by Deborah Heal
“The State Fair comes to Alton and I can’t go?” she cried. “Samuel and Frank got to go to Alton when they were sixteen—all by themselves—on the train. What’s the use of having a train run practically through your front yard if you can’t get on it once in a while?”
“I’m sorry about the fair,” Papa said. “I really wish I could take you, but I just can’t this year.”
“But it’s just to Alton. Billy Reynolds said—”
“I’ll not let you go across the street with Billy Reynolds, much less to the State Fair!” he fairly shouted at her.
“I don’t know why you don’t like him, Papa.”
“Never mind, Charlotte. I don’t want to discuss it again.”
She had stormed back to the kitchen to slave away the morning. Now, just the sound of her father coming down the hall from his study made her slam the knife down through the carrots she was chopping.
Jonathan Miles came through the kitchen door and paused. His hair was thinning on top, but still dark and silky like his full beard. His piercing brown eyes gentled when he saw the expression his sixteen-year-old daughter wore. She’d had to shoulder so much responsibility—too much responsibility—ever since her mother died. She was still furious with him. He only hoped she would find it in her heart to forgive him—and soon, before her temper caused her to hurt herself.
“I’m going to check on a few things at the mercantile before I meet the train, dear,” he said mildly. “I’m hoping there’ll be a letter from Mr. McGuire for me today.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Do you need anything for that stew you’re making?”
“No, Papa.”
“Will it be ready for the noon train?”
“Yes, Papa. Isn’t it always?”
“I’m going now,” he said, realizing she wasn’t ready to forgive him yet. “I’ll be back shortly.”
When he was gone and there was no one to see, she cried while she worked, stopping from time to time to scrub angrily at her eyes. With her tears and the steam from the cooking pot she could barely see what she was doing.
She brushed the chopped carrots and potatoes off the block into a blue crockery bowl and carried it to the cook stove. She lifted the heavy lid from the cast iron stew pot and dumped the vegetables into the rich simmering broth, stirring to make sure nothing was sticking to the bottom. Then she replaced the lid and wiped the steam from her face with her apron. Next, she gathered the peelings and carrot tops into the blue bowl and went outside, letting the screen door slam behind her.
Charlotte touched the flapping sheets as she passed the clothesline. They were dry and ready to come down, but she didn’t have enough time before the passengers arrived. She looked to the sky and decided it was not likely to rain.
When she reached the chicken yard, she didn’t bother to open the gate, just dumped the scraps over the fence. She usually loved the way the chickens, so calmly clucking and scratching about the yard one minute, became wildly squawking maniacs the next as they competed for the vegetable peelings. But today she did not take time to watch.
She started back for the kitchen, but decided there was time to check on the new litter of kittens first. They always cheered her up. She pulled the bolt on the half door and entered the dim barn, setting the blue bowl on the floor just inside the door. She reminded herself not to forget it this time.
Tiny mewing sounds were coming from the hay manger. “Momma Cat moved you again, didn’t she?”
Miles Station was gone. Just the logo and the words, Beautiful Houses: Take a Virtual Tour, showed on the screen now. Abby gradually became aware of the computer room in which she sat. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was almost eleven-thirty. She turned to judge Merrideth’s reaction.
She was staring back at her in a daze. “Abby?” Merrideth asked blankly. “Did we just travel back in time?”
“I don’t think so. I mean no. Of course not. That’s only in movies.”
“Then what just happened?”
“I don’t know, but my congratulations to whoever designed this software. That was the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced. I’m calling customer support. I want to know what’s going on.”
Abby went to get the phone and dialed the number she had found earlier. The owner’s manual boasted 24-hour service and the best-rated technicians of any computer company. The line was busy the first three times she dialed, but on the fourth try, the call went through. She felt a flutter of excitement until she realized that she was talking to a recorded voice.
“You have reached the customer service queue. Your call is important to us and will be answered by the next available service representative.”
Merrideth kept whispering, “Hurry up, let’s go back.” And after ten minutes Abby couldn’t stand it anymore and hung up.
“Well, I guess I’m not going to get any answers tonight.” She pulled her own cell phone out of her pocket to check the time. “It’s after midnight, Merrideth. We had both better get some sleep.”
“Come on, I want to see Charlotte again.”
Abby shut down the computer. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. No school. We’ll have all day to do whatever it was we just did.”
Chapter 9
After Abby finished washing the breakfast dishes, she hurried up to the computer room. Beautiful Houses was on the screen, and Merrideth sat staring at the houses scrolling by.
“I thought you shut down the computer last night,” she said absently. “Come on, come on! Where’s my house?”
“I did. Maybe your mom used it before she went to work.”
“She never uses this computer,” Merrideth muttered. “There it is. Gotcha!” She clicked on it, and Colonel Miles’ house popped up to fill the screen.
“Nothing’s happening. No sound, no movement, no nothing.”
“No anything.” Abby sat down next to her. “I still can’t believe this program. Some computer nerd—a really, really clever one—did a lot of research about the history of Miles Station to come up with such detail.”
“I think a really, really smart scientist invented a time-travel program.”
“If we had actually traveled back in time to 1854, Charlotte—or whoever that girl was—would have seen us, known we were there. Who knows how we would have changed history? No, Beautiful Houses invited us to take a virtual tour, and we did.”
“Then how come we didn’t have to be hooked up to wires and wear special goggles or something? Like in the movies.”
“Like I said, it’s really, really good. And in my opinion, what we did was way better than time traveling. I knew everything Charlotte was thinking and feeling. Like when I’m reading a good book.”
“Okay, okay. Whatever. But how do I make Charlotte come out of the house?”
“You don’t have to wait for that. We can go inside. Click on that drop-down menu,” she said, pointing. “Then select Interior.”
Merrideth followed her instructions, but nothing changed.
“Let me try.” Merrideth got up and Abby moved into her chair. She clicked on Interior and the other controls she had used the night before. Nothing. She leaned in closer to the screen. The house looked so real, not like a photo at all. But it was so silent.
Duh. The volume was down. When she dialed it up, they heard birds singing and a breeze rustling through the trees.
“We’re there,” Abby said.
“Well, why isn’t anything happening?”
“I don’t know. I wish I knew how to work it better. Like last night. I had it set for Interior, but then we followed that girl—”
“Charlotte.”
“Okay, we’ll call her Charlotte. We followed Charlotte outside to the chicken yard and barn.”
“But remember? You clicked on Lock.”
“Oh, right. I guess it overrode the other setting. And the way it just shut down suddenly without me doing anything? I think there must be a default time limit. I’ll check the Time Parameter and View op
tions next time.”
Merrideth sighed mournfully. “If there is a next time.”
The front door of the house on the monitor opened and Abby jumped. “There. She’s back.”
The same young woman they had seen before came out onto the porch wearing a different, fancier dress and a lacy shawl. She paused to sniff the pink roses on the trellis and then walked down the path that would later become Merrideth’s front sidewalk.
“I’m not hearing her thoughts, are you?” Abby said.
“Nope.”
Abby clicked on Lock, which still didn’t take them into complete virtual mode, but at least allowed them to follow the girl as she turned down the road and got farther and farther from the house.
“Don’t get me wrong, it’s still way cool,” Abby said. “But it’s not like last night.”
“Do something.”
“I’m afraid to mess with the settings or we’ll lose her.”
After a short walk, Charlotte—and Abby and Merrideth—arrived at the village. Charlotte stepped up onto the boardwalk and walked until she got to the building labeled Miles Mercantile. A man driving a buggy came down the street. She paused to wave at him and then went into the store.
She greeted the woman behind the counter by name—Florence—and spent several minutes chatting happily with her. Then she told her she needed salt, beans, and sorghum. Florence dipped sorghum into a Mason jar and weighed out the beans and salt, wrapped them in brown paper, and tied the bundles with string. While she did all that, Charlotte admired several bolts of bright fabric at the other end of the store.
“I guess I should be happy for the little Podunk grocery store in town,” Merrideth said.
“If this is a Hollywood movie set, it’s way more detailed than I ever imagined them to be.”
“This part’s getting boring, Abby. Why don’t we speed this thing up?”
“I guess we’d better, or we’ll use up our own lives watching Charlotte live hers.”
Abby turned the dial to fast-forward and experimented with speed. At first it was too fast to see what Charlotte was doing, and then when she eased back, it was too slow.
Eventually, she found a happy medium and they followed Charlotte as she left the store—apparently planning on coming back for the supplies later—and went on down the boardwalk. She stopped at a shoemaker’s. She looked at several pairs of boots and shoes but didn’t buy anything.
She left and went on down the street, passing various stores, a little school, and a huge structure that they determined must be Jonathan Miles’ grain mill.
At the end of the street, she turned right and walked a short distance to a small white house. She knocked on the door, and it was opened by a smiling young woman. She laughed at something Charlotte said and they went inside together. They were drinking tea from pink cups when the program quit, reverting back to the Beautiful Houses title and the scrolling houses.
“Make it go back,” Merrideth said.
“It’s time we stopped stalking Charlotte—for a while anyway.”
“It’s not stalking. I think we should call it time-surfing.”
“Okay. Let’s stop time-surfing,” Abby said with air quotes, “and go explore the Miles Station of today.”
Michael showed up just as they went outside, and he decided to go along as their “Indian guide.” When he went into the trees and came back with three sticks in case they came across any snakes, Abby named him Boy-Who-Runs-In-Woods. She tried not to think about what adventures he got up to, wandering around on his own.
She used the plat map as a guide, but everything looked so different from when Charlotte had walked down the street in 1854. But they began to see evidence here and there of the stores and houses that had once made up the village called Miles Station.
They discovered remnants of a stone foundation overgrown by prairie grass where once, according to the map, a warehouse had stood. Where the school should be, they found a small stone building that someone was using for a storage shed. A fiberglass garage door had been installed, and the windows were boarded up. But the little cupola on top, where once a bell had hung, gave it away. Abby visualized barefoot children studying at wooden desks in a one-room schoolhouse.
There was only an empty lot where the little white house that Charlotte visited once stood. A pile of broken bricks was probably the remains of its chimney.
They noticed that Maple Street did not dead-end at Mrs. Arnold’s house as they had thought. To be sure, the oiled and graveled surface ended at a barbed wire gate, but the road continued on as a grassy track through a pasture in which cattle placidly grazed.
After speculating on who owned the property and how likely they were to prosecute for trespassing, they opened the gate and followed the grassy path. The cattle paid no attention to them. The path led them to a good-sized pond glittering in the sun. A hundred frogs, croaking in warning, plopped into the water; a pair of red-winged blackbirds, clinging to cattails at the water’s edge, scolded them for getting too close to their nest.
Cattle tracks meandered everywhere in the mud, some leading from the water’s edge to an old hay shed that leaned precariously to one side. There was a strong cattle smell of manure and hay in the air.
Abby thought the scene pleasantly pastoral, but Merrideth wrinkled her nose, and Michael didn’t say anything. In front of the shed, they found a round concrete platform, and she and Merrideth sat on it to rest. Michael still had energy to spare, so he amused himself by circling them, doing his version of an Indian war dance complete with chanting and occasional fierce whoops.
Just when Abby was thinking she couldn’t take much more of his dizzying performance, he stopped and pointed to where they sat.
“Why is that there?”
“Maybe it’s a well top,” Merrideth said.
“No.” Michael stepped onto the platform and squatted next to them. “This,” he said, tracing the square hole in the center with his finger.
Abby started to say she didn’t know, but then she realized she did. It was not concrete, but stone—Jonathan Miles’ millstone—that had, as Mrs. Arnold told them, once ground the grain for every farmer for miles around.
Chapter 10
The whole house was quiet when Abby came downstairs at nine o’clock, showered and wearing a dress. Pat and Merrideth hadn’t stirred from their bedrooms. The solitude was pleasant, something she always missed during the school year when she lived in such close quarters with her dorm mates.
After making coffee, she took a cup into the living room to enjoy the delicious peace of a quiet summer morning. Maybe she wouldn’t go to church this one time. After all, she had worked so hard all week. And then she mentally slapped herself up the side of the head for following that train of thought. Being tired was all the more reason to go to church and be recharged for the coming week.
With a town the size of Brighton, Abby hadn’t expected it to take so long to find the church she had seen listed in the yellow pages. She ended up seeing the whole town before finally pulling into the parking lot of Westminster Presbyterian Church.
It was a small and rather plain brown building, and when she entered, five minutes after the service had begun, she saw it was equally plain inside. Certainly there were no stained glass windows or a towering ceiling. The only ornamentation was an oak cross and colorful, hand-stitched banners hanging from the white walls.
But a man, whose nametag said Jack, greeted her at the door with a warm smile and a bulletin, and led her to the entrance of the crowded sanctuary. He stood there frowning as he craned his neck every which way, scanning the room for an empty seat. The organist began an introduction to A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, and the congregation stood and sang enthusiastically.
At last, Jack grinned, put a friendly hand on her elbow, and whispered, “To your right—in the second row.”
Abby smiled her thanks and eyed the long center aisle. Great. It would be like running the gauntlet. Only with luck, no one w
ould hit her, and it would be accompanied by one of her all-time favorite hymns.
Taking a deep breath, she went quickly down the aisle to the second row. “Excuse me,” she whispered and edged her way past a young mother and father, five stair-stepped young boys, decked out in matching white shirts and crooked red ties, and a sleeping baby dressed in pink in an infant seat on the floor.
Abby had a horrible moment of panic when her foot snagged on something and she thought she would fall and squash the baby.
But then a strong, tanned hand reached out to steady her, and she settled with an exhalation of relief in front of the last remaining seat in the sanctuary.
“Thanks,” she whispered and looked up into a pair of smiling blue eyes. He towered over her five foot, four inches. It had just been a glance before she averted her face. But that’s all it took to see that the blue eyes were set in one of the most arresting masculine faces she had ever seen, all framed by silky, chocolate-brown hair.
Abby felt herself blushing and envisioned herself falling to the floor in a faint. Unfamiliar faces hovered over her saying, “What could be the matter with the new girl?” Mentally slapping herself for the second time that morning, she vowed not to look his way again.
But then he was offering her a hymnal, thoughtfully opened to the right page, so she glanced up to say thanks again. Her heart actually fluttered. Get a grip, she thought. She reached out to take the hymnal. When he didn’t release it, she realized he intended to share it with her.
He must think her a complete idiot for trying to tug it out of his hand. She spared another quick glimpse and saw that he was grinning. Her face felt like a third-degree sunburn. She looked back down at the hymnal, but that meant she saw his hand, so masculine and different from her own slender one.
At last, she cast her eyes toward the song leader in front. But they were nearly finished with the fourth verse before her heart rate got back to normal and her traitorous brain began to concentrate on the beautiful words of the hymn instead of the handsome him and how well his baritone voice blended with her soprano.