Page 34 of Stolen Time

Anyway, both my feet and my back hurt, although at least I’d been working while wearing the new flats I’d gotten from the mercantile two days earlier and hadn’t been standing in heels for the better part of three hours.

Both Ruth and Timothy were gone, saying they had an errand to run in Prescott and that they’d be back sometime in the late afternoon. Ruth had even offered for me to come along, but I’d politely excused myself. Having the run of the house for a while seemed like an appealing prospect, especially since I knew it would be easier to concentrate on using my magic if no one else was around.

A clock ticked loudly on the mantel, but it was the only real sound in the room except for the happy buzzing of bees and the faint rustle of leaves in the trees outside the open windows. It was warm, although not unpleasantly so; the weather had continued to cool from its peak the day I arrived in 1926, and some clouds forming to the east seemed to signal we might get an early monsoon storm.

Or maybe it wasn’t early for this day and age. I had no idea how much the climate had shifted between then and my own now, and in the end, I supposed it really didn’t matter.

Not if I wasn’t planning to stay here.

I closed my eyes and breathed in and out. Visualizing my room back home hadn’t seemed to help me very much in my first attempt at this, so this time I was trying a different tack, one I hoped might be successful.

Rather than narrowing my focus, I was going to take it as wide as possible.

I thought of Jerome’s narrow streets filled with self-driving cars, with people taking selfies in front of the shops andrestaurants or at the gorgeous overlook just a few yards from Rachel’s store, where you could stand in front of the railing and get an amazing shot of the Verde Valley and Sedona’s red rocks beyond. And then I made my focus expand even further, taking in the narrow stripe of Interstate 17 as it cut through the northern half of the state, ranging from my hometown in Flagstaff all the way down to Phoenix. Cars moving there, too, and jets in the air, full of people traveling with laptops and tablets and phones, all those indispensable items in a world that the residents here in 1926 couldn’t even begin to imagine.

That was my world…the world of the twenty-first century. I belonged there, not more than a hundred years earlier.

For just the barest second, the room seemed to waver around me. I caught a glimpse of a space of similar dimensions, only with one wall missing and everything else painted bright white. Soft furniture entirely unlike the prim Victorian-era pieces that surrounded me now, and the faintest background hum that I thought must be coming from an air conditioning unit.

Just as quickly as it had come, though, the vision disappeared, and I was still sitting in Ruth’s back parlor, with a soft breeze blowing at the curtains.

Damn it.

I’d been close, though…much closer than I’d been last time. Although I couldn’t be sure, I guessed I might have been seeing what this house looked like now, in my proper century. Part of the reason why I’d attempted this exercise here rather than in my bedroom was that I’d thought it would be better to emerge in a TV room or family room, rather than someplace much more private.

And the magic had almost worked. True, I had no real way of knowing whether what I’d witnessed had been from my actual year or one even five or ten years earlier, but it definitely hadn’t been 1926 or anything close, despite not catching a glimpse ofany technology that might have provided better clues to the decade I was seeing.

I rubbed my palms over my pleated skirt, then got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen. Ruth had told me there was a pitcher of lemonade in the icebox, and a cool, refreshing drink felt like just what I needed right then.

After pouring myself a glass, I leaned against the butcher-block countertop and glanced around me. As always, the kitchen was spotlessly clean, with the breakfast dishes dried and put away before Ruth and Timothy left on their errand and the damp rag hanging on its hook by the door. I had to admit it was a cheerful place, what with its yellow-painted cabinets and checked curtains at the windows, but it wasn’tmyplace. Even that teeny glimpse of this house in the future made me realize I didn’t belong here.

Especially if Seth had decided I was a bad bet.

Just as those unhelpful thoughts were passing through my mind, someone knocked at the door. At once, I set down my glass of lemonade and went to answer it. Back in the day — or, I supposed, forward in the day — I would never have answered the door if I wasn’t expecting someone, because otherwise it would have been some kind of solicitor, but I knew that wasn’t how people operated here. Other McAllisters seemed to drop by Ruth’s house all the time, whether to leave some flowers from their yard, or a jar of honey, or just to chat a bit.

Definitely a social bunch. But then, it wasn’t as if they had phone screens to distract them. In a way, I was still kind of surprised by how much I didn’t miss my cell phone, the constant pull of social media or texts from friends or just my mom sending me the latest image from her garden in bloom. Even on quiet days in this Jerome of the past, there always seemed to be enough happening right in front of me that I was just fine with focusing on the here and now.

I didn’t recognize the boy standing on Ruth’s front porch, although, since I didn’t get the tingle I usually felt when I encountered a strange witch or warlock, I guessed he must be a civilian. He looked around thirteen or fourteen, maybe a little older, thin and wearing shabby linen pants with suspenders and a shirt that could use a good bleaching or three. Dust smudged his cheek, and that, in addition to the matching blotches of reddish dirt on his clothing, made me think he must work at the mines.

So much for child labor laws.

“Miss Rowe?” the boy asked, and I nodded.

He handed over a folded piece of paper, which also bore a few smudges. “Mr. McAllister asked me to give this to you.”

“Thank you,” I said, mystified…or possibly not so mystified. Maybe this was Seth’s way of dumping me by proxy.

Having delivered the letter, the boy nodded at me before hurrying down the porch steps.

All right, then.

I closed the door and went back into the kitchen, thinking it might be a good idea to have a few more sips of lemonade before I opened the piece of paper from Seth.

If it was even from him. There were a whole lot of “Mr. McAllister”s in Jerome.

A silly idea, though. Why would any of the other McAllister warlocks have anything to do with me?

Well, except Charles, possibly, except I had no idea why he’d want to drop me a note. He’d made it pretty clear that he wasn’t terribly thrilled with me.