Page 7 of Killing Time

And he planned to kiss her plenty. No reason to hide their relationship anymore, and he wanted to make up for all the time they’d lost while pretending to be brother and sister in 1884 Flagstaff.

“Sure,” he said easily, telling himself they wouldn’t have much opportunity for intimacies anyway until they came back to the house at the end of the evening.

She pulled a sweater — a pretty black thing with some beading around the collar — from the closet and draped it over one arm, then went into the bathroom to refresh her lipstick. A moment later, she emerged, still wearing a smile, gray-blue eyes cheerful and bright, her wavy brown hair pulled back with one of the scarves she’d gotten from the mercantile.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s go see what the 1940s have done to Cottonwood.”

Not as much as he’d expected. Or rather, while the businesses had changed somewhat and Main Street seemed to have extended southward, Cottonwood’s downtown section seemed just as bustling as he remembered. And sure, the cars looked different — although he spotted a vintage jalopy here and there — but the town seemed to have weathered the years much better than Jerome.

And he was thrilled to see that the Copper Café occupied the same space it always had, and that while the sign over the front door had changed, the fonts used simpler and squarer just as they had been on the mercantile’s new sign, the interior looked almost exactly the same except for the upholstery in the booths that lined two of the walls, the vinyl now a deep turquoise rather than the burgundy he remembered.

As he and Devynn walked up to the restaurant, he wondered what he should do to explain his presence if it turned out some of the same people he remembered were still working there. Tell them he was Seth McAllister’s son? Say he was a cousin visiting from Payson who just happened to have a striking resemblance to the man who’d disappeared more than twenty years earlier?

To his infinite relief, the girl who handed them their menus and led them to a booth in the corner was very young, probably not even twenty yet, and therefore wouldn’t have been born before he’d vanished. She sported bright red lipstick and her blonde hair was carefully curled, lying just barely against her shoulders, but all the outward artifice couldn’t quite hide her youth.

He was glad of that, and of the booth she’d guided them to. Maybe she’d guessed he and Devynn were here on a date, since apparently it was Friday night, although the hour was barely six o’clock, not exactly a prime date time.

And while in his earlier life he might have felt a little guilty about skipping out on Halloween, there hadn’t been much evidence of trick-or-treaters as they’d driven out of Jerome. The Copper Café’s front window was decorated with cardboard images of happy ghosts and cute girls dressed as witches and holding black kittens, but overall, the holiday seemed fairly subdued this year.

Well, according to Charles, the nation had just recently come out of another world war. Seth didn’t know how long it hadlasted or how much the United States had suffered, but he had to imagine that it had probably been worse than the first one.

Yet another subject that merited some research, although he doubted he’d have enough time to really dive into it.

No, he and Devynn had other matters to attend to.

But even as preoccupied as he might be with Ruby’s current predicament, he couldn’t help being pleased to see beer and wine and cocktails on the menu, offerings that had been sadly lacking the last time he’d brought Devynn here. Since he had no idea what those cocktails even contained — what the heck was a Manhattan? — he figured it would be safer to stick with wine. The list wasn’t extensive, but his time in 1880s Flagstaff had taught him that pretty much any kind of red would go just fine with a steak.

Prices had definitely gone up since 1926, though, so he was glad of the wallet of cash Charles had provided for him, even if the gift had been given somewhat grudgingly. Then again, some would argue that Seth was still technically part owner of the store and therefore entitled to half its proceeds.

“It’s so nice to see wine on the menu again,” Devynn said as she laid down the little leatherette folder that held the restaurant’s offerings. “I thought Prohibition ended before World War 2 even started, but American history has never been my area of interest.”

“What was your area of interest?” Seth asked. He reflected that they hadn’t had much time to discuss their lives, despite the way they’d been in each other’s company so much over the past month.

Then again, he didn’t think his former life had been all that interesting. Sleep, go to work, come home, repeat the same thing the next day. Sure, he was a warlock, but he still needed to eat and pay his bills.

“Medieval Europe,” she said promptly in answer to his question. “You want me to tell you all the kings of England from the Norman conquest to the birth of King Charles? No problem. Need a list of all the small kingdoms in medieval France? I’m your girl. I suppose I wanted to study places far away in both space and time because I knew I’d never be able to go much farther than New Mexico.”

“So…you went to college?” Although such a thing hadn’t been entirely unusual in the 1920s, it also hadn’t been all that common. He was already a little intimidated by Devynn’s beauty and the combination of her magical talents, but if she had a college degree on top of everything else….

“Graduated only a few weeks before I came to Jerome,” she said blithely, then paused. “Does that seem weird to you?”

“No, not really,” he said hastily. Or at least, “weird” wasn’t the word he would have used for the situation. “It’s just that no one in my clan went to college because there wasn’t one located in our territory. My cousin Freddie took some kind of correspondence courses, but I’m not sure that’s exactly the same thing.”

“It probably depends on what was in those courses,” Devynn said. “Eventually, they built a community college in Cottonwood, but that would have been long after your time — and probably after this one as well. Everyone in the clan who wants to attend a four-year university has to go up to Flagstaff to Northern Pines or down to Phoenix or Tucson, depending on what their grades are like and what they’re interested in studying.”

Seth reflected that the amity amongst the three Arizona clans had a lot more benefits than merely not having to worry whether one of them was going to stir up trouble along your border. However, he couldn’t reply directly, since a waiter approached them then and asked them what they’d like to order.

Because he and Devynn had already decided on their beverage and meal of choice, the process went quickly enough. The waiter headed off to the kitchen, promising he’d bring out their wine in just a minute.

“It feels so…civilized,” she remarked, and Seth lifted an eyebrow.

“Are you saying that 1926 wasn’t civilized?”

“Not exactly,” she replied, although a smile touched her lips, an expression that awakened the small dimple that made its appearance in her cheek from time to time. “But even though this year is very different from the one I came from, it still feels a lot closer despite there only being a twenty-one-year difference from 1926.”

Seth supposed he could see that. Even in his own house, he could point out the progress that had been made — the shower in the bathroom, the ceiling fans in the living room and both bedrooms, the updated kitchen, with an electric stove and an icebox that wasn’t an icebox at all, but what Devynn had called a refrigerator. In a way…despite seeing how Jerome had suffered…he thought it was maybe a good thing that they’d made a stop here so he could absorb a smaller increment of changes rather than leaping forward directly into the twenty-first century.

The waiter returned with their wine and set it down on the table, promising that their steaks would be out in the next ten minutes or so. They thanked him, then waited for him to be out of earshot before they both raised their glasses.

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