Page 66 of Stolen Time
Molly smiled. In her clear-cut features and bright blue eyes, I could see something of Seth, although of course, he was much taller and sturdier. “Just let me know if you need help with anything.”
I nodded, then headed over to the part of the store where they kept small bibs and bobs like combs and brushes and scissors, nail files, that kind of thing. Since I’d given myself a nasty hangnail that morning, it seemed a good idea to get a file and a small pair of nail scissors.
After some deliberation, I selected the items I wanted and headed over to the cash register. As Molly was ringing me up, I ventured, “You have so many different items here in the store that I can see why Seth needed to work late yesterday evening to help with inventory.”
She blinked at me, her pretty features now a study in puzzlement. “‘Inventory’?” she echoed, then shook her head. “Oh, no. I think you must have misheard him. We always do inventory on Sundays, since that’s the only day we’re closed. And we’re not planning to do that for a little while, anyway, since we took stock of everything at the beginning of May.”
Interesting. So, Seth had lied to me about why he needed to cancel our date. Although irritation flared, I told myself I was the last person to be getting on my high horse about him misrepresenting something, not when I’d been lying about pretty much everything since the moment I awakened in his bungalow and realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
Or even in the twenty-first century.
I put on a silly little smile, one I hoped Molly would think was my way of laughing at myself for getting things so wrong. “Oh, I suppose I did,” I said. “We were talking about the store, and it seems I misinterpreted what he said about doing inventory.”
She handed me my change and the little paper bag of sundries I’d just purchased. “It’s fine. Do you want me to let him know you stopped by?”
“No, that’s all right,” I said hastily. “I know he’s busy. I’ll leave him a note later.”
“I’m sure he would like that,” Molly replied. “You have a good day, Miss Rowe.”
A hasty nod and another smile, and I made my escape. As I was walking up the hill toward Ruth and Timothy’s house, though, that smile soon turned into a puzzled frown.
What exactly had Seth been doing last night that would have made him cancel our date? I knew it couldn’t have been our argument, because he’d already called off our evening of dancing and fun in Cottonwood before he even discovered I was a witch.
No, something else had to be going on here…and I was determined to find out what it was.
In the end, my plan was pretty much the same one as I’d used earlier in the day — to lurk near the store and see where Seth went after he got off work. Maybe he would go straight home and I’d end up feeling like an idiot for being so suspicious, but if he hadn’t told me the truth about doing inventory the night before, then I really had no idea what else he might be hiding.
I got out of dinner by telling Ruth that I was going to walk down to the mercantile and meet him once he was done for the day, and luckily, she didn’t seem to detect anything suspicious about that story, instead only telling me she hoped I would have a nice time.
Well, I didn’t know about nice, but I hoped it would be informative…and not leave me with some proverbial egg on my face.
Hanging around on the sidewalk in front of the store wouldn’t work at all, obviously, but if Seth was going straight home, then he’d turn down Hull Avenue and walk to his bungalow along that route. At that time of year, all the treesand shrubs and flowers in Jerome were happy and full, and I was able to lurk behind a couple of exuberant-looking boxwood shrubs and be mostly hidden that way.
However, he didn’t come down the steep sidewalk just beyond my hiding place. No, I heard the rumble of a truck starting up and realized the sound was Seth getting ready to drive off in the big green Dodge the family used for business.
Another errand in Cottonwood?
The truck approached, and I crouched lower, praying he wouldn’t be able to see me. It was moving slowly, heading toward the street, and a wild idea sprang into my head.
I didn’t stop to think. No, I bolted out from my hiding place and jumped into the truck’s bed just as Seth began to make the turn onto Hull Avenue.
The bed was composed of bare boards, and I held back a curse as my hipbone collided with the hard surface. It wasn’t exactly clean back there, either, and my pretty green dress was almost immediately smudged.
Well, it wasn’t anything that Ruth and her trusty Fels Naptha bar — and maybe a little magic — couldn’t fix.
The truck turned right and then right again onto Main Street, heading up the hill past the fire station and the pretty little Catholic church — a near shambles in my own time — past the sanatorium that would one day become the Grand Hotel, and then rumbled its way up the mountain.
Was Seth going to Prescott? I had to admit I wasn’t looking forward to crouching back here that whole time, especially since I knew it would be very cold at the top of the mountain, much chillier than the kind of temperatures my lightweight dress had been designed for.
But then the truck slowed, and we turned onto a narrow dirt road that looked as though it led to the mine.
Why would Seth be coming back here? Hadn’t he quit his job?
Somehow I doubted he’d be returning to the United Verde after hours like this just to close out his locker.
I didn’t dare poke my head up too far lest he realize he had a stowaway, so I couldn’t see much except scrubby hillsides looming above me. This didn’t look like the kind of open pit the United Verde used to extract the precious copper ore from the earth here, and I wondered again where Seth was going…and what he was up to.
Eventually, the truck came to a stop. I waited, holding my breath and thinking of what the hell I was going to say when he discovered me back here.