by D. L. Koontz
“You’ve seen a moving picture show?” she asked with a lopsided grin.
He nodded.
“Imagine that with sound. In your home, twenty-four seven.”
As fascinated as he was with the concept, it was the “twenty-four seven” verbiage he cataloged in his memory.
“So, everybody is exactly the same in the future?”
Libby rolled her eyes. “That’s what society is pushing toward.”
“That’s not what God intended. He created us all differently. Different goals, talents, ambitions, purposes, outcomes.”
She planted a crooked smile on her face. “Things change.” She gazed at the sky again.
He wished he could read her mind.
“This place seems familiar.” Her voice was laced in perplexity. “Like I’ve been here before.”
“I felt that too. Something drew me here.” He looked around. “I have flashbacks, visions when I’m here. Moments of peace...other times, odd discomfort. I’ve been trying to figure it out.”
The truth, and what he wouldn’t tell her, is that the good memories involved a female...he was certain. When the conflicting visions surfaced, he forced himself not to linger, or to think about the pull he felt toward her, the woman in his visions. Decidedly he did not try to remember whether or not the woman reciprocated the feeling or became a part of his life or, indeed, what happened to her. Because, always, if he stayed too long, the vision turned to one of phantom screams. His chest tightened now as he savored the peaceful memory of the woman in his visions—her warm grin, the deep dimple in her cheeks when she smiled at him. And yet, above the grin and the dimples, the face was a blur.
“Mr. Harrow?”
He shook his head to dislodge his thoughts, and discovered she was looking at him expectantly. “It’s Brogan. Sorry, what did you ask?”
“Why are you building here if it makes you uncomfortable?”
Because the good visions are so wonderful, they far outweigh the bad. “I’m building beside it. Not right here. Besides, during the day the view of the mountains is worth every effort.” He needed to change the conversation. “May I ask why you wouldn’t see me when I came to the hotel?”
She swallowed and looked away. “You unnerved me. I guess it was that sense of recognition I experienced when we met in town. You seemed frightening, yet familiar. Not exactly a memory though.” She massaged her forehead. “When you said your name, I heard ‘Broken Arrow’ and I saw myself—a sort of ghosted version of myself—with you.”
His heart gave a dangerous, unexpected flutter. “That was my name. My Mohawk name. When I told the former sheriff, he heard me incorrectly. Thought I said Brogan Harrow. When he retired two years ago and I became sheriff, he arranged identification papers for me before I could correct him.”
“Why would you give him your Indian name?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want to lie.”
The edges of her lips rose. “Of course. So, Brogan Harrow. Broken Arrow. You don’t look Indian. I thought you said you were born Nathan McKenzie.”
“The woman who helped me, she said I once was called that, but I don’t remember. So, I never use it.”
She laid a hand at her throat. “In the street, you whispered ohon...ohote—”
“Ohonte, oròn:ya.” He swallowed against his embarrassment. “I’m not even sure what it means. For some reason, I felt it was important to say. Does it sound familiar?” Why was hope surging through him?
She repeated the words as she climbed to her feet and turned away from him. He watched her move, watched her shake her head as though she were pondering the words and decided they made no sense. She dropped her shoulders and turned back to him.
“I don’t know what it means.” She threw her palms up, a gesture of giving up. “Shakespeare wrote that the past is prologue. Maybe I’ll figure it out eventually.”
Hearing the quote, his body experienced an instinctual reaction, robbing him of equanimity. Something stirred, growing in the graveyard of his past. That quote, in her voice—the woman in his visions. Familiar. Too familiar. Achingly and poignantly familiar. Memories surged. He had stood with her once, at this spot. He was younger. So was she.
Another man was there as well. She called him “Pa.” He told her to go inside so they could discuss the tracts of land. She had hesitated, instead stood there smiling at him in that way girls do when they’re experiencing their first infatuation. Another memory nudged in. Something faintly disturbing. Unease prickled around the edges of the memory and burrowed in quickly. The same man lying across a wooden barrel. Scalped! Brogan smelled burned bodies, felt the residual heat of the embers. Panic for her. But why? The overwhelming feeling came that he would have hunted her to the ends of the earth if he had known. But she was here...
But, what about Gretchen, his wife? Gretchen, the descendant of the woman he’d abandoned to go in search of Elisa, who became Morning Meadow. And now, Libby. He remembered now! That girl-turned-woman had lived right here, at this home site. The Macay home. Libby was her—Elisa and Morning Meadow. The woman in his visions. He saw her face clearly now.
Then, his mind emptied and he felt like he was falling off a cliff. Trying to hold the memories, to process them, brought an ache to his head, his heart. He searched his mind, grasping for an explanation. Nothing came.
“Brogan? Are you well?”
“I...” He looked intently into Libby’s distinct eyes, searching. And there she was. Morning Meadow! Ohonte, oròn:ya. Green with blue. Together.
But Libby didn’t remember Morning Meadow. He rubbed a hand over his chest, trying to calm the knot developing there. “I need to leave.” He needed to extricate himself quickly. He stood, looking around, confused. “I must get back to town. To the fire.” To anywhere but here. “I’ll drop you at the hotel. Best if you get your car tomorrow in the light of day.”
Her brows pulled together, her gaze intensified. “Of course.” She grabbed his jacket and handed it to him, then picked up her shoes. “I can put these on while you drive.”
He extinguished the torches, and they returned to the car in silence. In his peripheral vision, Brogan could see her studying him, concern written on her face.
After they’d driven a few minutes, she broke the silence. “What now? Regarding Hardin, I mean.”
Good. She was asking questions. He appreciated that. He took a deep breath, tried to concentrate. “I listen. Try to find out if anyone else saw him at the fire. I’m sure my deputies did not. He had no family around here. If no one else saw anything, I announce he must have left town. Case closed. Meanwhile, we pray he finds a better life in another time.”
The rest of the trip unfolded in silence. When they neared the Springs, she pointed out her room. He pulled the motorcar to a stop at the bottom of the small slope that ascended to her door. He turned off the engine, and in the briefest moment of awkward silence that followed, he listened to the faintest of ticks as the motorcar cooled down, all the while trying to decide what to do and say.
She ended the awkward moment. “I’ll be fine from here,” she said, putting her hand on the door handle.
“I’ll walk you.” His tone was firm, his movements brisk. He climbed out, walked to her side of the motorcar and offered his hand to assist.
She took it and climbed from the car to stand beside him, but neither of them moved, as if the touch, though feather-light, had paralyzed them. He breathed her in. Did she feel it too? His knees weakened. He felt like he was swaying. The moment elongated, scintillated. And then it was over. She exhaled and stepped back, putting an arm’s length between them. It took all of his restraint not to reach for her again. Abashed, he looked away and headed toward her door.
Somehow, he deposited her at her room, returned to the car, and headed back to town. As he drove, the memories came, one by one, piling on top one another, like a snowball at the top of a hill rolling down with a thunderous speed, picking up more and more flakes as it travels.
Libby once had been Elisa Macay. Her family was murdered. At that site! She was taken by the Lenape and traded to the Mohawks. He’d gone after her. Found her. Fought for her.
Married her!
Watched her die.
Hadn’t he?
Ista! She was there when Morning Meadow died...and when he had found her five years before that. Ista had lived alone, just outside the Indian camp because of her newfound faith. She had taken Elisa in, renamed her, loved her like a daughter. Later, Ista saved her life, by placing her in the water...at least four years before he took the water. This is what Ista had meant, later, when she’d left him in 1921! She had said, “Wait for her.” He hadn’t listened. Hadn’t understood.
The memories were coming so fast and so complete, he thought he might be violently ill. He pulled the motorcar to the side of the dark road, kicked open the weighty door, and wretched. He sat back into the motorcar and held a hand to his aching head because it wasn’t just memories pouring into him. With those visions and flashbacks and recollections, came recall and comprehension, and all the searing emotions that accompanied the realities back then. All the feelings of anguish he’d felt at her family’s deaths, the intense love he’d developed for Morning Meadow among the Mohawks, the joy at their marriage, the despair when she’d been shot.
He had thought she died in 1765, but here she was.
Alive!
Gaelic belief says love and friendship is not measured by space or time, but rather by the force and capability of the soul. It was true, he still loved her. He needed her back in his life.
But, their five years together had ended thirteen years ago. They had changed. Experienced different things. Grown in different ways.
Most concerning, they both belonged to someone else now.
Chapter Twenty-Six
1926
A week had passed since Libby last saw Sheriff Brogan Harrow, yet their conversation, and the flashbacks it generated, was stuck on a repeat loop in her head. She had lost count of the number of times she had turned the facts and her questions inside out. Studied them from every angle. Weighed likelihoods and impossibilities, chances and odds.
And, the visions! They exhausted by day and prevented sleep at night, propelling Libby to pace her room, the hallway, the grounds, as if movement could drive her closer to understanding these teasing, taunting individual pictures of moments that refused to be caught.
The visions played in her mind like the reel of an old-fashioned silent flick, but were made up of unlinked stills without context. Snapshots without connection. No before and after explanations for clarity or continuity.
They inhabited her room like an unwanted roommate who shared and used her air. They peaked in the windows. Gathered in the depth of the drapes. Spread out in waiting on her bed, sofa and chairs.
Emotions surfaced as well. Intense feelings unlinked to the fleeting images. Feelings that meant nothing to her. She couldn’t cutline, code, or catalog them. An agitation built inside her from an offense she couldn’t identify. An abuse she couldn’t describe. An injury that left her breathless. A rage that confounded. A love that ameliorated.
“Idiot!” Libby pounded her head with the back of her right palm as she paced back and forth the length of her room. Why can’t she remember?
Brogan Harrow had once been Nathan McKenzie, then Broken Arrow. Why did that name leave her breathless? Bereft? His descriptions of living life so close to the land had sounded so raw, basic–why did that call to her? She was a woman who cringed at a life without plastic! And yet, the site he’d taken her to had intrigued her. She’d fought all week against finding her way back there.
Needing a bit of that raw element now, she barreled to her exterior door, yanked it open, and stood there breathing in the crisp autumn air. The mid-morning sun blanketed the area in a shower of golden warmth. October had ushered in cooler days, but temperatures remained unseasonably warm for that time of year.
She gulped in the air, determined to clear her head by replacing thoughts of Brogan Harrow with anything else. She should be mourning Hardin’s departure, not thinking about the sheriff.
Why then, was she trying to activate her memory by chugging the mineral water every chance she got? She’d consumed a gallon a day since the night with Brogan.
Ghostly spectrals surfaced again. Jolts of recognition. Unfamiliar faces. Yet, somehow not. The memories gamboled frustratingly just out of reach. A man, bare-chested, in a forest, raising a rifle. An old woman, her face covered by the angle of a hat, kneeling by the water. Brogan, holding her hand as they stood by a lake, the moon their only companion. Indians, painted and pierced, with stern faces, their tomahawks raised.
The only vision that came with a modicum of understanding was that this was the man who had haunted her dreams back in 2016. It was him. She remembered now. Before she’d even taken the water, with Andrew at her side, she’d seen this Sheriff Brogan Harrow, vivid and alive in her dreams.
He’d said, “Come back to me.” Here, without intending to, it seems she had done just that. And, he’d come forward. But who was he and what did it mean? Why wouldn’t these random images piece the story together in a coherent way?
She turned from the open door and returned to pacing, determined steps about six yards in one direction then back again across the jeweled carpet.
He had said a woman helped him when he came from the water. Who was that woman, and why did she care?
Who had followed her, watching as she placed Hardin in the water?
Her mind continued wrestling, returning full circle to thoughts of Brogan. She’d acted stupid. Muddled! When he’d brushed his hair out of his eyes...oh my. His hand was rough and slightly calloused. A true man’s hand. Strong and solid.
What was she thinking? Prior to last week she’d been afraid of him.
She was losing her senses.
It was no use. All she saw when she closed her eyes was Sheriff Brogan Harrow. The spill of cocoa-colored hair across his forehead, the twisted grin that drew the eye away from the scar and dropped it on the dimple to the left of his lips, the way his gaze burrowed into her when he was about to be serious. He’d been bigger than he had appeared in Bedford when she’d first met him, and though he was lean, there was a compact strength to every inch of his six feet. His bearing was smooth, quiet, self-contained, powerful.
How could she be drawn to him? He wasn’t sophisticated like the men of the future.
Yet, he was one of the most discerning and competent people she’d ever met—not formally educated like Andrew or her colleagues at the bureau, but insightful and sagacious with a mind that studied and adapted to his circumstances and fit pieces of knowledge together to tackle what life tossed at him, and then mastered it.
Would the men of the future have survived and adapted as he had? Doubtful. Clearly, this man Brogan was made of sterner stuff.
At his brief touch she’d felt safe and removed from harsh reality, yet terribly vulnerable, and that had launched a new fear. An anxiety for her heart. She took a deep breath, remembering his scent, all male, mixed with a faint underscore of soap and musk. She’d been close enough to feel the heat of his body. See the pulse jumping beneath his jaw. Notice the smooth skin of his neck and end-of-the day beard stubble. It had taken all of her restraint not to lean into him. To bury her nose in that hollow beneath his chin that was all chiseled bones and angles, and to relax in his strength. It would feel so natural.
But, what he must have thought! After he left that night, she had been mortified when she walked into her room and saw her reflection in the mirror that night. Her wrinkled, smoke-stained clothing had looked charred, black. Her hair had been disheveled, and her face smudged with soot.
Despite that, he had looked at her as though she was a memory he wanted back...until she quoted Shakespeare. Then, he had unexpectedly stopped. He could barely look at her. Like he had a thought he couldn’t share. One that consumed him. Scared him. What had it been? She need
ed to know.
Why did she care? She intoned a sound of frustration and fisted her hands. The shoes she’d worn that night were still on a towel on top her bureau. She grabbed one, whirled around toward the opposite side of the room, and threw it, cursing as she did.
As it soared through the air, Libby watched Maude appear at the open door, and duck. Her friend watched the shoe land on the door stoop, then clapped. “Good show. Whatever it is, get it out of your system.”
Libby rolled her head back with a groan. “Sorry.”
“All’s hunky-dory. It missed me.” Maude retrieved the shoe, walked into the room, and plopped down on a chair, propping her feet on a small table. “So what have I missed? My guess is a man is involved.”
“Why would you say that?”
“What else would cause such passion? Besides, you’ve been preoccupied all week. So who is it? Jarvis getting to you again?”
Libby hadn’t seen much of Maude in the past week, and when they had gotten together their outings involved an activity like horseback riding or tennis which precluded much conversation. Maude knew nothing of her involvement at the fire. But, she did know Hardin was gone. Three days earlier, at breakfast, with others around them, of course, they had read about the fire in the local newspaper and about how it had been attributed to faulty wiring.
Libby shrugged. “I miss Andrew. It seems like forever since he...died.”
“And?”
“What do you mean ‘and’? Isn’t that enough?”
Maude tilted her head. “Typically, yes. But you’ve never talked much about him. I would think his memory would evoke tears, not fits of anger. So, who else?”
Libby exhaled. Just say his name. Maude didn’t have to know the details. “Sheriff Brogan Harrow. He’s so...so...” Libby flailed her hands.
“Ahh.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Libby crossed her arms.
“It means ahh, that’s all.”
Libby groaned again. “Sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.” She rubbed her forehead.