Wrong Face in the Mirror: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series) (13 page)

Funny that the family had dwindled down to only Hart. You could hardly count Tommy, he didn’t trace his ancestry through the Hartleys.

And then there was Alistair’s grandfather. Like the Hartleys, he lived out on a ranch, though his place hardly compared with their vast spread. He was older than the crowd with which she’d grown up, but somewhat legendary for his bad temper, his drinking and woman chasing. He was the town’s bad boy, romantic and exciting in that way that appealed to some women.

She pushed all such thoughts aside as she got home, changed  into a house dress, washed her hands with strong soap, then went into the kitchen to help her mother make supper. Before long Helen joined them and Stacia looked around, thinking this was a gift, a few moments with members of her family who were long gone. How Helen would laugh if she told her she’d met her granddaughter today.

And what would Mom make of Bobbi, so
mischievous and irreverent. Mom would think her a most improper young lady, but she would love her too. Mom was incapable of failing to love her own great-granddaughter.

Well, she would just have to love Bobbi in their place. When she got back, if she got back. This visit was stretching on to such lengths that she was beginning to worry.

She was even more concerned that night when she lay awake in the bed across the room from her sister. She wondered what had happened when she left Hart’s body in the car beside the road. If something bad occurred to that form, then she would no longer have an ongoing role in life. She would be trapped in the loop of the past that only led to her own murder.

Hart woke up and turned over to find Helen quietly dressing on the other side of the room. “Sorry,” her sister apologized with a grin. “I was trying not to wake you since you seemed to have such a rotten night.”

Hart sat up. “I did?”

“Well, you talked a lot in your sleep, yelling something about your heart and how you were going to die so you must have had terrible nightmares. Once you even got out of bed and tried to leave the house. I had a terrible time convincing you that you were only having a dream and talking you back into bed.”

“I don’t remember anything.”

“Dreams are like that and you’ve always had wild nightmares. Remember the time Dad found you down in front of Millers’ Store sleep walking.”

Oh yes. That was one of the times when Hart had come visiting. She wondered now if Hart had tried and failed to come back to this time. Or perhaps she’d struggled to get back to Alistair and the present time where she now lived.

“Sorry to have been such a bother.” Stacia got up, feeling the unfamiliar warmth of the long flannel nightgown around her legs. “Did I w
ake up anybody else?”

Helen shook her head and she was glad there were no more explanations to make. She put on her own dress, knowing she was late for breakfast which always annoyed Dad
, and felt sick at her stomach that she was still here in the past when she needed to be back with Alistair, solving her own murder.

Alistair. She sank back on the bed, not caring if she was  late for breakfast because more memories were coming back, flooding her mind.

She’d already remembered meeting him at the school play where Mandy and Christy were performing. And it really was a first meeting. He and Hart might have been long acquainted, but it was the first time she, Stacia in Hart’s body, had seen him.

She’d been both mesmerized and doomed on seeing him. She’d never believed in love at first sight, but it had happened to her. He’d grinned, his overly-serious face turned to her as though even if he’d seen her dozens of times over the years, he was seeing her for the first time.

He might not have realized it, but something inside him recognized that a different person was looking out of familiar eyes.

How had Hart not fallen in love with Alistair Redhawk?

Feelings sizzled and crackled within her and she had a hard time not running to him and shouting, ‘I’ve been waiting for you all my life!’

Instead she stood, pretending to be poised and at ease as others moved around her leaving the school auditorium and her nieces ran to her side, demanding praise for their performances in the little play. She managed to hug them and say the right things even as she was aware that
he
, a man she was supposed to know but had never met, made his way toward them, shaking hands with her brother and greeting Nikki, his gaze on her face the whole time.

“Good to see you again, Hart,” he said.

“And you,” she responded, feeling weak in her knees.

They had lingered behind the others though Tommy kept frowning back at them. The conversation had not been particularly meaningful; she couldn’t even remember what they’d said, but by the time he left her at Tommy’s pickup they’d made a date for the previous night.

It had begun there and the weeks ahead had sped fast at the same time as lasting forever. They talked, kissed, fell deeper in love with each meeting and she was mentally begging Hart to stay back in the ‘40s for a little while longer.

She gave little thought to what the other woman was feeling, caught as she was by passion, and worried only slightly about her family who might begin to notice something odd about the woman who seemed to be their daughter.

She told herself she couldn’t force Hart to stay back there. This had to be a cooperative decision, a mutual choice. Hart didn’t want to come here anymore than she wished to return to her own life.

Now she thought how
narcissistic had been those first days of falling in love. She might as well have been caught in a little bubble with Alistair. Nothing mattered but him and when they ran away to get married, ignoring Tommy’s protests and not bothering to as much as notify Alistair’s family, it had been wonderful!

The weeks had gone by and then one day she found herself drawn back against her will and she was standing in front of the store and someone was shouting at her.

She didn’t know who. She couldn’t remember anymore, but surmised bitterly that she’d gone back to face her own death.

The medical staff at the Oklahoma City hospital had a plethora of opinions about why Hart once again lay unconscious on a hospital bed, but nothing concrete emerged as test after test was conducted.

Alistair sat at her side, his deputies seeing
to the crime in Wichita County, as he talked and read to his wife. He’d even gotten a copy of that old book she liked so much and took to reading aloud from it for a few minutes at a time, though he found it confusing as it dealt with several generations of a family as though they were all living at the same time.

Tommy had been there for the first two days, but Alistair had hidden his pleasure when Hart’s half-brother confessed he had to get back to work. “If I don’t work, I don’t get paid,” he said pointedly, “unlike some people.”

His parents called to see how the daughter-in-law they’d never met was coming along and they’d wired a huge bouquet of roses from their home in Florida. The note said, “Tell Heart we are thinking of her.”

Slumped at her bedside, her small hand in his, he was half asleep that evening when he heard her voice, “I would never have told you I loved anybody else.”

“Hart!” Tears came to his eyes as he smiled down at her. “You’re awake.”

“It was her,” she said, “not me.” She returned his smile, th
an lifted his hand to her lips for a kiss, nestling closer to him to fall asleep.

For an instant he feared she’d slipped back into unconsciousness, but somehow he was sure that wasn’t so. Her face looked soft with repose, the smile still half lingering on her lips. He waited a little before even summoning the nurses, enjoyed these moments with her.

When they came and he told them what had happened, the nurses seemed doubtful and sent him from the room. It was nearly forty minutes later when the hastily summoned doctor came out to tell him what he already knew.

They told him he could go back in to sit at her side, but to be very quiet because she needed to rest. It seemed to Alistair that she’d had plenty of rest already.

She tried to tell Alistair how she felt as soon as she’d recovered enough to put those feelings into words. “I remember,” she said. “I remember falling in love with you and getting married. I remember those weeks we had together at the ranch house.”

She looked lovingly up from her pillow at him. “But I don’t remember telling you that I loved another man because I didn’t and I don’t. It was Hart who said those words, not me.”

She watched the expression on his face change. He’d been looking down at her with such love, but now lines of concern dug into his forehead. “But, love, you are Hart.”

It was all so complicated to explain, but she was sure if she could put it into words she could make him understand. “Now I’m Hart, but really I’m Stacia in Hart’s body. It’s not the outside that makes the person, but the inside. In my soul I’m Stacia.” She laughed softly at the strange idea.

His tone was dauntingly reasonable, the kind you would use to a troubled child. “So there are two people inside you?”

She shook her head. “Just me. Stacia inside Hart.”

He took her hand. “Sweetheart, maybe you need to talk to someone.”

“I am. I’m talking to you,” she said eagerly.

“That’s not what I mean. Hart, I’m going to
speak to your doctor and have him recommend someone, a counselor who can help you work through your feelings.”

She stared at him, wondering why she was surprised that he thought she was crazy. It was a wild story after all.

The last thing she wanted was some head doctor probing her mind. Even though this was the man she loved, she would have to step back and pretend until he was ready to believe her.

“I’m just one person,” she said and it was true. Hart was gone. Hart had been killed sixty four years ago, leaving her to live out her interrupted life in another time. “Just me, the woman who loves you, the woman who married you.”

When he reached for her, she melted into his arms and found comfort in spite of the fact that he wasn’t ready yet to know and understand her whole story. And maybe never would be.

For herself, she was ready to go on with the life left to her. She would always miss the family she’d lost as well as the Hart Benson she’d never known, but she would honor all of them by living as best she could.

Instead of taking her home, Alistair instead committed her to the care of a rehab facility where she would daily see a psychiatrist.

Bubbling with internal anger, she argued fiercely with his decision and he only tried to soothe her by saying his only concern was what was best for her.

He reminded her that there was an illne
ss where a person’s brain deceived them into hearing voices that didn’t speak and act on messages that were illusory. And sometimes something happened so that more than one person seemed to reside inside a single brain.

He continued to talk to her as though she were a sick child and
she wondered how she could ever have thought she loved this annoying man who was so sure of his own opinion.

She wasn’t sick. She didn’t have two people living in her brain. Even when Hart was alive, they’d taken turns. They hadn’t been twinned in some way.

It took weeks for her to convince the psychiatrist that she was mentally sound, but at the end of the period she told Alistair that his wife was as sane as he was and that anybody who had been through what she had was entitled to be a little confused on waking from a coma.

She allowed him to drive her back to Mountainside because she had little other choice, but only spoke to him when absolutely necessary and asked him to check her into a room at the Medicine Stick Lodge as
she most certainly wouldn’t go home with him.

Alistair would have preferred to take Hart home with him, but she’d be safer at the lodge, considering that he’d left a deputy to keep watch through the night. Naturally he’d not informed Hart of that fact.

He’d tried to talk the doctor into keeping her at the facility in Oklahoma City a little longer, but his request had been refused. “She’s well enough to go home,” he had been told. “And if we keep her here much longer, we’ll have her convinced something really is wrong.”

He hadn’t been able to help thinking that she was safer in a locked building in Oklahoma City than back home in Mountainside, but the truth was that he only felt okay about her when she was within sight and touch.

She was so mad at him that he couldn’t convince her of that so the lodge was the next best bet.

The reports from the investigations of the fire were conclusive. Somebody had splashed gasoline on the floor to send the fire
racing through the loft of the old building. To him it looked like a direct attack on Hart.

Nothing had happened since, but that didn’t make him feel anymore easy about the whole thing. Tommy and Nikki Benson were deep in money trouble
; everybody in town knew that and knew as well that Hart had plenty of the green stuff. It was his experience as a lawman that most murders were committed for obvious reasons and gain was high on the list. And he’d been in this work long enough to know you couldn’t dismiss the intended victim’s nearest and dearest from the list of suspects.

Naturally he couldn’t tell Hart any of this when she was in such a fragile mental state. If she was imagining that she was somebody from the past, what would it do to her to suggest that her own brother might be wishing her dead?

That doctor could say what he liked about her firm mental grounding; he hadn’t heard her talk about being Stacia Larkin in Hart’s body and how Hart was dead . . .

It made him sick to think about her being that bewildered. Somehow he knew if he could find out what had happened back when she went missing and ended up on that street in Oklahoma City, he could help her get back to herself.

To herself and to him. Alistair ached to have her happy in his arms once again.

That night lying in her comfortable bed at the lodge, Hart wondered if she still had a job and felt more alone than she ever had in her life.

Alistair had told her that Serena and Bobbi had gone back to California while she was in Oklahoma City. And fond as she was of
Mandy and Christy, she found it hard to think of Tommy and Nikki as family. Now that she’d fallen out with the man she’d married, she seemed to have nobody left in her life.

It was a desolating feeling, but what could she do? She could hardly go to Alistair and beg his forgiveness when the whole thing was his fault. Oh, sure, she could understand that he might have been a little disturbed when she’d talked about being Stacia and not being Hart, but the Oklahoma City doctor, Alistair called him a shrink, had said she was sound and sane.

Of course she hadn’t told the doctor about the odd relationship between her and Hart. She couldn’t tell anybody else if she wanted to live a life free of doctors and institutions. This had to be her secret.

It seemed a lonely life she was doomed to live. Alistair might have given her the benefit of the doubt if the scientific evidence had backed up her claim that the dead woman was Stacia Larkin, but all he would say was that
getting that evidence would take a long time.

She didn’t know if it was the truth or he was lying. Maybe he just didn’t want to confirm what he considered to be her madness.

Restless and angry, she got up from bed and without turning on a light went to push aside the drapes and look outside. The rustic lodge hovered in the middle of a low mountain ledge overlooking the lake. A chill wintry moon gazed down on the water; the night hiding the shallow depths so that tonight the lake shone with an eerie beauty enhanced by the bare, granite mountains that edged its shores.

Down there was where she’d been born and grown up back when it was the town of Medicine Stick before the lake waters covered it over.

She’d played with her brothers and Helen, worked in Millers’ Store and helped Dad at the creamery where he took in cream and eggs brought for sale from neighboring farms.

She could almost smell the sour scent that came from those cream cans, could hear the cheerful chatter between her dad and the farmers.  He’d worked hard all his life for a meager living for his family, but he’d never seemed to have felt his life hard. His life had been better than that of his parents in the
pioneer years when they’d lived in a dugout and broke sod to plant their crops, and he prayed his children would have better lives yet.

Well, she guessed they had. She hadn’t gotten a chance to ask Helen’s granddaughter about what had happened to her brothers, but obviously Helen and her children had benefited from opportunities never available to their parents.

Most of that generation hadn’t been able to complete high school, certainly none of them even dreamed of college. And Serena had said her daughter, Helen’s granddaughter, was a genuine real-for-sure doctor. How proud Dad would have been!

But now as she looked now the scene which included the lake, between one glance and another, it changed. She saw instead the dimly lit town of the 1940s with an occasional car creeping
down its narrow streets, headlights lacing the darkness.

Not many lights were on in those houses. People in Mountain Stick worked hard and went to bed early. Without forming an actual intention to do so, she slipped into her jeans, shirt and shoes and crept from the lodge, half expected that when she stepped out the vision she’d seen from the window would be gone.

A few cars were in the parking lot on the end, but now in the middle of the week with the winter season beginning, few visitors were at Medicine Stick Lodge. And across from the lodge, possibly visible only to her eyes, lay the town.

That town and the lodge from which she’d just stepped could never have existed in the same time and yet they were both
here. When she looked back, she saw the spreading lodge built of native stone from the mountains. When she looked forward through the haze of moonlight, she saw her long vanished hometown. To the right of the lodge, she took the gentle slope that led down to the town, a familiar walk so that even in a night lit only by the moon, she could easily find her way. For a November night it was not terribly cold, though she did wish she’d thought to put on a sweater.

Glancing back, she could still the lodge with its well-lighted entry behind her and as she took the last step that led her onto the street into town, she seemed to hear someone calling, but the name
spoken was not her own. A man’s voice yelled, “Hart! Hart!” and for an instant she wondered who that was, but then she was once more in her own familiar town and an equally familiar battered old black Ford was coming to a low stop, then backing to her side.

“Stacia Larkin, what do you think you’re doing out walking at this time of night?”

She stared bewilderedly at her dad. She didn’t know. Last she’d remembered she was in bed, a big, wide bed with a warm coverlet.

“You’ve been sleepwalking again. Lordy, girl, what are we going to do with you?”

She glanced down and sure enough she was wearing her long flannel nightgown. How embarrassing! She could only hope none of the neighbors had seen her out in her nightclothes.

Before she could climb in, another car drew up, this one long and low and expensive looking. “Everything all right, Bob?” a woman’s voice called. “You having car trouble?”

“Nothing like that, Madge,” Dad leaned out the window to call back. “Stacia just has a problem with sleepwalking now and then.”

“Oh, my goodness,” the voice that Stacia now recognized as Madge Hartley’s responded. “Well, you go home and sleep in your own bed, Stacia.”

Stacia managed a little wave of acknowledgement, got into the car and tried to sink out of sight.

Madge was one of the Hartleys who owned the biggest ranch in the region. She should have known. Even though the automobile was new and not one
with which she was acquainted, who else in Medicine Stick could afford something that fancy other than the Hartleys.

“That was so humiliating,” she said as they put-putted off in the old Ford.

Dad shrugged. “Couldn’t be helped. It’s not like you choose to sleepwalk or even do it very often.”

That was the part that scared her, that this was all beyond her control and always happened when least expected.

She leaned back, taking in her abnormal experiences with a certain resignation. Like Dad said she couldn’t help it.

“I’m put
ting a new lock on the door tomorrow,” he tried to comfort her. “One so complicated you won’t be able to get out unless you’re wide awake.”

Her brothers were still asleep, but Mom and Helen were up, waiting anxiously for her return. Mom wept a little over her and scolded mildly while Dad said again that sleepwalking wasn’t something she could help doing. Helen didn’t say anything until they were alone in their room. “I woke up and found you gone,” she said, “and the front door was standing open. When I couldn’t find you out front, I woke up Mom.”

Stacia crawled wearily back into bed. “Madge Hartley came by just as Dad was picking me up. She probably thinks I’m deranged.”

“Well, who cares what she thinks, stuck-up old snob.”

Rightly speaking, Stacia supposed she should defend Hart’s grandmother, who had left the money now at her disposal since Hart wasn’t around anymore. But as she’d died when Hart was only a baby and here in Medicine Stick the family was so aloof from the community that Stacia only barely recognized them when they met.

“I don’t suppose she’s all that old, Helen,” she protested.

“No, she’s only about your age, but everybody says she’ll be a dried up old maid because no man is good enough for her.”

As she closed her eyes, Stacia thought that Madge Hartley must have found some man good enough as she’d lived long enough to
leave descendants.

Sheriff Redhawk’s senior deputy Mark Long called him when he was back at work in his office, catching up with some of the reports he’d missed while he was away. “Sheriff, Deputy Long here,” he said. “Got some bad news. That black-haired gal got away from me.”

Sometimes Alistair felt that Long had out-served his abilities, even though he was only
about fifty. He’d been with the Wichita County office since he was barely out of his teens and though plodding and dependable, he never seemed to find anything urgent. “What do you mean? Where’s Hart?”

“Was watching from my car and saw her come out of the lodge. Taking a little stroll. It was late for that, but it’s a fair night and I figured she just couldn’t sleep.”

“Mark! I told you not to take your eyes off her.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I didn’t. I watched as she started walking kind of slow like down the hill toward the lake. After a while, she stopped and just seemed to be looking, though there’s not much to see in the lake these days low as it is. And then she wasn’t there anymore.”

“You mean you lost sight of her?”

“I mean she wasn’t there anymore. One second I could see her and the next I couldn’t.
I’m real sorry, sheriff, but your wife done give me the slip.”

After giving orders for a thorough and immediate search and order
ing another deputy to the lodge, Alistair got in his car and headed out, anxious supposition spinning through his brain.

When Hart awakened she was once more on the bank above the lake and the town she’d so recently visited was no more than what she could see of worn out ruins sticking out of the water.

Thank goodness she’d been gone only briefly and nobody had stuck her in the hospital this time. She glanced around, saw a beefy older man down by the lakeside, but no one else and moved quietly back up to the lodge,
sneaking unobserved through a side entrance and using the card still in her jeans pocket to enter the room she’d left a short time before.

She was settled in bed, wearing a nightshirt and watching television in a vain attempt to disrupt the images of the evening from her mind when she heard the approach of emergency sirens. She went to the window to look out and saw the Wichita County sheriff’s car, followed by a second vehicle, both with lights blazing and sirens screaming.

It looked as though, somehow, her husband had gotten word that she was missing. She watched as the tall, strongly built figure, leapt from the first car and a young deputy she’d met before got out from the second one. The beefy man she’d seen earlier came trotting toward them, shaking his head.

She decided it would be best to pretend she didn’t see any of this happening if she didn’t want to have to explain the unexplainable to Alistair. It wouldn’t help matters between them if she said she’d taken a ride through Medicine Stick with her long deceased father and encountered the
great-grandmother of the woman she was supposed to be.

Not a good idea, not if she didn’t want to be sent back to the shrink and perhaps confined for what her husband thought was her own good.