“Larissa Breckinridge, I done told you about that!” Mary scolded. “When the major’s time comes, it comes and that’s all there is to it.”
Cluney gestured angrily toward the window and the sound of Free’s shovel beyond. “I won’t have you digging my husband’s grave while he’s still alive! I can’t stand it, Mary.” She ended with a sob.
“Try to calm yourself,” Mary cautioned with sympathy in her voice. “It won’t do nobody any good for you to go making your own self sick with grief. I’ll tell Free to hold off a spell.”
“Thank you,” Cluney murmured.
After a final glance toward the major and a slight shake of her head, Mary turned to leave. But Cluney stopped her.
“Mary, is Wooter still here?”
“He’s around someplace.”
“Would you find him for me and send him in here?”
“Of course, honey. Now you take it easy.”
Moments after Mary left, Cluney realized the sound from outside had ceased. She gave a shudder of relief, then closed her eyes for a moment. She knew, no matter what, she had to remain calm and strong. With Wooter’s help, maybe—just maybe—she could save her husband’s life.
She sank down beside the bed and took Hunter’s hand in hers. It wasn’t much, but it was all she could do for the moment. The old hound, Trooper, seemed to share Cluney’s thoughts. He sidled over to Hunter, pressing as close to his master as he could get.
“Oh, Hunter,” she whispered, “if only I had those pills. If only I could make you well by willing it so. This is damn unfair! You have to pull through or we’ll never have a chance at all the happiness we could have shared.”
Moments later, she heard Wooter’s knock at the door and hurried to answer it.
“Mary said you needed me, little girl.” His gaze wandered past Cluney to the restless man on the bed. “He ain’t so good, is he?”
Biting her lip to hold back the tears, Cluney glanced at Hunter, then back to Wooter. “No, he’s not. Mary says he’s going to die. I don’t want him to die, Wooter. I mean to save him. That’s why I needed to talk to you.”
He stroked his beard nervously. “I’d do anything I could. You know that. But I don’t see as I can help none.”
“Oh, but you can!” Cluney said with pleading in her voice. “You’ll be going back soon, won’t you?”
“Most likely.”
“How soon?”
“Come full moon tonight, I reckon.”
“If there’s a moonbow, you mean,” Cluney corrected.
“Hell, little girl, I don’t need no moonbow to shine the way. I been traveling this route so many years now, I know it by heart.”
Cluney’s spirits soared. “Suppose you do go back tonight, Wooter, how long before you could come back here? Not until the next full moon?”
He waggled his head. “Nope. You see, there’s three nights When the way is clear for traveling—full moon, the night before, and the night after. So I could go one night arid come back the next. I done it that way before.”
Cluney had the greatest urge to hug the old man. “Oh, Wooter, this is perfect! Will you do that for me, then?”
He scratched his head thoughtfully for a moment. “I reckon, if there’s a need for it.”
“There’s a need. Oh, what a need! Go tonight. Once you’re there—on the other side—get hold of my friend, B.J. It’s important that she get medicine for the major. Otherwise, he won’t make it.”
Wooter squinted at her. “I don’t know nothing about no medicines, ’cept herbs and roots and such.”
“You don’t have to worry about that. I’ll write down everything Hunter needs and B.J. will get it for you. All you have to do is bring it back to me as soon as you can. There’s not much time, Wooter, and this is desperately important to me.”
He waved a hand toward Hunter’s still form. “You mean, he’s important to you, don’t you, little girl?”
“Yes, Wooter. I guess he is—about the most important part of my life.”
Suddenly, Wooter’s face lit up. “Back to my cabin, I got some right powerful snake oil that a peddler-fellow sold me when he came to town. That’ll fix him right up. Why, it’ll do anything!” he said excitedly. “Cure lameness, make a blind man see, even grow curls on a bald head. I’ll bring that along, too. It’ll do the trick. You just wait and see.”
Cluney started to refuse Wooter’s offer of the patent medicine, but changed her mind. It would do the old man’s heart good to help make Hunter well.
She touched Wooter’s arm and smiled at him. “Do bring that, please. But get the other medicine, too. We don’t have much time, and I want to make sure we have everything we need.”
“I best be getting ready now, little girl. You watch over him till I get back tomorrow night.”
“Oh, I will, Wooter. And thank you.” Quickly she wrote down her list of medicines, then pressed the paper into his calloused palm.
He glanced at the list, then back to Cluney, shaking his head. “I hope your friend, B.J., ain’t hard to find, ’cause these things you wrote down is Greek to me.”
“Tell her I’m all right, Wooter. Tell her I send my love.”
He nodded, then left the room.
By sunset that evening, Hunter was worse. His fever was raging again. Cluney did everything she could to make him more comfortable, but it was precious little.
As dark seeped into the woods, Cluney stood at the bedroom window, watching the falls. Sure enough, she spied Wooter’s dark silhouette against the moon-silvered glow of the mist. One moment he was there. The next moment he was gone.
“Have a safe journey, Wooter,” she whispered softly. “And, please, hurry back!”
She returned to her husband and kissed his fevered brow.
Chapter Fourteen
B.J. hated telephone calls in the middle of the night. She’d had one already—some woman who claimed to be calling from California, looking for Cluney. Probably one of the college students with a warped sense of humor, who’d read in the local newspaper about the history teacher’s disappearance. B.J. had hung up on the sadistic little creep.
But even more frightening than a late-night phone call was a knock at the front door long after midnight. She’d been sleeping lightly, so the sound woke her immediately. While she pulled on her robe and made a dash for the door, a dozen different scenarios—each one worse than the one before it—flashed through her mind. But all her fears had a common denominator—Cluney Summerland.
She fully expected to find either Sonny Taylor or Sheriff Clewis Elrod on her doorstep, hat in hand. Either of them, at this time of night, had to be bringing back news—the worst possible news about her friend.
She was struck speechless when she opened the door to find Wooter Crenshaw—grim and dusty—staring back at her.
“Howdy,” he said, tipping his beat-up old hat as he would if they passed on the street at any ordinary time of the day.
“Wooter, what in the world?”
“I come about your friend.”
“My friend?” Again, thoughts and possibilities crowded B.J.’s mind. “You mean Cluney?”
“Yep. She’s got big trouble on her hands.”
B.J. narrowed her eyes suspiciously. A brand-new scenario had just popped into her mind: Old Wooter had kidnapped Cluney and this was his moment to demand ransom. When he pulled a slip of paper from the pocket of his red flannel shirt, she was sure she was right.
“Here! We’ll be needing this from you. Cluney said, ‘Fast!’”
B.J. didn’t bother to glance at the paper before she reacted. “Now, look, if this is some sort of extortion you’re attempting, it’s not going to work.”
“I don’t know what you’re a-talking about, but we ain’t got time to stand here palavering. I got to get this stuff back to her by this evening. She told me you’d take care of it.”
B.J. squinted down at the piece of pap
er, trying to read it by the dim porch light. The notepaper was definitely Cluney’s; she recognized the tiny yellow flowers that formed a border. The handwriting was Cluney’s as well.
She stepped back and held the door wide. “Come on in, Wooter. I’ll fix you a cup of coffee while you tell me what’s going on? Where is Cluney? Why didn’t she come herself? And why does she need all this medicine? Is she sick?”
A short while later, they were both seated at B.J.’s scarred pine kitchen table. Wooter was real cagey about where Cluney was. He refused to say exactly. He’d only admit that she was “a right fur piece from here” and that he had to get back to her before it was too late.
“Too late for what?” B.J. demanded, exasperated with her midnight caller’s vague approach. “If you want me to help, Wooter Crenshaw, you better tell me what’s going on. Everything on this list is some sort of drug. I’m not just going to empty my medicine chest and hand it all over to you until I know where it’s going and toward what purpose.”
Wooter shifted in his chair and sort of growled low in his throat. “Hellfire! Cluney claimed you wouldn’t give me no trouble. She said you’d be keen on helping her.”
“I am!” B.J. stated. “But if she’s so sick that she needs all this stuff, then she should be in a hospital.”
“Ain’t no hospital where she’s at!” Wooter snapped.
“Then tell me where she is—exactly!”
“Up to the falls,” Wooter muttered in an undertone.
“The falls? That can’t be. The sheriff and his men have searched every inch of that park.”
“Not this part, they ain’t. They couldn’t get there if they tried.”
“Is she in one of the caves? In that old mine shaft under the falls?”
Wooter gave a negative shake of his head each time B.J. suggested a new possibility until she felt as if they were playing a game of twenty questions.
Finally, with a sigh and a shrug, B.J. said, “I give up! Where else could she be?”
He looked her square in the eye and said, “Could be she’s over the moonbow.”
B.J. had a sudden flash of memory—a scene as vivid as if she were right there watching it again. She saw the shining silver light and Cluney, dressed like a bride, rising higher and higher up over the falls. She broke out in a nervous sweat.
“You better tell me what’s going on, old man, and you better be quick about it.”
He leaned closer and squinted hard at B.J. Could she be trusted with the secret? He couldn’t be sure. But then, she was a friend of the little Summerland girl. And if he was going to help her, it looked like he’d have to rely on this woman.
“She’s gone back,” he said at length. “Back to the past to save her husband.”
B.J. jumped up from the table with a sharp cry. She rounded on him, “What kind of sick joke is this? Cluney never got married. Her fiancé was killed in a plane crash. Maybe you can explain to me how she can save someone who’s already dead.”
Wooter remained calm. “Oh, she was married all right, but in another time and place. Somewhere that’s long gone now, except to those few of us who know how to find it. But her happiness depends on her saving that man she married. And his time is fast running out. Now, are you going to get me this medicine so I can take it to her, or are you just going to stand around balking like a mule till he’s dead and buried?”
B.J. still wasn’t convinced. “Tell me where she is?”
“I done told you. She’s up to the falls. It don’t matter no how where she is. It’s when that makes all the difference.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
He was squinting at her again, sizing her up. “No, I don’t reckon you do. So, I’m gonna tell you. But then, you better get me this stuff, and you better get it fast.”
He paused for breath and B.J. prompted, “Well? Tell me!”
“She’s gone back in time. Back to during the Civil War. She’s abiding in the year 1863, along with her husband. And he got hisself shot up real bad by a bunch of Rebs. If he don’t get help, he’s done for. Then your friend’ll be left a-grieving back then over her man just like she’s been doing in the here and now.”
B.J. couldn’t find her voice for a few seconds. Finally, she said, “And you expect me to believe all this?”
“If you want to help your friend, you have to.”
B.J. realized in a flash that she did believe every word of it. Cluney had gone back through a time slip just as she’d told Sonny she suspected. Without another moment’s hesitation, she hurried to the bathroom, where she kept all her medicine. Wooter was right behind her.
“How will you get this to Cluney?” She was already filling a paper bag with the various prescription drugs on Cluney’s list.
“I’m going on back up to the falls and cross back over the moonbow.”
B.J. stopped what she was doing and turned to stare at the old mountain man. “Just like that?”
He gave one solemn nod. “Yep! Just like that! It’s easy as pie when you know how.”
“Could I go with you?”
He frowned in thought, then shook his head. “I don’t see no use in that.”
B.J. almost blew up at him, but decided that calm reasoning would be her best approach with Wooter. “Listen, if Cluney’s having problems, it’ll help her just to have a friend close at hand.”
“I’m her friend,” Wooter snapped.
B.J. touched Wooter’s sleeve in a gesture of gratitude. “Of course you are, and Cluney’s lucky to have a friend like you. But don’t you see? The two of us have been so close for so long. It would give her comfort to have a woman friend with her at a time like this.”
“Well…?” Wooter was obviously mulling over the thought, not sure what to do.
“I won’t be any trouble, Wooter. I promise.”
He made up his mind in a snap. “Go get some duds on then. If we hurry, we can get back across this very night before the moon sets. But we ain’t got no time to waste.”
B.J. dashed for her bedroom and began pulling on her clothes.
An hour later, Wooter and B.J. arrived at Cumberland Falls. The moon was low in the sky, and there was not the slightest sign of a moonbow in the rising mist.
“Oh, Wooter, we’re too late.”
“Naw, we ain’t,” he answered. “You just come on with me. And mind you hang onto my arm. I ain’t never took nobody across before, but I figure you got to be holding on fast to make the journey. Was you to let go, no telling where you’d drop off.”
The idea of possibly losing her guide and falling into some long-ago year all alone sent a shiver through B.J. She wasn’t all that happy about traveling back into the past with Wooter. But alone, she’d be terrified.
They got out of B.J.’s car and started toward the edge of the gorge. When they were standing so close that B.J. could feel the mist rising from sixty feet below, she balked and gulped in terror.
“Are you sure this will work, Wooter?”
“I ain’t sure of nothing,” he responded. “But we won’t know till we give her a try. You grip me real good, now.”
B.J. put a death hold on his right arm. She glanced down again, her fear of heights making her stomach roll. “We don’t have to jump, do we?”
“Where’d you get such a crazy notion, girl? Course we don’t jump! You want to wind up splattered all over them rocks down there?”
B.J. shook her head because her voice had suddenly deserted her.
“You ready?” Wooter asked.
In answer, B.J. squeezed his arm tighter.
“All right, then. Close your eyes.”
Trembling all over, B.J. did as he instructed. Moments passed. Everything remained the same. She was about to decide that she had nothing to fear, when suddenly the wind rose—cold and brisk. She felt like it might blow her off the edge, down into the gorge.
“Hold steady!” Wooter warned, his voice
seeming to come from far away.
B.J. braced her knees and clung to Wooter.
“Oh, Lord!” Wooter moaned. “This ain’t good.”
“What do you mean?”
Terrified by his ominous tone, B.J. opened her eyes. Immediately, she knew what he meant. Directly before them, hovering so large and black that it closed off their view of the falls, towered a vaporous shape. At times, it looked like a whirlwind. Then it would change, taking on an almost human form, cloaked in a hooded shroud. And from the depths of the thing came a low moan that chilled the soul, a stench of rot and decay, and a promise of hopelessness.
B.J. let out a shrill cry.
“Hush up!” Wooter hissed. “Pay it no mind.”
“What is it?” she whispered, half choking with fear.
“It ain’t really got a name. But I reckon you know as good as I do what it is. We can’t leave here till it passes us by. Hold right still and don’t let it know you’re scared, girl.”
That was more easily said than done. B.J. closed her eyes again and tried to think happy thoughts about being reunited with Cluney. She had a feeling the thing would be repelled by any pleasantness.
After a time—what seemed an eternity—she sensed that it was gone. The air about them smelled fresh and felt warmer. Once again, she could hear the roar of the falls and the night creatures stirring. But she dared not open her eyes for fear that it might still be there.
“It’s all right now,” Wooter whispered hoarsely. “We can get on about our business. Death passed us by.”
Death! B.J. had not dared put a name to the horrible apparition. But the little coffin-maker knew this phantom intimately. She shivered, wondering just how close a call they’d had.
She was still pondering this question when she felt the warmth of a bright light on her face. She caught her breath as a lovely, weightless sensation flowed through her body.
“Hold tight.” Wooter’s words were the last she heard.
An instant later, they were rising, flying, leaving the Earth of 1992. B.J. felt herself floating back through time. The years flipped past in her mind like the pages in a picture book turning rapidly. She caught brief glimpses of passing years—astronauts landing on the moon, a flash of pink as the presidential limousine sped through the streets of Dallas, a happy mob scene in Times Square when World War II ended, President Lincoln in his box at Ford’s Theater, Generals Lee and Grant at Appomattox. Then all went black.
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