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I walked the trail, the same way I’d come up here.
Off to my right, there was a house.
I stopped, my feet frozen to the ground.
There had not been a house there before. Not today. Not any other day.
I walked around so I could look at it from the front.
Taking my hat off, I ran my hand through my hair.
It looked someone had taken a southern mansion and dropped right here in the trees of Colorado.
It wasn’t a big house, but it was two stories with a veranda. And four white columns.
It was the oddest thing. It looked like a direct transplant from the south. And it hadn’t been there before.
With the sun starting to dip behind the mountain tops, I could see that the house was well lit up on the inside.
Every room was brightly lit.
I put my hat back on my head. There were some things a man couldn’t explain. And this was one of them.
Turning, I continued down the path.
I’d taken no more than half a dozen steps when I froze again.
A woman was running toward me.
Even though she was wearing man’s pants, I knew instantly that she was a woman. Her long brunette hair flowed behind her.
It was… Ashlyn.
She didn’t seem to see me.
Instead, she looked over her shoulder and I could see there was man running after her.
She came closer, still not seeming to see me.
It was Ashlyn.
And there was a man after her.
I held out my arms to try to stop her, but when she was only about three feet in front me, she vanished.
Just vanished.
I blinked, thinking something was wrong with my eyes.
She had vanished and so did the man behind her.
I turned in a slow circle, looking for any sign of her.
Then it registered.
The house was gone, too.
The southern house with the brightly lit rooms was gone.
And so was Ashlyn.
But she’d been close enough that I’d seen the fear in her eyes.
CHAPTER 43
ASHLYN
As much as I’d thought about and dreaded this moment happening, I wasn’t prepared.
Jeremy was bigger than I was. I couldn’t defend myself if he got his hands on me.
“Get in, Ashlyn,” he said again.
I took another step back. There was no way I was voluntarily getting in his car and he was crazy to even think it.
I took another step back and pressed my hands against my waist to keep them from trembling.
Jeremy grinned. “Now don’t be difficult,” he said.
Running my hands downward, I felt the bottle in my pocket.
I had pepper spray.
“I guess I’ll have to come get you then,” he said, opening the car door.
I pulled out the pepper spray and wrapped my hand around it.
I’d never used it. Wasn’t even sure I knew how.
As he came around the hood of the car, I glanced down and placed my finger on what I hoped was the trigger.
I stood my ground. If I was going to do this, I had to be close enough to him.
He was close enough now.
It was or never.
I lifted the pepper spray, pointed, and squeezed the trigger.
I closed my eyes, just in case I had it backwards.
But Jeremy cried out. “You bitch!”
I kept spraying a second longer, then turned and ran.
I ran into the forest, not even knowing or caring where. My only thought was to get away from Jeremy.
But within a minute, he was coming after me.
The pepper spray must have been old and no longer effective.
He was ranting and raving, calling me all sorts of not so nice names.
I kept running, just putting one foot in front of the other.
Ducking beneath low branches. Sidestepping boulders and bushes.
Vaughn’s house was behind me now, but I was drawn to it.
The lights were like a beacon of hope and safety.
I veered back in that general direction.
But no matter which way I went, somehow Jeremy stayed a steady distance behind me.
It was almost dark now, but I raced toward the lights of her windows.
My breathing became labored. I hadn’t realized I’d gotten this out of shape so quickly. Being on the run wasn’t conducive to regular exercise.
I’d come so far. Been through so much.
And now it was all for nothing.
Jeremy had found me anyway.
No matter what I did, he was always there.
I looked over my shoulder as I approached the house.
He looked rabid.
The pepper spray hadn’t stopped him, but it had slowed him down.
I would get away from him.
I had to.
CHAPTER 44
HARRISON
“I need to see that woman,” I said. “Charlotte.”
I pushed my way into the saloon and walked right up to the bar. Trent was there, talking with a couple of men. I interrupted them.
“Charlotte?” Trent echoed. “She’s not here.”
I jammed my fist on the smooth wood of the bar.
“I saw here a few days ago,” I said. “Where is she?”
Trent shook his head. “Charlotte’s not here anymore.” He was looking at me like I was addled.
I didn’t care. I needed to see the woman who had promised to find me a wife.
She would know what this was all about.
I didn’t know how I knew this, but I did.
She was somehow connected with all this.
Trent held up his hands. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll find her myself.”
I started toward the back where the rooms were. To find the room where I’d met with Charlotte.
“Hey,” Trent said. “You’re not allowed back there.”
“Just let him go,” I heard one of the other men say.
I was going anyway. I didn’t care if Trent liked it or not.
There was too much insanity going on around here.
I needed to get help for Ashlyn.
I stopped two women, whores, in the hallway to ask if they’d seen Charlotte.
They both skittered away from me.
I must have looked about as crazy as I felt.
Standing in the middle of the hallway, I pressed my fingers over my eyes.
If I couldn’t find Charlotte, I didn’t know what I was going to do.
I didn’t know what other avenue to explore.
One of the doors opened and Charlotte grabbed my arm.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice low as she pulled me into the room and closed the door behind us.
“Looking for you.”
“I’m trying to maintain a low profile,” she said.
I dragged my hat off my head. “My apologies, ma’am,” I said. “But… it’s Ashlyn.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“She’s in trouble.”
“How do you know?” Charlotte asked. I could see the alarm in her expression even in the dim candlelight.
“You know she’s missing, right?”
Charlotte nodded slowly, but didn’t say anything.
“Well, I saw her. Up by that… house… by the river.”
“House?”
I was all in now, no reason to back down.
“I only saw it for a moment, but it was there. All lit up from the inside.”
“My God,” Charlotte whispered.
“But that’s not the point. The point is. I saw Ashlyn. She was running and there was a man chasing her.”
They were probably going to send me away to the insane asylum, but what the hell?
“Then they both just vanished.”
CHAPTER 45
ASHLYN
Vaughn’s back door opened and a second later, I saw her standing there.
She’d asked me to leave earlier. She’d said I wasn’t right for Harrison.
But she was wrong.
That’s why I had come here. To tell her that.
I could feel Jeremy running behind me.
He was quiet now, gasping as I was.
I gave myself one last shove and dashed toward Vaughn, running as fast as I could.
As I raced up the back stairs, she stepped aside for me to go through the door.
Once I was inside, she closed the door and locked it.
I stood with my hands on my knees, gasping.
“Jeremy…” I said. “He…”
“Don’t worry,” Vaughn said. “He can’t hurt you now.”
“But…” I stood up. Of course he could. He was a mad man.
A door couldn’t keep him out, much less windows.
The man had tracked me across the country.
“Come,” Vaughn said, calmly. “Sit down.”
She led me to the parlor where we’d had tea earlier and ushered me to sit on the sofa.
A fire blazed in the fireplace.
Other than the light from the fire and the glow of candle on a table, the room was dark. And quiet.
Had the electricity gone out?
The grandfather tolled the hour. Nine o’clock.
How had it gotten so late?
I knew I hadn’t been running for hours.
Time was off.
Vaughn sat across from me and now she was wearing a long dress in a shimmery bronze color.
Her hair was pulled up, leaving a few tendrils falling around her face. She clasped her hands in her lap and looked at me.
I struggled to steady my breathing while keeping one eye on the doorway.
I listened for any sign of Jeremy breaking in.
What were we going to do if he did?
“Maybe we could call the police?” I said.
That, of course, had never worked.
But with Vaughn as a witness, perhaps it would work this time.
“It’s not necessary,” she said.
“I don’t understand.”
She smiled at me. “I’m pleased that you came back.”
I wiped my brow. I wasn’t sure what to say.
I didn’t know what was going on.
Nothing was adding up.
Vaughn was the same, yet different.
It was almost as though… as though… I’d stepped back in time… again…
CHAPTER 46
HARRISON
The moon was bright, lighting our way back up the path that led to the river.
And the house I’d seen that wasn’t supposed to be there.
Charlotte walked quickly alongside me.
“There are a lot of things that you won’t understand,” she said.
“I already don’t understand anything,” I said.
One of those things I had trouble understanding was how she could be so calm.
I’d told her some very disturbing things.
She may think me a madman, but if she did, she didn’t let on about it.
When she didn’t answer, I asked. “Can you tell me anything?”
She glanced at me. Shook her head.
“All in due course,” she said.
“In due course.”
Ashlyn—the woman I wanted to marry—was in danger and all she could say was all in due course.
As we rounded the curve, I caught sight of the house. The one with the bright lights.
“This house wasn’t here before,” I said under my breath. I’d given up on getting information from Charlotte.
But she surprised me.
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t. And it isn’t supposed to be here now.”
I stopped. “What?”
Charlotte took a deep breath, but kept walking.
I hurried to catch up with her.
As crazy as all this was, Charlotte held the key.
Without her, I would never have a chance to find Ashlyn.
She stopped in front of the house. In front of the steps leading up to the veranda.
I’d never seen a house so lit up from the inside. Usually after dark, a house would be in shadows. Maybe lit by a candle or a lantern.
But this. This was different.
And the house was different. It was almost like it was alive. Breathing.
“What’s going on?” I asked, putting my hands on my hips and staring at Charlotte.
She bit her lip and looked perplexed.
Not much to inspire confidence.
“Wait here,” she said and started up the steps.
“No,” I said. “I—”
She turned and held up a hand. “Harrison,” she said. “Wait here. I have to find out what’s going on first.”
“Ok. I’ll wait.” I crossed my arms. I didn’t like it, but she wasn’t giving me much of a choice.
She nodded and turned back. A minute later, she disappeared inside.
Something felt different.
The air maybe.
The sounds.
The house was… humming.
And there was a roar in the distance. Not very loud. But now that I was alone, I heard it.
Something strange was happening.
It didn’t matter, though, as long as I found Ashlyn.
She was what mattered.
CHAPTER 47
ASHLYN
Someone knocked on the door.
I jumped. “What if it’s Jeremy?” I asked.
“It’s not Jeremy,” Vaughn said.
“How can you be so sure?”
Vaughn looked at me a moment as though she didn’t quite know what to say.
“Look around,” she said finally. “Does anything look different?”
Everything looked different.
It looked like the past. But I hadn’t done anything to get back in the past.
Just like I hadn’t done anything at the saloon to go back to the future.
“Oh,” I said. “This is the past. But… you’re here.”
“Yes,” Vaughn said.
“How?”
“Time as you know it doesn’t really exist for me anymore. I have to answer the door.”
How could time not exist?
Feeling a bit annoyed because nothing made sense and Vaughn seemed to think it should, I stood in front of the fireplace and waited.
How could I go from one time period to another without the time machine thing that Brooklyn had used?
At least, Jeremy couldn’t get to me here.
But without Harrison, this was another place to hide from Jeremy.
Feeling a bit lightheaded, I sat on the couch to wait.
The front door opened and closed.
Then I heard Vaughn talking with someone.
“Something’s gotten mixed up,” the guest said.
“So it seems,” Vaughn said. “This whole process is new. We were wrong to think that we could control it.”
“I don’t know,” the other girl said. “I have Harrison out there and he’s willing to go to the ends of the earth to find Ashlyn.”
Harrison was here? I sat up, and peered over the back of the couch, my heart racing.
That meant… that meant Harrison had survived.
He was alive and well.
And not only that, he’d somehow found me.
“Maybe there’s hope then,” Vaughn said. “I’m just not convinced that we should be trying to manipulate time like this.”
“Your daughter, Anna, believed it was possible. And so much work has been done on it since she figured out the whole program.”
“Yes. She did believe in it.”
I heard a smile in Vaughn’s voice.
“Maybe the timing wasn’t perfect. Maybe they had to find each other. You know. On their own.”
“That’s not it,” Vaughn said. “We already did that, by setting up the ruse.”
“Sometimes it takes a minute.”
I couldn’t hear anything else they said. The grandfather clock began to chime hour, blocking out their conversation.
I sat up.
Maybe I should just go find Harrison. If he was here, I needed to see him.
But then the electricity came back on with a jolt, lighting up the room with bright lights.
And I knew. It didn’t mean the power had come back on.
It meant I was in the future again.
CHAPTER 48
HARRISON
I was just about to give up on waiting when Charlotte came back to the door.
“You can come in now,” she said.
I walked up the stairs and through the door she held open.
There was an older woman, maybe late middle-age, standing next to Charlotte in an elegantly furnished foyer.
The older woman wore a long dress with a brooch at her neck. She could easily have passed for a much younger lady except for the lines around her eyes and mouth. She was stunningly beautiful and her eyes were what I could only call mesmerizing.
She smiled at me as I stood in the doorway holding my hat, no doubt looking quite uncomfortable.
“Harrison” she said. “My name is Vaughn Becquerel.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you ma’am,” I said. “Charlotte seems to think you might know where Ashlyn is.”
Vaughn nodded once. “I do, but first we need to have a talk.”
I glanced at Charlotte then back to Vaughn. “I signed something with her. I paid the fee. Has something changed?”
The two ladies glanced at each other.
“Not really,” she said. “But I think we owe you an explanation.”
“When can I see Ashlyn?”
“Soon,” Charlotte said, urging me to follow into a room off to the right of the house.
The room was bright with lights. Not candles or lanterns. Just lights.
The room was a study. A study with a woman’s touch. There were half a dozen flickering candles. Flowers on the end tables. And a setting of tea on the coffee table. One wall was lined with bookcases filled with leather-bound books.
