Page 14 of Borrowed Time

“Very good, miss.”

He headed back to the front desk after that, and I refolded the note and tucked it into the beaded bag I’d found in the trunk with the rest of the clothes my mother had left behind.

“Tea, huh?” Seth said once the man was safely out of earshot. “What do you think he wants?”

“To discuss Eliza’s disappearance, it sounds like,” I said, then lowered my voice. “And a few other things, I should imagine.”

Seth only tilted his head slightly in acknowledgment, and we left the matter there. Most likely, Jeremiah wanted to make sure I was improving and wouldn’t require any further intervention by his healer sister.

However, I couldn’t help hoping that maybe he’d come up with a solution for Seth’s and my problem, and would tell us he knew exactly how he could send us back to 1926. It was probably asking a bit much to expect that Jeremiah Wilcox might be able to send us to our respective times.

And deep down, I didn’t know whether I even wanted such a solution. Living in the 1920s hadn’t been a laugh riot from beginning to end or anything close to it, but I had started to get used to the pace of things, how I didn’t have a phone clamoring for attention twenty-four hours a day, and how people seemed much more connected with one another than they did in my own time. Yes, witch clans, by their very nature, required a lot of person-to-person interactions, and yet it still didn’t feel quite the same.

I knew I was probably getting ahead of myself, and when our food arrived a few minutes later, I found I was able to eat a lot more than I’d expected. Maybe there was still a corner of toast and a few scraps of scrambled eggs left when I was done, but overall, I’d done a pretty good job of clearing my plate.

All the same, I knew I’d be just fine with skipping lunch and waiting for our tea with Jeremiah. Would there be little sandwiches and tiny cakes, like I’d had that one time my mother had taken my sister and me to a tea house in Prescott’s historic district?

Maybe by three o’clock I’d have room for something like that.

Since we didn’t have to worry about checking out of the hotel — Seth had already told me the rooms were ours for as long as we needed them — we only headed upstairs so I could fetch a shawl and he, his hat. The day was sunny and bright, with only a few wisps of clouds clinging to the very tops of the San Francisco Peaks, but I knew the air would be chilly despite the outwardly friendly weather. The trunk my mother had left behind had also included two heavy wool cloaks, both of which I’d hung up to get the wrinkles out, although I guessed I wouldn’t need them today.

Soon, though, since the first measurable snowfall often happened close to this time of year…unless Seth and I were somehow able to escape.

We asked the front desk clerk for directions to Mrs. Wilson’s boarding house, and he sent us over to Elden Street, a few blocks away from the spot where the hotel was located. On that late Thursday morning, the streets were crowded with heavy wagons hauling logs to the town’s numerous sawmills and drovers bringing in various goods that had arrived with the train. In fact, I could hear its sharp, piercing whistle even over the rumble of wagon wheels and the sound of enormous saws grinding away at the ponderosa pines that had turned Flagstaff into such a boom town.

“I hadn’t expected it to be so…lively,” Seth remarked as he guided me across the street, helpfully maneuvering the two of us around a couple of large puddles.

“Well, it’s a frontier town,” I said. “No mines, but the sawmills made people here plenty of money. It was either that or ranching, basically.”

“And your family did both.”

I paused to shoot a careful glance around us, but no one was standing near enough that they should have been able to hear what we were saying.

“Yes, the Wilcoxes made a lot of money in both lumber and ranching,” I said carefully. “They made good investments.”

Probably best to stop there. No one in the clan liked to talk about it too much, but it was still a poorly kept secret that the first generation of Wilcoxes had used magic to increase their fortunes, to make it seem as if they just had better luck than most people when it came to choosing which piece of land or which business to buy. That practice had continued for decades, and even now, I knew that part of the reason why the clan had prospered so much during my lifetime was that we had my cousin Lucas, whose magical gift was luck of the purest kind, calling the shots when it came to managing the family’s various trusts. When my mother was my age, her stipend had been five grand a month, but mine was double that, an increase not completely due to inflation.

The lift of Seth’s eyebrow told me he thought there was a lot more to the story than I was letting on, but he didn’t press the issue.

“It does help to have been some of the earliest settlers,” he said as we turned down Elden Street. “The McAllisters wouldn’t have had all that choice property on Main Street if we hadn’t been in Jerome from nearly the beginning.”

I hadn’t even thought about that, but I supposed it was true. McAllister Mercantile had a prime spot toward the end of the street, near the overlook where so many people paused to take pictures of the lower sections of the town and the Verde Valley beyond, and in fact, pretty much every other business on the street was either openly run by members of the family or at least owned by them. Their wealth couldn’t equal that of the Wilcoxes, true, but they were still doing pretty well for themselves.

“Sometimes it’s good to have a little extra help,” I said, and left it there. Even though there wasn’t anyone close enough to hear what we were saying, I still didn’t think it was a very good idea to openly discuss the role magic had played in both our clans’ prosperity.

A smile flickered at the corner of his mouth, but Seth didn’t respond directly, instead saying, “I think that’s the house over there.”

He pointed to a two-story home that was painted white and had green shutters and several red brick chimneys. A cute white picket fence enclosed the property, and I guessed that the flowers planted there were cheerful and lively during the summer. Now, though, almost ten days into November, everything had been trimmed back except the roses, which were still green and full enough, even though none of them were blooming at the moment.

For some reason, an odd little stir of worry went through me. So far, it seemed as if Seth and I were navigating 1884 better than either of us had probably expected, but this would be the first person — well, besides Jeremiah Wilcox — that either of us had talked to who would have known my mother in her guise of Eliza Prewitt.

What if I made some sort of awful bobble that exposed I wasn’t one of Eliza’s long-lost relatives at all?

Don’t be silly,I told myself as Seth and I crossed the quiet residential street.Mrs. Wilson would have only known your mother as Eliza, and would have no idea she was connected to the Wilcoxes at all. Just keep your head on straight and you’ll do fine.

I hoped that internal no-nonsense advice would be enough.

When Seth knocked at the door, the woman who looked out was young, probably around my age or maybe even younger, with curly dark blonde hair and big blue eyes.

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