by Meg Cabot
He wanted to stay. Jesse wanted to stay. He would rather stay than live. He would rather stay—with me—than live.
“You can’t,” I said, my voice sounding freakishly high-pitched even to my own ears. That was the relief I felt, making me giddy. “You can’t stop him, Jesse. Paul will—”
“And just what do you intend to do, Susannah?” he demanded sharply. And if I hadn’t been convinced before of the sincerity of his wish to remain in this place and time, his gruff tone then would have been enough. “Talk him out of what he plans? No. It’s too dangerous.”
But love had given me courage I’d never even known I had. I shrugged into my leather motorcycle jacket and said, “Paul won’t hurt me, Jesse. I’m the reason he’s doing this, remember?”
“I don’t mean Paul,” Jesse said. “I mean time traveling. Slaski says it’s dangerous?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then you’re not doing it.”
“Jesse, I’m not afraid—”
“No,” Jesse said. There was a look in his eye I had never seen before. “I’m going. You’re staying here. Leave everything to me.”
“Jesse, don’t be—”
But a second later, I saw that I was talking to thin air.
Because Jesse was gone.
I knew where he’d disappeared to, of course. He’d gone to the basilica, to have a word with Paul.
And I was betting that that word would be accompanied by a fist.
I was also betting Jesse was going to be too late. Paul wouldn’t be at the Mission anymore by the time Jesse got to him.
Or rather, he would be. But not the basilica as we knew it.
There was only one thing, really, that I could do then. And that wasn’t, as Jesse had urged, to leave everything to him. How could I, when I could quite possibly wake up in the morning with no memory of Jesse whatsoever?
I knew what I had to do.
And this time, I wasn’t going to make the mistake of consulting with anybody beforehand.
I strode across the room, lifted my pillow, and pulled out the miniature portrait of Jesse—the one he’d given to his one-time fiancée, Maria. The one that I’d been sleeping on since the day I’d stolen—er—been given it.
Looking down into Jesse’s dark, confident gaze, I closed my eyes and pictured him… pictured Jesse in this very room, only not looking as it did now, with a frilly canopy bed and princess phone (thanks, Mom).
No, instead I pictured it as it must have looked 150 years earlier. No ruffled white curtains over the bay window. No window seat scattered with fluffy pillows. No carpet over the wood floor. No—ack!—bathroom, but maybe one of those, what were they called? Oh yeah, chamber pots.
No cars. No cell phones. No computers. No microwaves. No refrigerators. No televisions. No stereos. No airplanes. No penicillin.
Just grass. Grass and trees and sky and wooden wagons and horses and dirt and…
And I opened my eyes.
And I was there.
Chapter
Thirteen
It was my room, but it wasn’t.
Where the canopy had stood sat a bed with a brass stand. The bed was covered with a brightly colored quilt, the kind of quilt that my mom would have gone nuts over if she’d seen it in some craft shop. Instead of my vanity table with its big light-up mirror, there was a chest of drawers with a pitcher and bowl on it.
There was no mirror anywhere, but on the floor was a rug woven from… well, lots of different stuff. It was kind of hard to see really well, because the only light was what little moonlight spilled in from the bay windows. There was no electric switch. I felt for it instinctively the minute I opened my eyes to so much darkness. Where the light switch had been was just wood.
Which could only have meant one thing.
I’d done it.
Whoa.
But where was Jesse? This room was empty. The bed didn’t look as if it had been slept in anytime recently.
Had I come too late? Was Jesse already dead? Or had I come too early and Jesse hadn’t yet arrived?
There was only one way to find out. I laid my hand on the doorknob—only, of course, there was no knob now, but a latch instead—and went out into the hallway.
It was nearly pitch-black in the hallway. There was no electric switch here, either. Instead, when I groped for it, my hand touched a framed picture, or something…
…that promptly fell off the wall with a banging sound, although no glass broke. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t find the thing I’d knocked over, it was too dark. So I continued down the stairs, navigating the various twists and turns by memory alone, since I had no light to guide me.
I saw the glow before I heard the quick footsteps approaching the bottom of the stairs. Someone was coming…someone holding a candle.
Jesse? Could it possibly be?
But when I reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw that it was a woman who was coming toward me, a woman holding not a candle but some kind of lantern. At first, I thought she must be enormously fat, and I was like, God, what could she have been eating? It’s not like they had Twinkies back in Jesse’s day… er, now, I mean.
But then I saw that she was wearing some sort of a hoopskirt, and that what I’d taken for girth was really just her clothes.
“Mary, Mother of God,” the woman cried when she saw me. “Where did you come from?”
I thought it better to ignore that question. Instead, I asked her as politely as I could, “Is Jesse de Silva here?”
“What?” The woman held the lantern higher and really peered at me. “Faith,” she cried. “But you’re a girl!”
“Um,” I said. I would have thought this was obvious. My hair, after all, is pretty long, and I always wear it down. Plus, as always, I had on mascara. “Yes, ma’am. Is Jesse here? Because I really have to speak to him.”
But the woman, instead of appreciating my politeness, pressed her lips together very firmly. Next thing I knew, she was reaching for the door, holding it open, and trying to shoo me through it.
“Out,” she said. “Out with you, then. You should know we don’t allow the likes of you in here. This is a respectable house, this is.”
I just stood there gaping at her. A respectable house? Of course it was. It was MY house.
“I don’t mean to cause trouble, ma’am,” I said, since I could see how it would be a little weird to find a strange girl wandering around your house… even if it was a boardinghouse. That happened to belong to me. Or at least to my mother and her new husband. “But I really need to speak to Jesse de Silva. Can you tell me if he—”
“What kind of fool do you take me for?” the woman demanded not very nicely. “Mr. de Silva wouldn’t give the time of day to a… creature like you. Need to speak to Jesse de Silva, indeed! Out! Out of my house!”
And then, with a strength surprising for a woman in a hoopskirt, she grabbed me by the collar of my leather motorcycle jacket, and propelled me out the door.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” the woman said and slammed the door in my face.
Not just any door, either. My own door. My own front door, to my house.
I couldn’t believe it. From what I’d been led to believe, from Jesse and those Little House on the Prairie books, things back in the 1800s had been all butter churns and reading out loud around the fire. Nothing about mean ladies throwing girls out of their own houses.
Chagrined, I turned around and started down the steps from the front porch…
…and nearly fell on my face. Because the steps weren’t where they used to be. Or would be one day, I mean. And except for the moonlight, which was sadly lacking just then, due to a passing cloud, there was no light whatsoever to see by. I mean it, it was spookily dark. There was no reassuring glow of streetlights—I wasn’t even sure there was a street where Pine Crest Drive ought to have been.
And, turning my head, I could see no lights on in any nearby windows… for all I could tell, there were no ne
arby windows. The house I was standing in front of might have been the only house for miles and miles….
And I’d just been thrown out of it. I was stranded in the year 1850 with no place to go and no way to get there. Except, I guess, the old-fashioned way.
I could, I supposed, have walked to the Mission. That’s where Paul had supposedly gone. I craned my neck, looking for the familiar red dome of the basilica, just visible from my front porch, perched as it was in the Carmel Hills.
But instead of seeing Carmel Valley stretched out below me, all winking lights stretching to the vast darkness of the sea, all I saw was dark. No lights. No red dome, lit up for the tourists. Nothing.
Because, I realized, there were no lights. They hadn’t been invented yet. At least, not lightbulbs.
God. How could anybody find their way anywhere? What did they use to guide them, freaking stars?
I looked up to check out the star situation, wondering if it would help me, and nearly fell off the porch again. Because there were more stars in the sky than I had ever seen before in my life. The Milky Way was like a white streak in the sky, so bright it almost put the moon, finally flitting out from behind some clouds, to shame.
Whoa. No wonder Jesse was unimpressed whenever I successfully located the Big Dipper.
I sighed. Well, there was nothing else I could do, I supposed, but start hoofing it in the general direction of the Mission, and hope I ran into Paul—or Jesse… Past Jesse, I mean—on the way.
I had just found my way off the porch—down a set of rickety wooden steps, unlike the cement ones in place there now… I mean, in the present… my present—when it hit me. The first heavy, cold drops of rain.
Rain. I’m not kidding. No sooner had I looked up to see if it was really rain, or someone dumping their chamber pot out on me (ew) from the second floor than I saw the bank of big black clouds rolling in from the sea. I had been so distracted by all the stars, I hadn’t noticed them before.
Great. I travel more than a century and a half through time, and what do I get for my efforts? Getting thrown out of my own house, and rain. A lot of it.
Lightning flashed, high up in the sky. A few seconds later, thunder rumbled, long and low.
Fabulous. A thunderstorm. I was stuck in an 1850 thunderstorm with nowhere to go.
Then the wind picked up, carrying with it a scent I couldn’t place right away. It took me a minute to remember it. Then, all at once, I did: my occasional forays into Central Park back when I’d lived in Brooklyn.
Horse. There were horses nearby.
Which meant there had to be a barn. Which might be dry. And which might be unguarded by hoopskirted women who consider me bad rubbish.
Ducking my head against the rain, which was coming down harder now, I ran in the direction of the horse smell and soon found myself behind the house, facing an enormous barn, right where Andy had said he was going to have a pool installed one day, after we’d all finished college and he could afford it.
The barn doors were closed. I hurried toward them, praying they wouldn’t be locked….
They weren’t. I heaved one open and slipped inside just as another bolt of lightning streaked through the sky, and thunder sounded again, more loudly, this time.
Inside the barn it was dry, at least. Black as tar, but dry. The horse smell was strong—I could hear them moving uneasily around in their stalls, startled by the thunder—but the smell of something else was stronger. Hay, I think it was. Not exactly being a country girl, I couldn’t say for sure. But I thought the stuff that crunched and rolled a little beneath my boots might be hay.
Well, this was just great. I’d come to save my boyfriend’s life—or rather, to keep someone else from saving it—and all I’d accomplished so far was to enrage his landlady.
Oh and I’d been rained on. And found a barn.
Perfect. Dr. Slaski hadn’t been kidding when he’d warned me against time travel. It sure hadn’t been any picnic so far.
And when, a second later, I’d reached up to wring some of the water from my hair and felt a heavy hand on my shoulder—
Well, I had definitely had enough of the mid-1800s.
Fortunately for me, a roll of thunder drowned out my scream. Otherwise, the landlady—or worse, her husband, if she had one—would have been out here in a flash. And I probably would have gotten a lot more than just a bad scare.
“Shut up!” Paul whispered. “Do you want to get us both shot?”
I whirled around. I could only dimly make out his figure there in the darkness. But it was enough to send my pulse, which had been racing before, to a near standstill.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded, hoping he couldn’t hear the confusion in my voice. I was feeling an odd mix of emotions at seeing him: anger, that he’d gotten there before me; fear, that he was there at all; and relief, at seeing a familiar face.
“What do you think I’m doing here?” Paul tossed something rough and heavy at me.
I caught it inexpertly. “What’s this?”
“A blanket. So you can dry yourself off.”
I gratefully threw the blanket around my shoulders. Even though I still had my motorcycle jacket on, I was shivering beneath the leather. I don’t think it was from the rain, either.
The blanket smelled strongly of horse. But not in a bad way. I guess.
“So,” Paul said and moved into the sliver of light thrown through the still-open barn door, so that I could finally see his face. “You made it.”
I sniffled miserably. I tried not to pay attention to the fact that I was cold, wet, and inside a barn. In the year 1850.
“I can’t believe you really thought you would get away with it,” I said, glad I’d finally seemed to get the trembling of my voice under control. My chattering teeth were another story. “Did you think I wouldn’t try to stop you?”
Paul shrugged. “I figured it was worth a try. And there’s still a chance I’ll succeed, you know, Suze. He isn’t here yet.”
“Who isn’t?” I asked stupidly. I was still busy trying to figure out how I could possibly ditch Paul and get to Jesse without him noticing.
“Jesse,” Paul said as if I were mentally impaired. And you know what? Probably I am. “We’re a day early. He gets here tomorrow.”
“How do you know?” I asked, wiping my dripping nose on the back of my wrist.
“I talked to that lady,” he said. “Mrs. O’Neil. The one who owns your house.”
“She talked to you?” I couldn’t hide my surprise. “She wouldn’t talk to me. She threw me out.”
“What’d you do, materialize in front of her?” Paul asked with a sneer.
“No,” I said. “Well, not right in front of her.”
Paul shook his head. But I could see that he was grinning a little. “Bet you gave her a coronary. What’d she think of your getup?” He gestured at my clothes.
I looked down at myself. In my jeans and motorcycle jacket, I guess I didn’t really resemble any nineteenth-century miss I’d ever seen in the movies. Or, more important, in pictures from the era.
“She said she ran a respectable house and I should know better than to show my face there,” I admitted and was stung when Paul laughed out loud.
“What?” I demanded.
“Nothing,” Paul said. But he was still laughing.
“Just tell me.”
“Okay. But don’t get mad. She thought you were a lady of the evening.”
I glared at him. “She did not!”
“She did so. And I told you not to get mad.”
“I’m not exactly dressed like a hoochie mama,” I pointed out. “I’m wearing pants.”
“That’s the problem,” Paul said. “No respectable woman in this century wears pants. Good thing Jesse didn’t see you. He probably wouldn’t even have talked to you.”
I had had about all I could take of Paul. I said hotly, “He would so. Jesse’s not like that.”
“Not the Jesse you know,” Paul
said. “But we’re not talking about the one you know, are we? We’re talking about the one who’s never met you. Who hasn’t sat around for a hundred and fifty years, watching the world go by. We’re talking about the Jesse who’s on his way to Carmel to marry the girl of his—”
“Shut up,” I said before he could finish that sentence.
Paul’s grin got broader. “Sorry. Well, we’ve got a while to wait. No sense spending it arguing. Come up to the loft with me, and we’ll sit out this storm together.”
He slipped back into the shadows, and I heard a foot scrape on a wooden rung. One of the horses whinnied.
“Don’t be scared, Suze,” Paul called down to me from a few feet in the air. “They’re just horses. They won’t bite. If you don’t get too near them.”
That wasn’t why I was scared. Not that I was about to admit any such thing to him.
“I think I’ll stay down here,” I said into the darkness his voice had come from.
“Fine by me,” Paul said, “if you want to get caught. It’ll just make my job easier. Mr. O’Neil came by a little while ago to check on the horses. I’m sure he wouldn’t shoot a girl, though. If he realized you were a girl in time, I mean.”
This got me moving toward the ladder.
“I hate you,” I commented, as I started to climb.
“No, you don’t,” Paul said from the darkness above me. I could tell by his voice that he was grinning again. “But you go right on telling yourself that, if it makes you feel better.”
Chapter
fourteen
It was warm in the loft. Warm and dry. And not just because of all the hay. No, also because Paul and I were sitting so close together—for body-heat purposes only, I’d informed him, when he’d shown me the hole he’d dug in the giant pile of hay at one end of the loft.
“Because I don’t want to die of hypothermia,” was what I’d said, since the horse blanket didn’t seem to be doing the job. At least, my teeth hadn’t stopped chattering. My jeans weren’t drying as fast as I’d have liked them to.
“I’ll keep my hands to myself,” Paul had assured me.