Always

by Jude Deveraux

  “Lavender,” Darci whispered.

  “Yes, dear,” one of the women said. “Our own dear Lavey.”

  Darci’s eyes widened as she tried to turn around on the couch, but turning was difficult, for she was wearing a long dress with heavy skirts that weighed down on her legs. Lavender took Darci’s hand and held it tenderly. “Darci, dearest, you gave us quite a fright. You and Jack—”

  “Jack?”

  “Yes, Jack,” Lavender said, lowering her thick lashes, her cheeks turning a pretty shade of pink.

  Darci flopped back against the hard cushion of the hard sofa. “I don’t remember what happened.” Dramatically, she put her hand to her forehead and peeked out through her fingers. When she touched her head, she found that her own hair was slicked down over her head and she, too, had ringlets over her ears. She could feel a lump of what was surely a lifetime’s growth of hair coiled on the back of her head.

  Behind Lavender, the two older women were frowning, as though they didn’t believe Darci, but Lavender’s sweet face was all concern.

  “We’d just returned from the rehearsal at the church when Jack told us you’d fainted.”

  “Church,” Darci said slowly. “Rehearsing? For your wedding?”

  “Yes, of course, you silly goose, for my wedding tomorrow when I will become Mrs. John Marshall and you and I will become sisters.”

  “Sisters?” Darci asked, again trying to sit up. “Does that mean that Jack is my brother?”

  The two older women exchanged looks, as though to say that Darci had lost her mind.

  “You need to rest,” Lavender said. “I’m sure that all the work you’ve done for my wedding has overtaxed you.”

  “Not to mention this thing that’s about to cut me in half,” she muttered, pulling at the thick cloth about her waist.

  “I agree,” Lavender said, smoothing Darci’s hair back from her face. “But corsets are a necessary evil. No woman ever looked beautiful without pain.”

  Darci started to reply that that was absurd, but then she remembered dead lifts and squats. Pain indeed! “Could I possibly see Jack?” she asked.

  “Are you well enough?”

  “I think so,” Darci answered, trying to lift her legs under the heavy skirts so she could sit up. She was still a bit dizzy, completely disoriented, and she needed someone to tell her she’d wandered onto a movie set. The alternate—that she was in a past time—was too ridiculous to consider.

  There was a knock at the door and moments later Jack walked into the room. He was dressed in an old-fashioned suit that was nearly as narrow at the waist as Lavender’s dress was. There was a moment of rushing about as the two older women pulled Darci upright and tightened the strings on the corset, then buttoned her dress. During this time Jack talked to Lavender. Peering around the women, Darci saw that Jack was practically drooling over the beautiful woman.

  Darci tried to send him a mind message. Where are we? What has happened? How do we get out of here? Do you have the silver box?

  Jack’s lack of response made her sure he wasn’t hearing her.

  When one of the women pulled the corset strings too tight, Darci sent her a mind message to ease off. The woman didn’t obey. Curious, Darci turned to the women and concentrated. No response from either of them.

  On a table beside the couch was a little beaded bag. All her life, when Darci had touched a personal item belonging to someone, she’d immediately known a great deal about that person. But when she picked up the bag, she felt nothing. She put her hand on the arm of one of the women. Nothing.

  “There now,” one of the women said, “go to him. Have your last day together.”

  “Hardly that,” Lavender said, smiling. She had perfect teeth. “Are you packed for the honeymoon?”

  “I’m getting married, too?” Darci asked, aghast, as she stood up.

  Laughing, Lavender kissed Darci’s cheek. “No, but you’re going on our honeymoon with us. You haven’t changed your mind, have you?”

  Behind her, Jack was mouthing, Please don’t go, as he looked Lavender up and down.

  Darci moved to clutch Jack’s arm firmly. “No, of course I haven’t changed my mind, but now I need to talk to my, uh, brother in private.”

  “Yes, of course,” Lavender said. “But remember, tea is at four and dinner is at seven.”

  “We’ll be here,” Jack said cheerfully as he escorted Darci out the front door.

  “What—?!” Darci said as soon as they were outside. It was hot and she had on at least thirty pounds of clothes. Before them was a village that looked like a Currier and Ives print. “I need to sit down,” she whispered.

  “See the white house with the deep porch? That’s our house, where you and I live with our father—who’s rarely at home, by the way.”

  “Our house?” Darci whispered, feeling faint. To herself, she said, I want to go home. To my daughter and my niece. To my own father.

  But the way Jack was acting made her keep quiet. Holding her arm firmly, he led her onto the porch, which was relatively cool. “Watch this,” he said, then rang a little bell that was sitting on a wicker table. Within seconds, a pretty red-haired maid appeared and Jack told her he wanted a pitcher of lemonade.

  “Yes, sir,” the maid said, then disappeared into the house.

  Darci did the best she could to breathe, which wasn’t easy considering that her rib cage was encased in a tightly laced corset. “You seem to know a great deal more about what’s going on than I do,” she said, “so tell me everything.”

  “It seems, my dear sister, that we have done the impossible, which is to travel back in time.”

  “The box,” Darci said. “That’s what the box contained.” When Jack looked at her in question, she explained. “I was told that there are twelve magic objects and each one has a specific ability. The Touch of God…” She glanced at him. “The ball I used on your friend’s shoulder can heal. Unfortunately, it can’t heal everything. I mean, I can’t change a person’s destiny to die or not die, but it works on some things, like old wounds. Except sometimes, in certain circumstances, with help, it can do other things,” she added, then drew in a breath. “Anyway, it looks like that box your father had hidden away lets people…” She trailed off as two women, wearing tight-waisted, full-skirted dresses walked past, bidding them good morning.

  She was surprised when Jack addressed the women by name. “Do you know them?”

  “My mind seems to be full of two memories. I remember my life in the twenty-first century—except for about four years when I was under the influence of various illegal substances—and I remember this guy’s life, this John Marshall’s life.”

  “So why don’t I remember being…?”

  “Darci, my twin sister?”

  “Twin?” She looked back at the street. She was beginning to sweat under her dress and longed for a shower. A shower and a pair of shorts and some sandals. And to be barbecuing shrimp with her husband and daughter, and to be with her father and sister-in-law and their daughter.

  “Are you okay?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t think I have any powers,” she said softly. When Jack was silent, she looked at him. He was leaning back in the chair, his long legs stretched out across the porch. She wasn’t used to not having the ability to sense what people were feeling. She’d been born with her powers; they were as much a part of her as her skin. “Did you hear me? How do we get back if I have no powers to find out anything?”

  The front door to the house opened and the maid came out with a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses. There was a chunk of ice in the lemonade that had what looked to be a couple of sticks frozen inside it. Obviously, the ice had been taken from a pond that winter and stored in an ice house.

  Darci decided she had too much to worry about to concern herself with dirty ice. She could be treated for typhoid when she got back home.

  Jack said, “Thank you, Millie,” and the maid went back into the house. He settled back into
his chair as though he…as though he were at home.

  “You like it here, don’t you?” she said.

  For a moment he closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he was smiling. “I have no anger inside me, no hatred for a cold father who was displeased by anything I did, no history of drugs and women, and the images of the hideous things I’ve seen are fading with each passing moment. With every minute here, I feel…” He took a drink of his lemonade. “I feel cleaner.”

  “And then there’s Lavender.”

  Jack’s face split into a grin—the first one she’d ever seen on him. Physically, he looked the same as he did when she’d first met him, but here in this foreign place, in this foreign time, there was a big change in him. Here he looked younger…and happier.

  “Yeah, Lavey,” Jack said. “There’s not a movie star prettier than she is, but she’s not spoiled, not jaded by modern-day excess. She’s—”

  “She’s going to kill herself tomorrow,” Darci said. “Or be murdered.”

  Jack waved his hand in dismissal. “I’ll stay with her and stop that. I’m sure we were sent back here to prevent her death.”

  “We weren’t ‘sent’ back, as you call it. It was an accident. You stuck your nose into something you don’t understand and tried to steal a box—”

  “Steal?! It was my father’s box in his house, so it seems to me that you were the thief.”

  “That’s absurd. I was led to that box by the key I found years ago. I was meant to find that box.”

  “Steal the box, you mean. All I did was borrow your key to open a box that legally belongs to my family.”

  She turned to face him. “Borrow! You cut the cord off my neck! And where is it now?”

  “The box or the key?”

  She glared at him. “Right now I’d love to give you the worst headache you’ve ever had in your life!”

  “Ah,” he said, smiling, “but you can’t, can you? You are now just an ordinary person, like the rest of us.”

  With no way to get us back, she thought, but when she glanced at Jack, she could see that he was happier than she’d ever seen him. He wasn’t scowling, wasn’t looking at the world as though he wanted to blow it up.

  “Casting out demons” is what the Bible called it. The demon spirit that had clung to Jack all his life was now in the curvy body of the beauteous Lavender and Jack was no longer being tortured by her.

  As for Lavender, she’d at last got what she wanted: the man she loved.

  Darci watched Jack greet two more passersby. She wanted to talk to him, tell him that they had to leave there. They could not possibly stay. She’d never spent much time looking into the past—when she had the power to do such things, that is—but she knew that their presence in a time where they didn’t belong could harm things in the future. And, besides, waiting for her in the twenty-first century was her family, the people she loved.

  But it seemed that the people Jack loved were in the nineteenth century.

  Darci drank more of the lemonade—real lemons, real sugar—and looked out at the street. You’re on your own, she told herself. She knew it was up to her alone to figure out why they were there—other than by an accident caused by Jack’s thievery, that is—and to figure out how to get them out of there.

  Besides her concern for how they’d get out this time, there were some things that puzzled her. The Lavender they’d met in spirit form had been full of anger. She’d turned Chrissy’s very ordinary aura into flames of red and orange. Lavender as a beautiful young woman seemed sweet and kind, but Lavender in spirit form was an inferno of anger. The two didn’t match.

  How Darci wished she could see auras now! Many people who seemed one way showed their true nature by the colors around them. Children bullied into submission often showed their anger in their auras.

  Was Lavender that way? One person on the outside and another inside? Or would the events in the next twenty-four hours change her? Was she murdered or did something really horrible lead her to throw herself off a building?

  Darci glanced again at Jack and thought that she was going to get no help from him. His plan was simple. He was going to stick by Lavender all day tomorrow so nothing could happen to her, then he was going to marry her and live happily ever after.

  A horrible thought came to Darci. What if it was John Marshall who murdered Lavender? What if, on the day of the wedding, he found out something awful about her or she told him something bad, like she didn’t want to marry him? What if he hadn’t been in church waiting for her but had somehow managed to push her off the roof? That would explain Lavender’s anger and why she’d attached herself to him, why she’d made sure his life in the twenty-first century was miserable, and why she’d put him in a car crash that had wrecked his face. It was clear to Darci that Lavender’s spirit had stood over the surgeons as they’d rebuilt Jack’s face to look just as it had when she knew him in the past.

  To cover her thoughts, Darci put the glass of lemonade to her lips. All she knew for sure was that tomorrow something truly horrible was supposed to happen. Whether she or Jack could prevent it was another matter. And should they prevent it? If Jack and Lavender married they could possibly produce a child who destroyed the world. Anything was possible.

  She put her hand to her forehead.

  “Headache?”

  “No, I…” She couldn’t tell him of her thoughts. All she needed to concentrate on was putting the world back the way it was. And the first thing she needed to do was to gather all the information she could.

  “What happened before I woke up?” she asked, and when Jack smiled, she leaned back in her chair and listened to his story.

  Chapter Eight

  AFTER JACK OPENED THE BOX, HE AND DARCI AND the cold, angry spirit of Lavender had fallen through emptiness for several minutes. When Jack awoke, he saw that he and Darci were lying on the ground in a shady woods and they were both dressed in Victorian clothes. Darci seemed to be sleeping, while Jack was groggy. He said he tried to wake her, but couldn’t, so he’d walked to the road.

  “It was odd,” Jack said. “I could remember my modern life clearly, remember my childhood with Greg and his family, and I could remember my father. But what was strange was that the anger I’d always felt toward my father was gone. I’d hated the man all my life. I couldn’t forgive him for spending his life locked away with lawyers and always dealing with money. But, suddenly, I saw everything differently. My father’s absence had given me the freedom to play with the chauffeur’s son and to practically live with his wonderful family. If my father hadn’t stayed away from me…” Jack grinned. “Let’s just say that my dad wasn’t a fun person.”

  He took a breath. “But it was gone. In a flash, all the anger and hatred and the sense of injustice were gone.”

  He told how he staggered toward a pathway and with every step he took other thoughts that felt as though they were memories came to him. He knew when he came to a fork that one way led to the river where he and his buddies used to go skinny-dipping. The other way led to the main road.

  He saw a rock that made him cringe. He knew that when he was nine he’d fallen off his pony and landed on that rock. He’d chipped his left front incisor and cut his face that left a scar over his eyebrow.

  Jack had had to stand still for a moment to try to sort out his thoughts. In his “real” life, his twenty-first-century life, he’d fallen on his skateboard when he was eleven and made a scar over his left eyebrow, and his tooth had been broken in the car wreck. The doctors who put him back together years later had repaired both. But when Jack put his hand to his face, he found that the scar was there and the tooth was chipped.

  With his head whirling with two sets of memories—two childhoods, two schools, two fathers, two towns, two of everything—he made his way to the road.

  An old, toothless man on an old wagon gave him a ride, and when he called Jack Mr. Marshall, the memories of a boy bowling a hoop through the streets began to override the memori
es of a man who’d been an FBI agent.

  Since names were still fuzzy in his mind, Jack told the man to drop him off “you know where.” The man had let Jack off in front of Lavender’s house.

  Here Jack paused for a moment as the memory came back to him. “Lavender was on the porch, laughing with her girlfriends, and she looked at me with complete love. There was nothing guarded in her eyes, no sense of her saying, ‘What are you going to do for me?’ As I looked at her, I remembered my past life with her. I remembered picnics and going to church together, and stolen kisses behind the barn when we were thirteen. I remembered that I’d been in love with her all my life and I’ve never stopped.”

  He looked at Darci. “Did you know that in my twenty-first-century life I’ve never loved anyone romantically? Not really loved, not the way I love Lavender. Can you imagine that?”

  “No,” Darci said quietly, “I can’t.”

  “The truth is that I had no idea what it felt like to love, to want what’s best for someone else. You’ll laugh at me, but I’d…I’d jump in front of a moving train if it meant saving her.”

  “I understand that,” Darci said. “I’m just trying to find the train.”

  Jack smiled. “When I looked at Lavender I knew what had happened to me, to us. I knew that that box had sent us back in time. Maybe I should want to find the way back to the modern world, but it doesn’t interest me. All I want to do is be with Lavender for the rest of my life.”

  He looked at Darci with a one-sided grin. “I knew that you were my sister, but at the same time the modern me knew that I’d never had a sister. Remember that we read that John Marshall was an only child? Like Lavender. When she and I were in the first grade that’s what drew us together. Everyone else seemed to have half a dozen siblings, but Lavey and I knew what it was like to spend Saturdays by ourselves.”

  “I guess history made room for me when I came along with you.”

  “It looks that way. As far as I can tell, I’m the only person who remembers that I…I mean, John Marshall…didn’t have a sister yesterday.”