Shifting Shadows

by Sally Berneathy

  “Okay, okay.” He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “You think you’re Analise Dupard, and the year is 1911.” There was no point in pushing her. He’d have to try another tactic.

  He wasn’t very good at this. Two months of failure proved that. Tom would have known how to get the job done. But Tom was dead. And because of that, he wouldn’t give up—couldn’t give up.

  She clenched her hands in her lap, her expression becoming so intense it was almost painful to watch…or would have been if he believed she was sincere. “I’m Elizabeth Dupard.” The words sounded like a confession. “I only said my name was Analise because that’s what you called me. And I’m not sure about the year. It’s just that I can’t remember past my wedding.”

  “Fine. Have it your way. I’m not going to argue with you about that right now. But I am going to insist you have a doctor look at those bruises. You can tell him you fell down the stairs, that you have amnesia, that the year is 1911—I don’t care. But you will see a doctor.” Maybe her story was transparently phony, but the injuries were real. And perhaps once they’d healed, he might be able to persuade her to regain her memory, to give him what he needed.

  She looked at him for a minute with that big-eyed, helpless stare then straightened her spine in the scared but determined way she’d done a couple of times that morning. “Very well. Perhaps a doctor can help me get everything straight. As long as you don’t insist that I go to the hospital, I’ll agree to see a doctor. You may fetch him.”

  He leaned back, away from her, crossed his arms over his chest and smiled grimly. She was making things easier, feeding his ire, her story becoming so ridiculous he couldn’t believe she’d expect him to buy into it. “Fetch him? Oh, I see. In 1911 doctors made house calls, didn’t they? Well, they don’t do that anymore. We have to go to them. I’ll take you in my car. Did they have horseless carriages in 1911?”

  She lifted her chin defiantly and stared straight into his distrust. He had to fight a feeling of admiration for her courage, had to remind himself again that this was all a scam.

  “Automobiles?” she said. “Of course we had them. I saw them in Kansas City last summer.”

  “Last summer? Let’s see…that would be just over a hundred years ago. Right?”

  Her rigid posture dissolved, and she slumped in the chair. “Yes,” she whispered. “Over a hundred years ago.” She looked at him, and her eyes begged for his help.

  He didn’t believe her, didn’t dare believe her.

  He turned away, headed across the room to the phone. “I suppose your doctor’s name is on your list of things forgotten. Never mind. I’ll call mine.”

  Analise watched as he stalked away from her, crossed the room and picked up a dark, shiny object. Suddenly, somehow, she knew the device was a telephone, though it didn’t look like any telephone she’d ever seen, wasn’t attached to the wall, didn’t even have a cord.

  As he talked to the doctor, he stood at the kitchen cabinet, his back toward her—his back that seemed, like the telephone, familiar yet strange.

  She touched her face, felt her cold fingers on her warm flesh. She was really here—wherever here was—and all this was really happening. She was trapped in a nightmare. Her heart pounded erratically as the swirling, choking mists of confusion threatened to drag her down. She had to hold onto control tightly, not give in to panic. If she gave in for even an instant, she’d be lost forever.

  *~*~*

  The rain had stopped, but the clouds were low and gray, the air heavy with the threat of more storms when Dylan guided her outside to the street. As they walked across the wet grass, she studied the sky and shivered, wishing for the brightness of the sun, for something to illuminate whatever lay hidden in the dark corners of her mind.

  At least she felt no surprise, only dismay, when the automobile he led her to bore no resemblance to any vehicle she remembered. He opened the door to the shiny black machine. “Go ahead and get in. I need to put on a shirt. I’ll just be a minute.”

  She shook her head in a futile effort to clear it. On second glance, the vehicle looked almost familiar, but the space inside appeared small, and she already felt closed in by strangeness. She could feel the humid air pressing against her, squeezing the breath from her lungs. “I’d rather wait outside.”

  He looked exasperated. “Will you stay right here? Not go anywhere?”

  “Where would I go? Where would I dare go in this strange place?”

  Though he scowled disbelievingly, he turned and strode toward Rachel’s house. He was big, his steps determined and heavy. In that respect he reminded her of Blake.

  No, she corrected herself. He was big like Blake, yet it wasn’t Blake he reminded her of. But it was someone. In spite of his obvious hostility, in spite of the fact that he knew her but didn’t seem to be a close friend, in spite of the fact that she’d never seen him before this morning, she knew him. She was somehow tied to him. He scared her, but somewhere outside that feeling, he evoked memories of happiness and laughter.

  The front door closed behind him, cutting off the flow of those evanescent memories.

  She took an automatic step forward, started to follow him, to go inside the house and find Rachel, see her, talk to her, tell her about this insanity. But even before logic had a chance to halt her, the changes in the once-immaculate house pulled her up short. The porch had loose boards, a couple of rotten ones. Roots from the oak tree in the front yard pushed their way through cracks in the sidewalk. That oak tree should be only a sapling, planted by Rachel’s father to replace the one struck by lightning. But it was massive, a hundred years old.

  Elizabeth—or was she Analise?—turned slowly, fearfully, to look back at her own house, the house she’d just walked out of. In her mind’s eye, she saw it light blue with trim of darker blue and brick red. But even as she turned, she knew it wouldn’t be so.

  And she was right. It was gray now with white trim.

  The colors she’d always wanted it to be.

  “Analise?”

  Dylan had returned. In hopeless resignation, she faced him, the only person she knew, the only person who could possibly help her, the person who had frightened her with his dark, distrustful gaze then drew her to him in a comforting way she didn’t understand.

  “It’s true, then,” she said, her voice coming to her own ears as alien and disconnected. “It’s the future, and I’m not me…I’m her…I’m in somebody else’s body.”

  He gripped her shoulders, his touch amazingly gentle for someone so big.

  No, he didn’t remind her of Blake. Blake wasn’t gentle. But this man’s touch was familiar.

  “You’re in your own body and your own time. You were in this body yesterday and the day before—two months before that I personally know of.” He spoke sternly, almost harshly, his words a contradiction to his touch. He opened his mouth as if to say more, but shook his head and turned away to open the car door again.

  This time she slid inside.

  As they drove at a dizzying rate of speed along smooth ribbons of road, she clutched the dash so tightly her knuckles turned white. At first she worried that they would run over a carriage or a traveler on horseback or afoot, but they only encountered more of the strange automobiles, all speeding along as fast or faster than they were.

  When she finally accepted the fact that they weren’t going to crash into something, the ride became quite fascinating and astonishingly normal, as though she’d experienced it all before. Releasing her grip on the dash, she leaned back and stared out the window at the scenery flashing by.

  Trees and grassy fields she’d passed while riding in a wagon with Papa had been replaced by hundreds of houses—maybe thousands. Too many to count. She gaped in awe at images she’d never seen, never even dreamed of. Yet those images, after her first shock wore off, began to look right in an inexplicable way. Each new spectacle, startling at first glimpse, seemed to slip into and fill its own empty slot in her memory just as
the telephone and automobile had.

  One thing was becoming certain. The world she remembered was gone. Years she couldn’t account for had passed, and she was alone in this strange place. She swallowed hard as the implications hit her. Mama must be long dead, and Aunt Hester and Cousin Thad and her best friend, Rachel—everybody she knew.

  A sob caught in her throat. She couldn’t lose everyone at once. If she was alive, surely they must be too. But she knew they were gone. She’d never see them again in this lifetime. The grief of loss flooded through her, threatened to overwhelm her. She bit her lip, fighting back the tears.

  “How’s your head?” Dylan asked, diverting her thoughts.

  “My head? Oh, I guess I’d forgotten about it. Much better, thank you. What on earth is that?” In her sorrow over her family, she hadn’t been paying attention to their surroundings, hadn’t noticed they were approaching a group of tall buildings that seemed to touch the sky.

  “Kansas City.”

  When he spoke the words, she felt the information settle into place in her memory. “Yes,” she said slowly. “It is. But how did we get here so soon? It took Papa nearly half a day with our horse and buggy.”

  “Half a day? Fortunately, since I have to come here to work every day, we travel faster than that in our modern cars.”

  In his voice she heard again the disbelief, but for just an instant she saw a flash of uncertainty in his eyes. Before she had time to think about it, he pulled into a concrete-covered lot and stopped in the midst of a crowd of other cars.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  *~*~*

  A couple of hours later, when they walked through the glass doors and out of the building, Analise—she knew she had to start thinking of herself by that name—felt a great deal more relieved than when she’d gone in.

  The doctor, a short, balding man with a pleasant though distracted smile, had assured her that some memory loss from a head injury was common, that her memory would likely return soon. He wouldn’t have all the test results back until tomorrow, but everything looked normal so far.

  Normal. What a wonderful word. If the tests said she was normal, did that mean she would soon feel normal?

  Or would the tests reveal that she’d stolen Analise’s body or that she was mad? She was actually beginning to accept herself as Analise. She just couldn’t stop thinking of herself as Elizabeth too.

  “You don’t need to check on me every four hours tonight like the doctor suggested,” she said as the streetlight changed from red to green and Dylan took her arm, guiding her across. He had stayed by her side every minute, even through the frightening, sometimes painful tests, but this frequent checking recommended by the doctor would be asking too much of anyone.

  “You heard the doctor,” he said, his gruff tone belying the compassionate way he’d been acting. “It’s either that or you spend the night in the hospital, and you told him in no uncertain terms that you were not going to do that.”

  She looked up at his grim expression and wondered, not for the first time, if his tenacity about never leaving her came more from concern about her welfare or from the possibility that she might escape from him. She had no idea where that last notion came from, but she sensed that he wanted something from her.

  She sighed. Since she had no idea of Analise’s life prior to this day, there could be any number of reasons for his strange behavior. In any event, whatever the explanation, she was glad he’d been there, glad he was still with her, that she wasn’t totally alone in this strange land.

  Yet as they reached his automobile and he opened the door for her to get in again, as he stood so close beside her, she had to admit to another reason for being glad he was there. Even as his presence gave her a more secure feeling about this world, at the same time he made her feel insecure in an excitingly dangerous way—rather like riding the Ferris wheel at the World’s Fair in St. Louis.

  Settling into the car seat beside her, he pulled out of the parking lot, into the line of cars moving down the street. She studied his ominous profile, the square, clenched jaw, the dark secrets of his gaze, and thought she was most assuredly mad to feel an attraction for this strange man.

  “The doctor said you’d probably start to remember things soon.” He appeared to be focused on the mechanics of operating the vehicle, but the tension in his voice told her the comment was weighted with hidden meaning. What did he think—or fear—that she’d remember?

  “I hope he’s right,” she said then decided to take the plunge, see how he would react to the return of her memory. “Sometimes when I see things, like the tall buildings, or when you tell me something, I sort of get that memory back. When you told me this was Kansas City, I knew it was and that I’d been here, but that’s all.”

  “You admit you’re not some Victorian woman named Elizabeth Dupard?” Again his voice had a peculiar edge to it, as if he were testing her.

  “I know I’m Analise Parrish,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I know I can’t be Elizabeth Dupard if I’m Analise Parrish.”

  But I am Elizabeth! And Analise.

  *~*~*

  A weak sun was trying to peek through the clouds when they turned onto Analise’s street. She sat upright, gripped the dash as she noticed several cars parked in front of her house. Men in uniforms stood in the yard. Policemen. Had some crime been committed while she was gone? Or were they waiting for her? Had the doctor’s tests revealed her to be insane? Had he sent the police to get her?

  Panic stricken, she turned to Dylan, the man whose motives she didn’t understand or trust, but the only person she could turn to at the moment. “What’s happening? What do they want?”

  “You don’t know?” He swung around the parked vehicles and pulled up in front of Rachel’s house. “I see your ex-husband’s car among the crowd.” He indicated a shining white vehicle.

  Her ex-husband. Not Blake. She knew now he didn’t mean Blake.

  Did this have something to do with the divorce? Were they here to take her back to him? That thought made the world spin crazily. “I don’t remember my…” She had to force the words past her numb lips. “My…ex-husband.”

  “Then you’d better come meet him.” Dylan got out and came around for her. “Why are you shaking?” he asked as he took her hand. His gaze bored into her as if trying to ferret out her secrets, her very soul.

  She wanted to beg him to get back in the car and drive her far away. But she had nowhere to go. This was her home, her only remnant of the life she remembered. The house wasn’t exactly the way she remembered it, but it was the closest she’d found since waking that morning.

  She got out of the automobile, making an effort not to clench Dylan’s hand too tightly but not releasing it either. Like her house, he wasn’t completely familiar, but he was the only person she knew in this strange world.

  As they walked across the yard, one of the policemen came up to them. “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “You can tell us what’s going on,” Dylan answered. “This is Ms. Parrish. She lives here.”

  Analise waited, holding her breath, wishing she could sink into the earth or fly into the clouds, anything to escape whatever the officer was going to say to her.

  The officer lifted his eyebrows. “You’re Analise Parrish?”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Hey, Milton,” he called over his shoulder, “it’s the Parrish woman!” He turned back to her. “We thought something had happened to you. Your husband’s been worried. He came out, found the broken door but no sign of you, and called us.

  They weren’t going to arrest her! “I fell down the stairs. My neighbor took me to the doctor.”

  “Analise!”

  She looked up to see a tall, slim man striding across the porch. His eyes were so light a shade of blue they almost matched his meticulous silver hair. His skin was brown as though he spent a lot of time outdoors, but his face was unlined, his clothing immaculate, not like a laborer.
/>   “That’s Phillip Ryker,” Dylan murmured. “Your ex.”

  For a brief instant as he walked beneath the skeletal branches of the catalpa tree, his image blurred. He seemed larger, his hair and eyes darker, skin paler. Blake?

  She clung to Dylan. “No! I don’t want to go back!” The words came from somewhere deep inside, a place hidden even from her, for they made no sense as she uttered them.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he said, dropping her hand to slide his arm tightly about her waist. “You’ll never have to go back.” For that moment, his voice was different, and it touched that hidden place in her heart. She started to call his name, could almost remember it. Not Dylan, something else…

  But the other man rushed to her and pulled her away, into his arms. She didn’t try to fight him, just let herself turn into a limp sawdust doll in his embrace.

  “Thank God you’re all right,” he said.

  She blinked and shook her head. This was Phillip, not Blake. Not Blake.

  “I was so worried,” he continued, holding her at arm’s length so he could look into her eyes. “Lottie called me when you didn’t come into the shop this morning and she couldn’t reach you at home. I came out and found your door broken and no sign of you. What happened?”

  “She says she fell and hit her head,” Dylan said, his rough voice intruding between Phillip and her. “She’s covered with bruises. She doesn’t want to talk to the cops.”

  Analise looked up at him, surprised at the hatred in his voice and eyes. It was apparent from his tone that he knew Phillip, had some connection with him. He couldn’t have so much enmity for a stranger.

  She shivered as she recalled the improper, heady feelings Dylan evoked in her when he touched her. Could he be the reason for her divorce? Was that why he disliked Phillip?

  Yet Phillip gave no indication that he shared the ill will. With a curt nod of agreement to Dylan, he released Analise and turned to the nearest officer.

  Once again Dylan touched her, taking her arm, and a nebulous, familiar world almost coalesced around her as he led her toward her house, up the steps and across the porch.