Tashunka’s smooth jog had me entering Sweet Creek’s outskirts in just over an hour and a half. I stopped her at a hitching post at the edge of town, slipped off her bridle, and tied her up by her halter rope. Simon had been quite vehement about this. He said if I tied her by her bridle reins and something spooked her while I was gone, she’d pull back, break the reins, and I’d have a long walk home.
On Brad’s lightning tour of Sweet Creek last Friday, I had made a point of checking out City Hall, so it only took a fifteen minute walk to get there now.
The post office was part of the impressive City Hall building that housed the police station, the courthouse, clerks’ offices, and the Council Chambers. You could file a deed, buy a fishing license, pay a traffic fine, lodge a complaint, and mail a package all in one convenient location. All the offices and departments converged on a large marble-floored foyer built back in yesteryear when the residents of Sweet Creek probably thought their hamlet would grow into a city of some size.
I stepped into the air-conditioned foyer and saw a huge oil portrait in a gilded frame of Ezekiel F. Platt, first mayor and city father, with a bronze plaque beneath describing the highlights of his life. From there I turned left into the post office with Penelope’s mailbox key in hand. Three bills and another ladies magazine rested inside her box. Nobody ever wrote the Troll a letter as far as I knew, and she didn’t have email or Wi-Fi. There was no coverage for cell phones either and very few calls on her landline. Don’t think she had any friends. Color me surprised.
I closed her mailbox and took the mail outside into the heat. I should have walked right back to Tashunka and started for home. However, this was my first trip to Sweet Creek and I couldn’t resist doing a little window shopping.
Maybe it was just my imagination, but it seemed I got several hard stares and weird looks from people on the street. Of course in a town this size, everybody knew everybody and a stranger like me stood out like an Eskimo on the Arabian Desert. Still . . . .
I stopped outside the window of a women’s clothing store. Money was a problem for me. My parents’ estate was still going through probate, their attorney told me, and the money wouldn’t be available for the best part of a year. Even then, he said, it would be held in trust for me until I turned eighteen. The trust officer in charge would dole out a bit here and there if I needed something, but the officer would have to approve of it. I was certain that cute pair of red dress shoes in the store’s window would not make the cut. Still, I wanted a closer look.
A bell tinkled above the glass door as I entered “Greta’s Fashions” to see them better. Nice air conditioning in here, though not as good as the post office. Something that smelled like burning incense perfumed the air. The shoes were carried in my size, yet I couldn’t think of where I would wear them out here in the Styx. If I could buy a nice miniskirt and top or a pretty dress to go out with Brad next weekend, I would have loved to buy them. The shoes didn’t go with jeans and especially not with one of Charlotte’s oh-so-stylish Little House on the Prairie dresses. I always felt like “po’ white trash” wearing those dresses, and adding a pair of sweet red dress pumps to Charlotte’s dresses would make me look even more ridiculous.
“May I help you, honey?” a saleswoman asked in a voice coated with sugar. Her eyes roamed up and down my faded jeans and off-white T-shirt.
My outfit practically screamed trailer trash in this stylish store. She could barely hide the disgust. Who could blame her?
Didn’t know if she was Greta or not, but someone should have told her that wearing expensive designer slacks two sizes too small does not make you look thinner.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m just looking.”
“Perhaps I could interest you in a nice new blouse?”
I gazed down at my T-shirt advertising Cutting Edge Surfboards in Santa Monica and cringed. At least I wasn’t fashionably dressed in one of my latest Christian Dior haute couture shabby-chic pioneer dresses. It could have been worse. Not by much.
“Say, aren’t you that Ross girl? The one who’s related to that devil-boy, Benjamin Ross?” The saleswoman’s demeanor had changed from sticky sweet to sour in a nanosecond.
Even in the air conditioning my cheeks flamed. Three other women talking together by the cashier’s counter stopped and stared. One of them approached us.
I stood a little straighter, feeling my fists harden. “Ben Ross was my father.” I glanced from one to the other.
“That makes you a devil-girl, don’t it?” said the frizzy-haired woman who had walked over. The look of pure hatred emanating from her face like a force field made me want to back up a step or two, but I held my ground.
Another woman came close enough to say, “You keep away from my Samantha, hear? Your father wasn’t of this earth. His mother was a virgin, his father was Satan himself, make no mistake, and I’ll not be having you put the Devil’s Evil Eye on my child.”
“How on earth would you even come to such an ignorant conclusion?” I asked, staring straight into her eyes. She took a step back.
“Everybody knows that,” the third woman spat. She came closer than the other two and drilled a hole in my face with her glare. “My mother said at first that strange girl, Charlotte, had likely been raped. She had no boyfriend. Weren’t a boy in all Sweet Creek who paid her any mind. Then some o’ the coarser types in town wondered if it was a high school teacher who done it. We knew all them, and they didn’t have it in ‘em. Some even thought it was Pastor Welks who was givin’ religious counselin’ to that child two nights a week on account her mother, Penelope Ross, is a crazy old loon. But that boy, Benjamin, didn’t look nothin’ like the pastor. The police questioned the boys in town who drank and smoked that mare-wanna stuff. Couldn’t get a confession from none of them. And Charlotte herself just looked like a deer in the headlights and wouldn’t say nothin’ ‘bout who the daddy was. Not sure she even knew herself, or maybe the Dark Lord Satan had sealed her lips on that subject. The police concluded it must’ve been hippies who’d drift through town from time to time. Her bein’ raped was the only other possibility they said. But we know better, don’t we, Charmaine?”
The woman who’d taken a step back nodded but wouldn’t come closer.
“How terribly interesting,” I said pleasantly, turning to the saleswoman. “I think I’ll check out some other stores.” I left with my head held high and my heart thumping with dread. This was only the beginning and I knew it.
~ ~ ~
With the Troll still in bed when I arrived home, I delivered her mail and told Cook I was going for a walk. I’d been chaffing to search for Charlotte’s magical spring, but Penelope always had chores waiting that kept me home. Now was my chance. A lonely misfit like Charlotte could very well have made up the whole story. Being friendless as a teenager, she might still have been playing out fantasies with herself for entertainment. I felt driven to find out.
I set out after lunch staying as much as possible in the cool shade of pines and firs until I walked into a thicker part of the forest. Why hadn’t I asked those ladies what had become of Charlotte? Maybe their hostility had warned me away. Wouldn’t have gotten a straight answer out of them anyway.
Why did Charlotte refuse to name the father? It was almost a hunger inside me to learn who my grandfather was and if he were still alive. And what sort of woman abandons her baby? Maybe the mothering instinct was on the fritz in all Ross women. The Troll didn’t seem to have a shred of mother instinct in her. Look what she’d done to Charlotte and my father. Now she was doing it to me. And Charlotte? If she hadn’t just abandoned my father, what had happened to her? Hopefully I had escaped that neurological defect.
I traveled east as Charlotte had in her diary description. Through the undergrowth and drooping overhang of fir and cedar branches, the silent ruins of the sawmill ghosted into view giving
me goose bumps. Dilapidated by decades of disuse, the sawmill’s remains squatted in a weedy clearing sprinkled with rusty junk like a future archaeological site awaiting discovery. The forest had started to reclaim its old enemy with blackberry bushes covering some crumbled walls. Poison oak and a couple of alder saplings had taken root inside the mill and tendrils of leafy plants poked out of tiny spaces in the broken walls. The irony was not lost on me.
At the sawmill I turned left, to the north, and tried to follow a straight line. The path Charlotte had followed was overgrown now and only visible in bits and pieces. This present-day forest was definitely second growth. Only a few truly large trees remained to show how magnificent the forest must have been before the white man and his saws arrived.
I should have read a great deal more of the diary before attempting to find the spring. In any case, the next few weeks’ worth of entries hadn’t mentioned it except that Charlotte wanted to find her way back to it. The weather in Charlotte’s world had turned cold and snowy again and the pages were filled with descriptions of barn chores and mud, bear stew from a black bear the foreman had found menacing the cattle, having to break up the frozen clumps of firewood which had iced together, and other boring details of her life. It made me glad for summer.
Just when I began to think I’d missed the clearing, the trees gave way to a kidney-shaped grassy meadow with the volcanic boulders in a jumbled pile just as Charlotte had described. I didn’t see the seven or eight-foot-high burned out pine trunk described in the diary. It was a mere stump now hiding among the grasses, still black from the lightning burn, but no more than two feet tall. This must be the place.
The black boulders were rough and sun-warmed to the touch. I sat in the grass at their feet and listened for the chuckle of water over the buzz of two flies playing tag in the sun. Just as in Charlotte’s diary, spring water gurgled into a shallow depression and flowed through green weeds for several feet before disappearing into the earth again. I was sitting right where she must have sat. Maybe this was as close as I’d ever get to my grandmother.
Okay. She’d gotten all the meadow’s physical details right. The rest? Just fairy story stuff, the product of an overactive imagination. Only one way to find out for sure, though. I cupped my hands under the slender stream and peered closely at the water before raising it to my mouth. It didn’t look or smell unusual in any way.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered, sucking the water out of my palms and swallowing it.
Chapter 9
It tasted pure and cold and faintly sweet. I waited. Nothing happened.
“Charlotte,” I said to the cosmos, “I almost fell for your little fairytale. Wherever you are, I hope you’re getting a good laugh out of this.”
The breeze billowing the summer grass in waves brought me a peace I hadn’t felt since the Tahoe trip. I didn’t want to go back to the darkened house, kept hushed and closed up so the Troll could sleep. I sat in the grass gazing up at the forest surrounding the clearing and tried to visualize how it would look in winter. A twig snapped. Fifty yards away where the trees gave way to the clearing I saw movement. A doe and her spotted fawn stepped into the meadow with care and caution and began to graze, every now and again raising their large ears to listen for danger, waggling insects off them.
I was so intent on watching the deer and not moving a muscle that the faint sensation of popping, like effervescent bubbles in my brain, barely registered before a massive headache erupted. Wave after wave of dizziness swept over me, turning my stomach inside out, peppering dark speckles in front of my eyes. My heart pounded. I laid back in the grass and squeezed my eyes shut to make it stop. Instead, it grew more intense before it began to subside. At last my stomach stopped heaving and my head began to clear. The only sound I heard was the faint taunting gurgle of the spring.
I opened my eyes. The doe and her fawn had disappeared. Tall green grass still waved gently in a warm breeze, though it felt cooler than it had a few minutes ago. The boulders still rested their bulk in the grass and the spring still trickled. Everything else had changed. A thicker, taller forest now surrounded the meadow and cast dark shadows. The burned stump was now a sixty-foot blackened tree with every burned branch intact.
I gasped, whispering unsteadily to myself, “Okay, Charlotte. You didn’t make this up, but I sure know why you thought nobody would believe you.”
With gooseflesh rising on my arms, I stood and began retracing my footsteps back in the direction of the sawmill. Obviously this was a time warp of some sort, not that time warps really exist. I simply had no better way to wrap my head around it. Charlotte had gone back in time and I had too. Unless she had misjudged the height of the burned pine, we had not gone back the same number of years. She had described the burned pine tree as only forty feet high, the tree’s top broken off and just a log lying on the ground nearby along with most of the branches scattered about. What I saw was a much taller tree with all its scorched branches intact. What made that difference? Same spring, same water. Of course she had swallowed 1969 water and I had swallowed 2016 water. Maybe that had something to do with it. I just didn’t know “when” I had landed. How far back had my grandmother gone? No telling.
The very real possibility of getting lost in these monster trees tripped my gooseflesh again. Nothing looked familiar. I would have to concentrate to keep myself moving south. As I wandered between behemoth trunks, some that fifteen hunky men could stand shoulder-to-shoulder around, I couldn’t help but worry about when the effects of the spring water would wear off, returning me to 2016. What if they returned me to another time? The thought was too scary to contemplate for long. I was probably making better time through the woods than Charlotte had because I didn’t have to wade through snow.
That was another thing. She had swallowed the water in January 1969 and went back in time, to another winter day. I had done the same in July 2016, and from what I could see I had travelled back to another midsummer day. If I’d drunk the water in October, would I have gone back to a distant year in the fall?
After half an hour of maneuvering like an ant through a field of giant cornstalks, praying I was staying on course, I heard noises ahead. Male voices, though I couldn’t make out what they were shouting because the noise of machinery and the occasional whinny of a horse drowned them out. Tree-to-tree I made my way, blending into the underbrush until at last I could peek through the greenery unseen. It was the sawmill, up and running with men loading sawn boards onto an oversized buckboard hitched to a four-in-hand draft team, men working the mill machinery, harnessed horses dragging fresh logs out of the forest to the pile stacked behind the mill.
Charlotte said the mill ran to 1955. By then trucks carried the logs and lumber, not horses. These men wore heavy work pants, plaid shirts with suspenders, tall boots, and slouch hats that had to be from the late 1800s. I hadn’t gone farther back than 1865 because that’s when the sawmill had been built. Had I truly been carried back into the past over a hundred and twenty or thirty years?
The thought hollowed my stomach. I mustn’t be seen. Modern folks from Sweet Creek had been so easily convinced my father was the Second Coming or the son of Satan. If these less educated men caught me, there was no telling what they would think of a girl claiming to be from the future. I shuddered to think of what they might do to me. Why wasn’t the spring water wearing off? My heart accelerated. I’d never before felt quite this alone and vulnerable.
Almost too frightened to breathe, I slipped through the forest, giving the sawmill a wide berth, heading west toward the house. The house had been built in 1871. If it was no longer there, that would give me a clearer idea of how far back in time I’d come. My ancestors, Solomon and Laura Ross, whose portrait hung over the fireplace, would be the owners of the ranch now, I guessed. If the house had not yet been built, maybe another smaller house stood nearby. Of course I’d be as much a str
anger to those owners as to later relatives living in the big white house.
At last I caught a glimpse through the trees of a bright carnation-white structure up ahead. I approached like an escaped convict, sneaking between trees and staying well out of sight. At least I hadn’t gone back further than 1871, though clearly I was somewhere in the last quarter of the 1800s. What would happen if this spring water never released its hold on me?
The house stood proudly between giant sheltering fir trees which were no longer there in my time. It shone like a regal pearl. The paint looked new. That dirty off-white paint peeling away from the house in my time was nonexistent. The porch didn’t sag anywhere, and large comfortable-looking rattan chairs stood on its sturdy surface between potted flowers and a porch swing. Intricate gingerbread decorated the railings and the house gables. Out front, a tidy flower garden welcomed visitors. My oak tree stood in its place outside my attic window, though the branches were thinner and the tree shorter. Hitched to a buggy out front, a team of gray horses dozed in the sun, shuddering off flies and occasionally stamping a hoof.
I couldn’t go knock on the door. No one must find me here. It wasn’t as if I had “the family nose” or any other way to prove I was a Ross. I’d end up in this century’s version of an insane asylum if I claimed to be a Ross from the future and subjected to a horrific existence if the spring water never released its hold on me.
I slipped behind a giant cedar across the dirt road from the house as the front door opened. Two men and a woman stepped out onto the porch. The woman wore a dress straight out of an Old West movie. It shone like silk, had a form-fitting bodice and tight waist, long sleeves and a generous full-length skirt in a smoky lavender shade. One of the men wore a black broadcloth coat with a high winged collar and black trousers. Could these be my ancestors, Solomon and Laura? The other, possibly an employee, wore brown wool pants tucked into high leather boots, a plaid work shirt, suspenders and a felt hat. Thick walrus mustaches hid the men’s mouths. All three spoke together several minutes before the two men left the porch, boarded the buggy, and drove the horses in the direction of the sawmill. The woman stood alone on the porch, watching them go.
A Certain Twist in Time Page 8