Page 50 of Stolen Time

15

OVER THE HILL

So far,I thought I’d done a pretty good job of getting along in the early twentieth century. At least there was running water and food that seemed mostly familiar, even if a lot of it was heavier than what I was used to eating. Sure, the clothing was a little odd, and there were days when I thought I would have cheerfully committed some serious mayhem for central air conditioning, but overall, I wanted to give myself a mental pat on the back for acclimating as well as I had.

Right now, though, I would have killed for a single functioning computer or tablet or phone. Hell, I would have been okay with a TV and a decent lineup of streaming stations to distract myself.

There wasn’t anything like that in 1926, though. Only books and a radio, and everything I heard on there was just crackly and distorted enough that I didn’t like listening to it at all.

True, Ruth gave me plenty of chores to do, nothing so horribly taxing that I might start to feel like Cinderella or anything close, but just enough to remind me I wasn’t allowed to be simply a houseguest and nothing more. The work was something of a distraction.

Not enough, though.

Not nearly enough.

Yesterday had been Abigail’s twenty-first birthday party. I wasn’t invited, of course; I wasn’t family. But Ruth and Timothy had attended, leaving me to wonder how it had gone, whether they were going to commence kissing consorts right away, or whether they were going to give it a little time so they could have a decent roster of candidates lined up.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how it all worked. The McAllisters of my time had aprima-in-waiting, of course, Angela’s daughter Emily. She was almost five years older than me, so her all-important birthday — and the consort search — had all gone down while I was attending high school in Flagstaff, and she was happily paired off with the man fate had decreed would be her consort. And, even though Angela was married to theprimusof my clan, none of it had seemed all that important at the time, not when I’d been much more interested in school and friends and which kind of car my parents were going to buy me for my sixteenth birthday.

Now I wished I’d paid more attention to what was going on with Emily and the search for her consort, even as I tried to tell myself that they might do things very differently in the 1920s than they had in the mid-twenty-first century.

My chores done for the day, I’d retired to the front parlor with a book, figuring I should do what I could to lose myself in someone else’s story. The volume I’d chosen wasSense and Sensibility,a novel I’d found close to tedious when I had to read it in a college lit class.

Now, though, it felt more reassuring than I’d expected, a piece of familiarity in a world utterly unlike mine. And although Elinor and Marianne Dashwood weren’t witches, I found I could relate to their predicament, to the unfortunate necessityof relying on the kindness of others thanks to their reduced circumstances, than I’d thought.

After all, I would have been in a real world of hurt if Ruth and Timothy McAllister hadn’t taken me in.

The book helped distract me a little, even though I still found my attention caught by any kind of movement outside the window, whether that was a car driving past or one of the neighbors walking by with their dog on a leather leash.

And then….

I set down the book, my heart beginning to pound.

Was that Seth coming up the front walk?

Yes, it was. He wore a dark suit and tie, not the sort of thing I would have expected to see him sporting after a day at the mine.

Come to think of it, the time was barely three-thirty, far too soon for him to have gotten off work.

He wasn’t at work,my mind told me.He was off giving Abigail the consort’s kiss. That’s why he’s all dressed up.

And if he was here now….

I laid the attached ribbon along the page I’d been reading and set the book aside. Maybe it would have been better to keep reading until he got to the front door, but I knew I wouldn’t have been able to retain a single word about the travails of the Dashwood sisters if I had made the attempt.

No, I sat on the couch, heart beating far too quickly, until there came a soft knock at the door.

Luckily, by that point Ruth and Timothy were just fine with me answering the door if they were occupied elsewhere, so I didn’t even have to hesitate before responding to that fateful knock.

Sure enough, Seth stood outside on the porch, relief clear in every line of his handsome face.

“Good afternoon, Deborah,” he said. “Would you like to go for a drive?”

I didn’t even hesitate. “Love to,” I replied.

We drove into Cottonwood, back to the restaurant where he’d taken me for dinner the week before. Maybe it would have been prettier to go up to our picnic spot on Mingus Mountain, but with him in his good clothes and me in a dress and heels, it just made more sense to return to a more civilized place.

At that hour of the afternoon, the restaurant wasn’t very full. Seth asked the hostess for a quiet spot, so we sat in the back of the place, far away from the counter where people were drinking coffee or eating slices of pie.

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