The Time Seekers (The Soul Seekers Book 2) (10 page)

I could feel his breath on my cheek. It came harder and faster. “What are you doing? What’s happening to me?”

“Do you see it?”

His eyes squeezed closed, like I’d sent an arrow into his brain instead of a thought. His lips mumbled something, then he scanned my face in disbelief. “I don’t see
nuthin’.
” He sat back with a slump against the wall.

He was lying.

I shot off the bed, frustrated. I tried to send another picture to him, but he covered his ears as if I were emitting a high-pitched sound. “All right, William Bennett! You have a mole on your lower back, a little brown mole in the shape of a heart. You love Hemingway. You want to go to California and write the world’s next Great American novel. You love pistachio ice cream, peanut butter right out of the jar, black coffee, black licorice, and more than anything on this earth, you love a warm slice of hot apple pie.”

His eyes pierced mine in the dark, and the effect was made worse by his silence.

The typewriter caught my attention, as did the spent pile of paper next to it. I tried to think of the words I’d read over a year ago when he’d brought me to this very spot during the eclipse. We’d stood in this exact room declaring our eternal love. The moments we shared might be our last on earth. When I’d picked up a page to read his beautiful words, he’d called them disposable.

What were the words I’d read, again? Something about a river and a girl and a hawk in the sky. Closing my eyes, I whispered, “
She lowered her gaze to the current . . . while I rowed us slowly along, a single hawk’s shadow . . . upon her face, blotting out the sun.
” I turned to him. “Sound familiar?”

Nostrils flaring, he stood up and grabbed my arms the same as when we’d sat under the gazebo. “You’re in a dangerous position, little girl, sneaking into my room and snooping in my things like this! I should give you a lesson that’d really teach you good!” His fingers ground into my skin, drawing a painful whiteness. “Tell me how you know these things.” He shook me again. “Tell me!”

“Because I love you and have made it a point to know everything there
is
about you. I love you, William,” I repeated. Stupid tears formed in my eyes—not from the pain of his grip, but from exhaustion, frustration.

He shoved me toward the window. “Love? Someone like you’s gonna tell me about love? Stupid girl. Get on out of here, and don’t you ever let me catch you sneaking in my room again. Don’t talk to me when you see me in town, don’t even glance my way. I never want to see your pretty little brown eyes again!”

I glanced at the window and then back at him. “But I can’t go out there. I’ll fall.”

Reaching around me, he lifted the sill and then motioned for me to hurry up. “You ain’t gonna fall.” A wooden balcony with a very decrepit staircase clung to the outside wall, leading up to his window. Perhaps a servant’s entrance in another day. “But I don’t care if you do.”

I swung my leg over the sill, stepped onto the small landing, and then turned back with regret. Wouldn’t he speak to me at all? His eyes were filled with anger like I’d never seen. Hatred. This William hated me.

Not done with insults, he gave a smile and reached for the sash. “Now git!”

Chapter 10

I pulled into the garage and hefted the brake into place with a groan. My back hurt in three separate places. My heels had blisters on top of blisters. Mosquito bites welted all along my neck—and some other very private areas—and I was hungry as hell. And none of it had been worth it, because William had rejected me. No—not rejected me. Humiliated me. Treated me like a child. Thrown me out of his bedroom window. To top it all off, it was an hour till dawn, and I hadn’t even gotten one wink of sleep in the bony contraption called a cot inside my mother’s bedroom.

Still behind the wheel, I stretched and heard little crackles skip up my neck. Did I really have to stay here? I could close my eyes and go home right now. If William knew how to do it, I could as well. So I hadn’t used my gift lately, but it was in me somewhere, the same way he—my husband—was in that seventeen-year-old idiot.

I closed my eyes. A picture of our home in Penn Peak fluttered behind my lids. The living room, the kitchen. I placed myself inside the hall the moment before I walked into William’s office, so eager to show him my transformation into Grace Kelly. His expression had been of total surprise, love, rapture. That William loved me. That William would never shove me out a window.

But I couldn’t relax into the scene. With fingers gripped around the Chevy’s corded leather-and-metal steering wheel, I tried and tried to go back home. Sweat poured down my face and into my eyes. “Come
on
, Emma!”

Another scene filled my head. Me in the doctor’s office the day I found out I was pregnant, and then the night I wanted to tell William the happy news, but he came home drunk from Betty’s party. All those things he’d said about the future being a horrible place for children and how he’d never want to raise one in a world like ours. The fact was, he wanted to be in his time. His time was better.

Not mine. Not the baby’s.

My fingers released from the steering wheel and a little cry left my throat.

I climbed out of the Chevy and closed the rattling garage door with a hearty yank of the handle. Despite it being dark still, I could see the faint outline of a church steeple on the eastern outskirts of town, way up on the hill. Marcus. I’d have to deal with him on my own. A slight breeze picked up, and I wrapped my arms around myself to keep out the sudden chill.

I snuck into the house, careful not to let the front screen door rattle behind me. Then, with tiptoeing steps, I made my way toward the stairwell. Maybe I could get an hour or two of sleep. The cot seemed like a bed of feathers now, I was so tired.

“Good morning.”

I froze in place. Forced myself to turn around.

Grandmother Carrie stood at the kitchen doorway, black iron skillet in hand. She reached down to wipe a palm across an apron of light blue with white eyelet trim. Her eyes were filled with scrutiny.

The sun hadn’t even risen yet. It was only six-thirty, hardly a time for a person to be making breakfast.

“Good morning,” I said, defeated.

One eyebrow rose on her placid face, and she turned to head for the kitchen. I knew I was to follow.

I took a seat at the polished oak kitchen table I knew so well, dropping Grandpa Jack’s car keys down with a noisy rattle of metal. Someone had picked a fresh bundle of flowers and placed them in a vase of smoky violet glass. The back door stood open so a mild breeze could waft in.

“So,” she said, placing the skillet down on the stovetop, her back to me. I heard the sound of a gas flame hissing to life. “You went for a little ride?”

“Yes, but I—”

“And you thought it would be okay to borrow our car without asking?”

I tapped the table with my fingernails a few times. Of course Gran would get up early. “Yep.”

“How nice of you,” she replied, turning slightly.

“I’m sorry.”

She placed a few strips of bacon down into the pan. Overhead, a familiar cuckoo clock ticked away against a backdrop of yellow patterned wallpaper.

It was as if I’d never left.

They, the cult, had made me leave. Yes, I would have married William anyway, but
they
took away my right to visit Grandmother Carrie. And now she was gone. When I traveled back to my time, this woman standing before me would be gone.

Time was a thief, and sometimes I hated it.

She turned to me, light golden hair swinging in a soft circle around her face. “Are you hungry?”

I nodded. Right then, I couldn’t speak. My throat was so tight with things I wanted to say. To tell her. I knew she was mad at me, but if she knew, if she really knew, then it would all be okay. Then she would take me in her arms and I could tell her
everything
. William, the failed trip, the baby.
Gran, how do you fix a marriage when the other person is never around? When they want a life that doesn’t fit you, but you love them so much you’ll do anything to make it work out?

“You’re awfully quiet. Didn’t you sleep at all?”

“Not really,” I said, watching her pluck an egg from a copper wire basket on the counter near the stove. I heard the sound of a chicken outside, clucking a funny rhythm. I glanced out the back door and saw it hobble by, head bobbing up and down in little jerks.

“You have chickens?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. Just a few. That’s my good layer, Miss Pettipot.”

“Oh.” I watched a tuft of feathers disappear behind a wall of tomato plants.

Chickens. She had her own chickens. And William said modern day was wild.

Gran smacked the egg onto the side of the skillet, then emptied its contents with a quick lift. “I’ll get you some orange juice in just a moment.”

“I can do that.” I left my chair and headed for the refrigerator, not the one I knew—this one was huge and had the same kind of steel and chrome makings as the Chevy out in the garage. I saw a crate of oranges near the bottom, grabbed a few, and shut the door with my hip. Then, I opened the glasses cabinet and reached inside for the old carafe.

She appeared surprised, and I realized I’d acted like someone who knew the kitchen inside and out. I made an attempt to cover my mistake. “This kitchen is a lot like the one I have at home,” I said, cutting into an orange and squeezing its juice into the carafe. I kept cutting and squeezing, my face shielded by a long sheath of tousled hair.

“Is it?”

“Sure.”

“Where is your home, Emma? If you don’t mind my asking.” She tended the egg with a metal spatula, careful, so the yolk didn’t break.

“I told you, with Ruby. My mother.”

“And out of nowhere, you decided to come visit us?”

“Yes.”

She asked her next question while transferring my egg to a plate alongside a triangular piece of toast. “Are you in any sort of . . . trouble?”

I hesitated a moment before handing her the carafe. When I did, she handed me a plate and then motioned for me to go to the table and sit down.

“Trouble?” I asked. “No, there’s been no trouble. I mean, life’s a little confusing right now. You understand how that is.”

“Do I?” Grandmother Carrie wiped her hands on her apron. “And where’s the boy you snuck out to see last night?”

I stammered for a second. So this was the trouble she was referring to. I guess back then, sneaking out to see a boy meant you were a certain kind of girl. The worst kind.

“Oh, don’t be so surprised. I knew it had to be something like that, for why else would a handsome girl like you sneak out in the middle of the night? Foolish to the core.”

I heard the sound of bacon being laid down into the hot skillet. “You can stay for a few days if you need, but I’ll ask you to refrain from those sorts of activities from now on, if you don’t mind. My Pauline, she’s a little boy-crazy herself right now. She thinks the whole world is the male species, and I’m afraid there might be one particular ‘specie’ on her mind.” She sighed. “Pauline won’t tell me about him, but I figured it out.”

I took a bite of toast and chewed fast. My stomach was really mad at me for not keeping up our usual schedule. I followed it with a huge bite of egg, and then bacon when she set it down on my plate. Delicious, fatty, salty bacon. The hunger quieted inside, eased off, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before it started up again. This baby was never satisfied. Holding up the toast, I said, “Have you ever thought perhaps Pauline should meet this boy?”

Her body grew rigid. “No. I most certainly haven’t.”

“She does seem old enough and capable of making her own decisions.”

Gran flipped the rest of the bacon, unsettling a chorus of spitting grease. “She’s always done things to spite me, which means sometimes I have to step in.”

“Maybe she’s doing the right thing,” I threw out.

Gran came over with another strip of bacon; grease dripped from its sides all the way to the floor. “I hardly think you are one to talk,” she said, dropping it onto the already cleared ceramic landscape of my plate. Her eyes lowered to my abdomen and then back up, and I knew she wasn’t thinking of bacon.

“Oh,” I said. My appetite quelled. I sat and watched her work. After a moment, I got up and cleaned my plate in the sink. “How’d you figure it out?” My hands weren’t careful enough when they scrubbed her delicate china with the soapy pad of steely mesh. She reached in to remove the plate from my hands.

“I just had a feeling,” she said.

“Like women’s intuition?”

“Something like that. And I’m never wrong.”

Our eyes met. I couldn’t tell her all of it yet. She wasn’t the Gran I knew and trusted. She, like William, was a different person inside a familiar body. Like the sci-fi movie,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. I wanted to tell her, oh lord, how I wanted to. I wanted her to wrap her arms around me and squeeze me and say, “Congratulations, Emma! You will be a wonderful mother!” But she couldn’t, because I wasn’t anything more to her than a stranger. Loneliness filled me. I stood back to wipe my hands on my skirt. My rock-hard middle was concave under my warm and wet palms.

“Well, I think I’ll go take a bath,” I said. Sleep was impossible. I’d catch up later. Sleep was for fools.

My thoughts drifted to Marcus and the church. My real reasons for being here. Not to sleep, not to talk.

“Emma, dear,” Gran said with pity, “I didn’t mean . . .” She seemed remorseful. “I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything. All I ask is you keep your ‘activities’ away from Pauline. If you need help, I can assist you. You don’t have to be alone in this.” When she reached out to put an arm around me, I grew stiff. I backed away.

“Oh, but I do. I am alone. It’s my problem, and I have to fix it.”

“Fix it?” she said, lowering the dishtowel.

“Yes. But right now, I just need a bath.”

Her eyes were full of regret as I backed away and headed for the stairs.

¤ ¤ ¤

Upstairs, I found another problem to occupy my mind. The briefcase was missing. I searched under the cot where I’d stored my bag, but it wasn’t there. My pregnancy brain must have caused me to replace it, but where?

Mother passed by, ebony-handled bristle brush running through her hair, and I accosted her with an accusing voice. “
Pauline,
have you been messing with my things?”

She let out a guffaw, mid-stroke. “Why should I care about your stupid things?”

“Something’s missing.”

She plopped down on the edge of her bed and continued to brush her shining mass of golden bouffant hair. “Well, I don’t have it, whatever it is.”

I checked under the cot again, then under her bed, pushing her legs out of the way for a better inspection. A pair of black and white saddle oxfords knocked together and then nudged at my shoulder in irritation. “Hey!” When I stood up, she had a sore expression on her face.

“It’s got to be somewhere.”

“I don’t care
where
it is.”

The gun was in the briefcase, as were all of William’s things. But mostly it was the gun that had me worried. If it fell in the wrong hands . . .

Grandpa Jack had been the one to put them in the car. Maybe he’d misplaced it. Shoved it in the closet downstairs. I’d go ask him, and it would be there. It had to be.

I took a quick bath and dressed. Downstairs, the kitchen was already empty. I heard the sound of a television and found Grandmother Carrie and Grandpa Jack in the front den watching a Western. With a delicate needle suspended over an intricate piece of embroidery, Gran stopped to glance up at me. “Is everything all right, Emma?”

“Well, sort of. I think I’ve lost something—a leather briefcase. Do you remember bringing it in last night, Uncle Jack?”

John Wayne held his attention. He grumbled something into his chest, and then I heard him say, “There was only one bag. A pink one.”

“Only one? But I had two bags.”

“I grabbed what was there. I only saw one.” John Wayne ducked behind a boulder, and his eyes scanned the horizon for a tribe approaching on decorated horses. Grandpa Jack rustled in his chair.

“Then I need to go to town.”

“Oh?” Gran lowered her needle.

“If that’s okay. Would you mind if I borrowed the car?” The thought of climbing the steep slope of Walters Lane on foot had emboldened me.

Grandpa Jack twisted around. “Borrow the car? A girl like you can walk—”

“Jack.” Gran gave him a look which said not to speak. He obeyed and commenced to watching his movie with a slight scowl. “I think the question is,” she said, “is it just a bag you’re after in town? If it’s just the bag, then the answer is yes, you may borrow the car. If it’s anything else, then I’ll have to say no. It is just the bag, isn’t it, Emma?”

“Of course.” What did she think I would do, rob a bank? Actually, it wasn’t a bad idea. The Seekers needed money—without it, they’d wither into nothing. But to rob a bank, you had to have a gun. To do anything with the cult, you needed a gun. I had better hurry up and find the briefcase before someone else did.

Gran picked up her embroidery and, with careful stitches, created a silk pedal on a yellow rose. “Then you may borrow the car. But only for a few hours. And don’t leave town.”

“It needs a quart of oil,” Grandpa Jack added.