Page 15 of Borrowed Time

“Mrs. Wilson?” Seth ventured, and at once, the woman standing in the doorway giggled and put her hand to her mouth.

“Oh, no,” the girl said. “I’m Miss DeWitt — Clara DeWitt. I board here. Mrs. Wilson is in the kitchen at present. Who may I say is calling?”

I had to admit I wasn’t too thrilled to have bumped into Clara. According to my mother, the girl was a serious gossip.

But there was no way for me to warn Seth about her, not when she was standing right there in front of us.

“We’re Louis and Deborah Prewitt,” Seth replied without hesitation. We hadn’t really discussed what our aliases would be, but it seemed as though he’d decided it was better to keep calling me Deborah. I had no idea where he’d gotten “Louis” from, however, unless that was a nod to “Eliza’s” supposed hometown of St. Louis. “Eliza Prewitt’s brother and sister.”

At once, Clara’s mouth formed into an “O” of surprise. But she recovered herself quickly, saying, “Have you come looking for her?”

“Yes,” I put in. “We were hoping Mrs. Wilson might have some information that would be helpful.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Clara said, her tone forthright. “It seemed Miss Prewitt was the sort to hold her cards pretty close to the vest. But come inside — you can sit in the parlor, and I’ll go fetch Mrs. Wilson.”

Well, at least Clara wasn’t going to leave us standing in the street. She opened the door a little wider and Seth and I headed inside, where she led us into a parlor so stuffed with figurines and framed photographs and various knickknacks that I was surprised there was still enough room for the two of us to sit down on the couch. After telling us again that she would fetch Mrs. Wilson, Clara disappeared down the hallway, presumably toward the kitchen.

“We need to be careful around Clara,” I told Seth in an undertone. “My mother always said she was a terrible gossip.”

“Thanks for the warning,” he replied in a similar murmur, although I saw the way his eyes glinted with amusement. Maybe Clara looked harmless enough on the surface, but anyone in our situation needed to guard against the kind of person who’d have no problem flapping her jaw all over town.

A woman paused at the entrance to the parlor, and at once, Seth stood in acknowledgment. The newcomer looked as if she might have been in her fifties somewhere, although, with her gray hair and her gray dress, she seemed older than that. Then again, people in the Victorian era generally didn’t age as well as their twenty-first-century counterparts.

“You’re relatives of Miss Prewitt’s?” she asked. Her eyes were a bright blue, the only really colorful thing about her.

“Yes,” Seth said. “I’m Louis Prewitt, and this is my sister Deborah. Eliza is our sister, and we were very close, so we volunteered to be the ones to come out west in search of her.”

“That was kind of you,” the woman said. “And please, sit down, Mr. Prewitt. I am Mrs. Wilson, and yes, your sister did stay here in my boarding house for a few weeks. But I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more than that — there was certainly no sign that she planned to disappear in such a way.”

Seth resumed his seat on the sofa, flickering a glance at me at the same time.

“I know it was sudden,” I ventured. “And obviously, we are very worried about her. So you have no idea why she might have up and left without a word of warning?”

Mrs. Wilson’s mouth tightened. “Well, I heard that she’d taken up with a man named Robert Rowe, and they both disappeared at the same time. Most people think they ran off together, but if that was the case, then why on earth wouldn’t she have told someone what she was doing or where she wasgoing?” She paused there, eyes narrowing slightly as she took in the velvet-collared bustle dress I wore. “That’s very odd — your gown seems almost identical to one she commissioned from the dressmaker here in Flagstaff.”

So much for my naïve belief that no one would notice my gowns were the same ones my mother had worn while she was here. Thinking fast, I said, “Oh, Eliza and I often wear similar clothing. I suppose it comes from being twins.”

I’d tacked on that bit about being twins since I was exactly the same age my mother had been when she traveled back to 1884. Maybe people wouldn’t have questioned me on the subject if I’d said I was a year younger, as that sort of age difference was hard to detect, but by making Eliza my twin, I thought it more plausible that I would have come all the way to Flagstaff in search of her.

Mrs. Wilson seemed somewhat startled by my revelation, but then she ventured, “You do look a great deal like her, although your coloring isn’t quite the same.”

“Oh, we’re fraternal twins, not identical,” I said. “Our mother comments on that often, saying she was glad we weren’t so much alike that she wouldn’t be able to tell us apart.”

A pause there, while Mrs. Wilson obviously stopped to decide whether my story sounded plausible. But then, what would have been the alternative? As she’d pointed out, my mother’s and my features were very similar to one another’s, although she had the dark, inky hair so prevalent in the Wilcox clan, while I’d inherited my father’s medium brown locks.

Luckily, the landlady appeared to take my words at face value, because she nodded and said, “I suppose that makes sense. While she didn’t speak much about her family in Missouri, it sounded as though she had some relatives who were sympathetic to her cause.”

“Yes, Eliza and I often confided in one another,” I replied, fighting back a smile. That wasn’t even a total lie — my mother had talked to me about her adventures in 1884 plenty of times during my childhood, so I suppose you could say I’d been her confidant. “And that’s also why Louis and I came in search of her. She looks on us as friends as well as her brother and sister, and we thought she might not be as threatened by us.”

After those words left my lips, though, I couldn’t help thinking it sounded as if we were trying to approach a shy runaway dog and not a grown woman, and I did my best not to grimace.

It wasn’t as if I could take them back now.

However, Mrs. Wilson didn’t seem all that put off by my comment. She nodded, her expression now a little sad, and she said, “I wish I had more information to give you. No one seems to have known much about Mr. Rowe, except that he came from back East somewhere and had enough money to buy a sizable piece of land on the west side of town. That’s still tied up, though, because while he made the deposit, he disappeared before he could pay the remainder. I suppose the Wilcoxes will take it over at some point, since Elijah Royer, the man who was selling the property, wants only to get out of town and head east as soon as he can.”

Interesting. Neither of my parents had mentioned that my father had only put down a deposit on the land. Still, that would have effectively taken it off the market…and had apparently been sufficient to send Samuel Wilcox into a murderous rage once he realized his prize had been snatched away from him.

“Did Mr. Rowe make any connections with any of the people in town while he was here?” Seth asked.

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