For what seemed like an eternity they held that kiss until finally Duster cleared his throat.
She pushed back. She looked into his green eyes and he nodded.
With that she turned, trying not to allow herself to kiss him again.
Together they all five put their hands on the small time machine. Then Duster took off one wire and around them the room really didn’t change at all.
They were back in 2016.
Carson was gone.
And Sherri felt empty once again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
June 9th, 2017
Old mine above the ghost town of Silver City, Idaho
CARSON LOOKED AROUND at the crystal cavern after Sherri and Bonnie and Duster and Dawn vanished. His wires were still hooked up to the machine and the crystal.
Duster had been right about that happening.
He put on a glove, touched the box with his bare hand, and unhooked one wire with his gloved hand. As normal, nothing seemed to change.
He carefully unhooked the other wire from the box, then the two wires from the crystal.
Then carrying his heavy saddlebags filled with money and gold, he headed for the regular cavern. He quickly stored the money, then changed back into his 2017 clothes. It had been over twenty years since he had been here, yet only slightly more than two minutes had passed. That always felt very strange and this time was no different.
He headed down the mine, setting the alarms as he went as Duster had trained him to do. He almost missed one because all he could think about was Sherri and how wonderful that last kiss had felt just a few minutes before, yet over a hundred years in the past.
But now he was going to face his biggest fear. Would she still want him after eight months?
He made sure there was no one outside the mine, then quickly opened the mine door and stepped out and let the big rock go closed behind him. The afternoon was warming up, but wasn’t extremely hot yet. The air felt dry and the ghost town of Silver City far below looked like it had a few early-season visitors.
His blue Jeep SUV sat across the narrow trail in the trees near where Duster and Bonnie always parked.
Climbing in behind the wheel felt very, very strange. That last trip where he had met Sherri had been his fourth trip back today. He had only spent an hour in the mine since arriving here today, but it had been a couple hundred years of living and memory since he had last driven a car.
Duster had always said it was like riding a bike, a person didn’t forget. But they could sure be rusty at the skill and that’s exactly how he felt.
He sat for a moment, adjusting the air-conditioning and letting the car cool down some before carefully backing it up and then heading across the hillside on what seemed like nothing more than a goat track and then down to the valley floor and the main one-lane tourist road into Silver City.
By the time he got started back up the narrow road on the other side of the valley that crested over the summit on War Eagle Mountain, he was feeling his driving skills coming back.
And he was relaxing a little. He didn’t much like this narrow, twisting road along the tops of large cliff-like drops into the valleys below, but he had driven it a couple dozen times, so it didn’t flat scare him anymore. Even after hundreds of years in the past, he remembered it well.
The road was no more than one car width wide and covered in hard dirt and loose gravel. And the road was dusty and rutted from the winter run-off. In a few places there was still winter snow drifted in under the shadows of the trees.
As he crested over the top of the summit, he could see the Treasure Valley and Boise out before him, wonderful and green compared to the brown of the mountains around him.
Sherri was there, in that valley, waiting for him. He just hoped she still wanted him.
For him, it had only been a few minutes since she left. He couldn’t imagine how she was feeling right now after eight plus months of waiting.
The road made a sharp turn to the left. He knew that in another few hundred yards, the really bad narrow road would turn into a two-lane newer road made for large mining trucks. That road had been constructed a few years before to haul out loads of ore from a mine on the Treasure Valley side of War Eagle Mountain.
As Carson came around the sharp left-hand turn, his mind thinking about Sherri and her wonderful smile, a large deer stood in the road. Beside her were two small fawns.
It took him a moment to realize what he was seeing.
He wasn’t going that fast but his reactions were slow as he slammed on the brakes, sliding on the dry dirt and gravel toward the doe and her fawns.
They didn’t seem to be moving, so he steered toward the outside edge of the road to miss them.
The deer hesitated, clearly surprised, then finally jumped to one side and up the hill. But as they did, his front tire caught in the loose gravel along the edge of the road and yanked his Jeep hard right and out over the edge of a very, very long drop into trees and forest.
It happened so fast, there was not a thing he could do.
Nothing.
He held on as the car tipped and went over, picking up spinning speed as it tumbled down the hill.
His world spun over and over as the car just rolled and bounced down the steep slope.
He had no idea how many times it tumbled before it hit something very hard.
And then there was nothing.
The next thing he realized, he came to, still strapped into his seat. The car was lying on the passenger side and smashed up so much it didn’t even much seem like a car.
The engine was ticking from heat, but off. And he could smell gas.
Glass had shattered everywhere and through the smashed and broken and much narrower windshield he could see down the valley. Clearly he hadn’t rolled all the way to the bottom, for as much as that was going to help him now.
Blood was running off his forehead. He could tell he had broken arms and he could no longer feel his legs at all.
He tried to take a deep breath and screamed in agony and everything again went quickly black.
He came back awake at some point. He had no idea how much longer it was.
It couldn’t have been long, he knew that.
In all his lifetimes in the past, he had died numbers of times. A few had been sudden, but most had felt like this.
Exactly like this.
He had no doubt he was dying.
He carefully tried to look down at his body, but all he could see was red-stained clothes and blood dripping far, far too quickly from him and into the passenger seat that was below him.
He was bleeding out and quickly.
He still couldn’t feel his legs and he could see one bone in one arm sticking out like a third arm growing from his skin.
He had died in the past, so he knew this feeling.
But when he died this time, there was no reset button. He wouldn’t end up back in the crystal cavern.
This was in 2017.
This was for real.
Damn it all to hell. What had he done?
He could feel himself fading.
“I am so sorry, Sherri,” he said with what little bit of air he had left.
And as the darkness overwhelmed him, all he could see was her smile.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
June 9th, 2017
Warm Springs Avenue, Boise, Idaho
THE OLD GRANDFATHER clock in the entrance ticked to seven p.m. and chimed, the sound echoing through the front rooms of the mansion.
Sherri once again went to the window to look out at Warm Springs Avenue and the traffic going past in both directions.
She had done that every five minutes for the last two hours, she was so excited.
And so worried.
Something didn’t feel right, but she had no idea what it might be. More than likely her fear of seeing Carson again.
And her excitement.
It had been a very long, yet very short, eight months since s
he had kissed Carson goodbye in that mine and returned to Boise. It hadn’t taken long to fly in some great contractors after turning off the ghost. She set to work on the mansion with an intensity she had never felt before.
The progress had been slow over the winter, because she knew every detail she wanted and sometimes things just took time. She was following Carson’s original plans and making the place into something he would be proud of.
She had so loved the feeling of staying with him in the mansion in the past. Now she hoped they could both live here into the future.
And maybe build the mansion a few more times in the past as well.
She looked out the window one more time. She knew he drove a blue Jeep and there was no sign of that.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.
She knew that for him, only a moment would have passed since their kiss. She needed to remember that. She was the one who was going to have changed, not him.
She couldn’t let her fear get in the way.
Eight months of work and dreaming of him had to have changed her some.
She turned from the door and looked around at the place. Three times she had been written up in the newspapers and magazines for the ground-breaking work she was doing on an old historical mansion. She loved that, because she knew that Carson had seen one of the articles and been happy about it.
She had had a firm deadline and she wanted to meet it. She wanted Carson to walk back into his own home, fully restored and modern.
And she had hit that deadline.
The entire time she worked on the mansion, she had known where he lived just north of Boise in a modern apartment in the hills. And she had known he was working on his final doctorate and was teaching at the university. But she had managed to not get close to him, although she had seen him once from a distance.
She even knew when Bonnie and Duster and Dawn and Madison had offered him his first trip back in time and gone with him and how for months after that Carson had spent decades in the past, on every trip first building the mansion that she was remodeling.
In total, he had told her that he had lived almost eight hundred years. That made her feel very insecure, but she tried not to think about that. Bonnie and Duster had lived far longer and they were still her best friends.
Duster had warned her that she didn’t dare approach Carson now, because they had to first meet in the past for this present to work out.
“Even though he has only aged a number of months here, he’s lived hundreds of years in the past,” Duster had told her. “That’s the man you fell for, not some college professor.”
So she had agreed to stay away from him. Instead she focused all her attention on the mansion remodel.
And on hitting the deadline.
Now, just last week, all the work had finally finished, all the furniture was in place, every detail was done and she had loved it, loved living here for the last month.
It had felt perfect.
And Carson had now returned to this time as the person she had met.
For the first time, they were going to be together in a dual time, in both their real times.
She was so nervous, she felt almost sick.
Like prom night or something.
And the nagging feeling that something was wrong just didn’t leave her.
Somehow, she managed to stumble through the next number of hours, telling herself over and over it was going to take Carson some time to get off the mountain and then drive to Boise. He might have even stopped and changed at his apartment on the way here.
Finally, at nine, she decided that she needed to make a salad and cook herself a light dinner. The dinner she had planned for her and Carson could wait.
By ten in the evening, she was sitting on her front porch, the very first place she had talked to Carson over a hundred years earlier.
The air was warm, but cooling since the sun had set. The traffic on Warm Springs Avenue was light, muffled by the large trees sheltering her home.
With almost every car she expected Carson to pull into the driveway.
By eleven she knew the feeling that something was wrong had truth to it.
At midnight she called Bonnie and Duster.
When Bonnie picked up the phone, all Sherri said into the phone before breaking down into tears was, “He’s not here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
June 10th, 2017
Above the ghost town of Silver City, Idaho
BONNIE AND DUSTER picked Sherri up two hours before dawn and headed for the airport through the almost empty streets of Boise.
Dawn and Madison had checked Carson’s apartment to see if there was any sign he had been there, but he hadn’t.
Sherri knew he wouldn’t be. She knew that the only reason that he hadn’t come to the mansion last night was that something horrible had gone wrong somewhere.
It was clear that Bonnie and Duster thought the same thing.
She had no idea if it was in the time travel or on the road or what. She had called all the hospitals between Boise and Silver City and no one had been admitted matching Carson’s description.
And Duster had talked with the different county Sherriff’s departments between Silver City and Boise and there had been no accidents reported with Carson involved.
Then Duster had had a friend with the State Police track Carson’s cellphone. It was either turned off or destroyed.
Carson had just vanished.
At the airport, Duster had two helicopters ready and waiting. Neither were running, but both had two-person crews in their seats.
The plan was that Dawn and Madison were to search up the road while Bonnie and Duster and Sherri in the other helicopter would go to the mine to see if his Jeep was still there. If the Jeep was still there, they would all be let out down in the valley and hike up to the mine to see what was going on.
That was as far as the plan went.
Sherri had managed to force down a few pieces of toast while waiting for Bonnie and Duster to arrive, and she had a sports drink in her hand, but hadn’t opened it. But that was it. Her stomach wouldn’t allow anything more.
She had changed into jeans and a light t-shirt with a sports bra under it and running shoes. The morning air at the airport was still cool, too cool for only a t-shirt, but she was so numb at this point, she didn’t care.
“We’ll have enough light to start looking in about a half hour,” Bonnie said to her, putting her arm through Sherri’s. “We’ll find out what happened.”
Sherri nodded. After the cry last night, she hadn’t let herself talk much or even think about the worst case in this. If she did, she would burst into tears and be of no use to anyone.
Dawn and Madison nodded to them and headed for the far helicopter. The pilots and co-pilots were doing pre-flight checks and seemed almost ready.
Sherri let Bonnie help her up into the other helicopter and put on a helmet with headphones so she could hear all the transmissions.
Beside her Bonnie did the same and then Duster climbed in and pulled the door closed, nodding to both of them and then telling the pilot they were ready.
The rumbling of the big helicopter was amazing, filling all her senses. And if this flight had been for any other reason, Sherri knew she would have been excited about this first helicopter flight. But for now, this was just a means to an end.
If she had Carson riding beside her on the way back, then she would let herself be excited.
Just under twenty minutes later, they were over the old ghost town of Silver City. The sunrise was just starting to pretend to color the morning sky in orange, and the valley below was dark like a coal pit.
“About halfway up the other side of the valley,” Duster said to the pilots. “That’s where he would have parked.”
Sherri could see enough when they reached a few hundred feet above the side of the mountain that there was no Jeep parked there. She could barely see the old mine tailings a
nd the shack.
“Circle around a few times in this area,” Duster said, “in case he parked under a tree.”
They circled for ten minutes, and with each passing minute the hillside became clearer as the sun started to color the sky even more.
There was no Jeep.
Carson had come back and left the mine.
Duster reported that to the other helicopter.
Duster then directed their pilots along the hillside where Carson would have driven and then along the road into the valley.
“We’re starting slowly up the road from the highway,” Madison said.
“We’ll come at the top from this direction,” Duster said.
The helicopter moved slowly, staying a safe distance above the trees, yet not too high as to make a search impossible.
They hovered over the bottom of the valley and then started up the road toward the summit of War Eagle Mountain.
Nothing.
No sign of his car. Nothing.
How could that be? Is it possible that they had done something in the past and Carson didn’t actually exist anymore in this timeline? She didn’t know enough about the math of it all to even make a guess at that. But Bonnie and Duster seemed to think he was here.
As they crested up out of the valley and into the light, Sherri could see the other helicopter working its way slowly up the valley below.
“There,” Duster said, pointing down the steep hill to one side of the road.
Sherri’s stomach twisted up into even more of a knot, if that was possible.
“Can you put us down close to here?” Duster asked the pilot.
“Big turnaround on the new road about a quarter mile down,” the pilot said.
“Do it,” Duster said. “Then get mountain search and rescue up here as fast as you can.”
“Will do,” the pilot said.
Sherri had no idea what Duster had seen, but he was convinced it was Carson’s car. She wasn’t sure if she should be excited or terrified.
Bonnie was sitting between them, just looking straight ahead, no expression on her face at all.
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