“But then everything disappeared.” Tish did not lift her face. Flat and monotone, her voice was all but lifeless. “Gone, just like that.”
Clint suddenly indicated the parking lot. “Whose car?”
The rain blurred all outlines and it wasn’t possible to discern who climbed from behind the wheel under the protection of a black umbrella; at first I thought the man emerging into the rain was my father, but Robbie said, “Shit. I don’t believe it.”
“Who is it?” I demanded.
All of us except Tish rose to confront him; somewhere in a shadowy corner of my mind lingered the memory of the day another stranger entered the cafe, a man named Zack Dixon. But Zack was not part of this timeline; Aunt Jilly had not been attacked that summer, back in 2006.
Robbie said, “It’s Derrick Yancy.”
Tish lifted her head, leaning on the table for support.
I opened the screen door as Derrick climbed the porch steps, noting his obvious discomfort at finding himself the focal point of everyone’s attention. He closed and shook off his umbrella before entering, gaze leaping straight to Tish.
“I am so sorry, Tish,” he said with quiet sincerity, and whatever negative opinions I’d harbored about this man were at once dashed.
Her voice was as jagged as broken glass. “Case is gone…”
Ignoring everyone else for the time being Derrick strode to her side, wet shoes squeaking across the floor, and knelt. “I couldn’t get away until now. No one knows I’m here. I didn’t even chance an airline ticket. I drove straight through. Fallon has not reappeared since Saturday night. Father refuses to believe Fallon was responsible for anything. He thinks you were mugged, for Christ’s sake.” Derrick cupped Tish’s upper arm and squeezed. “I know otherwise. Fallon has lost all touch with reality. He has to be stopped. And…I may know how.”
Two hours later no one was hungry even though it was well past the dinner hour. Icy rain continued to fall, drumming on the roof; the wide front windows resembled distraught, weeping eyes. The conversation had deteriorated from its earlier animated progress; everyone was talking and no one was listening. I slipped outside for a moment to collect my thoughts, keeping under the eaves to avoid the drizzle as I paced. The wind had died. Flickertail no longer roiled with whitecaps, its silver surface pockmarked now by less-violent droplets. I paused at the far end of the porch, stalling, trying to process what Derrick had revealed.
So the Yancys’ ability to jump through time is not exclusive to Fallon.
But Derrick is too scared to try.
The back of Derrick’s head was visible from my vantage point as I peered through the front windows, hidden in the shadows of the eaves. He sat facing Tish, elbows widespread on the table; I couldn’t discern their words through the glass, only muted sounds. At age thirteen, Derrick woke one morning in a bed not his own. More bewildered than afraid, he wandered long hallways and peered into opulent rooms, at last coming across a newspaper abandoned on a desk. The date on the paper, a Chicago Tribune, was Sunday, April 10, 1910. As if touching the newsprint triggered a mechanism operated by someone out of sight, he was abruptly whisked back to his own bedroom in 1998.
“I’ve done everything in my power to forget that day,” were his exact words. “I knew enough about Fallon by then to realize he would kill me if I told him what had happened. He would have viewed my ability as a threat. I was terrified to sleep for months after that but it never happened again. To this day, I don’t know if I caused the jump to occur or if it was simply a fluke. I’ve never tried again.”
The jump.
“You have to try now.” Tish was gritty dead-serious, her bruised eyes fixed on his with the intensity of a cornered animal.
“I have no control over it. What if I can’t get back again? It’s not like there’s a guarantee for return.”
And so on.
I felt utterly disconnected, free-floating, all strings clipped as I peered through the front windows of my family’s longtime business. If returning to our real lives proved impossible, nothing else mattered – not even Derrick’s ability. So what if everyone believed this timeline was a horrible deviation from what was meant to be? Justin couldn’t very well leave Aubrey and start having babies with Jilly; Tish couldn’t bring Case back any more than Blythe and their sons could be restored to Mom, or Mathias and our children to me. Grandma and Aunt Ellen were gone. Ruthann and Marshall might as well have been stranded on distant planets. I turned away from the window, grinding my teeth, and descended the porch steps, lifting my face to the damp black sky.
The name on my lips was one I’d called upon many times in past years, connected to the man whose photograph once led me to Mathias. Whether he knew it or not, Malcolm Carter had sustained me for a long time. Clasping my hands as though praying – and, in a way, I truly was praying, hoping that somehow he would hear me through the barriers of time – I brought my intertwined fingers to my lips. “Malcolm. I know you’re out there. I can feel you out there. I always have. I believe that my sister Ruthann is with you and I need you both to hear me. I need you to know what’s happening to us here. Please, oh please, Malcolm, hear me…”
Nothing but the deep, repetitive pulse of falling rain met my ears. I inhaled a slow breath, concentrating for all I was worth. I pictured Malcolm’s face on the black and white photograph, the only tangible image of him I possessed, filling in the colors of his hair and eyes and skin, the mellow sunset sky behind him. I imagined the scent of him and the way his shoulders would feel beneath my hands. I remembered how often I’d kissed the two-dimensional image of his face; the face of a man I had loved through all time. And then I tried again.
“I know you’re out there, Malcolm. I forgive you, do you hear me? I know you never found Cora. Me, I mean, because I used to be Cora. Mathias and I brought her home to Minnesota almost eight years ago and buried her near the cabin where you meant to live after you were married. She’s safe now. I’m so sorry you couldn’t be together in your lives. It scares me so much because I’m afraid it means…” I gulped, clenching my jaw. “I’m afraid it means fate wants us to be kept apart in this life, too. And I can’t bear it.”
Headlights swept over my closed eyes; I opened them in time to see an unfamiliar truck park beside Derrick Yancy’s car. I heard the driver’s side door open, then close, before a man rounded the hood.
It was Mathias.
Joy burst through my blood, stronger than reason, stronger than instinct.
Malcolm sent him here…
But joy could only override sense for so long. Truth stared me down, an uncompromising force I could not deny. In this life Mathias was not mine. He was married; far worse, I knew he was a father to two children. I stood with both hands clasped at my chin, watching him approach Shore Leave. When he caught sight of me, immobile in the rainy darkness, he halted.
The next thing I knew I was in his arms.
“Camille.” He spoke against my hair, holding me so tightly I couldn’t draw a full breath. “I had to find you, I had to see you…”
Trembling and overwhelmed, I clung to him, pressing my lips to his neck, inhaling his scent the way I would inhale air after being trapped underwater. I knew I should shut my stupid mouth but I didn’t have the strength. “You’re here. I’ve missed you so much, Thias, oh God, I’ve missed you every second we’ve been apart…”
He dug his hands in my wet hair, rocking us side to side, his jaw against my temple. “I’ve dreamed about you every night since you left my parents’ attic. I’m not crazy, I swear to you, but I know I belong with you. We belong together. I’ve never known anything more right. It’s like I’ve been living in a dream world and I just woke up to the real one.” He drew back, clasping my face, thumbs tracing my lips. His voice was low and tortured, rasping over the words. “How is this possible?”
Hot tears seeped over my face, mixing with the cold rain. I knew what I had to do and I wasn’t sure I possessed enough will; I had to let him g
o. This version of Mathias was not mine and we could not remain in this horrible timeline in which we’d never met until now. It was my worst nightmare realized; every terrible what-if I’d ever asked, every moment I’d taken for granted. Every path that had led us to one another uprooted in this place, overturned and upended. Destroyed beyond repair.
“How?” he whispered a second time, agonized and intense. “Tell me everything. Please, trust me with this. Tell me what you told Tina.”
“I won’t do that to you.” My voice shook. “You’re a husband, a father. I know you would never do anything to hurt your children…or their mother.”
I felt his muscles tense and knew I’d struck a nerve. At last he said, “You don’t know her.” Gruff now, with strain. “We’re not happy.”
“But she’s still your wife.”
“Not in my memories. I only see you. I see us.”
“But it’s not us in this life. This life was never meant to be!” My control was crumbling and I broke away, heading for the dock.
“I don’t understand!” He followed right behind me, not about to let this go.
“Dammit, Mathias, you need to leave. I love you too much to do this to you!” I increased my pace, unable to bear looking at him.
“I knew it! I knew I wasn’t wrong.” He caught my elbow, halting my forward motion, and spun me around to face him in the wet darkness.
“Let go!” I cried, battling the image of Case dying in Tish’s arms.
“Not a chance. I love you too, don’t you hear me? I’m in love with you.”
“Don’t do this to me…” Crying now, I tried again to yank from his firm grasp.
“Who is Malcolm?” he demanded. “What does he mean to you?”
“He’s you!” I screamed, hands in fists at my sides. “You are him! Our souls have been connected through a hundred different lives and I have loved you in every last one!”
There was a sudden, tremendous commotion in the lake.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Landon, MN - July, 1882
WE REACHED LANDON THE DAY AFTER AXTON AND I HAD arrived in St. Paul.
“We’re home, dear one, come and see.” Lorie peered over her shoulder from the wagon seat as she offered this invitation. Her green-checked bonnet trailed down her back and her smile pierced my side all over again; it was my mother’s beautiful smile, warm and effortless, rife with love. Late-afternoon sun slanted against the west side of the wagon, creating a bright, oblong patch on the canvas. I lay in a restless doze, my body jostling to the rhythm of the grinding wheels, but climbed to the front of the wagon at her kind request.
I squinted as sunlight bathed my cold face, just in time to spy a wooden, hand-painted sign reading Welcome to Landon. Flowering vines bursting with blossoms climbed the sign, not to mention every fencepost in sight.
Oh –
My lips dropped open as the wagon, driven by Sawyer, rolled and creaked over Fisherman’s Street in my hometown. It was the nineteenth-century version of Fisherman’s Street, a narrow dirt track instead of smooth pavement bordered by concrete sidewalks, but I would have known it anywhere. The pine trees that guarded the south end of the road were only saplings but Flickertail glimmered wide and blue just a few hundred yards north, totally unchanged. My eyes darted left and right, conjuring up the buildings I remembered which had not yet been constructed – Anglers Inn, Eddie’s Bar, the post office, the hardware store…there was the exact spot where my family sat to watch the annual Fourth of July parade.
The only manmade structures in sight were wood-framed buildings housing a livery stable and a blacksmith shop, these to the left, while a general store with a square false front stood to the right. The general store was called Sorenson’s Dry Goods. The afternoon air shone hot and bright, sun spangling the dust stirred up by our passage along the street; two men sat on a wooden bench beneath an awning stretching from the storefront and there was an exchange of greetings. Horses were tethered to hitching rails along the street.
“Our homestead is around the lake, but minutes away,” Lorie explained.
I could only nod in response, too overcome as the wagon approached Flicker Trail, the path that forked at the beach and curved east and west around the lake. It seemed impossible that Shore Leave would not appear within the next mile on the eastern bank; I couldn’t fathom its nonexistence. Surely Mom and Grandma would be standing on the porch to welcome me home. The lake lapped a reedy shore inhabited by high-stepping white herons; rather than the wide, sandy expanse I remembered, the beach was a shallow strip of small granite stones. Boats dotted the blue surface, tranquil beneath the July sun. I’d never heard such a variety of birdsong in all my life.
How incredible that I’m seeing this.
Flickertail Lake, glimmering like cerulean satin, upon whose banks I had sunbathed for countless summer hours, in whose water I had splashed and dove, floated and tubed and skinny-dipped with my sisters and our friends.
Full circle, I thought, agony replaced by a sudden, unnatural calm.
It seemed right that I would die in this lake.
Soon I’ll be with Marshall and our baby.
At the fork we parted ways with Boyd, Rebecca, and Edward, whose homestead, White Oaks, lay to the west, the very same acreage upon which Mathias’s family would one day build their family business, where my sister and Mathias lived with their children in the homesteader’s cabin. I could picture it all so perfectly, my family in the twenty-first century. The womenfolk had remained at the forefront of my thoughts as we traveled north from St. Paul but I supposed that only made sense; their faces and voices were vividly alive in my memory because I would never see them again, at least not in life.
Please, let them be safe in their twenty-first century lives.
Let them be happy.
At all costs I shut out the sharp, intrusive voice that pleaded with me to listen, that warned I was making a terrible mistake.
Don’t do this, Ruthann.
The Rawleys are gone. You know what that means.
Fallon is still out there, he’s still a threat.
Not to me, not after tonight.
Exhaustion weighted my limbs; I had slept as though drugged in the hotel room last night, grateful that no one other than Axton knew I had lost my pregnancy. We’d told everyone that I was widowed; they were all well acquainted with the Rawley family in Iowa and believed Marshall had been a cousin to Miles, as close to the truth as I dared venture. The conversation at yesterday’s dinner in the hotel dining room had swayed between sorrow over Edward Tilson’s lost son and anger over the Yancy family causing yet more destruction in their lives. I recalled listening to Cole and Miles speak of the Yancys in Howardsville, the very night Patricia and I first met. It seemed more than a hundred years had passed since then.
A dizzying sense of disorientation settled over me yesterday as everyone crowded in a haphazard fashion around a large table in the dining room; exactly like the two families I had loved best in my old life, my own and the Rawleys, these people spoke and interacted with the ease of longtime companionship and abiding love. They were my family, to a certain extent, my Davis ancestors, flush with life and vitality and color. It was surreal to catch fleeting glimpses of Mom or Aunt Jilly in Lorie’s expressions, to watch the animation in Sawyer’s remaining eye as he spoke; golden-hazel, with a darker ring surrounding the iris, the exact same eyes I beheld when I looked in a mirror.
If Axton is Sawyer’s nephew, like they believe, then Ax and I are related after all.
I thought of the words he’d spoken at the depot.
It would mean I still have kin, Ruthie, imagine that.
“Who in the goddamn hell would believe what we had to say in defense of Spicer? Compared to the Yancys, we’re nobodies. Poor farmers from a remote corner of Minnesota. And former Rebs, to boot! I told Malcolm there wasn’t a thing he could do for Spicer but he’s stubborn as hell, always has been. He won’t let a friend down and I admire him for i
t, I do.” Boyd’s energy seemed almost visible in the air around him, unable to be contained. I figured him to be in his middle thirties, roughly ten years older than Malcolm, a huge man bristling with muscle and black curly hair. A thick mustache obscured his upper lip and he was tanner than saddle leather; it was his eyes that reminded me most of Malcolm, pecan-brown and deep with feeling.
“It destroys me to know my boy was only a few hundred miles from me when he was kilt,” Edward Tilson said. “He was the last of my boys. If I wasn’t so damn old and frail, I’d have ridden south with Malcolm and young Axton.”
The last of my boys…
Lorie and Rebecca sat to either side of the elderly physician; Edward was Rebecca’s uncle and lived in her and Boyd’s home. Lorie leaned her head on his arm, tears in her eyes; he bent his elbow to rest a hand on her cheek.
“I am goddamn sorry, Edward,” Boyd reached across the tabletop to grip the older man’s hand. “Goddamn sorry.”
“As we all are.” Sawyer spoke quietly, wide shoulders lifting with a deep sigh.
“We shall bury Blythe in the apple grove,” Rebecca decided. “So that we might visit him often. Lorie and the girls and I shall plant flowers near his stone, what say you, Uncle Edward?”
“I’ll help you, love, and I thank you,” he said, eyes crinkling in a web of wrinkles as he managed a smile.
“To think Thomas Yancy is dead at last, after all these years.” Sawyer stared into the middle distance as he spoke. “And killed by his own son’s hand. I recall Dredd. I would never have figured him for such an action. Fallon, for certain, but not Dredd.”
“Fallon is more dangerous than you could know.” My voice rasped over the words. All attention swung my direction.
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