Page 17 of Stolen Time

Don’t leave me here?

That would have been way too dramatic, and the last thing I wanted to do was call any more attention to myself than I already had.

So I lifted my hand to wave, and he waved as well, murmuring again that he’d see me soon.

“Well,” Ruth McAllister said briskly. “Let me show you where you’ll be staying.”

I had to admit it was a very pretty room, located on the second floor of the house and in the turret, giving me a curved wall on one side of the space, set with big windows that allowed an absolutely amazing view of Jerome and the Verde Valley beyond. Seth’s house, being situated much farther down the hill, hadn’t offered nearly as good a vantage point, and after Ruth showed me to the space — and mercifully added that she’d allow me some alone time to unpack — she said she’d be downstairs in the kitchen and that she expected me to join her there.

To help with dinner? That seemed an odd thing to do to a guest, but then, I had to admit I wasn’t exactly sure what my status was here. Houseguest? Boarder?

Putting that thought aside, I hung my two remaining outfits in the large walnut wardrobe placed on the wall opposite the windows, then headed over there to get a good look at my surroundings. This entire street, like the one in my own time, was lined with houses that clearly had been built at least twenty or thirty years earlier, mostly Victorian in style, with carefully tended front yards. The street was gravel instead of asphalt, and the colors on many of the homes had shifted over the years, but otherwise, the setting was still recognizable enough.

As was Jerome; I knew the town had been granted historic landmark status way back in the 1960s, and therefore all the buildings had been preserved rather than torn down to make way for newer, more modern structures. Now they definitely looked much fresher, but the outline of the town was basically the same as the one I’d come to know and love.

A faint haze of smoke lay over the place, though, probably from all the various coal-fired boilers and furnaces in the town, and maybe also from the smelter down in Clarkdale, although inside, I couldn’t really smell anything, thank God. No worries about environmental impacts back in the 1920s, that was for sure.

But even the smoke wasn’t enough to hide the beauty of the landscape, or the blue skies overhead. From here, I could catch an even better glimpse of Sedona’s red rocks and the rolling, golden contours of the Verde Valley. Once again, it didn’t seem all that different from the world I knew, except I thought the road leading away from Cottonwood and toward Sedona was narrower than it was in my time, with only a single lane in either direction.

Well, back then, there hadn’t been nearly the tourist presence of modern times. These were all working towns, whether mining or farming or ranching, not the sort of places people generally came to sightsee despite their natural beauty.

However, I knew I shouldn’t be concentrating on the view. No, now that I was alone, I needed to try my best to end this little trip down memory lane and get back where I belonged.

Unfortunately, I was scared shitless to try.

For the past ten years, I’d done everything I could to stifle my supposed gift, to make sure I controlled it and not the other way around. It had never been as simple as just telling myself that I wanted to travel a certain distance in time. The few occasions I’d made the attempt, I’d either gone in the opposite direction from planned, or way overshot and landed where I’d never intended to be.

And I still didn’t know exactly how I’d ended up here and now. Was it only that being knocked unconscious had allowed my particular brand of magic to cut loose, finally free from the constraints I’d placed on it over the past decade?

I supposed that was one theory. It made more sense than anything else.

Another unknown was why it had sent me back to June 1926, of all times. Not that I was a scholar of McAllister family history — far from it — but from everything I’d heard, it sure sounded as if the 1920s had been a quiet, prosperous time for the clan that had once been the Wilcoxes’ enemies. It just didn’t make much sense for me to be here.

Of course, this all could have been completely random. It wasn’t as if my talent hadn’t excelled at sending me to unexpected places on more than one occasion, although nothing had been as extreme as my current excursion to times before.

I let out a breath and went to sit down on the bed. It was a narrow thing with a white iron frame and a quilt in soft, pretty colors of rose and sage and mauve covering the mattress, which gave alarmingly under my weight and which I guessed was probably stuffed with feathers.

Good thing I wasn’t allergic.

How to go about this?

It had been so many years since I’d consciously tried to make my talent move me around in time that I had to stop and think about it for a long, hard moment. Problem was, I knew that every time I’d made the attempt, I’d screwed up royally.

I supposed some people would argue that I’d also messed up big-time while knocked out cold, which would seem to indicate I was pretty much screwed no matter what I did.

My stomach churned uneasily at the thought, and I did my best to ignore it. Admitting defeat before I even got started didn’t seem like a very good strategy.

Maybe I was wasting way too much thought on this, though. What if I didn’t try to think about how many years and months and days I had to travel, and instead only imagined when I needed to go and did my best to move things along that way?

It was worth a try…even as I realized that if I was successful, I’d appear in my own time right in this very spot, and therefore would materialize in someone’s bedroom.

Well, I’d deal with that situation if and when it happened. Trying to explain away inadvertent trespassing seemed a lot less fraught than remaining stuck in 1926, no matter how nice everyone here seemed to be.

Just in case, I got up from the bed and moved over to the window seat and sat there, my hope being that even if the furniture had gotten shifted around over the years, the window seat probably would have remained in the same place. From what I’d been able to tell, the people who owned the historic houses here in Jerome were all about preserving them rather than gutting them down to the studs to make them over into their particular vision of what their home should be.

The sun was already high enough overhead that it wasn’t hitting this side of the house. Even so, the temperature in this upstairs room was warmer than I would have liked, and no doubt would just get worse as the day wore on. About all I could hope was that there’d be a nice evening breeze to cool things down once the sun slipped behind Mingus Mountain in the early evening.

If, of course, I was even around to worry about sleeping in a hot room.

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