Wakening the Past: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series Book 2) (16 page)

Bobbi couldn’t seem to feel anything as she watched Alistair quickly strip the tape from his wife’s body to free her, then handed her the gun, telling her to keep both Maxwells under guard and shoot if either of them moved. B.J. also kept the unwavering rifle fixed on Bill, her face grim.

This was done in a minute and then Alistair went to Nolan Jeffers, who lay unmoving on the floor. “He’s still breathing,” he said quickly and B.J. gave a little cry, then with a stern look at Hart put the rifle down carefully, then went to Alistair’s side.

There seemed to be a lot of blood and she could see that were working to staunch the flow. Alistair then left Nolan in B.J.’s hands, saying he had first aid equipment in the car. Minutes later he came running back, not even out of breath, bending to apply medicines and bandaging to the left side of Nolan’s chest.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” B.J. asked in a broken voice.

“Bad,” Alistair said bluntly. “I’ve sent for an ambulance with paramedics, but I think we should head out of here to meet them. It’ll save time.”

“You gotta save him, Sheriff,” Terry Maxwell pleaded as though he really meant it. “He’s my best friend.”

Quicker than an ambulance could possibly make the miles from any town into the breaks, Bobbi heard sirens and then two men, a young one and an older one, broke in, guns out. Sizing up the situation, they quickly took over the prisoners and Hart was able to put her husband’s gun down. She collapsed into a chair, tears running down her face as she watched them work with her friend on the floor.

They all seemed to have forgotten Bobbi, still taped in her chair. She didn’t mind, but felt as though she weren’t really here in this moment.

When Bill fired his rifle, she’d heard the shot back at Medicine Stick once more and for an instant she’d thought she was about to die a second time.

In disbelief she’d watched Nolan Jeffers tumble to the floor instead and she’d sat frozen, feeling nothing.

She still slumped in her chair, all her emotions locked away as memories of two lifetimes
raced through her head. She was Hart who had grown up in Mountainside and occasionally visited Stacia’s life in Medicine Stick and she was Bobbi whose on-going life had been a bonus for the woman who had sacrificed her life for another.

Inside her she ached for the love Hart had lost and would never find again
, seeing a dear face but not being able to put a name to it, and in these moments alone she was more Hart than the woman walking in her form could ever be.

As for Bobbi, she felt nothing.

Hart felt as though she had held up as long as she could. Soaked to the skin, tired beyond measure, every bone in her body aching, she was ready to collapse.

But there was no time. The others were in worse condition. She had to leave her old friend Mr. Jeffers to Alistair and his deputies; they had the training to know what to do in such an emergency. She couldn’t feel hopeful about the elderly man’s chances of survival. She went into the kitchen, finding a few sticks of wood to stir up the fire, and filled the coffee pot, putting it on to heat.

She was worried about B.J. Harris, who was after all in
advanced years and had just seen the man she’d loved since youth shot down by another man she’d considered an old friend. She found a blanket and tucked it around the other woman’s shoulders and had her hand patted in reward.

Joey and Deputy Long had taken charge of the prisoners, handcuffing them and putting them into a car for transport. All by himself Alistair gently lifted Nolan into his strong arms and carried the frail old man to put him down in the back seat of his own vehicle. B.J. climbed in also, cradling Nolan’s head in her lap.

Hart directed her attention to Bobbi, who had sat so quietly while emergency actions were taken, and began, as gently as possible, to pull off the tape that held her prisoner. She knew this hurt since she’d been through it herself, but the girl didn’t even wince.

Alistair hurried back for them, wrapping the still dripping Hart in his own coat, then one arm around her and another around Bobbi, walked them to his car where he placed them in front, then ran around to start the car and lead the way, sirens blaring and
lights flashing, down the road.

Hart saw her abandoned car as they passed by with a sense of surreal wonder. Such a short distance from there to the house and yet covering those miles had cost her the struggle of her life.

She felt burning hot and shaking with cold at the same time and when they met the ambulance coming from Wichita, not only Mr. Jeffers was transferred into the paramedics’ care. After one look at her, they took her aboard also. Her wet clothes stripped off, she was wrapped in warm blankets and fell into a kind of stupor as they rushed toward the hospital.

It was only then that she began to realize that she was experiencing not only her own pain, but something coming from Bobbi that wasn’t quite right.

She was Hart and Bobbi with all the strange mixture that they conjoined and didn’t know what to do with all that overload entering her brain.

The child was in severe shock and needed help. She tried to tell them, tried to tell the paramedics, but somehow she couldn’t get the words out.

Alistair recognized when he was running on sheer
adrenalin and though he followed in the wake of the ambulance as it headed to the county seat hospital at fast speeds, he focused all his attention on driving safely.

That was why he didn’t notice until they were almost in town that neither of his passengers w
as doing particularly well. Bonnie Jo Harris had protested mightily at being separated from Nolan and now, as though her only reason to hold up had been to look after him, she slumped against the back of the passenger seat, her eyes closed and her face drained of color.

Bobbi, in between the two of them, sat stiffly erect, her gaze fixed ahead, not glancing either to the right or the left.

“Almost there,” he said cheerfully.

B.J. opened her eyes, glanced at him, th
en closed them again. Bobbi didn’t act as though she’d even heard.

“We’ll head straight for the hospital, B.J. You’ll be able to see how he’s doing.”

The elderly woman managed the slightest of smiles. Bobbi didn’t twitch a muscle.

Dawn lighted the sky as they drove into town and the few cars on the street this early in the morning pulled aside to avoid slowing their progress. Alistair followed the ambulance into the emergency entrance. He didn’t know a woman
with a recently healed broken hip could move so fast, but B.J. Harris was out of the car almost as quickly as he and he stood back while she tottered up to the first stretcher being unloaded into the willing hands of helpers from the hospital, all of them friends and neighbors.

A uniformed state trooper stepped up behind her, but Alistair shook his head, forbidding his approach. This was his county and his case. He didn’t intend to see either B.J. or Nolan harassed by officials who didn’t know what had been revealed this night.

After he’d seen them safely inside, he turned back to the second stretcher now being brought from the ambulance. His duty done, he could see to Hart, who had spent most of the long night exposed to the elements and was no doubt suffering from exposure. They’d wrapped her tightly in blankets and intravenous fluid was already being administered.

“You’re a heroine, darling,” he whispered, bending close to place a kiss on her hair, ignoring the fact that they were surrounded by people.

“Bobbi,” she croaked in a hoarse, barely discernible whisper. “Help Bobbi.”

Reminded, he turned to look for the girl. She sat still in the sheriff’s car, alone and unmoving.

Summoning medical personnel, he raced to the car and lifted her out as though she were three and not fourteen. She was stiff and unresponsive in his arms.

“Shock,” he heard a paramedic say, and yielded the girl to expert help.

“Hart?” Hart whispered nonsensically with all her strength. “Bobbi-Hart. Hart-Bobbi.” Her gaze followed the paramedic as he carried the child inside the automatically opening doors into emergency.

A small hospital with limited but dedicated resources, Alistair watched as they did their best for the three patients. Within thirty minutes, his former prisoner had been given immediate emergency care, th
an bundled into a helicopter for transport to the trauma center in Oklahoma City. He sent a deputy with B.J. Harris to take her to the city, having seen to it that her daughter who lived there had been contacted to meet her.

In spite of everything the
aging woman was bearing up better than anyone had a right to expect and he guessed that as long as Nolan continued his fight to live, she would stick by his side.

Serena and Dr. Hudson-Lawrence were with Bobbi and he felt sure he could trust them to see that she got the best of care, probably at some facility a whole lot more sophisticated than a small western Oklahoma
hospital.

Now he sat by his wife’s side while her fever climbed and her lungs clouded, whispering to her softly as she struggled against pneumonia.

He’d forgotten to notify her brother of her condition, but word got around the county quickly and by that evening Tommy had joined him at her bedside, looking genuinely worried and not bringing up the subject of money even once.

Exhausted as he was he resisted the doctor’s urging that he accept a bed for a few hours
of sleep, dozing in his chair, only to waken fearfully, relaxing only slightly when he saw that Hart was still there and still breathing, even though it was with the help of an oxygen mask.

He forgot that Tommy or anybody else was there as he sat in the intensive care unit and willed her to live and get better.
You can’t leave me
, he told her silently.
Don’t abandon me, my only love.

Even under a heavy weight of fever and delusion, Hart heard her husband’s voice more clearly than if he’d spoken aloud. ‘Trying,’ she sent the message, hoping that at least he would hear and know her effort. It was so hard to breathe. She’d given of every ounce of her strength during that long night by the river and it would be so easy to surrender now and allow herself to sink into nothingness and whatever God had for her on the other side.

But she had no sense of release. She saw no long tunnels, or dazzling lights, no relatives from the other side greeted her.

She had things to do yet and her husband called to her, promising her a future worth living and, only a little further away, the nagging, rather annoying voice of the child Bobbi interlaced with Hart’s, telling her they were so lost and confused they couldn’t find their way out.

This was the woman who had saved her life in old Medicine Stick and the child descended from her own
Larkin family, both of them pleading for help only she could give.

She saw only one way out for them. Surely she was in no condition to make this choice, but she was
certain if she didn’t they would dissolve into madness. Somehow she and Hart had learned over time, in all their years of growing up, to live with this, but Bobbi, child as she was had been brought into it too suddenly. She was terrified and drowning.

‘Leave, Hart,’ she whispered in her own brain. ‘Leave her alone. It’s the only way.’

The message received, she heard a deep quiet and then knew Bobbi rolled over in her hospital bed to fall into dreamless sleep.

She managed to lif
t her own lashes and looked into the face of her husband. Big, strong Alistair Redhawk had tears in his eyes as he smiled down at her and from somewhere beyond him she heard her brother’s voice saying gladly, “Look, Alistair, she’s awake.”

They celebrated the news with a backyard barbeque. Alistair broiled steaks, Hart baked potatoes and made a huge salad and B.J. brought her famous dessert of homemade banana cake.

Hart looked around thinking it was one of those rare June days when the weather was everything it should be. She kissed Nolan Jeffers to his obvious embarrassment and then he took the chair in the shade closest to the house. B.J. was getting him out more these days, but he still wasn’t wild about open spaces and plenty of that was available out here on the Redhawk place where the backyard rolled down to a cottonwood lined creek and on the other side to miles and miles of scenic vista, made dramatic by the purple-hazed granite mountains in the distance.

B.J., who still thought she knew this Hart a whole lot better than was actually possible, patted the top of her head and put her gorgeous cake down on the table and asked in her usual spritely fashion who else was coming.

“Hart’s brother and his family,” Alistair answered from where he worked at the grill, “and the deputies who have this afternoon off and their families.”

“His friends from work,” Hart added with a grin. “We’re both so busy all the time
; most of our friends are the people with whom we work.” She glanced at her husband. “But he wouldn’t let me invite my friends from work.”

“I couldn’t get them out of prison for the party,” Alistair added wryly.

“Except me,” Nolan spoke up. “They finally sprung me.”

He looked pale and thin, Hart thought, though whether because he was still recovering from his gunshot wound or because of all the years he’d spent incarcerated, she wasn’t sure.

One thing she was certain of as she watched him and B.J. hold hands was that from now on he would have the best of loving care.

Her goal these days was for both her and Alistair to live as long as Nolan and B.J. and still be holding hands every chance they got.

She passed around tall glasses of iced tea and listened as B.J. asked what news she had of Bobbi Lawrence.

“She texts me now and then, but she’s so busy in her new school that she doesn’t have much time for somebody so far
outside her peer group. But her grandmother writes regularly and she says Bobbi’s doing fine, has a boyfriend that none of her adult relatives can stand, and has become impertinent and mouthy.”

“A normal teenager,” B.J., who had raised two daughters, commented. “Tell her not to worry. When they hit about twenty, then
you become their friend again. It’s surprising how much wisdom you gain when they’re all grown up.”

Hart laughed. “Something we’ll learn for ourselves over the years,” Alistair announced grandly.

Nolan smiled and B.J. exclaimed, “A baby! That’s what this is all about. You’re going to have a baby.”

Lovingly Hart allowed the proud father to tell all the news about the birth expected
about Christmas time and watched indulgently while he passed around the evidence of the sonogram, their baby’s first picture.

She suspected she had a smug smile on her face as their other guests drove up out front and came around carrying potluck dishes. She watched Deputy Long’s wife greet B.J. who was a longtime friend and
said hello to Cully, their waitress friend from Pizza Plus, who had come as young Deputy Joey Harding’s date. She chatted with one guest after another as she directed them to the food and watched as Alistair distributed the steaks.

When she finally settled in her chair, she looked up to see down near the creek a handsome old Kiowa gentleman who bore a strong resemblance to her husband riding past on a big black and white paint.

Others were looking in that direction, admiring the scenic creek with its cottonwood, but nobody else seemed to see the man and his horse.

He lifted one hand silently and she greeted him with a slight nod. As he rode on, he glanced back to where his grandson stood by the fire.

The End