully. "What will you name the child?"

  Slowly he turned to meet her gaze, his pewter eyes cold and wary. He couldn't entirely hide his surprise at the inquiry, though Katherine could see he was trying. "Name him?"

  "He is your son, after all." How she wished that she too could lay just claim to that beautiful infant boy. She remembered little of her old life… if indeed it really had been a Me and not just an illusion… but she knew she'd longed for a baby from the day she was given her first doll.

  Gavin's answer was a quietly brutal chuckle. "Is he?" he countered, turning back to the fire.

  Katherine felt tears well up behind her eyes, but she refused to shed them. Somehow, through an instinct that seemed oddly like memory, she knew this man would not respond well if she wept. "Your wife was unfaithful to you," she said.

  Another chuckle, sardonic and wicked. "Yes," he replied, turning to face her, his arms folded. "You were. Are."

  "Then why haven't you divorced me?"

  Gavin smiled cordially. "Believe me, darling, I would love to, but even in the grand and gloriously modern year of 1895, such things simply aren't done."

  Katherine sat bolt upright as a series of mental puzzle pieces dropped into place. The primitive birth, the gas lamps on the walls, Gavin's oddly formal clothes, the long dresses the women had worn. "In 1895?" she echoed, awed.

  "Please," Gavin said skeptically. "None of your little dramas. You know exactly who you are, where you are, and what you did. And if I have anything to say about it, you're never going to forget."

  Chapter 2

  Katherine was unaccountably wounded by Gavin's dislike and troubled by memories that could not have been memories. Her emotional reactions to him during their first encounter had been ones of recognition, not discovery.

  She averted her gaze for a moment, fingers plucking at the elaborate lace trim of the top sheet. "Suppose I told you I'm not the Katherine you knew," she ventured hoarsely. "Suppose I said I'm really another woman, from another time?"

  Gavin clasped his hands together behind his back and rocked slightly on his heels. "I would respond that pretending to have lost your grip on sanity won't save you from my revenge," he said, and the tone of his voice made the otherwise cozy room turn chilly. "Instead it might just land you in an asylum."

  "Revenge?" Katherine swallowed. Just the suggestion of a nineteenth-century mental hospital brought on instant wariness.

  His smile was callous. "I loved you on our wedding day, Kathy," he said. "Perhaps if I still cherished tender feelings toward you, I would simply send you away somewhere, with an allowance and a maid, and get on with my life. Alas, my fatal flaw is that I want you to know the same humiliation, the same sense of betrayal, that I did." He came to stand at Katherine's feet, his knuckles white when he gripped the bedpost. His gray eyes glinted like frost over steel as he looked at her. "This time, Kathy, you'll be the one people pity and hold in contempt."

  Katherine's throat constricted. She didn't love this man, didn't even know this man, and yet his words were like hard-flung stones, bruising her soul. "Gavin…"

  He gave a low, mocking laugh. "How tenderly you speak my name," he said, going to stand beside the cradle. His expression grew softer as he looked down at the sleeping baby. "Were you as sweet to your lover as you are to me?"

  Katherine fell back against her pillows and put both hands to her face for a moment, struggling to gain some composure. "I don't know," she said, in all honesty.

  When she looked again, she caught Gavin watching her with naked sorrow in his stormy eyes. The expression was so quickly sublimated, however, that she wondered if she'd imagined it.

  "Good night," Gavin said without emotion, and then he turned and strode from the room, closing the door briskly behind him.

  Katherine lay shaking in that other woman's childbed for a very long time, watching the shadows gather in the corners of the room and the fire die to embers on the hearth. Finally, when she felt strong enough, she rose and went to kneel carefully by the baby's cradle.

  Her son slept, his thick dark hair like ebony against the white blankets, and she touched him ever so gently, marveling that so beautiful a creature could exist in such an uncertain world. He was a mi
niature Gavin Winslow, this tiny soul, and Katherine already loved him, already thought of him as her own.

  "You look just like your dad," she said in a whisper. "One of these days, he'll notice that. Might take a while, though, because as you can see, he's a very hardheaded man. We'll have to be patient, you and I."

  For a long time she lingered beside the cradle, admiring the child, marveling. Then, when she began to feel the strain in her weary body, she stood awkwardly and made her way to the bureau.

  There was a mirror above the dresser, framed in dark, heavy wood, and Katherine's first glimpse of herself had all the shocking impact of a body slam by a major league quarterback.

  Her knees weakened, and she raised one hand to her chest in an unconscious effort to modify the pounding of her heart. She did not remember who she had been before the accident, before crossing the crystal bridge and finding herself in 1895, but she knew she hadn't looked at all like the woman reflected in the glass.

  In fact, she could almost see her previous self, standing beside this stranger she had become.

  In that other life, she'd been small and slight. The woman looking back at her was tall, with a lush hourglass figure.

  Before, Katherine had had short brown hair, worn in a smooth, bouncy cut. Now, dark auburn tresses tumbled, thick and wavy, around the bodice of her nightgown. Her eyes were green, her cheekbones high and well defined, her lips full, her skin flawless and very creamy, like fine ivory.

  Katherine stared at herself for a long time. Then, when the weakness grew too great, she turned and made her way back to the bed.

  She had barely settled beneath the covers when a woman entered the room carrying a tray. It was the same girl Dr. Franz had sent to bring Gavin when it was clear that the baby's birth was imminent.

  "Supper, missus," she said without meeting Katherine's gaze.

  Given that this was 1895 and that the mistress of the house had obviously had an affair, Katherine supposed the maid saw her as a scarlet woman and preferred not to associate. The thought only made Katherine feel more isolated, confused, and afraid.