There and Now

by Linda Lael Miller

  Trista nodded and rested her head against Elisabeth’s shoulder. “Most times, when grown-up people go away, they don’t come back.”

  Knowing the child was referring to her lost mother, Elisabeth hugged her again. “If I don’t return, Trista, I want you to remember that it was only because I couldn’t, and not because I didn’t want to.” She stood. “Now, you go and finish your practicing while I look for the necklace.”

  Elisabeth searched Jonathan’s study, which was the small parlor in modern times, and found nothing except a lot of cryptic notes, medical books jammed with bits of paper and a cabinet full of vials and bottles and bandage gauze. From there, she progressed to the bedroom where he had made such thorough love to her only that afternoon.

  She was still angry, but just being in that room again brought all the delicious, achy sensations rushing back, and she was almost overwhelmed with the need of him. She began with the top drawer of his bureau, finding nothing but starched handkerchiefs and stiff celluloid collars.

  “Did you lose something?”

  Jonathan’s voice startled Elisabeth; like a hard fall, it left her breathless. She turned, her cheeks flaming, to face him.

  “My necklace,” she said, keeping her shoulders squared. Where is it, Jonathan?”

  He went to the night table beside his bed, opened the drawer and took out a small leather box. Lifting the lid, he looped the pendant over his fingers and extended it to Elisabeth.

  “I’m going back,” she said, unable to meet his eyes. For the moment, it was all she could do to cope with the wild emotions this man had brought to life inside her. He had taught her one thing for certain:

  she had never truly loved Ian or any other man. Jonathan Fortner had first claim on both her body and her soul.

  He kept his distance, perhaps sensing that she would fall apart if he touched her. “Why?”

  “We made love, Jonathan,” she whispered brokenly, her hands trembling as she opened the catch on the pendant and draped the chain around her neck. “That changed things between us. And I can’t afford to care for you.”

  Jonathan sighed. “Elisabeth—”

  “No,” she said, interrupting, holding up one hand to silence him. “I know you think I’m eccentric or deluded or something, and maybe you’re right. Maybe this is all some kind of elaborate fantasy and I’m wandering farther and farther from reality.”

  He came to her then and took her into his arms. She felt the hard strength of his thighs and midsection. “I’m real, Elisabeth,” he told her with gentle wryness. “You’re not imagining me, I promise you.”

  She pushed herself back from the warm solace of him. “Jonathan, I came here to warn you,” she said urgently. “There was—will be—a fire. You’ve got to do something, if not for your own sake, then for Trista’s.”

  He kissed her forehead. “I know you believe what you’re saying,” he replied, his tone gentle and a little hoarse. “But it’s simply not possible for a human being to predict the future. Surely you understand that I cannot throw my daughter’s life into an uproar on the basis of your…premonitions.”

  Elisabeth stiffened as a desperate idea struck her. “Suppose I could prove that I’m from the future, Jonathan—suppose I could show you the article that will be printed in the Pine River Bugle?”

  Jonathan was frowning at her, as though he feared she’d gone mad. “That would be impossible.”

  She gave a brief, strangled laugh. “Impossible. You know, Jonathan, until just a short while ago, I would have said it was impossible to travel from my century to yours. I thought time was an orderly thing, rolling endlessly onward, like a river. Instead, it seems that the past, present and future are all of a piece, like some giant celestial tapestry.”

  All the while she was talking, Jonathan was maneuvering her toward the bed, though this time it was for a very different reason. “Just lie down for a little while,” he said reasonably. His bag was close at hand, like always, and he snapped it open.

  “Jonathan, I’m quite all right….”

  He took out a syringe and began filling it from a vial.

  Elisabeth’s eyes went wide and she tried to bolt off the bed. “Don’t you dare give me a shot!” she cried, but Jonathan put his free hand on her shoulder and pressed her easily back to the mattress. “Ouch!” she yelled when the needle punctured her upper arm. “Damn you, Jonathan, I’m not sick!”

  He withdrew the needle and reached for the plaid lab robe Elisabeth had tried to hide behind after their lovemaking that afternoon. “Just rest. You’ll feel better in a few hours,” he urged, laying the blanket over her.

  Elisabeth sat up again, only to find that all her muscles had turned to water. She sagged back against the pillows. “Jonathan Fortner, what did you give me? Do you realize that there are laws against injecting things into people’s veins?”

  “Be quiet,” he ordered sternly.

  The door creaked open and Trista peered around the edge. “What’s wrong with Elisabeth?” she asked in a thin, worried voice.

  Jonathan sighed and closed his medical bag with a snap. “She’s overwrought, that’s all,” he answered. “Run along and do your spelling lesson.”

  “Pusher!” Elisabeth spat out once the door had closed behind the little girl. The room was starting to undulate, and she felt incredibly weak. “I should get that Farley person out here and have you arrested.”

  “Don’t you think you’re being a little childish?” Jonathan asked, bending over the bed. “I admit I shouldn’t have shoved you down that way, but you didn’t give much choice, did you?”

  Elisabeth rolled her eyes. “A pusher is…Oh, never mind! But you mark my words, Doctor—I’m filing a complaint against you!”

  “And I’m sure Marshal Haynes will track me down and throw me in the hoosegow the minute his boil is healed and he can sit a horse again.” In the next moment, Jonathan was gone.

  Struggling to stay awake, Elisabeth wondered how she could ever expect to get through to this man if he was going hold her down and drug her every time she talked about her experience. She drifted off into a restless sleep, waking once to find Trista standing beside the bed, gently bathing her forehead with a cool cloth.

  Elisabeth felt a surge of tenderness and, catching hold of Trista’s hand, she gave it a little squeeze. Then she was floating again.

  The house was dark when the medication finally wore off, and the realization that this was Jonathan’s bed came to her instantly. She laid very still until she was sure he wasn’t beside her.

  Her hand rose to her throat, and she was relieved to find the necklace was still there. Another ten minutes passed before she had the wit to get out of bed and grope her way through the blackness to the door.

  In the hallway, she carefully took the pendant off and tossed it over Trista’s threshold. Only when she was on the other side did she put it on again.

  There was pale moonlight shining in through the little girl’s window, and Elisabeth went to her bedside and gently awakened her.

  “You’re leaving,” Trista whispered, holding very tightly to her rag doll.

  Elisabeth bent to kiss her forehead. “Yes, darling, I’m going to try. Remember my promise—if I can come back to you, I will.”

  Trista sighed. “All right,” she said forlornly. “Goodbye, Elisabeth.”

  “Goodbye, sweetheart.” Elisabeth put her arms around Trista and gave her a final hug. “No matter what happens, don’t forget that I love you.”

  Trista’s eyes were bright with tears as she sank her teeth into her lower lip and nodded.

  Elisabeth drew a deep breath and went back to the door, closing her eyes as she reached for the knob, turned it and stepped through.

  She was back in the twentieth century. Elisabeth opened her eyes to find herself in a carpeted hallway, then reached out for a switch and found one. Suddenly the electric wall sconces glared.

  She opened the door to her room and peeked in. A poignant, bitter lonelin
ess possessed her because there was no trace, no hint of Jonathan’s presence. After lingering for a moment, she turned and went downstairs to the telephone table in the hallway.

  Not surprisingly, the little red light on her answering machine was blinking.

  There were three messages from Janet, each more anxious than the last, and several other friends had called from Seattle. Elisabeth shoved her fingers through her hair, sighed and padded into the kitchen, barefoot. She was still wearing the cambric dress Jonathan had given her, and she smiled, thinking what a sensation it would cause if she wore it to the supermarket.

  Since she hadn’t had dinner, Elisabeth heated a can of soup before finding the microfilm copies she’d made in the Bugle offices. It gave her a chill to think of showing Jonathan a newspaper account of his own death and that of his daughter.

  While she huddled at the kitchen table, eating, Elisabeth read over the articles. It still troubled her that no bodies had been found, but then, such investigations hadn’t been very thorough or scientific in the nineteenth century. Maybe the discovery had even been hushed up, out of some misguided Victorian sense of delicacy.

  Flipping ahead in the sheaf of copies, Elisabeth came to her own trial for the murder of Jonathan and Trista Fortner. With a growing sense of unreality, she read that Lizzie McCartney, who “claimed to be” the sister of the late Barbara McCartney Fortner, had been found guilty of the crime of arson, and thus murder, and sentenced to hang.

  Elisabeth pushed away the last of her soup, feeling nauseous. Destiny had apparently decreed her death, as well as Jonathan’s and Trista’s, and she had no way of knowing whether or not their singular fates could be circumvented.

  She took her bowl to the sink and rinsed it, then went upstairs to take a long, hot shower. When that was finished Elisabeth brushed her teeth, put on a lightweight cotton nightgown and crawled into bed.

  Unable to sleep, she lay staring up at the ceiling. It would be easy to avoid being tried and hanged—all she would have to do was drop the necklace down a well somewhere and never go back to Jonathan’s time. But even as she considered this idea, Elisabeth knew she would discard it. She loved Trista and, God help her, Jonathan, too. And she could not let two human beings die without trying to save them.

  Throughout the rest of the night, Elisabeth slept only in fits and starts. The telephone brought her summarily into a morning she wasn’t prepared to face.

  “Hello?” she grumbled into the ornate receiver of the French telephone on the vanity table. Having stubbed her toe on a chest while crossing the room, Elisabeth made the decision to move the instrument closer to the bed.

  “There you are!” Janet cried, sounding both annoyed and relieved. “Good heavens, Elisabeth—where have you been?”

  Elisabeth sighed an sank down onto the vanity bench. “Relax,” she said. “I was only gone for a couple of days.”

  “A couple of days? Give me a break, Elisabeth, I’ve been trying to reach you for two weeks! You were supposed to come to Seattle and spend a weekend with me, remember?”

  Two weeks? Elisabeth gripped the edge of the vanity table. The question was out of her mouth before she could properly weigh the effect it would have. “Janet, what day is it?”

  Her friend’s response was a short, stunned silence, followed by, “It’s the first of May. I’m on my way. Don’t you set foot out of that house, Elisabeth McCartney, until I get there.”

  Elisabeth’s mind was still reeling. If there was no logical correlation between her time and Jonathan’s, she might return to find that the fire had already happened. The idea set her trembling, but she knew she had to keep Janet from coming to visit and get back to 1892.

  She ran the tip of her tongue quickly over her dry lips. “Listen, Janet, I’m all right, really. It’s just that I met this fascinating man.” That much, at least, was true. Bullheaded though he might be, Jonathan was fascinating. “I guess I just got so caught up in the relationship that I wasn’t paying attention to the calendar.”

  Janet sounded both intrigued and suspicious. “Who is this guy? You haven’t mentioned any man to me.”

  “That’s because I just met him.” She thought quickly, desperately. “We were away for a while.”

  “Something about this doesn’t ring true,” Janet said, but she was weakening. Elisabeth could hear it in her voice.

  “I—I really fell hard for him,” she said.

  “Who is he? What does he do?”

  Elisabeth took a deep breath. “His name is Jonathan Fortner, and he’s a doctor.”

  “I’d like to meet him.”

  Elisabeth stifled an hysterical giggle. “Yes—well, he and I are taking off for a vacation. But maybe I can arrange something after I—we get back.”

  “Where are you going?” Janet asked quickly, sounding worried again.

  “San Francisco.” It was the first place that came to mind.

  “Oh. Well, I’ll just come to the airport and see you off. That way, you could introduce Jonathan and me.”

  “Umm,” Elisabeth stalled, biting her lower lip. “We’re going by car,” she finally answered. “I promise faithfully that I’ll call you the instant I step through the doorway.”

  Janet sighed. “All right but, well, there isn’t anything wrong with this guy, is there? I mean, it’s almost like you’re hiding something.”

  “You’ve pried it out of me,” Elisabeth teased. “He’s a vampire. Even as we speak, he’s lying in a coffin in the basement, sleeping away the daylight hours.”

  The joke must have reassured Janet, because she laughed. A moment later, though, her tone was serious again. “You’d tell me if you weren’t all right, wouldn’t you?”

  Elisabeth hesitated. As much as she loved Janet, Rue was the only person in the world she could have talked to about what was happening to her. “If I thought there was anything you could do to help, yes,” she answered softly. “Please don’t worry about me, Janet. I’ll call you when I get back.” If I get back. “And we’ll make plans for my visit to Seattle.”

  Mollified at least for the moment, Janet accepted Elisabeth’s promise, warned her to be careful and said goodbye.

  She showered and put on white corduroy pants and a sea green tank top, along with a pair of plastic thongs. Then after a hasty trip to the mailbox—there were two postcards from Rue, one mailed from Istanbul, the other from Cairo, along with a forwarded bank statement and a sales flier addressed to “occupant”—Elisabeth made preparations to return to Jonathan and Trista.

  As she looked at the copies of the June 1892 issue of the Bugle, however, she began to doubt that Jonathan would see them as proof of anything. He was bound to say that, while the printing admittedly looked strange, she could have had the articles made up.

  Elisabeth laid the papers down on the kitchen table and went up the back stairs and along the hallway to her room. In the bathroom medicine cabinet, she found the half-filled bottle of penicillin tablets she’d taken for a throat infection a few months before.

  The label bore a typewritten date, along with Elisabeth’s name, but it was the medicine itself that would convince Jonathan. After all, he was a doctor. She dropped the bottle into the pocket of her slacks and went back out to the vanity.

  Aunt Verity’s necklace was lying there, where she’d left it before taking her shower that morning. Her fingers trembled with mingled resolution and fear as she put the chain around her neck and fastened the clasp.

  Reaching the hallway, Elisabeth went directly to the sealed door and clasped the knob in her hand.

  Nothing happened.

  “Please,” Elisabeth whispered, shutting her eyes. “Please.”

  Still, that other world was closed to her. Fighting down panic, she told herself she had only to wait for the “window” to open again. In the meantime, there was something else she wanted to do.

  After riffling through a variety of scribbled notes beside the hallway phone, she found the name and number she wanted. Sh
e dialed immediately, to keep herself from having time to back out.

  “Hello?” a woman’s voice answered.

  Elisabeth had a clear picture of Chastity Pringle in her mind, standing in that quilting booth at the craft show, looking at the necklace as though it was something that had slithered out of hell. “Ms. Pringle? This is Elisabeth McCartney. You probably don’t remember me, but we met briefly at the craft fair, when you were showing your quilts—”

  “You were wearing Verity’s necklace,” Chastity interrupted in a wooden tone.

  “Yes,” Elisabeth answered. “Ms. Pringle, I wonder if I could see you sometime today—it’s important.”

  “I won’t set foot in that house” was the instant response.

  “All right,” Elisabeth agreed quietly, “I’ll be happy to come to you. If that’s convenient, of course.”

  “I’ll meet you at the Riverview Café,” Chastity offered, though not eagerly.

  “Twelve-thirty?”

  “Twelve-thirty,” the woman promised.

  The Riverview Café was about halfway between Pine River and Cotton Creek, the even smaller town where Chastity lived. Elisabeth couldn’t help wondering, as she stared blankly at a morning talk show to pass the time, why Ms. Pringle was being so cloak-and-dagger about the whole thing.

  At twelve-fifteen, Elisabeth pulled into the restaurant parking lot, got out of her car and went inside. Chastity hadn’t arrived yet, but Elisabeth allowed a waitress to escort her to a table with a magnificent view of the river and ordered herbal tea to sip while she waited.

  Chastity appeared, looking anxious and rushed, at exactly twelve-thirty. She was trim and very tanned, and her long, dark hair was wound into a single, heavy braid that rested over one shoulder. She focused her gaze on Elisabeth’s necklace and shuddered visibly.

  Elisabeth waited until the waitress had taken their orders before bracing her forearms against the table edge and leaning forward to ask bluntly, “What was your connection with my Aunt Verity, and why are you afraid of this necklace?”