The Ghost and Miss Hallam: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series Book 1)

by Barbara Bartholomew

  “Only when I’m here. When I’m with Lynne I’m still half transparent.”

  “Lynne? That’s your young woman’s name?”

  He nodded. “Lynne Hallam. She’s twenty four, going on twenty five, and she comes from a town in New Jersey. She has extremely bossy parents and equally bossy sisters and a big brother. They all try way too hard to look after her.”

  “I had a brother,” she said thoughtfully. “He and I were all the children of my parents who survived to adulthood. He was very important to me.”

  “I have a sister,” he countered, “but she wouldn’t know me if she saw me and most likely couldn’t care less. Do you think twenty four is too young?”

  “Too young for what?” she asked with suddenly whetted interest.

  “Too young for me. I’m a whole decade older than that. She probably thinks I’m an old man.”

  Maud’s laughter sounder silvery and surprisingly young for a woman in her seventies. “Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself considering that you still haven’t decided whether to live or die?”

  He stared at her balefully. “You do bring a man crashing right down to the ground, don’t you?”

  Her laughter stilled to a tender smile. “Perhaps that’s the reason you’re here. So that I can help you decide.”

  “That’s not something I get to choose,” he said in horror, “it’s up to the doctors and nurses and to God, I guess.”

  “Sometimes choice is involved, Moss.”

  She popped corn on the range in the kitchen and they both ate it, hot and buttery, while they watched the evening news on a black and white television. Afterwards she beat him at a game of checkers and then drifted into a rather aimless conversation.

  “All those years you spent in prison, Moss,” she changed the subject, “your life didn’t grow in the normal way.”

  “You’re saying I’m weird,” he teased, already feeling like she was the cranky old aunt he’d never actually had. He felt almost like a family member and guessed it was because she was so obviously fond of him.

  “Not exactly. Only that your social growth was likely stunted. Oh, I’m sure you learned a lot of practical things from the skilled criminals who mentored your growing up years, but not a lot about marriage and family and how to deal with the opposite sex. What I’m trying to say is that in some ways your Lynne is probably just the right age for you. A thirty-five year old woman would probably be mature beyond your years.”

  Maybe it was the reminder of his associations in prison, but his laughter was embittered. “So you’re giving your approval. You’re saying I can ask her to marry me.”

  “Don’t get above yourself, son. She might think taking you on was more than she’d want. She might say no.”

  “And here I thought I was irresistible.”

  She didn’t laugh this time, but looked at him thoughtfully. “Most likely there’s some reason the two of you came together, but it has to be about her as well as you.”

  “Well, she did say she’d been sent out here as a punishment. Maybe I’m her discipline. You know a rapping on the hands for being naughty.”

  Deep lines cut into Maud’s forehead. “What had she done and who was setting the punishment.”

  “Her family apparently. I told you they were bossy. She’s the youngest and it looks like they all push her around.”

  “But what did she do?” Maud insisted again.

  He shrugged. “Couldn’t have been much of anything. She doesn’t look like she’d hurt a kitten.”

  Maud pursed her lips, but didn’t comment. This was one of those instances, he guessed, when the old woman thought he was younger than his years and a mite naïve. But she hadn’t seen Lynne. She couldn’t know what an absolute sweetheart the young woman was.

  He slept in her guest bedroom that night, enjoying the scent of wind-dried sheets and pillowcases and in the morning he helped her make the breakfast pancakes.

  After caring for the domestic animals, she showed him how to saddle a glossy black mare, who seemed not to know that he was a spook or something, and then the two of them on horseback, they rode off into the late summer morning.

  He’d never ridden before and was more than a little self-conscious in the saddle, but she was as at ease as she’d been in her rocking chair. She’d ridden all her life, she told him.

  These hills didn’t provide the best grazing in the world, but there was a scattering of Hereford cattle, a couple of milk cows and Maud’s beloved horses. “My brother gave me my first pony,” she said. “I was only about three but I’ll never forget that day.” She chuckled. “In some ways ponies can be harder to handle than horses. They are little, but mighty strong-minded. It took a few days for Brownie and me to work things out between us, but after that we were inseparable.”

  He wished Lynne could be here with them to see the red hills with Maud Sandford riding at her side, able to hear her stories and ask questions about her life. He’d just have to listen as hard as he could so he could tell her every last detail.

  “You grew up in the city?” she asked, pausing so they could savor the view from the top of a hill where, it seemed to him, they could see half the county.

  “On the California coast. You know all cliffs and angles and the beautiful sea beyond. I loved it there, but I don’t know if I could bear to go back. Both my parents died while I was in prison.” He tried to sound matter-of-fact as though this was a perfectly normal thing to have endured, but instead he felt the scalding pain that always came when he thought of his mom and dad.

  “What were they like, your parents?” Her horse whickered softly and she patted it between the ears.

  He considered. “Mom was gentle and soft-spoken, but when she said something even Dad listened. He was a bit bombastic, given to loud pronouncements and demands, but his heart was soft as mush. He was older than her and thought he had to look after her, though I’m fairly sure it was the other way around. I was so young when I was sent away that we never got past that teenager-father point where we were always butting heads.”

  “I’m sure he knew how much he meant to you.”

  He closed his eyes. “I hope he did. I hope they both did. Anyway at that point in time, Cynthia was the apple of their eyes, the spoiled darling who could do no wrong while I was arrogant and rebellious, convinced that my folks were hopelessly old-fashioned and didn’t understand my sensitive self.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. What you’re telling me is all a natural part of growing up. It would have evolved over time.”

  “Only we ran out of time,” he responded bitterly. “One Christmas eve the police came to the house and accused me of horribly murdering the girl who had been my girlfriend. She’d just broken up with me, you see, and we’d had a loud and noisy quarrel at school where everybody heard. They said I’d been the last person seen with her and she had my hoodie wrapped around her neck. They said I’d strangled her with it.”

  Suddenly he understood what he was doing, exposing this old woman to such information. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “You don’t want to hear this.”

  She met his eyes with an unflinching look. “I do if you need to tell it.”

  He decided they both needed a change of subject. “What happened to your brother?”

  “He died when I was seventeen.”

  Chapter Eight

  By morning it seemed to Lynne that she had no choice but to turn her phone back on. The minute she did, it seemed, it started the familiar chirping.

  “Hi, Lana,” she said.

  Her oldest sister’s voice started out a little tentatively. “Lynne, been meaning to get in touch and see how you’re liking the wild west.”

  A suitably casual beginning, Lynne thought resentfully, if she couldn’t see from her missed call log that Lana had attempted to reach her half a dozen times already this morning.

  “All good,” she responded. “Though it’s a little quiet out here on the ranch.”

&nbs
p; “I suppose it’s lovely.”

  “Not the way we’re used to thinking,” she said honestly. “Not with trees and mountains and lots of streams and lakes. But it has its own beauty if you’re tough enough to stand it.”

  This was, apparently, the opening for which her sister had been waiting. “Look, babe, if it’s too much for you out there, I’ll talk Mom and Dad into letting you come home.”

  And she could do it. As Lynne’s oldest sibling who was a nurse and a wife and mother and married to a professor, she always got the family respect that Lynne longed for. “No,” she said hastily, appalled at the idea of leaving Moss behind, not knowing what had happened to her. “I’m getting lots of work done. Maud’s journals are fascinating.” Not exactly true. It seemed her that teenagers and their diaries were much the same. She really hadn’t found much there that Mom could use, though Moss seemed to be giving her the intimacy with the writer that might lead to real insights.

  “If you’re sure,” Lana said doubtfully.

  Lynne was only half successful at reassuring her sister, but finally, having chatted a bit about her two little girls, Lana closed the conversation and she was able to go into the kitchen to start the coffee. This morning she had a sense of dread as though at any minute they’d call from the hospital to say that, mercifully freed from his vegetative state, Moss Caldecott had passed on.

  Only thing was it could have happened at any hour of the night. Maybe that was why he’d had to leave her. But nobody would call. As far as they were concerned she had no claim on him and no right to any news at all.

  The next call was from her brother David. Obviously Mom and Dad were delegating. David was more candid. “What’s this about you pretending to be related to a dead man?” he queried after the briefest of greetings.

  Lynne sighed. “He’s not dead. He’s just in a coma.”

  “The best of company,” he quipped. “Can’t talk back.”

  She didn’t dignify that comment with a reply.

  That didn’t stop David. He was a musician and teacher who played with a jazz band. He could also be surprisingly blunt. Perhaps he’d learned to speak up for himself by being the only boy in the family. “But Lynne, you do know he’s not your brother. I’m your brother and the whole idea makes me jealous.”

  “I know, David. I just felt sorry for him, all alone in the hospital without any friends or family.”

  “But Lynne, he’s in a coma. He doesn’t know the difference.”

  A long pause didn’t discourage him. Finally she said, “Somehow, David, I think he does.”

  He didn’t offer to try to talk Mom and Dad into bringing her home. Instead he said, “Make your own choices, little sister. It’s about time.”

  Surprised, she said goodbye and shut off the phone. Sometimes her only brother didn’t say what she expected. Maybe he understood, just a little bit, what is was like to be the baby of the family when you were a grownup twenty four years old. Perhaps it was somewhat like being the only boy in the family.

  Alarms were going off around him and with no other sense than hearing to tell him what was going on, Moss knew he was in crisis. Dimly, as though buffered by some kind of insulation, he felt assaults made on his body and wondered if they were shocking his heart the way he’d seen it done in movies.

  He should be worried, he supposed, but wasn’t sure anything mattered much. If he woke up, it would be to pain and struggle as his body tried to recover from the damage done by that truck. Even his brain wouldn’t be the same, he might have to face the rest of his life with the kind of challenges dealt with by people a whole lot braver than he was.

  He’d been through so much. Fear and fighting, men who had never known anything else as his closest companions. Profane, distorted human beings who’d not had an even chance, not from the day they were born, as well as those who were so deeply disturbed that they found pleasure in torturing others, their only ability to relate through pain.

  What chance had he at turning his life into something positive now?

  And then he remembered something Maud had said to him. She’d said not everything happened by chance. Sometimes choice came into play as well.

  That led him back to the girl with the heart-shaped face and the so endearing smile. If he did have a choice, he would choose to spend what ever time he could beg, borrow or steal with her. Another five minutes was worth any cost he could pay.

  Mentally he gritted his teeth and tried to hang on while the medical professionals fought to save his life. He couldn’t even breathe for himself, but air was kept pumping into his lungs and through his body. ‘Trying as hard as I can, Lynne,’ he forced the thought through his brain. ‘Lynne!’ And then, because he felt himself being whirled away, he thought he’d lost.

  And then she was there right in front of him, so deeply absorbed in what she was doing that she didn’t even know she had company.

  She was reading from Maud’s journal. He peered over her shoulder and began to read as well.

  We lost Simon today. It’s almost impossible to write those words. They can’t be real. My brother is gone forever. How can I go on without him? Why can’t I just die too?

  He’d been sick for so long, getting weaker so gradually that I began to take it for granted that he would go on that way until one day he took a turn for the better and began to get well. We would go riding together. He would come over, bringing his pretty wife to visit. He and Mama would be friends again.

  Serena sent the neighbors for us. She wouldn’t leave him herself. I grabbed my bonnet, as though it mattered, and tied the strings even as I ran outside to the neighbor’s wagon that was waiting to take us to Simon and Serena’s farm. I didn’t expect Mama to go, but she was right behind me, not even bothering with her bonnet as she climbed on board, her face still and white.

  When he married Serena, Mama said she’d never step into their house, but today she left all that behind and went to her dying son. Edward was there with his sister, sitting at the side of the man who had been his best friend since they were old enough to ride their ponies between neighboring ranches.

  Mama ignored them both, Serena and Edward, as she bent down to clasp Simon’s hand where he lay pale and weak on his bed. He looked like Papa, I thought, a resemblance I’d never noticed before, but his character was more like Mama’s. The two of them were the most stubborn human beings I’d known and that was what put them into clashing with each other, over little things all the time Simon was growing up, and when he was a man over his determination to marry the one neighbor girl Mama couldn’t approve.

  He’d been as stubborn as she and now I was glad. At least he and Serena had been allowed a few years together.

  “My son,” Mama whispered in a cracked voice that didn’t sound like her own.

  He managed a smile. “Mama,” he said, than looked past her to where I stood. “Little sister.”

  It was all there was time for and then Mama moved aside and gestured to Serena to move close so that they were holding hands when he died. And me, the girl who never lets anyone see her cry, turned to Edward and went right into his arms, sobbing like a baby.

  Nothing will ever be the same for any of us. And I can’t talk about how I feel out loud to other people, but I can put it into my stories, spinning all the feelings out in words so that they won’t fester and burn inside me until I am as bitter as my mother.

  Lynne glanced up and her heart jolted within her. One more time. He had been able to come back once again to spend time with her.

  He indicated the journal with the wave of a hand. “She was telling me about that just today. She said her brother died when she was seventeen.”

  Lynn felt a kind of jealousy of this long dead woman who kept seizing Moss away from her. The feeling was not rational or reasonable, she knew, but then feelings rarely were.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.”

  He shrugged as though to allow the details of the day to slide away from him. She fe
ared it had not been a good day for him, but was afraid to ask. Sometimes it was better not to know too many details.

  Her phone chirped at her. This time it was her other sister. “Hi, Loy,” she said impatiently.

  Like her parents, Loy was a college professor, though at a less well known institution than the one with which her mom and dad graced their presences. Still, like her older brother and sister, she was an individual of many accomplishments to make her family proud.

  Lynne thought sourly and not for the first time that she was the only one who didn’t fall into place with measurable success and blue ribbons for outstanding merits.

  “Lynne, darling, I’ve been trying to reach you since last night. Hope all is well?”

  “Just great. You can tell Mom and Dad that I’m fine and not pretending to be anybody else so I can visit helpless men in the hospital.”

  She looked up to see Moss watching her with humor visible in his eyes. Drat him! He was enjoying eavesdropping on her conversation. She had a hard time keeping an answering grin from her lips.

  “If I should happen to talk to them,” Loy agreed smoothly. “But the real reason I called is to tell you I’m engaged.”

  This was not a surprise. Loy had been living with Roger Stately for the past five years. Commonly such a relationship was termed an engagement, most likely leading to an eventual marriage.

  “Congrats. Give Roger my best wishes.”

  “It’s the other way around,” Loy commented with amusement. “In our grandmother’s world, you congratulated the groom and gave your best wishes to the bride. Anyway, I’m not marrying Roger.”

  This was a surprise. Still she had to remember it was an engagement, not a marriage, and the one apparently just concluded had lasted five years. These days living together could go on longer than something that started with a formal wedding. “Then who is the lucky fiancé?”

  “His name is Joseph Hardy.”

  “You’re engaged to Joe Hardy?” Lynne asked with increasing amusement.