Wakening the Past: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series Book 2) (4 page)

The ice melted as the day progressed and as the pace of work slowed, Alistair felt increasingly fatigued. He’d had little sleep the night before and had taken time only to grab a fast-food hamburger and fries as breakfast and lunch. By dark the night would begin to freeze the melting slush on the roads, but he knew he would have to leave the patrolling to other members of his staff.

It was time to go home. He drove slowly, feeling a sense of failure over the still missing prisoner. The old man had probably collapsed in some obscure corner, he thought now, overcome with the shock of his freedom. They’d probably find his body one of these days.

His exhausted mind rested on one thought. Soon he’d be home with Hart and they’d find refuge in each other’s arms. He didn’t know why it was that they were edgy these days and liable to fall into dissent. Their quarrels seemed to spring out of nothing and flare into fierce anger. They said
unforgivable things to each other and then were sorry and made love fiercely instead of apologizing.

Last November he would have sworn that if they’d been blessed with more time together, they would never exchang
e a cross word, but would rejoice in each other’s company. It had been as though one of them was dying from a hopeless disease and a miracle had happened. He’d watched her shot dead and then he’d found her again, up the mountain waiting for him and they’d come together with all the expectations of a normal life ahead.

And now they couldn’t seem to spend more than a few hours together without blazing into bitter, painful argument. He loved her with his whole heart and yet could not live at peace with her. Nor she with him.

There was only one answer. The only time when they seemed to belong together, to melt into passionate agreement was when they made love. When he got home, he would say no more than a greeting, but would take her into his arms and show her the love he had so much trouble speaking.

It wasn’t until he was moving up the long drive that he remembered their guest. Young Bobbi Lawrence would be in the house with his wife and there would be no opportunity for the privacy he so
desired.

To Hart’s surprise, Bobbi made no mention of her fainting spell and the smoky kitchen was explained to Alistair by her simply saying she’d let her attention wonder and burned the morning’s bacon. To make up, she’d cooked her husband’s favorite chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and salad, taking care that Bobbi kept her company in case of another mishap.

Now that it
had happened again, she would be fearful of a reoccurrence. Once last fall, she’d been driving and had barely gotten to the side of the road before she slipped into that other life. So many things were dangerous, not only to yourself but to others, when you were likely to fall into sudden unconsciousness.

Back when Hart had been alive, she had no such fears. When one took on the other’s life, then she
was in charge and could avoid sudden accidents, but after the other woman’s death she’d ended up in one misadventure after another, including being flung over a hundred miles away to lie at risk in a city street.

She’d hoped that was all behind her now that the answer to Hart’s murder had been found and her killer meeting justice of a sort. But now life seemed to be posing her a new problem, one she would have to face alone.

So it was that when a weary-looking Alistair commented that she didn’t look as if she were feeling well, she snapped back, “You don’t look so great yourself.”

Surprisingly Bobbi tried to intervene. “You’re both tired,” she said tactfully and handed the bowl of
salad to Alistair. “My granny is coming tomorrow. She says she’ll rent a car in Oklahoma City and be out here by afternoon to take me off your hands.”

“That’s good,” Alistair said.

“Alistair!” Hart exclaimed. “That’s like telling Bobbi you can’t wait for her to leave.”

“I will be glad to see her restored to her family. They’re worried about her.”

“I’m not leaving,” Bobbi said, her mouth set in a firm line. “Now that I’m here, I’m going to try to talk Granny into staying a while.”

Alistair’s forehead ridged. “Don’t you have to go to school?”

“I’ll make it up later.” Bobbi carefully cut a small piece from her steak.”

“Schools must be more liberal in California. Here they don’t allow you to go running off whenever you like.”

Hart looked at her husband with surprise. It wasn’t like him to be so negative, especially not with a child. On the other hand, Bobbi didn’t seem to be at all disturbed by his attitude.

“I don’t do public school,” she said. “I go to a private school and work with a tutor. Granny will probably arrange something if we stay here long enough.”

Hart knew from what the girl had already said to understand she had things to work through. Real things, like she’d had as a child. Somehow she was connected to Hart, or Hart’s memories, and she needed to be here in this place. Surely Alistair could understand that.

“We could ask
Bobbi’s grandmother to stay here with us too,” she suggested. Bobbi’s grandmother. Helen’s daughter. Her sister’s daughter and she was anxious to know her better.

Alistair looked at her as though she’d lost her mind, then got to his feet and walking with the authoritative sound of cowboy boots against a wood floor, left the room. She heard the front door slam behind him and knew he’d gone outside.

She tried to hide her anger and embarrassment. “He’s had a couple of rough days,” she said, feeling the apology was
i
nadequate. Sometimes she felt she didn’t know Alistair very well at all.

“It’s okay.” Bobbi seemed almost glad he’d gone. “He doesn’t
get it, but you do. I know you. I mean I deep down know you, Stacia.”

It took only a flash of an instant for her to remember she wasn’t Stacia, not anymore. “I’m Hart,” she said gently. “Stacia was your
great-grandmother’s sister.”

A look of confusion twisted the girl’s round, dimpled face. “Oh, Yeah,” she agreed. “Sometimes I get names mixed up.”

Hart pretended interest in her breakfast. She could hardly admit to the girl that she knew well enough how mixed up she must feel. She seemed to have some of Hart’s memories; that was frightening clear. But she didn’t want Helen’s great-granddaughter to go through anything like what she’d experienced as a child when she might be red-haired Stacia in the 1930s and ‘40s one minute, and the next dark-haired Hart in the late 20
th
and early 21
st
centuries.

Now she understood it, knew she was always herself even in Hart’s body, but there had been times when she’d questioned her own sanity. And her poor parents, increasingly convinced that something was wrong with her, had become
more and more protective as she grew up.

Much as she wanted to know how much of Hart had been brought back in this girl born so many years after she’d been killed, for Bobbi’s sake, she could not encourage her to believe this
had actually happened.

Better for Helen’s great-granddaughter if she turned her back on memories of Hart forever.

“I’m sure you’ll be happy to see your grandmother again,” she said, then became guiltily aware she was acting the way the grownups in her family had when she was so troubled at what was happening to her.

She remembered a time when she’d been in her sixth grade class at Medicine Stick Grade School. Fourth, fifth and sixth had been in the same room with only one teacher. Mrs. Holland, the teacher, had been working with the fourth graders while fifth and sixth graders were
doing their assignments. Stacia was reading something about the planets and trying to memorize their order from the sun. Mercury was closest, she was thinking, and was extremely hot. One of the boys said you’d have to make your home in an air conditioned dome to live there and she was imagining what it would be like.

And then she was in another classroom, this one noisier and less formal and when she looked down at her hands, they were smaller and younger and had some sort of polish on the nails.

The teacher looked right at her and said, “Hart, you always get your problems done first. Come up to the chalkboard and show the others what you did with the fifth problem that everyone is finding so difficult.”

The teacher looked straight at her. This was not a new experience. She had been Hart before, but always found it disconcerting. Also Hart might be good at math, but she, Stacia, hated to even think about numbers. She just hoped they switched back before she got to the board.

She picked up the chalk and, quick as that, was in her own familiar classroom again with her science book in front of her and nobody paying attention to what she did.

That was only one of many memories she had of switching lives, but this couldn’t be what was happening to Bobbi. The fourteen-year-old called her Stacia, her true name, now and then. She worried over memories of a time she couldn’t possibly remember. And, today,
as he’d confided to Hart within Alistair’s hearing, she’d seen a man long dead, who had ridden up on a horse and opened the door to a locked house so she wouldn’t be left freezing outside.

Bobbi had been born into her family, not Hart’s. And Hart was dead.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Bobbi’s flippant remark eased through her abstraction.

“Not worth a penny,” she responded in a similarly light tone.

They finished eating and, after Alistair got a call that sent him out of the house and roaring down the road in his official car, they loaded the dishwasher and went into the living room to watch a program chosen by the girl.

This was official business and he had no reason to feel guilty because he hadn’t told his wife the call concerned his missing prisoner. No need to get Hart upset until he knew for sure they’d found Nolan Jeffers.

She seemed to feel almost as though the old man was close family, somebody she needed to look after, and from where he sat it seemed to him that Hart had too many concerns on her mind.

As soon as he got the chance, he was going to talk to her about going back and seeing that psychiatrist in Oklahoma City again. She had some problems she needed to work out. Hell, they both did!

Each day he felt the relationship between them crumbling a little more, increasingly falling apart. And he struggled, ended up saying the wrong thing and driving her further away from him. How could he love her so much and seem to be losing her in spite of his efforts?

A man not given to much introspection, Alistair tried to avoid thinking about those minutes last November when he’d thought he saw the long-vanished little town of Medicine Stick in front of his eyes and a woman that seemed to him to be Hart being shot by a woman crazed with jealous
y.

Damn, he thought again. That woman hadn’t even looked a bit like Hart. She’d been taller, bigger, and her coloring had been entirely different. The woman he imagined . . .the woman who had seemed so real there for a moment . . .

Being a man who could have seen an unidentified flying object occupied with little green men right in front of his eyes and would have been convinced there was an ordinary, prosaic answer to his vision, he had largely talked himself out of those few lost minutes down by the lake. He’d been stressed, worried beyond belief about Hart and her safety, and he’d let his imagination run away with him.

That’s all it was. If he started to believe anything else, he would resign his job, knowing he no longer had the judgment to work at safeguarding the public.

He was a reasonable man and he knew well enough that talks of switching bodies and jumping back and forth between past and present just didn’t happen. He would waste no more time thinking about things like that and he would see that Hart didn’t either.

But good Lord, Serena would be heading back here tomorrow, asking more questions about Stacia and her death and getting Hart all worked up. He didn’t want either her or Bobbi in his house a minute longer than was absolutely necessary.
He and Hart deserved some normalcy.

He didn’t turn on his siren, but with flashing lights approached the little town of Mountainside which lay within his territory of Wichita County. Even with his lights on, he drove watchfully as the town had more than its share of senior citizens who sometimes forgot to look carefully before backing their cars and even more of young drivers who did everything too quickly and with no expectation of encountering others.

He drove past the post office and the little city hall, then Pizza Plus, a couple of empty buildings with the fading lettering indicating long-defunct businesses to pull to a stop in front of the newly restored antique shop where his wife had once lived in a loft apartment.

The evening was turning dark and, strange as it seemed, after three years of extreme drought, the air felt heavy with moisture as he got out of his car, stepping carefully to avoid skidding on the refreezing slush. A sheriff’s office car was parked on the street and two of his deputies stood outside, waiting for him.

“Mark’s around back,” Joey spoke quietly as if afraid of being overheard. He was youngest and newest of the deputies, but the one from whom Alistair had the most hopes for real professionalism, considering he’d caught him early and was seeing he was properly trained.

He nodded. Passersby had reported hearing an old
man sneaking into the unoccupied building and the sheriff, sending deputies over at once, told them to stand guard until he’d arrived on the scene. He was hoping to get through this without anybody getting shot, not even the escaped prisoner.

The building had been damaged in a fire late last year and most locals couldn’t see the point of having what they called the old junk shop restored, but the owner had insisted
on plowing money back into the place, saying it had been a family business for years and she didn’t intend to be the first to give up on it.

Most folks thought Mrs. Harris was being foolishly sentimental, but a local builder had been
glad to give the low bid on the job and had rebuilt the damaged store and the loft apartment, though nobody seemed to think there was much of a future for either it or the Mountainside downtown.

Alistair led his troops to the front door. “Got the keys from Cully down at the pizza place,” Joey Harding told him in a voice so low as to be almost a whisper. He waited for the younger man to open the door, then pulled his gun and with it leveled in front of him, went in through the new front door. “Police,” he advised loudly, but in what he hoped was a non-threatening tone. He didn’t want to push a frightened old man into unnecessary resistance, though he didn’t suppose Jeffers was even armed, unless he’d found an old weapon among the odds and ends of ancient furnishings, collectibles and such that rested undisturbed in Ye Old Antique Shop, better known locally as Mrs. Harris’ junk store.

The store didn’t look the way he’d remembered it, not even before the fire that had done so much damage. It no longer smelled of smoke and the crowded arrangement of everything from old iceboxes to old rocking chairs and a huge assortment of glassware had been dusted, cleaned, polished. It was still a confusing mass of items, but no longer was the place festooned in spider webs. Even the antique farm equipment looked cleaned up, though the colors worn away in pioneer fields were still faded and worn.

The place smelled of lemon furniture polish and bleach and looked as though it had been cleaned back into the most remote of corners.

Even though he tried to walk quietly, it still seemed as though his footsteps echoed through the old building, as did those of the deputy following him.

Lots of places to hide here. A man could be behind that old church organ or under the huge old desk in the corner. He and Joey were vulnerable if anyone wanted to shoot at them from such a hiding place and he listened for any sound and watched for any flash of movement, his tension heightening as he pushed his way through the accumulated debris of many people’s lives.

He motioned Joey to remain where he was and found his way to the stairs in the back. Most of the bottom level of the store had remained reasonably intact, as had the collectibles. The worst damage was upstairs where the fire had been started in the apartment where his wife had once lived and what he found there was totally unfamiliar.

It reeked with the scent of newness. The rug
-covered floors were now newly polished hard wood, the walls painted neutral shades and the kitchen featuring a cabinet with a marble countertop. The rooms were not yet furnished, though the kitchen displayed a small range and refrigerator and was equipped with a dishwasher and twin stainless steel sinks.

The apartment showed little resemblance to the cozy loft where he’d visited Hart in the days before the fire. Only the bedroom was scantily furnished with a modern-looking bed and the one piece of furniture from before, a small vanity with a mirror that had been distorted by the heat and smoke of the blaze.

He almost forgot the man he was trying to find as he stared into that mirror, remembering the blue and white old-fashioned bedroom that had been here before.

The bed was made up with sheets and pillows, covered with a deep purple coverlet that was pushed back to reveal the slightly sunk in pillows and tumbled sheets. Someone had been sleeping here. He searched the closet, finding it empty even of clothing, then went into the shiny new bathroom where a heap of orange clothing lay on the floor.

He recognized those garments immediately. He should since he regularly saw hundreds of prisoners so clad. This was the jump suit Nolan Jeffers had been wearing when he escaped.

He had been staying here.

Calling for more deputies, he immediately instigated a thorough search of the building and its environs, but after hours of looking, his troops had to finally admit the obvious. Nolan Jeffers had been here, but he was gone.

Hart awakened by a strange sound found that sometime during the night Alistair had come in and was asleep at her side. He must have been terribly late because she hadn’t even heard him enter the bedroom.

She listened, trying to determine what had caused her to wake from sound sleep. Then she heard it again. Someone was crying and that someone had to be Bobbi.

Surprised that the apparently brash teen would so indulge, she crept silently from her side of the bed, anxious not to disturb what little sleep her husband was managing to get and tiptoed from the room and down the short hall to the guest bedroom.

Bobbi wasn’t merely crying, she was wailing so loudly that she could be heard even through the closed door. Turning the knob and pushing it open, she was surprised to see the girl lying in the light cast by the little reading lamp, her eyes closed as though she were soundly asleep
. At the same time those terrible cries came out of her mouth.

Even as Hart watched, she turned over and the wails turned to agonized murmurings, half smothered against her pillow.

Poor baby. She looked a lot younger than her fourteen years, more like a little girl with her face swollen from crying and her hands scrambling against her sheets as though in some kind of desperation.

“She’s going to shoot! She’s going to shoot! Run, Stacia, run.”

The words were mumbled, but distinct. With horror, Hart realized she was reliving those moments when a killer had Stacia at gunpoint and Hart was rushing to her aid, sacrificing her own life for the other woman.

For Stacia. For her. She touched the girl’s skinny arm lightly so as not to add to her distress. “Bobbi, it’s all right. It’s only a dream.”

The child continued to mumble indistinguishable words and to toss wildly. “Hart,” she found herself saying the name she went by these days, though the soul inside her did not belong to that name. “It’s all right, Hart. It’s over.”

Long lashed eyes flew open and Bobbi stared up at her in obvious bewilderment. If she’d been dreaming she was Hart, what was it like for her too look up and see the woman who seemed to be Hart standing
near her.

“It’s over. It’s not happening anymore,” Hart tried to comfort her, taking her into reassuring arms. “You’re Bobbi Lawrence and you
’re at my house in Oklahoma. You came here because there was something you wanted to talk to me about.”

The girl went silent as she collapsed, shivering, into Hart’s grasp.