Lawrence smiled. “Well, then, let us find out for certain.”
6
Danica ended up spending the entire afternoon at Lawrence’s house. At one point Andre headed out, saying he was going to get lunch for everyone. Which he did, reappearing awhile later with takeout boxes with Navajo tacos — fry bread, beef, cheese, lettuce and tomatoes — for all three of them.
The food was delicious. Good thing, too, because she’d never realized how physically taxing mental exercise could be. Lawrence wanted her to meditate, to think of time like the air around her — eternally flowing, something to be breathed in. It was not a straight line, like the road that led back to the highway, but something ever-present, in all places at once and always.
Easier said than done. Because she’d taken yoga, Danica had learned how to be calm and still, how to keep her thoughts from darting this way and that, how to use her breathing to steady herself. Many times over the past six months, it seemed as if the practice was the only thing keeping her sane. Even so, she thought it was a pretty big leap to go from the quiet serenity of deep meditation to letting her consciousness flow through time like a trout swimming in a forest stream.
Anyway, a lot more than her consciousness would have to be involved if she wanted to succeed. This wouldn’t be a spirit walk like the one Angela had taken on the astral plane to find Nizhoni and break the curse. Danica would have to find some way to take her odd facility with time and allow it to jump over the hundred-plus years that separated her from the ghost…or rather, the man the ghost had once been.
And thinking of those hundred years wasn’t the right way to go about it. Centuries and decades only chopped up time into artificial units. They weren’t really time.
Not that she could precisely say what time was. She only knew it didn’t seem to be on her side at the moment.
She breathed in, trying not to be conscious of Lawrence sitting in his chair on the other side of the room. For this exercise, she’d moved to the couch, since it was far more comfortable, despite its shabby appearance. She thought of her gift, of how it could give her all the time in the world…if she would only let it.
That’s right. Five minutes was a construct. Five minutes meant nothing to the universe. There was only time, moving around her and in her, pulling her along in its strong current. But a good swimmer didn’t necessarily have to move with the current.
A wave of warm air washed over her. For an instant, Danica thought something had gone wrong with the swamp cooler. Her eyes opened, and she sucked in a breath.
The house was gone. She sat on a rock in the midst of a huge expanse of rolling grassland. A line of dark trees seemed to follow a river to the north and east, judging by the angle of the sun. Dark against the bright green of the grass, huge herds of cattle grazed.
So she finally had gone crazy.
She shifted on the rock where she sat, and realized the unfamiliar landscape wasn’t completely unfamiliar. The box canyon behind her looked like the same one that backed up to Lawrence’s property. At least, its contours were the same. The area seemed far lusher than the dry, dusty desert she’d left behind her.
Left behind in her own time….
A sensation of the air being pushed out of her lungs, as if she’d fallen flat on her face. She gasped, and blinked, and was back in the dim, damp confines of the living room where she’d first been sitting.
“You went,” Lawrence said quietly.
“I — ” Danica blinked and tried to pull in a breath. “I went…where?”
“That’s for you to tell me, I suppose.” His sharp black eyes were focused on hers. “This was not like Angela’s spirit walk. I saw you sitting there on the couch, and then you were gone.”
Back to whenever that had been, with these hills rolling green instead of dusty yellow, and cattle as far as the eye could see. “How long?”
“Less than a minute. And then you were back.”
He seemed remarkably calm about the whole thing. Danica wasn’t sure how she would have reacted if she’d seen him wink in and out of existence right in front of her eyes.
“I saw green hills,” she said. “And a line of trees along the river — I guess they’re still there today, but they looked thicker. And herds of cattle.”
A nod. For some reason, he appeared almost sad. “That was this land, many years ago. The settlers overgrazed their cattle and moved on. It was greener then.” He let out a sigh, hardly more than a soft breath, then went on, his tone far brisker, “So you did go back.”
“But I was still…here.”
“Yes. Your gift has always only given you the ability to move in time, not in space. When you do go back, you will need to make sure you are standing someplace that would have been safe back then.”
Well, the family cabin had existed back in the 1880s, but she had a feeling her Wilcox forebears might not appreciate a strange young woman appearing out of nowhere in their living room…or whatever they called it back then. The parlor, maybe?
And then Danica realized she was thinking about traveling to that time as if it wasn’t of much more consequence than getting in her SUV to go to the mall. She swallowed, glad that she was sitting down. Her knees felt a little shaky.
Okay, really shaky.
Lawrence was still watching her carefully. “What brought you back?”
“I don’t — ” She broke off there. She’d been about to say she didn’t know, but she thought she probably did. It was when she’d consciously thought about what she’d just done, when she might have gone, that she’d sent herself right back where she’d started from. “Realizing I might have just gone back in time.”
He chuckled. “Well, that means you know what you have to work on.”
* * *
Andre drove her back to town not long after that. The sun was just beginning to set, glaring into her eyes even though she had her sunglasses planted firmly on her nose. As on the drive out to Lawrence’s house, neither Danica nor Andre said much to one another. Her thoughts were churning.
I went back in time. I went back in time.
All right, only for a few seconds, but still. She knew she hadn’t imagined what she saw. How could she have? She hadn’t even known that those lands weren’t always dried-up desert. Local history wasn’t something covered in her school’s curriculum, except the standard story about how a group of travelers had come to the area in July of 1876 and cut down a ponderosa pine so they could fly the American flag for the holiday, thus giving birth to Flagstaff’s name.
If that story was even true.
Once they reached the house Andre shared with Marie, he pulled into the driveway. They both got out of the Jeep, and Danica absently thanked him for driving her. He seemed to understand that she didn’t want to talk, so he only told her it was no problem, and that he’d be happy to take her again if she needed him to.
Maybe she would. She didn’t know yet. Clearly, she’d managed a tiny jump back in time, but she knew a few seconds or a minute certainly wasn’t enough for her to do anything about saving the man who had died on her family’s land so many decades ago.
And maybe she should stop thinking about years and minutes and seconds, but that was just how her mind worked. At least she was able to turn that part of it off when it really counted.
Danica drove back up to the cabin in the gathering darkness. All was quite black when she got there, and she wished she’d had the forethought to at least leave the porch light on or something. Then again, she’d had no idea she would be spending that much time at Lawrence’s house.
Time again. Always time.
Luckily, she kept a flashlight in the glove compartment of her Land Rover, so she dug it out and exited the vehicle, keeping the narrow beam fixed on the ground in front of her. The weather was getting to be too cold for snakes, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t put her foot wrong in a gopher hole or something.
The light passed over something solid and black, definitely not a rock.
Boots, dusty. Danica gasped, flicking the beam upward.
He was standing in the driveway again.
Was it strange that the flashlight’s beam didn’t even pass through him? If she hadn’t known better, she would have said he was just as solid as she was.
His eyes met hers. Again she felt that odd pull, that ache somewhere deep within her. She didn’t know who he was or why he had died, although right then his shirt looked untouched, the bullet hole gone. Had he gotten rid of it, realizing that the sight of it disturbed her?
She didn’t know. What she did know was that she wanted him.
After moistening her suddenly dry lips, she said, “I’m trying. I think — I think I can help you. But there are still a few things I need to figure out. You’re from back then…but when back then?”
He continued to watch her for a few seconds, expression faintly puzzled. Then he nodded, as if something had occurred to him. Moving past her, still in that unnatural silence with no crunch of gravel beneath his feet, he went to the rear window of the Land Rover. It was coated with dust she’d kicked up on her drive back here; there hadn’t been any rain for more than a week.
Danica stared at him, mystified, and wondered what the heck he was up to. She sort of doubted he was going to scribble “wash me” on the SUV’s window.
Not exactly that, but he did reach out with one finger to touch the glass. A downward stroke, and then a couple of swirling motions, followed by a quick angled brush of his finger and a final stroke that mirrored the first one he’d made.
Heartbeat speeding up, Danica trained the flashlight’s beam on the Land Rover’s rear window. She halfway expected to see nothing at all — could ghosts even affect the physical world? — but what the flashlight revealed made her mouth go dry.
“That’s when you were here?” she asked, even though she knew the stranger wouldn’t — or couldn’t — reply.
But he did. Not verbally, but he inclined his head.
That did narrow things down a good bit. Still….
“When in 1884?”
He paused then, glancing around him, although Danica wasn’t sure what he might be looking at. Then he pointed at the trees, and at the sky.
Well, that was clear as mud.
“I don’t understand.”
A frown creased his brow. During their previous encounters, his features had been still for the most part, although Danica had noted the sadness in his eyes. Now, though, he looked almost frustrated.
No wonder, she thought, if he’s been waiting more than a hundred years to communicate with someone and then can’t even speak when he finally finds a person who can see him.
Then it seemed as if a sudden thought struck him. He stepped away from the Land Rover, moving purposefully toward the cabin. Danica hurried along after him, although she couldn’t begin to guess what he might be up to.
The stranger stopped by the aspen tree that stood a few yards away from the eastern side of the house, then reached up and plucked one of its leaves, and let it fall to the ground. Watching this performance, Danica could only feel her own sense of puzzlement grow. She lifted her shoulders.
“I still don’t — ” But then she broke off as realization struck. “It happened when the leaves were falling?”
He nodded, relief clear in his face.
That would be mid- to late October in Flagstaff, depending on when the first frost had struck that year. There would probably be a record somewhere, in someone’s almanac or a farmer’s diary…something. She’d find out, one way or another.
“October 1884?”
Another nod. Then he smiled, eyes meeting hers, and the shock of that blue, blue gaze made her knees go a little wobbly. If he could have this effect on her now, when he was nothing more than a spirit, how the hell was she going to react when she met him in person?
If she could meet him in person. There were still so many variables involved here that she couldn’t allow herself to be overly hopeful.
But she wouldn’t express those doubts now. She wanted to comfort him as best she could.
“All right,” Danica said. “October 1884. It’s a date.”
Another of those heart-melting smiles, and then he was gone.
Goddamn. She stood there for a moment, flashlight still trained on the spot where he had stood, but he didn’t reappear. Then she took in a breath and headed for the front door of the cabin.
She had a lot of work to do.
* * *
Back to the historical society, where she explained that she was working on a paper for school. None of the older ladies staffing the place — clearly volunteers — seemed too surprised by her explanation. It probably was something that happened fairly often in this college town.
Danica did find an almanac that stated the first frost in 1884 fell on September twenty-second, which was very close to the average. Funny how she’d never really paid that much attention before, although her mother dutifully pulled in her potted ficus from the patio every year around that time. So the autumn leaves would have been at their height a few weeks later, and beginning to fall toward the end of the month.
That gave her the timeframe she needed, but what now? Everything she’d read seemed to indicate that Flagstaff during that era was beginning to bustle, but the population was small enough that the arrival of an unaccompanied young woman would raise more than a few eyebrows…unless the young woman in question was going to work in one of the young logging town’s thriving saloons or whorehouses.
Neither of those options sounded very appealing to Danica. If she could come up with some way to get back there — and stay back there as long as her “mission” required — then she’d also have to think of a plausible cover story.
But poring through the microfiche — thank God the historical society had transferred all the old newspapers to that format back in the 1980s — she thought she might have found the answer to her problem. The first school in Flagstaff had been built in 1883, but the population was growing so quickly that the following year they hired a second teacher to come help out the town’s one overworked schoolmistress. The young lady they hired, one Eliza Prewitt, never arrived, however. The mystery was never really explained, although Danica wondered if Miss Prewitt got cold feet about heading out to the wild, wild west all by herself and had instead decided to stay in her native Missouri.
Unfortunately, the accounts didn’t include any old photographs or even descriptions of Miss Prewitt, so Danica had no idea whether she and that long-ago young woman shared any similarities in appearance. But pretending to be Miss Prewitt did seem to be the best course of action. It wasn’t as if anyone back in 1884 Flagstaff would be able to look up her photo or her credentials in a central database.
Danica was feeling fairly pleased with herself after that discovery…until she was halfway back to the cabin and realized that simply taking on Miss Prewitt’s identity wasn’t going to be of much help when it came to disguising her own witch nature. All it would take was for Danica to get within ten feet of Jeremiah Wilcox or any of his family members, and they’d know she had witch-blood, the same as all the rest of them.
“Well, shit,” she muttered as she turned off the Forest Service road and onto the gravel drive that led up to the cabin. Supposedly her cousin Damon had devised a spell to hide someone’s witch nature — which was how Connor had been able to sneak into McAllister territory to meet Angela without her discovering who he was — but the secret of that spell had died with Damon. So she’d have to come up with some sort of a plausible explanation for being a single witch far from her own clan’s territory.
Running away from a crappy engagement or marriage seemed the best idea. Back in the Victorian era and earlier, the witch clans hadn’t been quite as freewheeling about letting their members choose their prospective spouses as they were today. Again, that sort of thing would be very difficult to check. Even so, she would still have to find out who the witch clans in Missouri actually were. The Wilcoxes ha
dn’t had much contact with other clans, for obvious reasons, but Danica figured Marie would know.
Which of course she did. She raised an eyebrow at Danica’s request, when she came down into town the next day to visit her cousin, but Marie said calmly enough, “Missouri? That would be the Landons, for the most part. Up near the Iowa border, there’s some spillover from the Rollins clan.” Her gaze sharpened. “Why do you need to know about the Missouri clans, Danica?”
Her question seemed to make it clear that neither Lawrence nor Andre had said anything to her about Danica’s time-traveling plans. “Um…just curious,” Danica replied, knowing how stupid that answer probably sounded. She’d certainly never shown any particular interest in the witch clans in other parts of the country before then.
Luckily, though, Marie wasn’t the sort to pry. She shrugged, asked how Danica was faring at the cabin, and seemed willing to let the matter go. And after a few more minutes of conversation that really didn’t go anywhere, Danica was able to make her escape.
So, she could be Eliza Prewitt, of the Landon clan. No one should think it particularly strange that her last name wasn’t Landon, since of course other family names tended to get mixed in as a clan grew and intermarried with civilians and whatnot. The only reason the Wilcox clan had so many actual damn Wilcoxes was that Jeremiah had been one of four brothers. And hadn’t one of those brothers had just sons and no daughters? She couldn’t remember for sure; her own great-great-great-whatever-grandfather was Wyatt Wilcox, the only son of Jeremiah’s younger brother Edmund.
Danica had another reason for coming to town today besides seeing Marie. After poring over old maps of the town and and a number of architectural sketches, she thought she had a pretty good idea of which streets existed back in 1884 and which ones weren’t even yet a twinkle in a city planner’s eye. At the corner of San Francisco Street and Phoenix Avenue, just below the train depot, there had been a row of businesses, including the general store. That seemed a safe enough place to try her second trip back in time…but her first in a populated area.
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