Wakening the Past: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series Book 2) (6 page)

Luckily he had the ability to compartmentalize his thinking. It was the only way he’d survived, first as a deputy, then as the duly elected sheriff of Wichita County, considering that most of those he served were long time acquaintances, even friends, so that deaths or lives gone wrong always struck in a personal way.

Now he left the house, moving quietly past his sleeping wife who had chosen to abandon their mutual bed to rest on an uncomfortable sofa, and slip from his sorrow and anger over the state of affairs between them into work mode even as he went out the door.

It was just past midnight as he spun onto the highway, emotions heated despite his resolve, and drove toward little Mountainside. Another citizen had reported seeing Nolan Jeffers and he intended to be personally involved in checking this call.

He wouldn’t think about Hart. He wouldn’t think about the two of them, alone in their house, together in their bed. He felt as though he’d been given a glimpse of paradise, then shut out.

With vague plans of maybe booking a room for herself, Hart led the way along the confusing back roads toward Medicine Stick Lodge where Serena had agreed to a couple of days stay. Bobbi had chosen to ride with Hart rather than with her grandmother, but she knew better than to be flattered. She was quite sure Bobbi simply wanted to avoid recriminations from Serena for as long as she could, having already been thoroughly scolded by phone this morning in a long call that had involved both her parents.

Hart got the feeling that the family was not accustomed to direct challenges from the girl. She guessed Bobbi had been good at getting her own way without causing too many disturbances.

It was a skill she wished she possessed, she thought wistfully, thinking of Alistair. But no, there would be no games between them. They must work things out or go their separate ways. The very thought of the latter made her heart hurt.

“I talked Granny into staying a few days,” Hart was saying. “So you’ve got to help me, Hart.”

“Help you?” Hart parried. “How can I do that?”

“You know. Tell me how you deal with it?”

“Deal with what?” she continued to evade, looking closely both ways as she pulled out on to the busier highway. Not that busy meant anything in terms of the traffic Bobbi was probably accustomed to seeing
out in southern California, but they got fairly steady traffic through here as this was a main roadway down to Texas. Today there seemed to be an especially active flow of trucks so she zipped on, adjusting quickly to the higher speed and watching that Serena had followed her.

Oh, Lord, no!
With everything going on, she’d forgotten. She hadn’t meant to drive again, particularly not with a passenger in the car. And now she was sandwiched in between two huge, fast-moving trucks and in the corner of her eye she was seeing a tiny fleck of light that shouldn’t be there.

She was being looped back in, caught in the past and if she slipped from her body in these circumstances, leaving it to unconsciousness, she and Bobbi and maybe others on the roadway might die.

“No! No!” she shouted and, for perhaps the first time, fought the transfer that would send her back into the past. “Hang on, hang on,” she told herself and trying to ignore the tiny light that grew larger in her peripheral vision, she clicked the indicator that would tell others she was trying to pull over to the right. Instead she hit the emergency flashers.

That was good. This was an emergency. She had to get off the highway and bring the Nissan to a stop.

As though from a distance she heard Bobbi’s frantic voice. “Hart, you’re driving crazy! What’s going on? Hart, is she taking over? Are you going back?”

Then, as she
sensed herself slipping into that tunnel that led to the past, she felt Bobbi take hold of the wheel and knew that she was surrendering control to a fourteen-year-old who most likely had never driven a car before. She held on as long as she could, pressing her foot to the brake and trying to get the car slowed and off the road.

She heard Bobbi scream.

The strain of trying to slow the switch to the past left Stacia shaking and sick. She dropped the platter of fried chicken she was carrying and it fell into
bits on the floor, the pieces of Mom’s perfectly browned chicken flying all over.

Stacia heard two voices screaming at once: Bobbi’s back on the highway and Helen’s here in the kitchen of the little house in Medicine Stick. “Mom, Stacia dropped the chicken,” Helen yelled, even as Bobbi’s shrieks faded into the background and then were gone.

Her mother came in scolding over her carelessness, but Stacia had a hard time considering the loss of the main dish for the family’s dinner seriously. Not when she couldn’t know what had happened to that car she’d been driving down the highway.

It was one thing to endanger herself, but she’d put Helen’s granddaughter and innocent travelers at risk by her carelessness in getting behind the wheel after her recent experience.

“I didn’t think,” she said out loud. “I forgot.”

S
he rushed outside to vomit into the red dirt in the front yard. Then she looked up to find that both Mom and Helen had followed her from the house.

“You’re sick, baby,” Mom said, taking her arm to lead her back into the house where she was sent to brush her teeth and wash her face. The smell of chicken in the air made her feel even more
sick, but she managed to avoid disgracing herself by heading back to the bedroom she shared with Helen.

She closed her eyes and tried to push herself forward, back to Hart’s body, but though for the first time she’d managed to delay the switch for a few seconds, hopefully enough to prevent an accident, she seemed unable to exert any control now.

She saw herself in the vanity mirror, a red-haired young woman, not a child at least. Once more she was reliving the past, though she could see no purpose for doing so.

“Feeling better, Stacia?” Helen peered in, her eyes showing her concern.

She nodded.

“Mom said not to worry. She’d just washed the kitchen floor and she’ll pour water over the chicken and put it back in the skillet to heat up.”

Still halfway back in Hart’s time when the loss of a meal wouldn’t have meant much, she remembered that here a dinner of fried chicken was a big deal. Most days they had meatless meals, mostly beans and fried potatoes, and the whole family would be looking forward to Mom’s fried chicken.

She’d just bet Bobbi would be disgusted at the idea of picking the chicken up off the floor and washing it. She’d probably think it should be fed to the neighbor’s dog as being unworthy of human consumption.

The thought sobered her. Bobbi knew more than she should already. She’d even understood what was happening when Hart began to depart. That meant she had memories from both Hart and herself, or was she only able to recall Stacia’s past because of Hart’s visits to the past?

She only hoped the girl was all right.

Bobbi veered the nearly out of control
car to the right by jerking on the wheel. She heard the truck behind them hit his brakes, than honk a long howl of reproof as he skidded on past the little Nissan. Hart slumped against her as she jammed her own smaller foot against the one already on the brake, bringing them to a jarring stop.

She watched as Serena in her rental car zoomed on past, apparently too focused on  avoiding the truck that had suddenly slowed ahead of her to notice that Hart and Bobbi had pulled off the road.

Everybody seemed too occupied with getting somewhere in a hurry to pay any attention to them. Bobbi, accustomed as she was to the vast populations of southern California, was not surprised that nobody pulled over to offer help, though Hart, who still had not adjusted to the idea that you could drive past your neighbors without offering help, would have felt differently.

But Hart had gone somewhere and Bobbi wasn’t surprised at that either. Somewhere, vaguely, in some distant edge of her brain, she almost knew about this. Hart went away to Stacia’s world and Stacia came here. But there wasn’t any Hart any more, only Stacia.

How she knew this, she couldn’t say. But somehow she did and ever since her first visit to Oklahoma with Granny last year, this awareness had moved to the forefront so that nightly she seemed to dream and understand more.

Not that this didn’t make her afraid. Not that right now she wasn’t sitting in the little dark-blue car and wondering what she should do. She tried to shake Hart awake, but she lay limp and unresponsive against her
slighter form.

She had her phone, but she could hardly call her friends in California for help. And if she called Granny and Granny realized that Hart had collapsed virtually in the midst of the highway, she’s have Bobbi out of here and headed home before she had time to think of a good argument.

She had no choice. She fumbled in Hart’s purse, pulling out the little phone and checking numbers until she found the one that said Alistair.

She was just about to give him a call when Hart’s eyes opened.

“I came back,” she said. “I had to come back.” She smiled, a slow, lazy just waking up smile. “We’re both still alive,” she said with evident pleasure.

Bobbi drew in a deep breath, grateful not to have to call Hart’s intimidating husband. “Between us we managed,” she said
.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, Bobbi allowing Hart to regain her equilibrium. Finally she said, “We probably should go on. Granny’s likely to come back looking for us.”

Hart shook her head, still looking pale. “I can’t risk driving,” she said.

“I’ve never driven,” Bobbi protested, “besides I’m only fourteen.”

Hart thought for a minute, than she took her car keys and the phone Bobbi still held in her hand and got out of the car, motioning the girl to do the same. Once out, she walked over to fling her keys into the tall grass in a nearby pasture where cows grazed. Then she made a call on her phone, “Alistair,” she said in the tone of one leaving a message rather than talking to another person. “I’ve lost my keys and can’t get in the car and am going to have to leave it on the highway about five miles before the Medicine Stick turnoff. Serena is coming to pick us up, but could you come by with the extra keys that are hanging in the kitchen when you get a chance?”

Hart stared at her. “What if Granny doesn’t come back?”

“We’ll call somebody, but I’ve got to have an excuse to avoid driving this car another mile. I’d be endangering everyone on the road.”

Bobbi nodded. She looked up
and grateful to see Granny’s rental car coming back down the highway, she began to wave.

It wasn’t until they were in the other car and headed toward the lodge again that Hart realized. Having just protested her independence from her husband, he had been the first person she contacted when she needed help.

The report of a sighting of Nolan Jeffers turned into a young mother’s identifying of an elderly, rather reclusive neighbor as the man she’d seen. A short, rather plump gentleman he bore little resemblance to Jeffers other than being in his
early seventies.

Having apologized to the ‘suspect,’ a man he’d known all his life who probably had never gotten as much as a traffic ticket and hardly ventured from his house these days because of ill health, he thanked the young woman for her vigilance in calling the sheriff’s office. “We’ve anxious to find Mr. Jeffers,” he said, “both for the sake of the public and his own.”

She wrapped her arms around her little son, while another clung to her leg. “I’m afraid to let the boys play outside,” she said. “Mountainside isn’t used to having a criminal loose right here in town.”

Tired and his patience stretched, Alistair almost told her that several such lived in her midst, but of course they were drug dealers, wife beaters, and drunken drivers, not known murderers. He owed it to the community under his care to bring in the escaped prisoner. Only he didn’t know how.

He would have guessed nobody could hide out long in Wichita, or for that matter, in nearby Mountainside. With most prisoners, he would have supposed they’d gone to ground with friends out in the county.

But Jeffers had no friends. He’d been locked away for too much of his life.

Not until after he’d gone by his office and made sure everything was being worked, including the continuing search for Nolan Jeffers, he decided it was time to take a few hours off. The last thing he wanted was to have to face some major problem, the kind that could come up anytime in a sheriff’s day, when he was mentally and physically exhausted.

Barely casting a glancing thought to going home for a nap, he headed northeast. He needed to pay a visit to Rainy Mountain and his own
long buried past.

Even though for the first time she had been able to control which time frame she would exist in, at least after a few frightening moments, the tug from her own past was almost irresistible.

She’d insisted on taking the back seat in Serena’s plush rental car, leaving Bobbi seated up front with her grandmother. Closing her eyes, she could feel the world of old Medicine Stick and the little house where she’d grown up, building around her, beckoning.

But when she opened them, she was right here, Hart Benson Redhawk, in a car with Serena Hudson and Bobbi Lawrence, headed for the lodge where she hoped to get a room.

In a way, she thought with bemusement, she felt like a woman in bad need of a bathroom and afraid she would wet herself embarrassingly at any minute, but determined to hang on a few more minutes.

She had to hang on. She couldn’t pass out here in the car with Serena. Her niece, Helen’s daughter, would no doubt call for an ambulance as soon as she realized Hart couldn’t be awakened. She would not understand as had Bobbi, but would think she was dealing with a medical emergency.

And Alistair would be called. He would be convinced more than ever that something was wrong with her and would rush her back to the doctors and confinement in Oklahoma City.

She couldn’t really blame him. All the symptoms were there. She kept blanking out, she’d confessed to hearing voices and being convinced she was another person, not Hart. He simply wanted her to be treated and get well, which was impossible since she wasn’t sick in the first place.

No, she couldn’t allow that world that kept peering over her shoulder to take over until she was safely alone. As soon as she’d gotten to the lodge, checked into her room and told Serena and Bobbi she was tired and wanted to rest for a while, then she could let down her guard and let the past swallow her up again.

Though he often drove by the low mountain that set out in the prairie some miles from his home, only infrequently did he give it more than a cursory glance. He associated it with his Kiowa grandfather, who had talked in such a low voice that he had to tune up his hearing to comprehend about the mountain and its history.

He supposed, in a way, he’d filed away
those stories when Granddad died. The death of Jon Redhawk had been the first significant loss of his young life and it had hit him so hard that he’d had to store memory of the relationship away. Without Granddad, he’d felt lost and abandoned. Nobody had understood him the way his grandfather had and for a while he didn’t know how to go on.

His mother, who had never approved of his
native American grandfather had discouraged any spoken memories, brushing them aside in terms that he now knew would be considered insensitive. She’d found the Indians and the way they clung to the old life hard to understand. Why couldn’t they just settle down and be good American citizens like everybody else? She hadn’t much approved of western Oklahoma either and had a definite distaste for farming and ranching. She’d been delighted when she’d finally managed to persuade her husband to retire in sunny, sensible Florida and still complained about her son choosing to hang on to the old place.

As for Dad, he and his father had always stood in opposition, almost willfully choosing to misunderstand each other. He’d found his family name mildly embarrassing and even talked about going to court and having it changed to something more ‘American,’ though he never had.
But after his father’s death and his own eventual move out of state, though he’d sold most of the ranch property, he’d kept the house and the immediate acres for his son. He’d said it was what Jon Redhawk would have wanted.

Now he pulled to a stop along the roadside and rolled down the car’s windows before turning off the engine. Not many people around, a cow grazed here and there, an occasional car drove by, a driver glancing at the officer in the official car, probably thinking he was setting up a speed trap.

But mostly the day was silent and he was alone, too tired to get out of the automobile for a walk, his eyes fixed on the low mountain where he’d come so often with his grandfather, touching base with other Kiowa and hearing their stories.

This had been a special place, a landmark for the Kiowa after their long journey ended in loss and tragedy on the southern plains. Before that they’d been up north in that harsh, cold climate, a warrior race that had moved down the plains over the generations, telling their stories of the origin of their people, taking part in the Sun Dance. Along with the Comanche, they had become a proud race of expert horsemen who dominated the region that was theirs.

His grandfather had been raised by the Kiowa, but he’d grown up into a world where the buffalo that sustained them had been wiped out and only a remnant of the people remained, drawn to this magic plain and their memories. He had lived mostly a white man’s life, though never forgetting the past of his people that had connected them to a mystical time when they had been free and wild, essential to a way of life that no longer existed.

Alistair leaned his face against the steering wheel, thinking that Jon Redhawk probably wouldn’t have found anything strange about Hart’s conviction that she visited in another time and shared a twin bonding with a woman who had given her life for her.

Greater love hath no man
. . . Abruptly he thought what he was doing, bringing a quote from the Bible into unison with Kiowa history, and then thinking that it was true, that what pure love there was in sacrificing your own life for someone else’s, whether it was through death or by living a life of service.

Granddad has not cared for the white man’s authority, but Alistair felt that he would have understood that in his own way,
his grandson had chosen life as a warrior, a life of risk and at the same time one of service. He wouldn’t tell anyone else for fear of being accused of sentimentality, but it was his job, in his own small way, to try to protect the young, the old, those who couldn’t look after themselves from the evil of this modern world.

Damn, but he must be getting old and foolish. Here he was trying to help the woman he loved find her way in the real world and he sat here drifting off into Indian legends. He turned his eyes away from the mountain, and starting his car with a roar, wheeled about and went back to work.

The artificial scent of cleanliness in the room seemed pleasant to Hart as she locked and latched her door behind her and looked around at the familiar lodge room. Rustic with dark wood and original paintings of historical scenes done by students who came to t
he annual summer arts institute, the room didn’t look like a standard hotel room. It was more like being in a cabin in the woods, though she knew if she went over to open the drapes that covered the large window, she would look out on the lake which was beginning to fill up again after days of rain and runoff from the surrounding mountains.

Tempted to look out and see if the battered buildings from her long ago town were beginning to disappear once more under the water, instead she pushed her suitcase out of the way and
sank down on the bed. The need to escape to the past overwhelmed her and she knew she would be safer if it happened when she was stretched out on the mattress.

Nearly sick with the sense that she must
go back there or she would miss something important, something that mattered tremendously.

Almost immediately she felt herself drifting away. It was like sinking into sleep, except she was wide awake and knew the instant when everything changed and the bed she was
lying on smelled of the lavender her mother favored and she was home again.

“Feeling better?” Mom asked from the doorway, her voice concerned. Her brood was largely healthy, but when one of them got sick, Mom tended to panic. No wonder, in her youth she’d lost two siblings as little children, a not uncommon experience in those pioneer days when medical care had been rare and often inexpert.

She sat up. “I’m fine,” she said and found it to be true.

“That’s good because our company will be here at any minute.”

That’s right. She’d forgotten that the reason for the special meal she’d come close to ruining was because her mother expected a couple of old friends to join them.

She hurried to help get the meal on the table, though she noticed that neither Helen or her mother seemed willing to trust her with anything
spill-able.

The chicken, looking innocent of damage, rested on Mom’s second best platter in the middle of the table. The best platter, the one that had belonged to her grandmother, was in pieces in the trash bucket, she guessed guiltily.

The guests were Mom’s friend Oma Jeffers and her little boy Nolan. Nolan was six now and he’d brought his friend Terry Maxwell with him. Stacia knew of the Jeffers more from hearing her mother talk about them, then from actual acquaintance.

She knew
Mrs. Jeffers was a single mom, her husband having been killed in the last years of the war, and that she struggled to earn a living for herself and her son.

Nolan, a cute little curly-haired boy who seemed to greet the world with a smile, provided a direct contrast to his friend. Terry was thin and pale and scared looking, he hardly said a word throughout the visit and waited without complaint, even though he’d been overloo
ked when the chicken was served. It wasn’t until Nolan mentioned this that he was handed a piece of meat.

Mom, who was a sucker for any child especially one who looked as frail and timid as this one, chose
the drumstick for the little boy and saw that he had heaping helpings of mashed potatoes and green beans as well as an extra homemade roll.

“How sweet that Nolan tries to look after his friend,” she told
Oma Jeffers.

Oma
smiled at the compliment to her son. “He has a good heart,” she said. It wasn’t until the boys had finished their meal and been allowed to go outside to play that Stacia heard her whisper, “Terry’s dad is hard on him. Seems to have a grudge against the world, but I sure wish he wouldn’t take it out on the boy.”

“What about his mother?”

“Poor woman, she couldn’t stand up for herself, much less for the child.”

The two women then noticed that Helen and Stacia were taking in every word and rose to begin clearing the table, their talk drifting to the years when they’d been growing up together.

Stacia, feeling that her mission was accomplished, at least for now, waited to be wafted back to the form that waited for her in a bed at Medicine Stick Lodge.

Helen gave her a gentle shove. “Don’t just stand there. Let’s do the dishes so Mom can visit with her friend.”

“Oh! All right,” Stacia agreed, surprised that she still seemed to be stuck in place. Logic told her that the lesson she’d been sent to learn had ended.

Nolan Jeffers and Terry Maxwell had been friends from childhood and Terry’s dad was a frightening man, abusive to his son
as he had been to his late wife. No doubt what had happened later had grown from this root.

But she was still here and someone, most likely Alistair, was likely to demand entrance to her room at the lodge any minute now, and would find her once more unconscious.

The very thought made her anxious. She didn’t want to wake up once more in an Oklahoma City hospital with her husband more convinced than ever that she had some mental disorder.