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THE BECQUERELS
SERIES VOLUME THREE
KATHRYN KALEIGH
To learn more about Kathryn Kaleigh, visit
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www.kathrynkaleigh.com
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CONTENTS
Time Tempest
The Heart Remembers
A Moment in Time
Moonlight Shadows
Rescued in Time
Written in the Wind Preview
Also by Kathryn Kaleigh
PART 1
CHAPTER 1
MADILYNN SINCLAIR
Present
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It was a beautiful autumn day. Leaves in shades of reds and golds and brown fell like fat raindrops from the maple, hickory, and oak trees. The dry leaves crunched beneath my boots as I walked around from the back of the house to the front door of the Becquerel home.
My home for the indefinite future.
The breeze coming off the Mississippi River felt soft and crisp, reminding me of high school football games. With cheering and bands playing. Hot cocoa.
All bittersweet memories.
As I stepped into the foyer, a little shiver of anticipation skittered up my spine. I ignored it.
My boots echoed on the mahogany floor as I walked over to the grandfather clock and looked up into its face. Though silent, the clock held an imposing presence.
Someone would be coming to repair the problem with the winding mechanism.
Besides it not ticking, there was a gash across the clock’s face between the six and seven.
Wounded.
I was a little surprised that the gash hadn’t been repaired, but over time it had become part of the clock’s history. There was quite a story behind this clock.
It had been brought over from France in the 1700s. A gift from the man who built the house to his bride.
I passed the stairs leading to the second floor and went into the parlor.
A grand piano in one corner. A fireplace on the back wall.
A sofa and what had to be some of the original chairs.
The seat cushions, though worn and faded, were covered with hand embroidered fabric. Bright colors. Red. Yellow. Green. Butterflies and birds.
At least one woman had spent countless hours putting in stitch after stitch.
The designs were of such intricate detail, it was unfathomable that they hadn’t been done by machine.
Deep emerald velvet curtains framed each of the tall floor to ceiling windows. Windows that were actually doors.
Doors that could be opened up to allow people to spill out onto the veranda.
Closing my eyes, I imagined a young lady sitting at the piano while men and women talked and laughed.
There had been happiness in this house.
I could feel it.
And there would be happiness again.
There would be weddings and honeymooners and reunions and whatever else anyone wanted to gather together for.
The last person hired to do this had gone a little bit crazy.
I could see how someone could wrapped up in the beauty of this house. The history.
The last person, a woman by the name of Briana, had disappeared from here.
Rachel, the curator of the Becquerel Estate, had found her car parked at the end of the driveway.
It had been several months, but Briana had never been found.
They had found no evidence of foul play.
And I didn’t think there had been any.
I was toying with a story to tell the tourists who would be coming to see the centuries old house.
There had to be a good story because Briana’s disappearance had been in the news.
Rachel was afraid that it would give the house a bad reputation.
But if she let me do my job, I could spin it into something romantic. Something just fanciful enough to be believable.
But that was down the road a bit.
Right now I had lots of work to do before the house would be guest ready.
Tomorrow I was interviewing a landscaper.
Nothing had been done with the yard in decades.
And since the outside was the first thing anyone saw, it needed to reflect the elegance of the house.
I couldn’t do it, but I could hire someone to do it while I focused on the inside of the house.
Rachel insisted that money was no object.
And based on what she was paying me, I believed her.
I’d run a historic bed and breakfast in Birmingham before coming here.
And even though I had a degree in hospitality management, I’d learned ten times more hands on in that job than I’d learned from books.
It had been a good job and I’d made it mine.
But I could do the same thing here.
It would just take me a little bit of time.
Unfortunately, though, time was something I didn’t have a whole lot of.
Rachel wanted this place up and running by Christmas.
Apparently it was a year overdue, so I had a lot of expectations on me.
Fortunately, pressure was something I was good at handling.
Standing at one of the French windows, I looked out toward the front lawn.
The road leading up to the circle drive in front of the house was lined with oak trees.
Trees so old, their limbs, as wide around as most tree trunks, dipped down to the ground with their weight.
It was quiet and peaceful here. Isolated.
And it was my job to bring this place back to life.
CHAPTER 2
BEAU BECQUEREL
I needed to hire more help.
I tossed a pitchfork full of hay into one of the horse stalls and went outside to haul in another bale of hay.
My brother had accumulated a dozen champion horses before he left in the early light of dawn, taking only one mare with him.
When he’d been here, he’d done all the work in the barn himself, but then he was a little bit mad.
At least that’s what everyone said.
I knew better.
I knew he’d done the work to keep his mind occupied.
But with Father sick, I had to take care of not only Bradford’s horses, but Father’s cotton, and what little time was left, I used to cultivate my tobacco plants.
It was a damn shame, too, because the tobacco plants were my passion. That and studying.
I read everything I could get my hands on.
I’d read every book in my father’s library.
And I hungered for more.
My brother and I were a lot alike in our thirst for knowledge. Except where my brother learned from others, I learned from books.
My brother was in politics. A United States senator.
I had no interest in any of that.
I liked it right here.
Quiet. Peaceful.
But at the moment, there was far too much work for one man.
My quality of life was suffering.
I tossed another pitchfork full of hay into the next stall. I’d been rotating the horses each time I went out in the fields, but there just weren’t enough hours in the day.
Even now, the sun was setting.
I liked to sit on the veranda with a good cigar, a good book, and watch the sunset.
Yes. Something was definitely going to have to change around here.
“Beau?”
It was Theo, the cook.
“Sir,” Theo said. “your mother sent me to fetch you. It’s your father. He’s taken a turn for the worse.”
“Did anyone send for Doc?”
“I don’t think so, Sir.”
Damn.
Somehow between my older brother leaving and my father taking ill, taking care of the household had fallen to me.
I had to take care of my ailing father, my mother, and my younger sister Bailey.
Bailey was supposed to have gotten married over the summer, but the wedding had been postponed, probably due to Father taking ill.
Postponing the wedding was the only good thing that had come out of all this. Once my sister married that fellow from Birmingham, Alabama, we’d likely not see much of her.
Our brother was the only one in the family who did much traveling.
With all the work around here to be done, I did good to get a good night’s sleep, much less travel to the next state.
I jabbed the pitchfork into the dirt.
Somebody had to take charge.
And apparently that someone was me.
“Would you go see if you can find him?” I asked. “Try his office in town, first.”
Theo turned to leave.
“Theo,” I said. “Take that horse on the end. You’ll get there a lot faster.”
Theo grinned. No man in his right mind would argue with taking one of these thoroughbred horses for a spin.
As Theo saddled up the chestnut mare, I wondered how I was supposed to get help out here.
“After you find Doc, stop by the newspaper office and ask them to run an ad for some help out here.”
Theo looked at me funny.
“I think the newspaper office is closed,” he said, leading the horse toward the barn door.
“Right,” I said, picking up the pitchfork. It was already dark and I was still doing chores.
I listened enviously as Theo galloped down the lane on his way to town and hurried to finish up feeding the horses.
Now I had to go inside and see what was wrong with Father.
Not that I could do anything.
And besides that, Father was not a good patient. He was cranky as hell and hard to get along with.
CHAPTER 3
MADILYNN
The next morning, I stood in the kitchen, waiting for the latte machine to heat up.
It was no Starbuck’s, but it would have to do.
If Rachel wasn’t so old-fashioned, I’d talk to her about putting a Starbuck’s franchise out here.
But, of course, she’d never go for it.
First of all, it would be a total loss with so few people coming through, and second, Rachel insisted on keeping everything as authentic as possible.
I didn’t blame her, of course.
People came here to step back in time. And having a different kind of coffee came with the territory.
I filled my cup and walked to the back, out onto the veranda.
It was still early and it looked like a morning storm was moving in.
Fall was my favorite time of the year.
Next time I went into town, I’d buy some pumpkins and set them around the front and back verandas.
I opened up my phone and checked the weather.
Yep. Definitely a storm headed this way.
And the landscaper was scheduled to come out this morning.
I needed to reschedule him for a later day.
I sat down on one of the white wooden rocking chairs and propped my feet on lower ledge of the banister.
The banister was loose. Like just about everything else around here, it needed work, too.
I would have to hire a carpenter.
I’d always heard that an unlived in house would fall apart. That people kept life in a house.
I’d always wondered how that could be true.
But now I was beginning to understand.
As long as someone lived in a house, there was someone there to fix things as they broke instead of letting the house just cave in.
The morning sunlight cast a shadow across the back lawn.
I put a hand over my eyes and peered across the glare of the sunlight.
My feet crashed to the floor and I nearly spilled my coffee.
There was a man walking toward me.
Well, not toward me, exactly, but toward the steps of the veranda.
He didn’t seem to see me.
Thinking he must be the architect, I stood up and set my coffee cup on the railing, and prepared to greet him.
He was a handsome man, though he looked a bit like he’d just woke up and hadn’t had his morning coffee yet.
He looked a bit like I felt.
His dark hair just reached the collar of his white shirt. He was wearing dark trousers and what looked like riding boots that come nearly up to his knees.
He walked up the steps toward the back door and went inside.
Not once looking in my direction.
He hadn’t seen me.
And I’d been so focused on the fact that he hadn’t seen me that it only just now occurred to me that a strange man had just gone inside my house.
CHAPTER 4
BEAU
I walked out of my father’s bedroom and blew out a breath of relief.
Not relief that Father was better. He wasn’t.
But relief that I had gotten out his dark, stuffy room.
If I ever took ill like that, I would insist that someone at least open a window.
How was he supposed to get better lying there in the dark, stale air?
Doc hadn’t made it out last night, but he assured Theo that he’d make it out today, hopefully this morning.
I was already ticking off the hundred things I had to do today.
And I was going to start off my day by checking out my tobacco plants, by God.
Right after I mucked out the horse stalls and fed them hay.
But then I would definitely make it to my tobacco plants. I had neglected them for the last two days.
I reached the top of the stairs, went down to the landing, and froze.
There was a young lad standing in the foyer, his hands on his hips.
But then he turned and I quickly realized that he wasn’t in fact a young lad.
He was a young lady.
A young lady in boy’s clothing.
My sister had been known to wear my clothes from time to time when she had been riding in the fields or doing other things around the house.
Dresses were quite cumbersome to get around in at times. So that wasn’t the part that surprised me.
The young lady was most definitely not my sister.
She was, in fact, a beautiful lady. And her britches fit her more snuggly than I’d ever seen britches fit on man or woman.
Viewing her profile, I had an excellent view of her shapely backside.
What strange woman had come into our home on an early Tuesday morning wearing boy’s clothing that hugged her figure like a glove?
It was most unseemly.
And most intriguing.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
She didn’t see me standing there.
She should have felt me staring at her.
After a quick glance over her shoulder toward the front door, she turned her attention to the clock.
The steady ticking of the grandfather clock with its chimes that marked each and every hour of my life in this house were barely noticeable to me.
It was just there.
Like the rising and setting of the sun.
But the girl was looking at the clock as though it was the one of the most unusual things she’d ever seen.
When it began to chime the hour, she gasped and jumped back.
I smiled to myself.
Whoever this girl was, I definitely wanted to meet her.
Perhaps she was one of Bailey’s friends… but Bailey didn’t have any friends.
Maybe she was one of Thomas’s relatives. A sister perhaps.
Bailey hadn’t said anything about Thomas coming to visit, much less his family.
Almost on cue, I heard my sister’s footsteps coming down the hallway.
She walked with a lightness and quickness of foot that no one else in my family had.
Looking up to the top of the stairs, I called her name to get her attention.
She stopped and looked down at me with a bemused expression.
“Is Thomas here?” I asked without preamble.
“Thomas? Hardly.”
“What about his family?”
“Why would they be here?” she asked, with a certain amount of irritation that I didn’t miss. “You may recall that we postponed the wedding.”
“Then who is the—”
I looked back downstairs, but the girl was gone.
“Who is who?” she asked, coming down to the landing to stand next to me?
“The girl,” I said, staring into an empty foyer.
Bailey rolled her eyes at me.
“You’ve been working too hard.” She turned and bounded back up the stairs. Then glanced back over her shoulder. “You should hire some help.”
“I’d like to do just that,” I said, but I was only speaking to myself.
Bailey closed her door, leaving me there alone to go downstairs and find the mystery girl on my own.
CHAPTER 5
MADILYNN
I’d been through the house three times, but there was no one there.
I thought about calling the local sheriff, but it seemed like an overreaction.
Besides, the man hadn’t looked dangerous.
By the time I made it through the house for the third time, checking all the locks as I went, I was exhausted.
Collapsing on the sofa in the main parlor, I decided I had either been hallucinating or… I had seen a ghost.
I’d been playing around with the idea of making up a story about Brianna going back in time.
But maybe there was something else I could add to my little make-believe story.
Maybe the place was haunted with people from the past.
