Page 4 of Stolen Time

As he turned away from the lantern and raised his arm to shine the light around the interior of the shaft, however, he realized he wasn’t alone.

Lying on the floor of the tunnel was the limp form of a woman. She faced away from the entrance, so all he could see was a spill of long brown hair against the dirt and one outflung arm. Even from this distance, he immediately noticed she was dressed oddly, in blue denim pants not too dissimilar from the dungarees many of his fellow miners wore and a light-colored blouse that did nothing to cover her arms.

For all that Jerome was a rough and ready town, with more than its fair share of women who were, as his father liked to obliquely say, “no better than they should be,” Seth couldn’t recall ever seeing a woman who wore those sorts of pants. At fairly regular intervals, tourists came through Jerome from the East Coast or even from Los Angeles to the west, and the women were often decked out in what had been to his eyes some fairly outlandish getups, but even they hadn’t been sporting a tightly fitting pair of trousers like these.

Frowning, he moved toward the strange woman, even as he called out, “Hello?”

No response, not even a twitch.

Worried now, he hurried over to her and knelt on the far side of the spot where she lay so he could get a better look at her and assess whether she’d been hurt in some way. As he set the lantern down on the floor of the mineshaft, its warm glow caught her face.

She was beautiful. Eyes shut, which meant he couldn’t see what color they were, but even when slack, her mouth was full and rosy, her nose straight and delicately molded, her face almost heart-shaped because of its wide cheekbones, but softened by a more rounded chin.

And no real sign that she’d been injured — no bruises, no blood. Nothing to explain why she appeared to be in a deep faint, or how in the world she could have ended up here.

“Hello?” he ventured again.

Not even a flutter of the long lashes against her cheeks. For one awful moment, he wondered if she was dead, but then he saw the rise and fall of her chest under the sleeveless buttoned shirt she wore, and he knew she still walked among the living.

For now, anyway.

Could he risk moving her? Even though she didn’t appear to be hurt, he knew that carrying her could be a problem if she’d suffered some kind of back or neck injury. On the other hand, leaving her here in the tunnel while he went to fetch help didn’t seem like a very good idea, either, not with everyone gone for the day.

And unfortunately, his gift for moving from place to place, one that had emerged on his twelfth birthday, wouldn’t help him now. Over the years, he’d done a lot of work to test its limits, and about the most he could carry with him was forty pounds. That was a decent amount, but definitely not enough for him to take the woman down the hill to safety.

He reached out to lay his fingers against the strange woman’s throat. Her pulse was strong and steady, so whatever hadhappened to her, it didn’t seem as if it had put her in any immediate danger.

She should be able to hang on until he came back in his car.

With that plan settled, he blinked himself into his bungalow’s kitchen, then went down the back steps to the detached garage he’d had built a little over a year ago, right after he purchased the convertible Dodge that was his pride and joy. He didn’t much like the delay involved in having to open the garage door and back out the car, then hurry over so he could close the door again, but he tried to reassure himself that the woman he’d found had seemed stable enough, and really this whole expedition would only take about ten minutes or so.

The streets were pretty much deserted by that point, with his fellow miners done with their shifts for the day and most of Jerome’s denizens safely tucked inside having their dinners. Seth was glad about that, just because he really didn’t feel like explaining why he was taking his car up to the mine.

When he returned, it didn’t look as though she’d moved at all.

Was that a good sign?

Since there wasn’t anything else he could do, he knelt and slid his arms under the woman, then lifted her from the ground as carefully as he could. During this procedure, she didn’t stir, not even the slightest bit, and his worry deepened.

What had happened to her?

He wasn’t a doctor or a healer, only a man who’d decided to buck tradition and work at the United Verde rather than the store that had been in his family for going on three generations now. But the McAllister healer, his cousin Helen O’Dowd, should be able to determine what had caused the strange woman’s ongoing faint.

She was very light in his arms, not much of a burden for someone who’d done hard physical work from the time he wasseventeen. Stepping as gently as he could, he headed back to his car and then laid her down in the back seat. During all this, she’d been as limp and unmoving as a rag doll, and he murmured a prayer to the goddess Brigid under his breath that the woman he found wouldn’t be harmed by the trip down the hill to his bungalow.

A lone car passed him as he drove down into town, but he didn’t recognize it, and guessed the vehicle probably belonged to either a tourist or someone from Prescott who’d been doing business in the Verde Valley but now wanted to get over the mountain before true night fell. His street was similarly deserted, with no one to take any note of him carrying the woman into the house.

The familiar space surrounded him, with its windows open to the evening breeze and the few pieces of furniture he’d been able to acquire carefully set in the space. Chief among them was the sofa, purchased only a few months earlier at a store down in Cottonwood. It was still quite a novelty to have a shop like that nearby at all, rather than having to make the perilous drive up and over Mingus Mountain to Prescott to purchase those items you didn’t want to build for yourself. Several members of his clan were expert woodworkers, and they were the ones who had provided the table and chairs in the dining room and the cabinet which held a few pieces of mismatched china his mother had provided for him, but the couch — that was the item he was most proud of, since he’d paid for it with the money he’d earned in his new position as one of the foremen at the mine.

He laid the woman down on the sofa and then, as carefully as he could, unlaced the sturdy boots she was wearing. The laces felt odd under his fingers, too silky to be cotton, definitely not leather. And the soles were also strange — while he could tell they were some kind of rubber, they felt far springier than any rubber-soled shoes or boots he’d ever seen.

Who was she?

First things first. Although some of the houses in Jerome now had telephones, his wasn’t among them. Seth had decided it was a luxury he couldn’t afford, and besides, the town was small enough that you could get pretty much anywhere you needed to be in ten minutes or less.

And Helen’s home was much closer than that — just a few houses down the street, in fact.

By that time, night was truly beginning to fall, and he had the uneasy feeling he might be interrupting Helen’s supper with her young family. It couldn’t be helped, though — part of being a clan healer was knowing that you might be intruded upon at any time to treat an ailing family member. They did their best to make her cures for their various coughs and colds and bumps and bruises seem as if it was all perfectly natural, nothing more than folk medicine that had been in the family for generations, for while the McAllisters were the dominant group in the town, there were still plenty of strangers living in Jerome as well, people who could never be allowed to learn that there was a little something more to the McAllister clan than met the eye.

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