Spelled, page 28
But she wasn’t there.
Juliette had vanished.
Just as the building had vanished.
When I’d stopped to ask directions, that was what they had told me.
They told me that they had a vague memory of a Club 1818, but that was all.
Is that how it would be for me? With Juliette?
Would I have nothing but a vague memory of her?
I closed my eyes.
“No.” I realized I’d said the word out loud.
But, no, I wasn’t willing to accept that I’d have nothing more than a memory of her.
I should never have brought her back here.
I should have just taken her home.
She would have been safe there.
I watched as a storm brewed in the distance.
So I’d been right.
There had been a storm in the air.
I took two steps forward into the grass to where the club building had been.
But it wasn’t there.
And there was nothing I could do to bring it back.
And I knew, in my heart that there was nothing I could to bring Juliette back either.
As the rain started to fall softly, I turned and walked away.
I wasn’t giving up on seeing her again. I just needed to get some perspective.
And think about what to do next.
CHAPTER 18
JULIETTE
I had gone from standing on a street in front of the spot where the club had been to standing in front of the club with a storm raging around me.
It was dark, but the club’s second story windows were brightly lit.
Within seconds, I was soaked.
It was immediately clear that I had gone back to the future.
I turned and looked behind me for George, but I already knew that he wasn’t there.
I’d left him behind in 1836.
A flash of lighting struck near me immediately followed by a crash of thunder.
It was enough to prompt me to move.
I rushed to the door and stepped inside.
My sister, Machala, was sitting there at one of the tables looking at the phone on the table in front of her.
She saw me and gasped.
“You’re here,” she said, standing up.
I nodded.
She rushed forward, taking my arm. “We need to get you dried off.”
“Where are all the customers?” I asked.
“We closed the club,” she said. “sent them away.”
“Why?” It was odd, being here in the evening with no customers.
She held up her phone.
Right. The text.
“You got my message?” I asked.
She took a towel and handed it to me.
“The one that said you were in 1836? Yeah. I got it.”
I dried off.
“You need to change clothes,” she said, “then tell me everything.”
“Shower,” I said, vaguely remembering that I hadn’t showered since some time yesterday.
“Okay,” Machala said, leading me toward the stairs.
“Do you believe me?” I asked as we went into my room.
“That you were in the past?” Machala set out a towel for me.
“Probably,” she said. “I’ve been doing some research on it.” She turned on the water in the shower.
I nodded. I would have done the same.
“Did you tell Mom and Dad?”
“Fortunately, I didn’t have to,” she said. “With the full moon, Mom has been working overtime and Daddy had to go out of town to help his aunt with something.”
“That’s probably good,” I said.
The fewer people who knew what had happened to me, the better.
Machala left me and I stepped into the shower.
The hot water felt better than I ever could have imagined.
I was glad to be here. For the hot water. For my sister.
But I wanted to be back in 1836.
For George.
Even though there was nothing I could do since I hadn’t done anything for it to happen in the first place, my heart felt heavy.
I stood beneath the hot water until it began to run cool.
Then I stepped out and dried off, now wearing the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle.
My sister had brought me a fresh pair of jeans and a t-shirt to put on.
I felt better physically, but I couldn’t say that I felt better mentally.
I got dressed and slowly walked back down stairs.
My sister had actually closed the bar after I’d gone back in time.
And she’d done some research.
I was curious to see what she’d found.
Machala stood at the bar with a large book open in front of her.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“The library.”
“You’re amazing,” I said, sitting down beside her.
She pointed to something on the page she was reading.
“This is really fascinating,” I said. “How did you have time to go to the library?”
She looked pointedly at me.
“You do know that they deliver,” she said.
“I did not know that,” I said. “So what did you find?”
“Lots. Let’s start here.” She pointed to an obscure phrase in the book.
“There was an incident in 1836 when this club completely disappeared for about a day and a half.”
“A day and a half? That’s all?”
For the first time since I’d come home in my own time, I felt the fleeting tendrils of hope wrapping around my heart.
“So the inn comes back?” I asked.
“Yes,” she was looking at me sideways. “Did you see it disappear?”
“Not exactly, but I did see the lot without the building.”
“Then it did happen?”
“So it seems.” Why couldn’t my sister have been the one to go back in time? She was the one who believed. She’d watched the movie Somewhere in Time enough to have it memorized.
Me? I was all about numbers. Time travel was wasted on me.
“How did this happen?” I asked. “And why?”
Those were the kinds of answers I needed to make sense of things.
“They don’t have an explanation for it,” Machala said. “In fact, most people don’t believe it really happened.”
“But it did.”
She nodded.
“How did we not know that?” I asked.
“I guess it wasn’t something the realtor had to disclose,” she said. “probably didn’t even know about it.”
“You’re a genius,” I said.
“Well, there’s more.”
“I’m listening.”
“Before any of this happened and way up around Natchez, there’s a legend. A legend about a girl whose life was saved by sending her through time. Apparently that rip in time is what has caused other people to fall through that rip.”
“People and buildings.”
“Except the building thing doesn’t fit with the rest of it.”
“And it’s in the wrong place. What…”
Machala held up a finger. “They don’t have a clue. But it’s in the records so I don’t doubt it’s true.”
I swept a hand over my wet hair.
“I can attest to the building part.”
“There’s more,” Machala said. “But first maybe I should get you something to drink.”
“Just water, please.”
“Seriously?” Machala, asked as she went around the bar. “Not only does your father own a bar, but you just went through time and back again and you want water?”
“I need to focus,” I said, pulling the book closer.
Some things were stranger than fiction.
If the disappearing building was in here, maybe I could find out something about how it all happened.
And if I could figure that out, I might could make it happen again.
CHAPTER 19
GEORGE
I went home.
After staying in New Orleans another night, I went home.
I’d tossed and turned the whole night, barely sleeping.
I slept in the bed where Juliette had slept the night before
And even through the stale scent of the blankets, I could smell hints of honeysuckle and jasmine that lingered from Juliette.
After going back to the lot and seeing that nothing had changed, I’d retrieved my horse form the livery, saddled up, and started the ride home.
“I was wondering if I should come looking for you,” Father said as I slid off the horse and tied the reins to a hitching post in front of the house.
“Good thing you didn’t,” I said. “You probably would have missed me.”
“Could be,” he said. “come on inside and tell me all about your trip.
Following him across the porch and through the foyer, I heard the grandfather clock began to chime the hour.
That clock had been there as long as I could remember.
It had practically come with the house.
“Are you feeling better, Father?” I asked.
Father waved a hand.
“Doc says it’s just old age trying to set in.”
“Old age,” I said. “I don’t know why you listen to that old quack.”
Father laughed. “He’s probably right. But I’m feeling rested now. So tell me how it went.”
“Before I tell you about my meetings I said as we settled into his study. “I was wondering if you might tell me a bit about that girl who traveled through time.”
“Vaughn?” he asked, going to sit behind his desk.
“Yes. That’s her,” I said, sitting in a chair across from him. “Vaughn. What do you know about her?”
“I know that your Great Uncle Nathaniel loved her dearly.”
“But she wasn’t around very much.”
Everyone had heard about Vaughn. She was something of a legend. I’d never paid much attention to the stories. It was mostly something the women talked about.
“She was often pulled back through time for no apparent reason.”
My hopefulness tanked.
“So no one knows what causes the time travel?”
“You may as well ask why the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. It’s just one of those things that happens without any kind of explanation.”
“You believe it?” I asked.
“It’s not for me to decide. Or to judge for that matter.”
“So it really happened?”
“Yes. I saw it happen myself,” Father said, nonchalantly as though he had just said he say a streak of lightning during a thunder storm.
“You saw her travel through time?”
“I was a boy. And she didn’t know I was there. I was inside the house playing when she’d appeared on the stairs. It had only been for an instant though, before she’d vanished.”
“Has it ever happened anywhere other than here?” I asked. “that you know of.”
“No,” Father said. “The rip in time is here.”
I didn’t argue with him. He seemed more than certain about where the rip in time was.
And I hadn’t decided just yet how much to tell him.
“So,” I said. “How can someone make it happen again?”
Father laughed humorlessly.
“That’s the thing,” he said. “No one makes the spell work. It just does.”
A spell that just worked of its own accord.
Not only had the spell happened in New Orleans where it wasn’t supposed to happen, it was something that no one had any control over.
That did not bode well for me ever seeing Juliette again.
CHAPTER 20
JULIETTE
While Machala searched the Internet, I stayed old-school and started reading at the beginning of the book she had left open on the table.
It was a handwritten journal of some type, the words written with ink that were stained.
“Whose journal is this?” I asked.
Machala glanced up from her iPad.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t say.”
I kept reading. If I had to guess, from the meticulous way the letters were formed, I’d say it was written by a woman.
And the more I read, the more obvious it became.
How was it possible that a woman could love two men at the same time?
When I’m in the future with Jonathan, I miss Nathaniel.
But when I’m in the past, I miss Jonathan.
If I had to choose between them, I don’t know how it would even be remotely possible.
I love them both.
Sometimes I think I’m blessed to have two men who love me like crazy. Other times I believe I am cursed.
Instead of living in two different times, I would split myself in two and live in both.
But then I would not be whole.
Sometimes I wonder if I can will myself from one time to another.
If so, I really don’t want to know.
Because if I knew that I could choose, I would be tortured.
I looked up from the journal, feeling like I had just intruded on someone’s innermost private thoughts.
Machala looked up from her iPad.
“Anything interesting?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said. Nothing except a woman who was obviously heartbroken in spite of having two men who loved her, both of whom she loved back.
“Did you read this?” I asked.
“I only skimmed it, looking for clues about how the time travel happened,” she said.
I nodded and looked back down at the journal.
Machala didn’t understand. It didn’t just matter how it happened. It mattered that it did happen.
And it mattered that because it happened, a woman’s life was upended.
I understood that because I couldn’t stop thinking about George.
He’d called me his wife in order to protect me from being tossed out as a prostitute.
And I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to really be his wife.
I looked over at my sister again, absorbed in whatever she’d found to read on her phone.
If anyone could figure this thing out, Machala could.
She was like a dog with a bone.
Machala’s phone rang and she walked off to talk with one of her friends.
It was a stark reminder that Machala had a busy life outside of this club. Outside of her family.
I wasn’t sure if she was dating anyone at the moment. It was sometimes hard to keep up with her active social life.
But Machala would be alright.
Even without me, she would be okay.
I turned the page in the journal and continued to read.
I wanted to know more about Vaughn and her life.
And, I had to admit to myself, I wanted to know how to make the time travel happen again.
I wanted to see George.
CHAPTER 21
GEORGE
I went back to work in the indigo fields.
Life was normal again.
Except that it wasn’t.
Juliette was the first thing I thought about in the mornings and the last thing I thought about as I drifted off to sleep at night.
I didn’t know what to do. The rip in time was supposed to be here.
Yet Juliette had come back in time to New Orleans.
Were there two rips in time?
As I rode my horse along the freshly plowed fields, I contemplated that possibility.
It was possible.
It was possible that the world had rips in time all over the place.
Could a person use more than one rip in time?
I had no idea and I had a feeling that there was absolutely no one who could answer that question.
The question, then, became what was I going to do about it?
For the first time in my life, I’d met the woman that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
And she was from the future.
A future I had no access to.
None whatsoever.
Dark clouds were brewing up a storm in the west, so I headed home.
Father had told me everything he knew. Which was very little.
My other option was to speak with my mother.
It was possible that she knew more than Father did about such things.
I stabled my horse and, after brushing him, headed into the house.
Father was sequestered away in his study so Mother would be upstairs in her sitting room.
I knocked on her door and waited for permission to enter.
But instead of calling out for me to come in, she appeared at the door herself.
“Come in,” she said, motioning me inside her sitting room.
“Your father seems to think that we need to talk.” She closed the door to her sitting room.
“Father is right,” I said and sat down on the little sofa.
Mother spent a great deal of time alone in her room. Her journal lay open where she had been writing.
There was a stack of journals on a table behind her. Mother had filled all of them with her words.
I had never been allowed to read any of it.
I wondered now if any of her journals would survive the passage of time.
To me it seemed like Mother wasted far too much time scribbling who knows what down on paper.
Mother sat in a chair across from me. She studied me, searching my eyes.
“You’ve encountered a woman from the future,” she said.
I nodded once.
“In New Orleans?”
“Yes.”
She sat back and took a deep breath.
“I was hoping that my children would avoid this.”
“Avoid what?” I asked.
She laced her fingers in her lap and I knew she was about to tell me everything she knew.
“The Becquerel men have all married women from the future.”
I sat back and studied my mother, absorbing her words.
Her lips were pressed together and she tapped her fingers together.
My father was a Becquerel.
“How do you know?” I asked.
