witches of cleopatra hill 06 - spellbound

by Pope, Christine

  She parked at the depot and walked down to the spot she’d chosen, which was under a huge oak probably as old as the city itself. It was now just a little past two in the afternoon, and so the street wasn’t too busy. Even so, she made sure to stand in a place where she wouldn’t be directly visible to passersby. The last thing she wanted was for anyone to see her wink in and out of existence in broad daylight.

  In preparing for this moment, Danica had understood that she couldn’t just pick a date and use that as her target. Dates were meaningless, arbitrary numbers assigned by people who needed to create some order from the chaos that was the universe. No, she had to keep the images she’d seen in the old photographs she’d studied fixed in her mind — what the streets had looked like, what the people were wearing. The fall color on the trees. All of those details would help to pull her toward that one place where she could go to help the stranger.

  So…the leaves of the tree above her head would be golden, and there would be no true sidewalks, just packed earth. The men would have frock coats like the one her ghostly visitor wore, or possibly sheepskin jackets, if the day was cold enough. They’d all be wearing hats. The women would be wearing bustle dresses, or possibly plainer skirts and what they called shirtwaists, or blouses, depending on their social status. In the background there might be the mournful whistle of a train as it pulled into the station, and the clopping of horses’ hooves. And….

  She had to stop visualizing at that point, because what she’d imagined in her mind’s eye was suddenly there on the street before her. Only now it didn’t have the sepia tones she’d somehow imagined must tinge everything in that long-ago era, but instead blazed before her in full color. The bright bay coats of a team of horses pulling a buggy. The almost eye-searing purple and green plaid of the bustle dress one woman wore as she climbed the steps into the general store only a few yards from where Danica stood in the shelter of the oak tree. A little girl’s golden hair, worn in a neat braid halfway down her back.

  All that, and above a sky with the deep, serene blue of autumn, and billowing white clouds gathered up near the top of Humphreys Peak. The air felt colder than Danica had expected, but she realized this must be mid-October, not the mild day in early September she’d left behind her. All of the men she saw wore coats, and the women had shawls wrapped around their shoulders as they went about their business.

  Holy shit, she thought. I’m really there.

  But she couldn’t let her thoughts dwell on the miracle of her standing here in Flagstaff in 1884. No, she had to let herself drink in the scene without thinking too much about how she was able to do so. At the same time, she realized she couldn’t stay here too long; she was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, not exactly the sort of attire considered proper for a young woman of the day. So far, it didn’t seem as if anyone had noticed her standing there in the shadow of the oak tree, but she couldn’t count on it to conceal her forever.

  Pulling herself away was harder than she’d thought, however. She wanted to keep standing there and absorbing everything, from the clean tang of fresh-sawn pine on the air to the undeniable scent of horse manure — not as bad as she’d feared, though. A group of men not too much older than herself, all of them in rough coats in brown or black, emerged from one of the buildings across the street, laughing. From the unsteady way they walked, it seemed clear enough to Danica that they’d just had a few too many beers or whiskeys or whatever the pour of choice might have been back in 1880s Flagstaff. One of them straightened slightly, though, and looked across the street at her, shock seeming to register on his face as he took in her attire.

  Oh, crap. Time to go.

  Danica immediately thought of the present day she’d left behind, with cars lining the streets and people moving along the sidewalks, absorbed in texting or checking their email or surfing the Web. The college students who used to be her classmates — the guys with their faux lumberjack beards and the girls who didn’t think anything of going to school or to the store while still wearing their plaid flannel pajama bottoms.

  And, just like that, she was back then. Back now. Whenever. Traffic whirred past, and off in the distance somewhere, Danica could hear a girl talking loudly on her phone, saying quite without embarrassment that she’d seen him sticking his tongue down the throat of that skank at the party, and —

  Good old twenty-first century, Danica thought, cringing inwardly. In that moment, she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t take the scent of horse manure over having to listen to one more unguarded cell phone conversation.

  Even so, she couldn’t help experiencing a flood of triumph. She’d gone back then, had seen what this very street looked like more than a hundred years before. In addition, she’d been able to control her coming and going.

  She might really be able to go back and stay there long enough to make a difference.

  In the meantime, though, she still had a lot of work to do.

  7

  “You want to do what?” Olivia Wilcox said, staring at her daughter as if certain she hadn’t heard her correctly.

  Danica was already beginning to regret coming home, but she didn’t have that much choice. What she had to do next required access to the Internet and her bank account. And she could only think of one even halfway reasonable-sounding excuse for suddenly wanting to acquire a wardrobe of Victorian dresses and accessories.

  “I think I’m going to try cowboy action shooting,” she said.

  “You’ve never shot a gun in your life,” Olivia pointed out.

  True enough. “They just call it that. You don’t actually have to shoot anything if you don’t want to. A lot of people just like to get dressed up and watch the shooting matches.”

  Olivia crossed her arms, frowning. “And where did all this come from?”

  Well, Mom, I met a ghost, and he’s really hot, so I need to see if I can go back in time and save him so he doesn’t become a ghost. But for that, I need some bustle dresses.

  Yeah, right.

  Danica shrugged. “I met some guys who were doing practice shooting out in the woods. It sounded like fun.”

  “‘Some guys’?” Actually, her mother didn’t sound all that disapproving as she asked the question. There might have been a hopeful note in her voice, as if she thought Danica meeting “some guys” might be healthy step in the right direction, even if the guys in question liked to dress up in Wild West clothes and shoot guns on the weekend.

  “Yes,” Danica replied, lying furiously. “One of them actually goes to Northern Pines, but we’d never met because he’s getting his degree in mechanical engineering and none of our classes ever overlapped. He was out shooting with his older brother.”

  There, that sounded safe and family-oriented. And a nice young man who wanted to be mechanical engineer? Catnip to someone like Olivia Wilcox. She still wasn’t entirely thrilled that Mason had gotten married to someone who worked as a carpenter, who didn’t even have a college degree. Never mind that, up until a few years ago, the McAllister clan didn’t really have access to a four-year college, not unless they wanted to get a dispensation from the de la Paz family to study down in the Phoenix area. Danica had never heard of any of them doing that, though; they hadn’t seemed too inclined to wander very far from the territory they called their own.

  “Oh, well, if you’re not actually going to be doing any shooting….” Olivia let her words trail off and then shrugged. “It sounds as if it could be fun. Is it very expensive?”

  “It can be,” Danica admitted. “But I just need to get a wardrobe together. At least I won’t be buying any firearms.”

  Her mother seemed to think that over before giving another slight lift of her shoulders. It looked as if she’d realized that there were worse things a daughter could be spending her money on. At least this all promised to be vaguely educational.

  “Well, I suppose there isn’t any harm in it. Just don’t go too crazy with the dresses and all that, at least until you’ve really decid
ed whether you’re going to keep at it or not.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Danica said, and went to give her mother a quick hug. Olivia appeared vaguely startled — her daughter hadn’t been all that demonstrative lately, ever since the Matías incident — but she smiled as Danica hurried out of the kitchen and back to her room.

  Time to start spending some serious money. Thank God for the stipend all Wilcox clan members received, because she sure needed it now.

  * * *

  She bought herself a membership so she’d have access to the shooting society’s bulletin boards and chat rooms. That seemed to be the easiest way to get a line on a local dressmaker who specialized in costuming re-enactors. A quick perusal of the ready-made dresses that were available had told Danica they wouldn’t do her much good — she might not be an expert on Victorian costume, but she could tell at a glance that the gowns she was looking at weren’t anything like the ones she’d seen during her brief flashback into 1884.

  Luckily, she found the person she was looking for in Prescott. Once upon a time, going there for fittings would have been out of the question, since Prescott was in McAllister territory, but none of that meant much these days. Danica was able to get herself moved to the head of the woman’s line, so to speak, by offering to pay a thirty-percent rush fee.

  The dressmaker, whose name was Jackie, arched an eyebrow when Danica explained what she wanted. After giving her new client a once-over, she asked, “A schoolmistress? Are you sure? Most of my clients who’re your age want to be saloon girls, or maybe Annie Oakley or Calamity Jane.”

  Danica assured her that she wanted to look like a respectable young lady, and ordered a week’s worth of underthings, along with a corset, plus four gowns, two of them cotton, one in lightweight wool, and the last a dinner gown in silk. Maybe that was being extravagant, but surely it couldn’t hurt to have at least one really nice dress.

  Right, for when your ghost takes you out to dinner, she mocked herself. But she just couldn’t resist that dark teal silk brocade Jackie showed her as part of her swatch collection. It was too gorgeous to pass up.

  “And they’ll be accurate?” Danica asked anxiously.

  “Totally accurate,” Jackie assured her. “I’ve been studying Victorian clothing for almost twenty years now. You’ll look just like you stepped out of a fashion plate. And go here for all your accessories,” she added, giving Danica a business card that was lying in a silver dish on her coffee table. “Louise makes awesome hats, and she can get your gloves and reticules and shawls, everything else you need. You’ll be the best-dressed young lady in northern Arizona.”

  Danica hoped so. Or at least, she hoped that nothing she ended up with would make her look out of the ordinary. She had to blend in as best she could.

  After writing Jackie a scarily large check — and that was just for the deposit — she headed home, hoping that the dressmaker really knew what she was promising when she said the whole wardrobe would be ready in two weeks. Yes, it wasn’t as if she had to make everything by hand, but still, that seemed like an awful lot of sewing.

  Then it was back home to place her accessories order online, choosing two hats, a couple of shawls, shoes that were supposed to be exact reproductions of ladies’ boots from the 1880s, stockings…so much that Danica wondered where she was going to store it all.

  Right, in the carpetbag she ordered as well.

  And money. She found someone in Flagstaff who sold antique coins and bought several thousand dollars’ worth of silver dollars that would be usable in the Arizona Territory of the 1880s. Well, several thousand dollars to her; the actual face value of the coins was a couple of hundred bucks, which she hoped would be enough. But it had to be, in a time when you could buy a new pair of shoes for only two or three dollars. Plus, if she was really journeying back in time to pose as the new schoolmistress, it meant she would presumably be getting paid something for her efforts.

  Even though the thought did scare her a little, Danica wouldn’t allow herself to worry about the whole teaching thing too much. All right, she hadn’t finished college, but she remembered reading about Laura Ingalls Wilder, who’d taught school when she was younger than Danica was now, and definitely hadn’t had the benefit of a college education. And hadn’t Anne in the Anne of Green Gables books done basically the same thing before she was actually able to go to a real four-year college? Anyway, Danica thought she should be able to fake it. The hardest part would be making sure she didn’t let anything slip that people wouldn’t have known back in 1884. And the kids…well, she’d spent enough time around all her Wilcox cousins that she was used enough to children of all stages of development. It wasn’t as if she’d be teaching nursery school; it sounded like most kids back then started school around six. Besides, little Victorian children had to be better behaved than some of the terrors she’d had to deal with at family gatherings.

  While she was waiting for her new wardrobe to be finished, Danica read as much as she could about Flagstaff in the 1880s, about the Arizona Territory in general, and about anything else she could think of — Victorian manners and deportment, politics of the day, popular music, dining, and more. She knew some of her newfound knowledge wouldn’t be all that applicable, since she kind of doubted a rough frontier town like Flagstaff was the place for afternoon teas or grand balls, but it never hurt to sock the information away in case she needed it. Also, she read as many novels of the period as she could, trying to absorb how people spoke and thought, and also watched movies set in that era, even if she wasn’t sure how accurate any of them might be.

  When she wasn’t reading, she was staying studiously out of the sun so the last of her late-summer tan could completely fade away — sun-browned women were definitely not in vogue in the 1880s — and spending hours in front of the mirror, fighting with her long stubborn hair until she could force it into a more or less reasonable facsimile of the styles she’d seen in old portraits and books of fashion plates. No way would she cut bangs, which seemed to be very “in” in the mid-1880s, but after leaving her hair braided at night so it would have soft waves in it, she was able to pull it up into a heavy looped plait at the back of her head. A few ornamental hair combs she’d found in a local antique shop, and she figured it would pass.

  One time she did drive up to the cabin, just so her ghost wouldn’t think she’d abandoned him. But although she waited until nightfall, and sat on the porch as the air grew steadily colder, he never materialized. Maybe it was enough that he now knew she was planning to help him, and so he saw no more reason to drop hints for her.

  Feeling strangely disappointed, she’d returned home. Her parents had gone out that night — it was a Friday — and so she wandered the house by herself, thinking of how big and empty it felt, and wondering what her ghost would have thought of the place. The granite and stainless-steel kitchen probably would have mystified him, as would the large TVs in the family room and her father’s study. But the couches and the tables and all that…they weren’t exactly Victorian in style, but they were still recognizable. Things hadn’t changed all that much.

  She realized then she was just trying to reassure herself, that if she stopped to think about all the thousands of ways 1884 was different from the twenty-first century, her head would probably explode. Anyway, she’d already committed to this, and she would just have to roll with whatever happened.

  Jackie emailed her the next morning and said the dresses were ready. A mixture of excitement and fear sent Danica’s stomach roiling, but she made herself email back, saying that was great and she’d be by around two to get her new wardrobe.

  That appointment took longer than she’d thought, because Jackie made her try everything on, including the corset. It had been laced in such a way that the strings came out in a pair of loops at the center back, and Danica looked at it in some mystification.

  “It’s so you can tighten it yourself,” Jackie explained. “I know a lot of the time, you re-enactor girls don’t have some
one to help you get dressed.”

  Danica tried it out, and, sure enough, the corset tightened up beautifully. Not too tight, though — she was already slender, and she wasn’t trying to be Scarlett O’Hara. She just wanted to look accurate.

  All the dresses fit perfectly, and they all buttoned up the front, which meant Danica could get in and out of them easily, even though she was sure she was going to knock something over with that big wire-framed bustle petticoat. Oh, well, it was still probably better than trying to manage a hoop skirt. And Jackie did show her how to sit down in it, how to surreptitiously gather up the draperies at the back of the skirt and the cage bustle with them, so it sort of collapsed when she sank down into a chair. The whole process wasn’t as difficult as she’d feared.

  The last gown Danica tried on was the teal silk dinner dress, and it was hard not to stare at herself in the mirror as she inspected that one. Jackie had really outdone herself — the gown had black braided trimming with dangling glass beads, and the skirt was wonderfully draped and pleated. Danica had to hope it would survive being stuffed in a carpetbag.

  “It’s stunning,” Jackie said, looking over the entire ensemble with a critical eye, as if making sure for herself that everything was draping and falling where it was supposed to. “Where are you planning to wear this one? The big convention in Vegas?”

  “Um…yes,” Danica replied. She had absolutely no idea what the dressmaker was talking about, but face it, the gown wasn’t the sort of thing you’d wear tromping around in the dirt at an outdoor shooting range.

  “Well, I hope you don’t mind attracting attention!” Jackie chuckled, clearly not realizing that the very last thing Danica wanted to do was attract attention.

  Well, except for a certain handsome ghost….

  She paid the balance due on the commission, then gathered up everything and took it back out to her SUV. It did all seem like far more than could fit in the carpetbag she’d ordered. Maybe she should’ve bought two.