Page 67 of Killing Time

The conversation lagged there as Helen got some eggs and milk and bacon out of the refrigerator, and promptly put together a scramble she made more interesting with the addition of some cheese and onions, along with cutting several slices of homemade sourdough bread for toast.

That, combined with the excellent cup of coffee she poured for him, helped improve his mood ever so slightly. Devynn was still missing and he feared the worst, but at least now he felt as though he could begin to think clearly.

Just as he was scraping the last of the eggs and cheese from his plate, the phone mounted on the wall by the fridge rang. At once, Helen hurried over to answer it, and Seth set down his fork, steeling himself to hear the worst.

Because who else would be calling at this hour if it wasn’t her son-in-law or someone else in Payson checking in with whatever they might have found once the sun came up?

She seemed content to listen to what they had to say, and didn’t interject or ask any questions. When they appeared to be done, she said “thank you” and then hung up before turning to look over at Seth.

“That was Ed,” she told him, which was about what he’d been expecting. “He drove back down the highway to take a look in daylight, and this time he noticed some skid marks on the asphalt. No sign of an accident, though — no debris or broken glass or anything like that. And it didn’t seem as if whoever had braked so hard had gone over the side of the road. In fact, the skid marks stopped so abruptly that he was sort of surprised there wasn’t something to show there had been a collision of some kind.”

Seth had to admit that this description of the condition of the roadway seemed more than a little odd. While he didn’t pretend to understand all the advancements that had taken place in the automotive world since the 1920s, he’d driven his father’s Chevy Stylemaster just enough to know it couldn’t stop on a dime like that, no matter how good its brakes might be.

No, something strange was going on here.

“Anything else?” he asked, and Helen shook her head.

“Not that Ed was able to see. He didn’t want to drive any farther than that, as he knew he was probably a mile or two into Wilcox territory already and didn’t want to push his luck.”

Although it wasn’t as if the members of the other clan patrolled the borders of their land to keep out any interlopers, Seth knew it still wasn’t a good idea to pretend as though those borders didn’t exist. The Wilcoxes would somehow be able to sense when a McAllister decided to trespass…unless, of course, they were protected by Devynn’s gift, which wasn’t Ed’s case.Seth had no idea what Helen’s son-in-law’s talent was, but he knew it couldn’t be that, not when no one outside the Winfield clan appeared to have the same kind of power.

“Well, at least it’s good there doesn’t seem to have been a crash of some kind,” he said, although he hated that they didn’t have any kind of definitive proof as to what might have happened to Devynn.

Right now, it seemed as if she’d vanished into thin air.

The second that thought passed through his mind, Seth’s stomach clenched. No, she couldn’t teleport the way he did, but her particular mode of time travel did make it seem as if she had disappeared right in front of your eyes. Eventually, of course, the world would catch up with her, but….

What if Devynn had used her time travel ability to get away from Jasper, who might have been in hot pursuit?

His brain told him that wasn’t even a possibility, not when the car had disappeared as well. It was one thing for her to send her mind and body into the future, and quite another to make a couple of tons of Detroit steel vanish completely.

That thought made him relax a little, although he still couldn’t rid himself of the worry that she had been captured by Jasper. If that was the case, then she might use her gift to send herself just far enough ahead that she’d be effectively alone where she was, and could simply walk away as though she hadn’t been a prisoner at all.

Well, that was a pretty fiction, one he’d like to believe even when he knew Devynn wasn’t capable of controlling her talent to such a degree. Yes, she could send herself into the future, but that could be five minutes from now…or fifty years. Somehow he doubted she would take such a risk, not when the price of her freedom might mean leaving him alone in the past forever.

He supposed some people wouldn’t think twice about doing such a thing, not if it meant getting away from their captor,but he knew Devynn wasn’t capable of such a cold-hearted maneuver.

Instead, she’d try to wait this thing out and hope he’d rustle up the cavalry to come rescue her.

“It’s one thing more we can tell Abigail and the other elders,” Helen said, although something in her manner seemed almost hesitant, as if she wasn’t terribly sure whether filling in theprimaabout the situation was going to change the situation too much.

Seth wasn’t very sanguine, either. If Ruby had been in charge of the clan, then he thought she would have done whatever was necessary to make sure Devynn was returned safely to them, but Abigail was made of very different material. She’d probably wave a languid hand and say it was all very sad but that since the missing woman wasn’t part of their clan, there was very little they could do to get her back…if she even was in Jasper’s hands, something that none of them could know for sure, not without any way of seeing what was happening in Wilcox territory right now. Lacking a seer, the McAllister clan didn’t have many options when it came to that sort of thing.

“But,” Helen went on, tone turning brisk as she picked up his now empty plate and coffee mug and set them on the counter by the sink, “I think it’s time to fetch Ruby, and then we can get all this hashed out and decide what we should do next.”

Seth was grateful for that, if only because getting up from his chair and following Helen down to the house where Ruby lived was something of a distraction. Theprima-in-waiting seemed chipper enough this morning, hair once again perfectly coiffed, a dark blue sweater covering the brown and blue print dress she was wearing.

“Oh, I slept very well,” she said in answer to Helen’s question, then looked over at Seth, her expression darkening a bit. “Where’s your friend?”

“She never made it to Jerome,” he replied, knowing how curt he sounded, disappointment and worry sharp in his tone.

“I’m so sorry,” Ruby said, wide-eyed. “That’s terrible. Does anyone know what happened?”

“Not so far,” Helen told her. “We had people go out to look for her, but there’s no sign of her or the car she was driving.”

Theprima-in-waiting’s brows drew together. She didn’t say anything else, though, but only continued to frown slightly as they made their way up the hill to Paradise Lane. Was she trying to come up with a plan to look for Devynn?

Seth didn’t know what more they could do, though. It sounded as if the crew in Payson had done a thorough job of searching the roads for any evidence that she’d even come that way, and besides the odd tire marks on Highway 87 about five miles outside Winslow, there didn’t seem to be anything at all they could point to as a piece of helpful evidence.

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