Amazing it hadn’t happened before now.
He folded the paper and put it in his jacket pocket, then went back to eating the wonderful-tasting rib-eye and the perfectly fried potatoes.
By the time he had finished his meal, he knew what he had to do. If he introduced himself to Duster, he might jeopardize what Bonnie and Duster would do when they asked him to go to the mine the first time.
Carson didn’t dare do that.
And he wasn’t even sure if he should be around Duster much, in case something slipped that gave him away as another time traveler.
Since, in this timeline, Carson was twenty years older than the college grad that Bonnie and Duster met. Carson knew he hardly looked the same. So just having Duster see him here would never trigger a problem in the future.
When he got done with this trip, it was going to be fun to go talk with Bonnie and Duster and tell them what happened. But right now, Carson figured it was better that he be another face in the past for Duster.
Carson paid for his meal and went back down to the poker room. He found an open seat across the room from Duster.
And the night went easily and he won, finally heading back to his mansion just before midnight.
It was halfway back to the mansion that he wondered just exactly how many time travelers from his future were in that room that he didn’t recognize.
CHAPTER SEVEN
September 20, 2016
Inside a mountain above the ghost town of Silver City, Idaho
SHERRI MANAGED TO hold her desire to run screaming back up the old mine tunnel and into the light of day until she and Dawn got packed. They put in old-fashioned undergarments that did not look comfortable, plus her modern underwear and her sweat pants and tee-shirt she had brought to sleep in.
Also some modern hygiene products were added in a few secret areas of the saddlebag, plus some first aid and pain meds.
“We’ll change into riding clothes when we get back in here,” Bonnie said, swinging her saddlebag up to her shoulder and following Duster toward a tunnel in the back of the mine.
“We’re going deeper into the mountain?” Sherri asked, her panic almost freezing her to the spot. She had never been claustrophobic or afraid of tunnels or caves, but at the moment she was having trouble breathing.
Dawn swung her saddlebag over her shoulder, then took Sherri’s saddlebag in one hand. Then Dawn put her other arm around Sherri’s shoulders and pushed her forward to follow Bonnie and Duster.
“You are about to see one of the great wonders of the world, maybe the greatest.”
“If I live to get to it,” Sherri said, trying to catch her breath.
Sherri stumbled along, even though the dirt floor of the cavern was smooth, as they went into another tunnel and through another wall hologram, then past a huge open door and out into light.
Bright, pinkish-colored light.
The light was coming from beautiful crystals covering the walls of a massive chamber.
It didn’t register what she was seeing for a few steps out onto the flat, dirt floor of the huge chamber. Then the size and the beauty hit her like a blow to the gut.
She had been inside of the large football stadiums and this place seemed bigger. And as far as she could see the room went down into the mountain with even more huge caverns of crystals. The other rooms seemed to vanish into an impossible distance.
Her mind would not allow her to really take in what she was seeing.
She blinked and tried to focus on something close to her.
Every inch of every wall was covered in crystals of varied sizes. There were massive crystals that were larger than she was to crystals so tiny she could barely see them. The crystals seemed to be growing in clusters and none of them were the same.
And every crystal seemed to glow with its own power.
She had stopped cold and now she could feel her legs start to give out.
She had never been the fainting type, but honestly, when faced with something like this, fainting seemed to be a damn fine option in her opinion.
Bonnie was on one side of Sherri, Dawn on the other.
Sherri knew they were there, but couldn’t grasp anything at the moment past “Wow!”
And the intense desire to just faint to the floor.
“Too much, isn’t it?” Dawn said.
Sherri tried to nod, but wasn’t sure she succeeded.
“Every crystal in this place is the physical representation of a timeline, just like the one we are living in,” Dawn said.
“Every decision anyone makes splits off a new timeline, forms a new crystal,” Dawn said. “All the crystals in this room are so close to our timeline, it would be impossible to tell the difference.”
“In all these crystals, all these timelines,” Bonnie said, “the four of us are here right now. If we had decided to not bring you here, that timeline would be caverns down the line somewhere.”
“In other caverns, more than likely hundreds and hundreds of caverns away, are timelines where you decided to not tell us about the ghost,” Dawn said.
Sherri slowly let what they were saying sink in.
“There have to be millions of crystals in here,” she managed to say, both surprised and happy her voice still worked.
“More into the billions,” Dawn said, “in just this massive chamber.”
Sherri looked around, letting both Dawn and Bonnie steady her. The only thing that marred the walls of crystals was where the door from the other cavern had been punched through and those displaced crystals were stacked neatly to one side of the door.
The flat dirt floor seemed to just go off into the distance like a massive desert floor, slanting downward slightly.
Sitting near one wall to the right of the door was a long wooden table with a wooden box on it. It seemed tiny and out of place in the vast room.
Two cables long enough to reach the nearby wall were there as well and Duster was adjusting something on the wooden box.
“I’m going to go back to the middle of May of 1902,” Duster said, “get us all rooms in the Idanha for August, and horses and supplies and will meet you on August 2nd. That should give us enough time to figure out why this ghost guy of yours kills himself in September.”
“We are really going to do this, go back to 1902?” Sherri asked as Dawn and Bonnie led her across the smooth dirt floor the twenty steps to the wooden table.
“You want to see how your home looked in its glory, don’t you?” Dawn said.
Sherri nodded, stunned at the idea. Her mind just felt clouded over, foggy, as if she was dreaming, or had too many glasses of wine.
“This is the best way to research that then,” Dawn said.
“This is how you do your research?” Sherri asked, looking at Dawn.
“Don’t tell anyone my secret,” Dawn said, smiling.
Dawn gave Sherri her saddlebag and helped her slip it over her shoulder.
Bonnie moved over to Duster and kissed him. “Behave yourself.”
“Don’t I always?” Duster asked, smiling.
Bonnie didn’t answer, just shook her head.
Sherri stood next to the table with Dawn on her left and Bonnie on her right in front of the wooden box. There seemed to be a timing device on the machine and two terminals to attach the cords on the side. The thing wasn’t much bigger than a large breadbox, but didn’t look like there was any way to open it.
On the wall near the table Duster attached both cables to a crystal with some sort of expansion band that looked like it could grow or shrink as much as needed and still keep the cables attached. He was wearing thick leather gloves and being very careful.
“Why is he being so cautious?” Sherri managed to ask.
“The crystals contain a vast amount of energy,” Bonnie said. “We don’t know what would happen if someone touched one with a bare hand, and we don’t want to find out.”
“Oh,” Sherri managed to say and was proud of herself for getting tha
t out.
Duster came back to the machine and attached one of the wires to the machine. He then smiled at all three of them.
Sherri had no idea what was about to happen. She just was glad Dawn was sort of holding her up.
“See you all in a few months,” he said, putting his bare hand on the box.
Then he attached the other wire and vanished.
“What?” Sherri asked.
There hadn’t even been a sound or a cloud of smoke or anything. He was just there and then he wasn’t.
Panic again threatened to send her running.
Dawn’s firm grip on her kept her from moving.
Bonnie quickly turned the dial on the machine slightly without touching anything but the dial edge, then said, “On the count of three, put your hand on the box.”
“Trust us,” Dawn said to Sherri, taking Sherri’s hand and moving it toward the box.
Sherri was beyond any fight at this point. She was not believing her eyes at all that Duster had just vanished.
“One, two, three,” Bonnie said.
They all put their hands on the box at the exact same moment.
And nothing happened.
Nothing.
Now that was a disappointment.
CHAPTER EIGHT
August 5, 1902
Edwards Mansion, Boise, Idaho
CARSON HAD MANAGED to keep out of Duster’s notice for the entire summer. Carson mostly stayed at his mansion, working to get it ready to last for as long as possible.
He was going to leave enough money in an estate account to take care of the home for eighty years, in case he wanted to return at any point in that time. But he knew that he didn’t dare just be out of town. He needed to fake his own death and set up some warning systems to scare the unwary away. Nothing fancy, but it would do the trick, he knew.
In 2017, an architectural historian had bought the mansion and was working to return it to its former glory, something that made his heart sing. He had seen her picture in the paper and she seemed to be enjoying what she was doing with his home. He loved this mansion more than he wanted to admit and was glad to see the place surviving into his own time.
And from what he saw, she was doing a great job matching everything about the mansion, even though in 2017 that had to be costing her a fortune.
Each trip back into the past, he built the mansion again, using the same workers, the same design, the same craftsmen, the very same materials.
He never changed a thing from one timeline to another. He never saw a reason to.
That way he could enjoy twenty years here before moving on to do his real research and the reason for his trip into the past.
In four months of time in 2017, since his first trip back with Bonnie and Duster, he had lived just under eight hundred years in the past and rebuilt the mansion thirty-one times.
This trip he planned on spending time in Europe to fill in a few details on some events he had already researched, and then he planned on riding on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. Chances are he would die. He certainly had no plan on taking anyone’s spot in a lifeboat.
One of the nice things about knowing you could not die in your original timeline, it allowed for many other chances back here in the past. He had died numbers of times already and although he didn’t much care for it, it didn’t scare him much any more.
He always just found himself back in the mine touching the machine two minutes and fifteen seconds after he left.
Once he was killed on one of his many expeditions to research the Balkan Wars that led into World War One. He had been killed in World War One three times, once trying to survive until the Christmas Truce. He had wanted to write a chapter about the truce, but after being a part of the Christmas Truce on another trip back, he now planned on making it an entire book.
He had twice witnessed the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, twice he had been on the Lusitania when it was sunk. He had survived that both times.
He had always been passionate about the time period of 1904 to after World War One in Europe and had done his original thesis on the period far before meeting Bonnie and Duster. He was now working on various books on the subject. He hoped to be one of the world’s leading historical experts on the time period by 2019.
The hardest part was not only going back and witnessing the events, but finding the collaborating evidence to what he had seen so that modern 2017 readers would allow and give credibility to his research.
Finding that evidence is what took most of his time.
After he did his research this trip and returned to 2017 and filled in his notes and made progress on the next book, he would return to Boise’s past again and build the mansion once again.
Thanks to Bonnie and Duster, he could do that as often as he wanted. He considered himself the luckiest man alive.
CHAPTER NINE
August 2, 1902
Inside a mountain above the mining town of Silver City, Idaho
SHERRI STOOD THERE for a moment with her hand on the box while Dawn and Bonnie stepped back.
Dawn sort of guided her back away from the box.
“Without getting into any of the math of it, what just happened works this way,” Bonnie said. “We attach the two cords to a crystal on the wall. That’s the physical representation of another timeline that is so similar to our own timeline as to be almost mathematically the same. Maybe in this new timeline in 1970 someone had a child and in this one the child wasn’t conceived.”
Sherri nodded. “I understand multiple outcomes of a decision or an event.”
“That’s what all this represents,” Bonnie said, waving her hand around at the huge cavern that vanished into the distance into the ground. “Our math proved that all time has a physical representation in matter in what is basically a central hub. This is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of that hub for this area of time and space.”
“So where did Duster go?” Sherri asked. “How did he pull that off?”
“He went into the past of the timeline the machine is hooked up to,” Bonnie said, pointing to the crystal where the wires were attached. “And we are now in the past of that timeline as well.”
“If you detach the wire,” Dawn said, “than all four of us will appear back in our timeline exactly two minutes and fifteen seconds after Duster left. No more and no less.”
“No matter what we do or how long we stay in this timeline,” Bonnie said. “You could stay here and grow old and die and only two minutes and fifteen seconds would pass from your life. And you would be very much alive back in the mine in 2016.”
“Why the odd time?” Sherri asked, not at all sure she was believing any of this still.
“That comes from the nature of space and time and matter,” Bonnie said.
“Beyond me, then,” Sherri said.
Bonnie nodded.
Sherri shook her head, still not really buying any of what they were saying. Granted, they had found the most impressive crystal cavern ever imagined. But all this traveling in time and other timelines she couldn’t get her mind around.
Bonnie turned. “Let’s go see if that husband of mine has gotten himself in trouble or not.”
Bonnie went to the big metal door and opened it.
Sherri remembered they had left it open before.
They went out into the big cavern and the lights came up.
“No Duster,” Bonnie said, a slight worry in her voice.
Dawn just shook her head and looked worried as well.
“You were expecting him here now?” Sherri asked.
“He was supposed to get us horses and reservations at the new Idanha Hotel in Boise,” Dawn said as Bonnie headed toward a rock wall. There she slid back what was clearly a fake panel that covered an instrument of some sort.
“We’re here on time,” Bonnie said, sliding the panel closed. “It’s seven in the morning on August 2nd, 1902.”
“Oh, good, yet another early morning,” Sherri said.
Dawn laughed.
“Let’s see if he’s outside.”
“What does she mean?” Sherri asked, again trying her best to keep the panic down to a snippy comment or two.
“Welcome to 1902,” Dawn said, smiling.
Bonnie was at a rack of dresses taking one old-fashioned dress off a hanger.
“Come on,” Dawn said. “You’ve got to see this, but we have to dress to the time period in case anyone is looking our way.”
“This can’t be real,” Sherri said. “But damned if I can figure out why you guys are playing this joke on me.”
“No joke,” Dawn said.
She handed Sherri what looked like a cotton dress that buttoned up the back. “Don’t worry about buttoning or if it fits. Just slip it over your clothes and put on this hat.”
Dawn handed Sherri a wide-brimmed cotton hat with a yellow ribbon on it, perfect high fashion for 1902. She knew that because she had spent far too many years researching historical homes and styles of various time periods.
Sherri slipped on the dress and then followed Bonnie and Dawn back up the mineshaft toward the entrance.
Inside the entrance, Bonnie looked through some kind of scope and shook her head. “It’s clear. No one out there at all.”
“That’s not good,” Dawn said.
“What does it mean?” Sherri asked as the door slipped open and the huge rock slid aside letting in the warm morning air.
“More than likely Duster got himself injured or killed doing something in the last few months,” Bonnie said, looking almost disgusted at the idea.
Sherri opened her mouth to say something, then shut it as they stepped out onto the top of the mine tailings and the huge rock slid silently into place behind them.
The mine tailing looked a lot newer, not as worn. The old shack that had been about to fall down was standing proud and still had windows in it. And where Duster had parked the big Cadillac SUV in a stand of trees was now nothing more than bare hillside.
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