A Twist in Time (44 page)

“Mommy,” Pony shrieked. “Come and see the fish.”

Lucy smiled. Galen looked up, his expression soft. Hardly like a Viking warrior at all. He was a good man and true, constant in his love for her and patient with Pony. He’d never once said he wanted a boy after Pony had arrived and been named for his mother and her horse goddess.

He’d get one now, of course. Lucy patted her stomach. In about another five months. That was one reason why they’d decided to come back to live in San Francisco again. No more babies delivered in Thailand. It was time to come home from the sea.

Jake, as it turned out, had left the apartment house to her in a hastily made will before Casey had gotten to him. And she happened to have a gift for the stock market. You can trade from anywhere with a satellite phone and an Internet connection. So she and Galen were more than set. They could fund his efforts to save Gaia from mankind till the cows came home.

She leaned over, and the weight of Leonardo’s book in her bag jostled Pony. “Sorry, honey,”

Lucy said. “Oooh, those are great fish.” She’d taken to carrying the book around with her again ever since they hit land last week. It was a little worrying. She thought she’d left that whole obsession thing behind her. Other than her obsession with Galen, of course. That hadn’t abated one bit. Nor had his for her. She’d had to unlearn some prejudices about Vikings.

The Exploratorium was emptying out. Galen glanced toward the door marked
Danger, No
Admittance
in the hallway beside the gift shop.

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They were here to check that the machine was still secure.

They drifted toward the gift shop, Pony in tow.

A little docent with mousy brown hair and big eyes hurried over. “Closing time, sorry,” she announced.

“Okay,” Galen said. “We’ll just stop at the restrooms before I take my two girls home.”

The docent smiled.

And Lucy shuddered. The echoing Exploratorium around her seemed to pulse in and out. She couldn’t get her breath. She could feel Leonardo’s machine behind that door as though she could see right through the metal. And she could feel his book under her arm, almost . . .

quivering. Was that possible?

“Lucy, are you all right?” Galen was at her side, supporting her. She staggered against him. “You need to sit down.” He looked around.

“Over here, ma’am,” the little docent said. “Here’s a bench.”

“Thank you,” Lucy murmured as Galen helped her to sit.

“What’s wrong with Mommy?” Pony asked in a small voice.

“Nothing, honey,” Lucy managed. “Maybe Mommy didn’t eat enough at lunchtime.”

The museum was empty now, all the noise now concentrated out by the doors.

“I’m fine,” Lucy insisted as both Galen and the docent hovered.

“You look . . . uh . . . pretty pale,” the docent said. There was something about her . . . had Lucy seen her before?

Galen looked around. “Can you look after Pony?” he asked the docent. “I’ll buy a coffee mug at the gift shop and get a glass of water.”

The docent grabbed Pony’s hand, and Galen strode away.

The presence of the time machine at Lucy’s back was palpable. Leonardo’s book seemed almost to . . . yearn for something. That sounded crazy. Better take her mind off this.

“Have you been a docent long?” she asked.

The girl turned her attention up to Lucy and . . . and a connection sparked between them. The girl’s eyes were really quite beautiful. Hazel maybe, with long, thick lashes.

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“A few years. It pays the bills while I wait for my ship to come in.”

“And what exactly would your ship look like?”

The girl smiled, a self-deprecating, self-aware smile that said she was smart and knew well enough that being so was not always an advantage. “Well . . . I write books. You know how it is.” She looked up to see Lucy’s expression of sympathy. “Oh, I’m published,” she assured Lucy.

“But it doesn’t come with health insurance or a four-oh-one(k). Working for the city of San Francisco does that.”

“What do you write?”

“Romances. Well, they aren’t the usual romances,” the girl assured her. “They’re very carefully researched.”

“Historical?”

She nodded. “Premedieval. The origins of the age of courtly love.”

What would this girl do if she knew she had a Dark Ages Viking not twenty feet away collecting water from her water fountain in a cup that said . . . Lucy peered over at him . . .
Explore today
at the Exploratorium
? She’d probably wet her pants.

The girl sighed. “That was a time to live in.” Longing drenched her voice.

And Lucy knew.

Just as Frankie Suchet must have known that day nearly five years ago now, Lucy knew.

Sureness. Rightness. The feelings coursed through her. Galen came up, a worried frown creasing his brow.

She smiled, first at him and then at the girl. “I have a gift for you. You’re just the person to appreciate it.” Lucy hauled Leonardo’s book from her bag and handed it to the girl.

The girl glanced from the book to Lucy and back again. “This is old. . . . I . . . I couldn’t take this.”

“Of course you can. I want to give it to you, just as it was given to me.” She glanced to Galen and stilled his protest with a look.

The girl opened the leather binding gingerly. “It’s . . . it’s written backward.”

“Yes.” Points to her for seeing that. To most people it just looked like gibberish.

“What language is it in?”

“Archaic Italian, some Latin.”

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The girl looked dubious.

“Take a class. It will be worth your time. Or have it translated. There’s a guy over at Berkeley, Dr. Dent. He could do the job.”

Galen swept up Pony in one arm. Lucy rose, feeling better than she had all week. She couldn’t keep from smiling. “I’m feeling okay now. We can go.” Galen looked disturbed. He glanced significantly at the
Danger
door. “I’ve done what I came to do,” she assured him. Turning to the girl, Lucy said, “What’s your name? I’d like to pick up some of your books.”

The little mouse blushed charmingly. “Diana Dearborn.”

“That’s a great name for a romance writer.”

“I didn’t change it. That’s what my mother named me,” she said defensively.

“Lucky you.” Lucy pressed Diana’s hands. “Have a wonderful time. I did. It will change your life.

Maybe it will transform you. And when you’re ready . . .” She leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “Look behind the door.”

Diana Dearborn looked shocked, puzzled. Yeah. She would. But not forever. She’d figure it out.

Galen downed the rest of the water and gave the cup to Pony. He took Lucy’s arm and guided her protectively out into the night. “What about the machine?” he whispered into her ear.

“It’s there. I felt it. It’s fine. And we’re done with it. The book needed to go to someone else. I think it needed to go to Diana Dearborn.”

“You look as though a weight has been lifted.”

“An obsession, more likely. One of them. I still have obsessions.” She rubbed his arm, feeling the hard muscle through his sweater.

He looked down at her, a smolder rising in his ice blue eyes. “Pony really likes that nice lady who babysat the other night, don’t you, sweet one?”

“Yesss,” Pony said carefully. She was newly aware that she had a sibilant
s.
“S-she is very nice.

She likes Vandal.”

“Vandal likes her,” Galen said, talking to Pony but still looking at Lucy. “Even though he’s very protective of you.”

“And they’re doing Wagner at the opera . . . ,” Lucy added. Galen was wild for Wagner. All that Germanic Sturm und Drang must be pretty close to his own experience.

He gave her a warning look. “You know that Wagner always puts me in the mood for . . .”

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She sighed, trying not to grin. “Something to do with pillaging? I guess I can handle it.”

“
Ja,
” he said, his accent coming up a little, just as it always seemed to do in the bedroom. “You handle it, Lucy.” He bent to kiss her ear. “And I will handle you. Equal.”

“I warn you, you’re likely to feel equally pillaged.”

“Ahhh, I’ll try to bear up,” he said sadly. “My proud Viking spirit has been broken.”

“Sometimes I wish,” Lucy laughed. But she didn’t. She liked him difficult and protective and even demanding. He was a match for her in so many ways.

Galen opened the door for Lucy and bundled Pony into the car seat of the black Escape Hybrid.

Vandal lavished her with kisses. Lucy slid into the passenger seat. The car smelled like new leather and wet dog. It had been raining earlier.

“Vandal,” Pony cried, laughing as the big black dog washed her ear. “What an
yful hund.
” What would Pony’s kindergarten teacher think of her mixture of Old and modern English?

Galen came around to the driver’s seat. He loved to drive. In fact, he loved to drive fast, but he didn’t with Pony in the car.

“Why do you like opera so much?” Lucy asked when he had settled behind the wheel.

“Because it seems magic, of course. The singing, the music of so many instruments joining together into another thing altogether, the way they make you think the stage is so many different places . . .” He pulled out of the parking lot under the arch of the Golden Gate.

Galen had brought a simple joy and wonder to so many aspects of the world she’d always taken for granted. What had life been like before Galen? Maybe she’d gotten the magic to transform her life in more ways than one. Not easy, any of it. But worth it, every day.

“Then Wagner it is. Let’s go and find a little magic tonight.”

Read on for an excerpt from the next book

by Susan Squires

THE MISTS OF TIME

Coming soon from St. Martin’s Paperbacks

The machine that lowered the casket into the ground made a grinding noise. They really ought to oil the mechanism. Fog rolled in as the light faded. She pulled her black wool cape tighter around her shoulders. Spring in San Francisco still seemed far away in March. A guy waited in a
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small tractor-thing to scoop dirt back into the grave. Indoor-outdoor carpet was draped over the excavated pile, as if that would camouflage the finality of dirt.

The other mourners had gone after they said all the prescribed words about the “unfortunate event” being a blessed release since her father had Alzheimer’s, and how he was going to God’s bosom—that sort of thing. She couldn’t quite muster the will to take her eyes from the coffin. If you’d watched as many horror movies as she had, you couldn’t help but wonder what he’d look like after a year or five or ten or fifty in there. Maybe she should have opted for cremation. But her father had wanted to be buried beside his wife of thirty years. They were the reason she could write romances. She knew at least one couple who’d found love.

The thunk as the coffin hit the bottom of the grave was like a slap. She heaved in a breath and jerked her eyes up. Her gaze was drawn to the grove of redwoods up the hill from the gravesite.

The shadows between their trunks were filling up with mist.

She knew he was there before he stepped out from the trees. Dark hair, fair skin, bulky shoulders. She might have been mistaken when she’d seen him across the lake at the Palace of Fine Arts. He could just have been someone who looked a little like the guy who pushed past her in the corner liquor store near her apartment.

But this time, there was no doubt. It was the same guy all right. If she got closer, she’d see the blue-green eyes (or maybe gray?) and classic features she’d glimpsed in the liquor store. Was he stalking her?
You can’t stalk somebody if you look like the cover model for a romance novel,
she wanted to shout.
People notice a guy like you.
Women, anyway. And while she might not be someone guys ever noticed, she was still a woman. In that liquor store, as his whatever-colored eyes had met hers, she’d experienced some thrill of . . . well, of the sort she only wrote about.

Spooky, really. You couldn’t be attracted to a man you didn’t even know. Not like
that.
But it meant you’d recognize him when you saw him again.

A thrill of fear found its way into her stomach. She couldn’t look away from the stalker now, as though staring at him could solve the mystery of why any man would be stalking someone like her. Romance writers sometimes acquired stalkers. The guys who wrote all those fan letters from prison sometimes got out. But she wasn’t a big name or anything, though she’d had a score of books published. She wasn’t rich, and she wasn’t beautiful. He just stood there, maybe fifty yards away, letting her look. Did he
want
her to know he was stalking her, just to wring maximum fear out of the situation?

He looked . . . familiar, somehow. More than just the two or three times she’d glimpsed him. He couldn’t be . . . and yet . . .

“Miss Dearborn?”

Diana gasped and jumped.

“Oh, I am so sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

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Diana heaved breaths while she patted her palm against her breast as though that would start her heart. How had the woman surprised her? She always heard what people would say just before they said it. That was her gift, or her curse. The world was like an echo chamber for her, people forever repeating what she had just heard them saying. Like singing a constant “round robin” song. She must have been distracted by her stalker. “Don’t mind me,” she said breathlessly. The woman was a candidate for “portly short” clothing. Her hair had been dyed what hairdressers called “menopause red.” She glanced up to the redwood grove, but her stalker had disappeared. Was she imagining him?