Page 16 of Borrowed Time

Mrs. Wilson shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of. He mostly kept to himself…which was why people took note of the few times he was seen conversing with your sister.”She hesitated there, her expression somehow worried and disappointed at the same time. “None of us could really make heads or tails of the situation. Your sister seemed like a kind, well-spoken young woman, and she did well with the children at the school. It was hard for all of us to believe she’d abandon them like that when she’d come so far to take the position in the first place.”

That was the one thing I knew my mother regretted about the situation — that she’d basically disappeared on those kids without telling them goodbye. Not that she’d had the chance, when Samuel had kidnapped her right from her schoolroom and taken her to the family cabin as bait, hoping to lure my father there so Samuel could take care of the troublesome interloper once and for all.

But the children in her classroom couldn’t have known any of that. All they knew was that “Miss Prewitt” had pretty much vanished into thin air.

“She must have had a good reason for disappearing,” I said, doing my best to keep my tone level. “I know she would never walk out on a responsibility unless she had no other choice.”

Again true. She’d gone through a rough patch all that time ago, but she’d always been a wonderful mother to my siblings and me — and a devoted partner to my father.

For a moment, Mrs. Wilson didn’t reply. Then she let out a melancholy breath and said, “I hope you’re right about that.”

Our interview with Mrs. Wilson hadn’t yielded much useful fruit, but that didn’t stop Seth and me from wandering around Flagstaff afterward, getting the lay of the land, taking note of the various landmarks my mother had mentioned to me — Mr.Brannen’s general store, the Methodist church where she’d been compelled to attend services so she wouldn’t attract attention to herself, the park that in modern times was another city block full of shops and businesses.

Some of the patterns of the streets were familiar, but others were utterly strange to me, and I realized how much the city had changed over the years, spreading not just east and west but north onto the shoulders of the mountains and south past the valley where one day Interstate 40 would cut a band through the hilly landscape.

“Where did you live?” Seth asked me after we’d made a round of the park and then deemed it time to head back toward Park Street and the big green-painted house Jeremiah Wilcox called his own. “Somewhere around here?”

No one was anywhere near us, so I thought it safe to reply honestly. “Not really,” I replied, and then gestured vaguely southward. “In my time, this is all built up, and there’s a highway called Interstate 40 that sort of bisects the city north and south. We’re south of it, kind of over by those hills.”

In a big newish house, a place where we’d moved when I was around five. Before then, we’d lived in an updated Victorian home just two blocks over from the street where all the Wilcoxes currently had their houses, but after my brother Patrick came along and there were five of us sharing two bathrooms, my parents decided we needed a house with more space. I’d always gotten the impression that they’d bought the first house because my mother wanted to live in a place that wouldn’t feel like such a culture shock to my father. However, he hadn’t seemed too bothered by leaving that first house behind and moving to a place that allowed each of us kids to have their own bathroom — and being on a piece of land that was just under an acre and offered a lot more privacy than the postage-stamp-size lot of the original home.

“So it’s much, much bigger in your time,” Seth said.

“A lot. I forget what the actual population is, but I think it’s just a little under a hundred thousand.”

“A hundred thousand people,” he repeated, now looking almost awestruck. But then a corner of his mouth lifted, and he added, “I hope they’re not all Wilcoxes.”

I couldn’t help grinning back at him. “Of course they aren’t. Still, the clan is pretty big. My cousin Marie — she’s the one who keeps track of all our genealogy — says we’re probably going to hit two thousand people in the next year or so.”

Much, much bigger than the McAllister clan, who were probably about a quarter that number at most. Not that it mattered in my day. It wasn’t as if we were going to war with each other or anything. Just the opposite, in fact.

If I somehow managed to return Seth to 1926, would his opinion of the Wilcoxes change now that he knew who I was? And now that he’d met Jeremiah Wilcox and seen he wasn’t the big boogeyman that generations of McAllisters had been led to believe, would he try to convince the other members of their clan that they might have been mistaken in their judgment of him?

And if he did so, would that change the timeline forever?

I had no way of knowing. As far as I’d been able to tell, my mother’s sojourn in the past didn’t appear to have changed anything in her future or about the clan in general. But she’d gone back with a set mission, one that didn’t involve a Wilcox at all…at least, only peripherally.

All I could do was try to follow her lead, touch as little here as I could…and hope like hell my mere presence in 1884 wouldn’t cause the sort of ripple effect I couldn’t possibly foresee.

5

TEA AND SYMPATHY

None of this was normal.He shouldn’t be talking to Devynn as though nothing had changed, and he shouldn’t be walking the streets of a Flagstaff that felt like something out of a painting or an old photograph, with the women in their bustle gowns and the men in their wide-brimmed hats and horses and wagons and buggies crowding them on all sides.

And he absolutely shouldn’t have been walking up the path that led to Jeremiah Wilcox’s front door as though he’d done this a hundred times before.

True, this wasn’t his first foray to the imposing house. Just two days earlier, he’d stood on this walkway with a dying Devynn in his arms, not knowing where he was or how he had gotten here.

Of course, back then he’d thought her name was Deborah and that she’d come from a clan far off in Massachusetts.

Well, he supposed a quarter of that was true. She had the blood of the Winfields in her veins, even if she’d been raised a Wilcox.

And although he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge such a thing, he knew he’d found her oddly charming in her dark green bustlegown, which hid far more of her figure than the simple cotton dresses she’d worn during her time in Jerome and yet was still more alluring than he’d expected. He’d noted how her speech sounded casual when they were alone together, and then took on a much more formal tone when speaking to people such as Deborah Prewitt, who’d come in search of her runaway twin sister. That had been a nice touch, he thought, and explained away the similarities in their appearance and their age.

He hadn’t been expecting to discover much on their fact-finding mission, so he wasn’t too disappointed when their conversation with Mrs. Wilson hadn’t produced anything of real use. Maybe Mrs. Marshall, who Devynn had said was the other teacher at the school, might have been able to offer some additional insight, but because school was in session and wouldn’t get out until they were already at Jeremiah Wilcox’s house, they hadn’t gotten the opportunity to talk to her.

Now an older woman who looked as though she might be in her middle or late fifties opened the door in answer to their knock. Smiling, she said, “Mr. and Miss Prewitt? Mr. Wilcox is expecting you.”

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