Chapter One
Present Day
CAROL WREN SAT in the doctor's office, wishing she was anywhere but sitting on the curvy beige examination bed, waiting for her test results. Ever since the inexplicable kidnapping of two students from Leonard Dunkelson's class in Bristol Area Middle School, Carol's knee had felt as bad as it ever did.
She hadn't been able to explain how her knee caused her so much pain that it made her fall when Kenneth Yardrow and Savannah Proehl had been kidnapped by a person in a heavy-looking spacesuit. But her knee had hurt too much, and those poor kids were gone, and she could not tell anyone where they were taken because she could not possibly know.
She had tried telling the investigating detectives all that she'd seen, but they had only laughed at her. She had felt embarrassed, then guilty at being embarrassed, and then angry at the police officers for making her feel guilty, because she only told them the truth. Why would she even think of making it all up?
Finally, she just decided to tell them that she didn't know much of anything about the incident since, a doctor could confirm, she had been immobilized with an injury. A teacher had fallen asleep at his desk, though no toxins had been found in his blood that would indicate sedation. The classroom floor had been ruined with the man's large tracks. Carol thought of him as an astronaut who must have weighed quite a lot to leave such deep indents in the tile. Yet those things were just hard to explain.
No one around the school had seen anyone coming or going-not the janitor who had been mopping the girl's bathroom floor, not the security guard at the front entrance who had been sitting at his station watching six black and white security feeds, and none of the teachers. Certainly not Leonard Dunkelson, who had been placed on administrative leave pending a psychiatric evaluation.
Carol Wren did not want to be placed on administrative leave pending a psychiatric evaluation. There was no way she could defend herself. The surveillance tapes had revealed nothing.
No DNA samples had been found on the scene, except those of the children already present. A K-9 unit had uncovered nothing at the school that might lead to the presence of narcotics. A search team had combed through the area in a ten-mile radius, but had uncovered nothing useful.
Every abandoned building in Bristol had been searched, many left over from the heyday of the steel boom from fifty years ago. Volunteers had spent mornings and evenings searching through the township with flashlights, night vision goggles, and even metal detectors.
No one had been able to find a single clue of any kind relating to the two missing children, though they had found in the course of their search, a lost sheepdog and an illegal campsite made by two people who had eloped.
The case of the disappearing children had made national headlines. The police continually repeated evasive statements which meant absolutely nothing. Though the story had been a media sensation for a week, they lost interest when no new information came up.
She followed the story with intense interest, while her knee had not improved as it should. Full-blown attacks continued through the days and weeks that followed. She struggled through the rest of her classes until school finally let out, and then scheduled an appointment with her doctor across the border in Canada.
She felt fortunate to live a short flight away from Canada. The first time she had wrecked her knee after stepping into a groundhog's hole a while back, she bluntly asked about the price of everything. She learned very quickly that medical procedures in Canada cost far less than they did in America. She paid out of her own pocket for the surgery that left three white scars on the skin of her kneecap. Mile long runs in the morning finally drove the memory of the painful recovery away.
If only it was like that this time. She headed out again after calling her sister Katrina in Vermont. From there were about a three-hour-drive to see her doctor. It was uncomfortable with her left leg throbbing the entire time, but seeking treatment in Canada would save her from personal bankruptcy.
Doctor Kerchel Russell entered the room with a folder full of papers in hand. He wore a white lab coat and smelled of antiseptic. A pair of glasses with round frames clung tight against his face. A black pen stuck out of his shirt pocket and underneath his lab coat was a white business shirt and a straight blue tie with a large brass pin. White residue from medical gloves still remained on the top of his hands.
Doctor Russell sat down on a swivel chair and faced Carol.
"Hello again, Carol. How are you feeling today?" he greeted her.
I feel like hell," Carol bluntly but honestly replied. "I've got a three-hour drive back to Vermont after we're done here, so I'm hoping you have good news for me."
Doctor Russell laid open the folder across his lap. He looked for a particular page, and then brought it before him. He furrowed his eyebrows, lost in thought for a moment, he said. "I'm sorry to have made you wait."
"That's quite all right," Carol said, even though she felt anything but all right.
"It's taken so long because I wanted to make sure I knew what I was looking at. I confirmed with everyone involved in taking your X-Rays. You see, the X-Rays we have of your leg now very closely match the X-Rays we took six years ago, when you first came to us.
"There are a few differences, though they are so small that they wouldn't have been detected had we not enlarged the image. In fact, could you pull your pant leg up, Mrs. Wren? I'd like to have a look at your knee again."
Carol had no idea where the doctor was going with all this. She rolled up the denim over her left leg until it bunched up around her thigh, leaving her throbbing knee in plain sight. She looked down at it, and saw what he had seen from the first. The scars of her previous surgery were not there.
"It's exactly the same as it was the day I stepped in the hole," she said in a quiet voice.
Doctor Russell ran a hand through his short, bristly brown hair. "I'm afraid that means we'll have to do the same procedure all over again. Although I must confess, I've never before seen a case where the scarring has disappeared completely. There's no question that if you continue to walk on that leg the way it is now, you risk putting yourself in a situation where amputation will become necessary."
Carol had heard the word amputation before, and it had scared her today just as much as it scared her six years ago. She'd been saving up for retirement in two years, but she found herself having to choose between continuing to work for another decade, or retiring on a disability salary given out by the government.
"How much does it cost to do that? Is the price still the same?"
Doctor Russell had come prepared with documents detailing the cost of the procedure. Carol regretfully pulled her wallet out of her purse, sighing, but thinking that this was better than being taken somewhere where she might be suffering far more than she could imagine like those poor, kidnapped children....
Journey Through Time (A Time Travel Adventure Collection Part 1) Page 16