Table of Contents
A CERTAIN TWIST IN TIME
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
A CERTAIN TWIST IN TIME
ANITA K. GRIMM
SOUL MATE PUBLISHING
New York
A CERTAIN TWIST IN TIME
Copyright©2019
ANITA K. GRIMM
Cover Design by Melody A. Pond
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, business establishments, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
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Published in the United States of America by
Soul Mate Publishing
P.O. Box 24
Macedon, New York, 14502
ISBN: 978-1-68291-857-9
www.SoulMatePublishing.com
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This book is dedicated to all the children
whose innocent lives are shattered
by family circumstances beyond their control,
and who fall into the maw of The System
that makes life-altering choices for them,
often with minimal heart or compassion.
And to the CASAs (Court Appointed Special Advocates)
whose volunteer efforts, within yet outside The System,
seek to soften the blow.
Acknowledgments
To my beloved husband, with whom my life is blessedly shared, and who understands the long solitary hours I spend at the computer. To my wonderful writing group who are like a second and profoundly treasured family—you know who you are. To my beta reader, Carol Secoy, author of The Bag Lady War, for her critical eye and enthusiastic support, and to Cheryl Yeko and Debby Gilbert for their invaluable guidance at Soul Mate Publishing.
Chapter 1
My parents drowned this afternoon. At least that’s what the park ranger told me while I sat paralyzed on my hotel bed, staring up at him in disbelief.
It doesn’t feel real. It can’t be. I keep expecting them to walk through the door of our Lake Tahoe hotel suite, laughing and wind-blown, as if none of the rest of us had spent half the day with our guts twisted and our fingernails gouging holes in our palms. As if I hadn’t prayed for hours that they had swum to shore after their rented sailboat was discovered capsized three miles out on the lake. Mom’s never been much of a swimmer, but Dad was on his high school’s competitive swim team back in the Dark Ages. He could have towed her to shore, couldn’t he? After all, the park ranger hadn’t actually seen anything but the overturned boat adrift in the lake.
By the rest of us I mean the nervous hotel manager who’d parked himself in a corner of my room, clasping and unclasping his marshmallowy hands, no doubt anticipating some horrendous lawsuit. The hotel did own the rental sailboats, after all. A park ranger in his Smokey-the-Bear hat made a continuous circuit of our hotel suite, adjusting his dark glasses, speaking in hushed tones to the others and trying to look official and important. Two police officers conferred with the invisible headquarters on their shoulder radios, and two female social workers from Child Protective Services whispered together and studied the notes they had taken on their iPads.
While the police officers and park ranger milled about the room whispering so I couldn’t hear, one of the CPS workers approached me.
“Why did your parents leave you alone in this hotel room?” Her tone was accusatory, as if my parents were criminally negligent, maybe even child abusers. Guess they’re always on the look-out for that kind of stuff.
Attacking my maybe-already-dead parents hardened my jaw. What? Would it have been better for me to be with them now, wherever that was? Good friggin grief. I’m not a baby. I’m almost sixteen. I just wanted to mess around on my laptop and email my friends back home more than I wanted to go sailing on the lake.
But that’s not what I said to her. I pinned her with my eyes and spoke through my teeth. “It was my choice.” I’ve learned when to swallow the words I really want to say. Sometimes it feels like swallowing battery acid.
Another police officer, older than the other two, walked into my room, mumbling something into his radio before pulling up a desk chair next to the bed where I sat cross-legged in shorts, a faded Disneyland T-shirt, and bare feet. His name plate read Sgt. T. Haglar.
“Emma, isn’t it?” he asked. “Emma Ross?”
His brown eyes studied me as I nodded. “I’m sorry, Emma. The rescue team has searched the area around the sailboat incident for three hours. Another team has picked through every inch of the nearest shore. We haven’t found your parents’ bodies yet.”
I’d been battling alternate waves of fear and grief all afternoon, pushing them back, telling myself everyone always imagines the worst in these cases and it didn’t mean anything until they had solid proof. Now I felt my stomach crouch into a knot, ready to heave up what little I’d forced down at lunch. I pushed that down, too. It was obvious Officer Haglar didn’t hold out any hope. Of course, he could always be wrong. He didn’t know my father. Dad had held his Lifesaving Credential and his Water Safety Instructor Credential since the Paleozoic Era and I had passed my Junior Lifesaving and CPR course this spring.
“It takes a long time to swim three miles to shore,” I informed the cop, forcing a facsimile of hope into my voice. “They’ll turn up. You’ll see.”
The officer studied his lap in despair as if he were failing to reason with a three-year-old. He slid his police hat through his fingers and sighed. His dark hair was thinning on top.
“It’s the middle of June,” he said, as if I didn’t know. “The air temps didn’t even break into the seventies today, and the water out that far will be in the high thirties.”
I wasn’t a total moron. Why do grown-ups always assume kids my age are the intellectual equals of jellyfish? I rolled my eyes.
The officer glanced up. “Even a strong swimmer would find three miles of lake a challenging distance to swim, ho
ney,” he continued, “but in water that cold, your muscles start to stiffen up and don’t work well. After a few minutes it’s almost impossible to swim at all.” His eyes pierced my own. “Hypothermia sets in. You know what I’m saying, don’t you?”
It was more of a statement than a question. I clenched my teeth and fisted my hands hard as concrete, fighting for control. The tears came anyway, soundlessly rolling down my cheeks. He put his arms around me and pressed me against his uniformed chest.
~ ~ ~
I insisted on staying put in my hotel room that night instead of going off someplace else with the social workers. I mean, what if my parents showed up at the hotel? I wanted to be here just in case. So I could throw my arms around them. So I could shout horrible things at them for putting me through the worst day of my life. So I could hear them tell me everything would be all right.
My life up to this point had been perfect.
Well, as perfect as any teen’s life can be with helicopter parents. Being an only child meant I got lots of attention. And lots of rules. Though I’d put up a pretty good argument for being old enough to go out with boys, I’d lost. My parents had promised I could date after I turned sixteen, and that would happen at the end of this month. I could get my driver’s license then, and Dad said if I kept my grades up I could find a job and save for a car. He would match every dollar I saved. Life had been ready to burst its own seams with new freedoms and privileges on the other side of my sixteenth birthday. Now, I didn’t care about any of that stuff.
Instead, life closed like a black fist around me, squeezing out the thinnest shred of light, erasing joy and hope, wrapping me in a cocoon of fear. The little girl part of me that still kept dusty Barbie Dolls on a shelf in my bedroom held off total panic by pretending none of this was real. Bad things only happened to strangers on the six o’clock news. The young woman part of me Dad said he saw blossoming, stewed feverishly with equal parts of panic and rage. Who would I live with? I had no other relatives. Were orphanages really the bleak monuments to misery I’d seen in old black and white photographs? Would I ever see my friends in Pasadena again or go to the same school? My breath came hard, realizing my future was disintegrating.
Mom and Dad were never coming back. Death is forever. There’s no mercy for the living, nothing to soften the blow or cushion the free fall into that bottomless pit of grief.
~ ~ ~
The next day I spent staring out the hotel window at stands of ponderosa pine and fir, the Enemy Lake sparkling in taunting blue between the trees. Waiting. Endlessly waiting. Refusing food or conversation. Feeling a weird sort of numbness settle into every cell of my body. Seemed I had only energy enough to sit and stare for hours without really seeing anything. For the first time ever I yearned for a brother or sister to hold my hand through this. To distract me from hearing the faraway voice of the brown-eyed cop telling me it could be weeks, months, maybe longer before the bodies were found.
The news finally arrived that evening as I sat before an untouched plate of pork chops and baked potato in the hotel’s dining room, surrounded by my entourage of professional experts, there because they were paid to be there. That fact that made me feel even more alone. The news, carried by a cop I’d never seen before, was whispered into the waiting ear of the social worker, Miss Burgess. She approached me in what seemed to be slow motion and settled into the seat across the polished pine table from me.
I felt like bolting. Running without stopping. Somewhere. Anywhere. Because if I didn’t actually hear the words, it somehow wouldn’t be true. That was the little girl part of me. I was old enough now to take this. Had to be. When you came right down to it there really wasn’t another choice, was there? I stayed while she placed her hand over mine on the table and looked like Polly Pitiful herself as she arranged the words inside her head.
“Emma, dear, your parents have been found.”
Adrenaline knifed through my stomach. Alive? Please?
Miss Burgess could see the hope in my eyes and tented her eyebrows in concern.
“Their bodies are on the way to the morgue. I’m terribly sorry, sweetheart.”
No, I told myself. You can’t fall apart now. You’ve got to keep it together. I held my face rigid, my chest tight, and withdrew my hand from beneath the social worker’s. If I let go now, I’d make a terrible scene right here in the dining room where hotel guests sipped their wine by candlelight and sliced into their steaks without a care in the world.
Miss Burgess smiled thinly. “Emma, we need to know who your family members are in order to inform them . . . of this tragedy. We need to find one willing to take you in.”
My voice strained through a frozen throat. “There’s nobody. I have no other family.”
A crease deepened between the social worker’s eyes. “Nobody at all? Are you sure? Think hard, Emma, because if you have no family willing to take you in, your only other choice will be a foster home. It would be better for you to live with relatives.”
Think? Was she kidding? My brain felt rubbery and blurry—beyond that, empty of everything except the image of my parents lying face up on cold metal slabs in the morgue. I struggled just to breathe. How could anyone expect me to think at a time like this?
“An aunt somewhere? A grandparent? An adult cousin perhaps?”
My temples pulsed with the pressure building inside my head. Why couldn’t they just leave me alone? I wanted the privacy of my room where I could scream and cry and pound my pillow until there was nothing left inside me. Trying to answer their stupid questions now was agony. My grip was slipping. I could feel it. I jumped up out of the chair and raced for the elevators.
~ ~ ~
Two-and-a-half weeks crept by with the speed of a crippled snail. I’d been placed in a foster home with a middle-aged couple but felt completely lost. Alone, I railed against waves of grief, rage, and hopelessness. Alone I pleaded with the CPS workers and judge. They wouldn’t let me go back home to Southern California. I could never see my house again or pack my favorite things to take with me into some other life. They wouldn’t even let me say one last goodbye at the morgue. Too young, they said, as if they knew the least thing about me.
The judge assigned two lawyers to locate my parents’ legal papers, put our house up for sale, and pack a box of my things to send north to my foster home in Auburn. Not the clothes I would have chosen, but I now lived a life without choices.
My parents’ ashes were sent to Pasadena and buried in a cemetery plot they’d bought years ago. There was no funeral. Not one mourner to lay a flower at their graves.
Mr. and Mrs. Matheny, my foster parents, were okay I guess. I don’t really know. Never gave them much of a chance. They had a lumbering hulk of a rescue dog named Radcliff whose large dark eyes and pink tongue brought me more comfort than all the words humans could think of to say. We were both rescues I guess. They let him sleep in my room, and his curly brown fur was thick enough to absorb every tear I cried.
It was while going through my parents’ legal papers that the lawyers discovered my only living relative: Penelope Ross. My great-grandmother. To tell the truth, I’d forgotten all about her. She was my father’s grandmother, the woman who had raised him from a baby, but he had never talked about her much. She lived somewhere in Oregon. She never called us, and we never called her. Not so much as a Christmas card passed between us. Kinda weird, huh?
“She’s eighty-seven,” Miss Burgess informed me, faking enthusiasm, “but in good health and she has a lot to offer.”
Yeah. Right. Let me guess. Like prunes for breakfast, dinner at four-thirty in the afternoon and lights out by seven-thirty? Had she even seen a teenager in the last thirty years?
“She lives in west-central Oregon seven miles east of a little town called Sweet Creek,” said the other social worker, “at the foot of the Cascade Mounta
ins.”
Oh, great. In the middle of Oregon? Isn’t that the same thing as the middle of nowhere? The social worker waited for me to respond. “The few times Dad mentioned her, he had nothing good to say,” I mumbled.
“She lives on a ranch, Emma. It’s been in the Ross family . . . let’s see,” Miss Burgess checked through her notes. “Since 1849 when it was established by your fifth great-grandfather, the pioneer Ransom Ross. You’re the eighth generation of Rosses, and the only heir to your great-grandmother’s estate.”
“Why would she want me? At her age? Seriously?”
“Well, it did take about ten minutes of talking to her before she even figured out who you were. Once she was certain you were a Ross, she agreed you might be a big help to her.”
Oh, I get it. I was about to become the old woman’s slave. Wonder what Dad would have had to say about that?
“We’ve made arrangements to have you driven up tomorrow. You’ll have to leave before eight in the morning to get there by dinner time. Better pack your things tonight.”
“Do I have any choice about this?” I asked. I already knew the answer to that.
“No!” they chorused.
Chapter 2
The trip north was hideous. A silent chisel-faced man from CPS named Mr. Forsythe opened the door to a mud-splattered Dodge Durango and tossed the cardboard box full of my clothes and stuff into the back. He barely glanced at me as I climbed into the front seat and fastened my seat belt. The Mathenys waved goodbye to me and I waved goodbye to Radcliff as we backed out of the driveway into a bright June morning that promised coming heat only a camel could love. It seemed ironic that today was my sixteenth birthday.
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