Wakening the Past: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series Book 2) (8 page)

“Wake up, sleepyhead.”

Even though the call wasn’t a loud one, the familiar voice penetrated into Hart’s sleep and she sat up, orienting herself to the fact that she was in a room in the lodge and her husband had already jumped from the bed and was ready for attack.

“Always the sheriff,” she murmured, “It’s only Serena Hudson. She’s staying here too.”

“Come on, Bobbi. Time for breakfast. It’s almost ten but I’m still on California time.”

Bobbi! She thought Bobbi was in here. Something was wrong.

Alistair was already pulling on the clothing he’d shed the night before and by the time she’d thrown on the bathrobe she’d left on her chair, he had on jeans and was at least decent enough to face company.

She flung open the door and Serena, still addressing herself to her granddaughter, stepped into the room, saying, “I’ll bet you girls sat up half the night watching . . .” As she took in the two
towsled, half-dressed people, she stopped, her face flushing lightly. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were here, Alistair.” She looked around. “But where is Bobbi?”

Hart felt suddenly sick in her middle and her mouth was so dry she couldn’t speak. Bobbi had left here hours ago to go to her Grandmother’s room. And she’d never gotten there.

She had to leave communication to Alistair. “Serena, Bobbi said goodnight to us a little before midnight and said she was going to join you.”

Serena stared at him. “You let that child go off by herself in the middle of the night?”

Hart understood. Sometimes utter fear triggered anger at whoever was standing closest. “She’s fourteen, Serena, and you were only a few doors away.”

“But what has happened to her? Where is my granddaughter?” Serena seemed caught between fury and terror. Hart understood because she felt the same way.

Alistair had already buttoned his shirt and put on socks and boots. Ignoring them, he was on the phone and she could hear that he was calling an alert to his deputies and ordering at least some of them to the lodge for a search.

“I’m going down to the front desk and see if she’d down there. Maybe she’s in the restaurant.”

For some reason, Hart didn’t place much faith in this possibility. “It would have been closed until this morning.”

“Maybe she didn’t want to disturb her grandmother and slept on one of the sofas down there.”

“I’m going with you,” Serena insisted. He nodded and the two of them left.

Panicked, Hart said a silent prayer. Somehow she felt really bad about this and she didn’t know quite why. Bobbi had already shown that she was very capable of independent action. She had run away from friends and family to come here. But still, somewhere within her, she felt a rising fear.

She rushed to pull on a pair of jeans and a knit shirt. As she was tying her shoes, she thought to grab a coat. It was cold outside and somehow she knew that was where she must go to look for Bobbi.

When Bobbi left Hart’s hotel room, her main emotion was anger at Alistair for showing up to interrupt an important talk with Hart. Being fourteen was hard enough, considering her few friends and relatives were often too busy for her, always excepting Granny, of course.

Oh, she knew Mom and Dad loved her, but with
active careers and the difficulty she had being ‘important’ enough, considering that their patients’ problems were often a matter of life and death, she’d begun to think of Hart Redhawk as a kind of foster sister, an older woman who had experienced weird things on her own and could help Bobbi deal with what was going on.

But Alistair kept pushing between them and she could sense that Hart wasn’t truly happy with him. In spite of that, she’d felt she had no choice but to leave them alone and go back to Granny.

But she was nearly grown up now. It wasn’t fair to always lean on her grandmother, who had raised her own family long ago. So in the few steps from Hart’s door to Granny’s, she changed her mind.

She wasn’t sleepy anyway. She’d just go down to the lobby and sit by herself in one of those big chairs and try to think things through.

Unfortunately she found she wasn’t the only one with that idea.  A round little woman with a worried face already sat in one of the big chairs, leafing through a magazine as though she weren’t really concentrated on either photos or text.

“Hi,” she said as Bobbi chose the chair further away. “Having trouble sleeping?”

Bobbi heard that patronizing sound in her voice of an adult speaking to a child. She felt compelled to offer no more than a nod, then picked up a magazine of her own to hide behind. Maybe this woman would go away soon and leave her the privacy she needed.

The woman smiled at her. “I have two little girls of my own.”

This was just too much. “I’m fourteen,” she said coldly. “I’m not a little girl.”

The woman sighed. “I know all about fourteen,” she said, “I coach teens.”

Bobbi got the impression that she didn’t find coaching a rewarding profession.

“And I teach math.”

Bobbi considered math a bore. It had no plot, just a lot of numbers. Oh, her mother had tried to teach her differently. Math and science were the pathways to a good future, according to her mother, the way she’d gone to a distinguished education and an even better career.

So Bobbi had decided to hate math even more, just to show her mother.

“My girls are Mandy and Christy,” the woman went on, seeming to feel a desperate need for conversation. “Mandy and Christy Benson. I left them alone tonight with their dad. That way he can’t go out.”

Bobbi tried to look as disinterested as she felt. Why was this person burdening a total stranger with her family situation?
Because she can’t talk to anyone she knows
, a voice inside her head answered her own question.

Well, she had enough problems of her own. Bobbi go
t up and hurried away. She could think of no place to go except outside. As she stepped out, she hugged herself in her own arms for warmth. Maybe she should go back for a coat, but no, she didn’t want to wake Granny, who would just insist she stay in the room and go to bed.

Tonight she couldn’t bear to be confined. Too many voices were speaking in her head.

Even though a cold wind blew, the rain had stopped and she decided to chance a few minutes away from the wide veranda that lined the front of the lodge. Maybe that wind would blow the echoes out of her head.

Christy and Mandy, the names of the two little girls flitted through her brain, seeming familiar. Then she realized that she’d heard the names from Hart. Christy and Mandy Benson, Hart’s nieces, daughters of her brother. That strange little woman must be Hart’s sister-in-law. What was she doing sitting in the lobby at this time of night when she had a home in Mountainside?

Memories that weren’t her own flicked through her brain.
He has as much right to the money as you! You owe us that much help at least.
The words in her head were spoken in that woman’s voice, but she hadn’t said them tonight, nor to Bobbi.

She’d said them to Hart before . . . and she’d been so very angry. Perhaps she’d come here to do Hart harm.

What was her name? Bobbi tried but couldn’t seem to remember. This past she was recalling was fuzzy and vague with only lines spoken by various voices popping into her head.

Even though she was cold, she felt as though she were breaking out in a sweat. Things were getting worse. Soon the voices inside her would push her right out of her own head. She had to have help. She had to get back to Hart who must know some of the answers because the main voice was hers.

Out of the circle of lights around the lodge, she seemed to be steeped in darkness. The dark waters of the lake glittered in faint starlight just down the mountain. That was the place where Stacia had lived and died. Not Stacia. Not really, she realized. Stacia was the woman sleeping inside with her husband. Only the body was Hart. The woman was Stacia.

The woman who had died down there had been Hart. She was who Bobbi had been before. Almost she could remember dying down there, a memory that was more like a nightmare that vanished when you awakened, leaving only the knowledge that something fearful had happening.

Without conscious will, Bobbi stumbled down the mountainside to the lake, barely aware that she shivered violently in the cold.

So anxious to begin searching for Bobbi, Hart almost didn’t pause when she saw the woman struggling upward in the big chair by the fireplace as she passed the lobby on her way to the front entrance.

Then she stopped and turned back, more than a little curio
us as to why her sister-in-law was sleeping in a hotel lobby. “Nikki?” she asked quietly. “Is everything all right?”

Her sister-in-law glared, her eyes heavy with sleep and her face red-lined from where it had rested against the chair’s cushions. She bushed heavy bangs back into the mass of short, thick hair. “Much you care.”

Hart wished she hadn’t stopped. She never heard anything from Nikki but angry recriminations. Still, she couldn’t help being concerned about the man she thought of as her half-brother and the two little girls she’d come to love. “Are Tommy and the girls all right?”

Nikki took a tissue from her purse and blew her nose. She looked as though she might have been crying before she fell asleep. “They were okay when I left home last night.”

The need for finding Bobbi as quickly as possible tugged at her so she tried to hurry Nikki along. She didn’t much care why Tommy’s wife had spent the night out here, not if her family members were all right.

“Well, I’ve got to go. A young friend of mine is missing and we’re about to start a search.”

She turned to leave the room before she could be attacked by anymore of Nikki’s customary venom. Her marriage had its own problems, but she liked to believe that Hart was the source of all her trouble.

“If you’re talking about that little girl who was wandering around the lodge last night, I had a bit of a talk with her.” She raised expressive eyebrows. “If one of my girls behaved that rudely, I’d have something to say, believe you me. Here we were conversing nicely and up she scoots out the door without a by your leave. Kids these days aren’t taught matters.”

Her heart jolting, Hart turned back. “You saw Bobbi last night?”

Nikki nodded. “About
midnight. She sat in that chair.” She pointed across the room. “And then she got up and went outside without even a sweater on, cold as it was. I heard the front door open and close.”

“You didn’t see her after that?”

“No, and I was awake for hours thinking about Tommy and our problems. That’s why I came out here, you know. A neighbor came out for dinner and said she saw you check in, but the clerk wouldn’t tell me your room number so I just decided to wait here all night so I could catch you this morning.”

“And Bobbi went outside?” Hart turned and headed toward the entrance.

“I told you I need to talk to you.”

Hart ignored the quarrelsome voice trailing after her. No wonder the night clerk wouldn’t give Nikki Benson her room number. No doubt her feelings about her brother’s sister were well enough known in the community.

Well, she would sort Nikki out later. Right now she had to find Bobbi and make certain she was all right. “Later,” she called over her shoulder as she went outside.

The day was clear and cold with a strong north wind blowing so that Hart buttoned her coat up to her chin and tucked her hands in her pockets as she started down the cliff to the lake.

This wasn’t the kind of weather that attracted visitors lakeside so she had the site to herself. Not even a boat was out on the water today and enough water had come downstream in the last days of rain to fill the lake to a more normal area. It looked very different than it had last fall when the lowered water level had revealed traces of the little town of Medicine Stick, which had been covered over by water when the lake was constructed back in the 1940s.

Hart swallowed hard and tried not to think of the day when she’d come out here just in time to watch Alistair and his deputy investigate a skeleton found in one of the decaying buildings.

Even less did she want to remember whose bones those had been. She concentrated on finding Bobbi.

The girl was nowhere in sight, though, of course, she could be hiding in the
shrubbery near the lake. She began to walk toward the nearest cluster of cedars, but as she moved forward she began to see things out of the corner of her eye that could not be there.

This had happened so many times that she no longer panicked. Once it would have meant she was heading back to her own body, leaving Hart Benson to this one. But Hart was gone and when she left these days,
Hart’s body went empty and unconscious.

If she collapsed out here, she might die of the cold. Hart struggled to hang on, guessing she didn’t have time to get back up to the lodge and so heading toward the protection of the cedars. At least they would shelter her form the icy wind.

The enlarging scene behind her and to her left was quickly coming to swallow her up. Strangely it wasn’t a familiar view of the streets or inside the rooms of Medicine Stick. She had only time to grab hold of a cedar branch, blinking to try to bring the scene into clearer view and then it took her in and she was there, no longer hanging on to a tree branch, but in a warm room where three men were hovering over a free-standing heater and drinking coffee.