15. Over the Hill

15

OVER THE HILL

So far, I thought I’d done a pretty good job of getting along in the early twentieth century. At least there was running water and food that seemed mostly familiar, even if a lot of it was heavier than what I was used to eating. Sure, the clothing was a little odd, and there were days when I thought I would have cheerfully committed some serious mayhem for central air conditioning, but overall, I wanted to give myself a mental pat on the back for acclimating as well as I had.

Right now, though, I would have killed for a single functioning computer or tablet or phone. Hell, I would have been okay with a TV and a decent lineup of streaming stations to distract myself.

There wasn’t anything like that in 1926, though. Only books and a radio, and everything I heard on there was just crackly and distorted enough that I didn’t like listening to it at all.

True, Ruth gave me plenty of chores to do, nothing so horribly taxing that I might start to feel like Cinderella or anything close, but just enough to remind me I wasn’t allowed to be simply a houseguest and nothing more. The work was something of a distraction.

Not enough, though.

Not nearly enough.

Yesterday had been Abigail’s twenty-first birthday party. I wasn’t invited, of course; I wasn’t family. But Ruth and Timothy had attended, leaving me to wonder how it had gone, whether they were going to commence kissing consorts right away, or whether they were going to give it a little time so they could have a decent roster of candidates lined up.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how it all worked. The McAllisters of my time had a prima -in-waiting, of course, Angela’s daughter Emily. She was almost five years older than me, so her all-important birthday — and the consort search — had all gone down while I was attending high school in Flagstaff, and she was happily paired off with the man fate had decreed would be her consort. And, even though Angela was married to the primus of my clan, none of it had seemed all that important at the time, not when I’d been much more interested in school and friends and which kind of car my parents were going to buy me for my sixteenth birthday.

Now I wished I’d paid more attention to what was going on with Emily and the search for her consort, even as I tried to tell myself that they might do things very differently in the 1920s than they had in the mid-twenty-first century.

My chores done for the day, I’d retired to the front parlor with a book, figuring I should do what I could to lose myself in someone else’s story. The volume I’d chosen was Sense and Sensibility, a novel I’d found close to tedious when I had to read it in a college lit class.

Now, though, it felt more reassuring than I’d expected, a piece of familiarity in a world utterly unlike mine. And although Elinor and Marianne Dashwood weren’t witches, I found I could relate to their predicament, to the unfortunate necessity of relying on the kindness of others thanks to their reduced circumstances, than I’d thought.

After all, I would have been in a real world of hurt if Ruth and Timothy McAllister hadn’t taken me in.

The book helped distract me a little, even though I still found my attention caught by any kind of movement outside the window, whether that was a car driving past or one of the neighbors walking by with their dog on a leather leash.

And then….

I set down the book, my heart beginning to pound.

Was that Seth coming up the front walk?

Yes, it was. He wore a dark suit and tie, not the sort of thing I would have expected to see him sporting after a day at the mine.

Come to think of it, the time was barely three-thirty, far too soon for him to have gotten off work.

He wasn’t at work, my mind told me. He was off giving Abigail the consort’s kiss. That’s why he’s all dressed up.

And if he was here now….

I laid the attached ribbon along the page I’d been reading and set the book aside. Maybe it would have been better to keep reading until he got to the front door, but I knew I wouldn’t have been able to retain a single word about the travails of the Dashwood sisters if I had made the attempt.

No, I sat on the couch, heart beating far too quickly, until there came a soft knock at the door.

Luckily, by that point Ruth and Timothy were just fine with me answering the door if they were occupied elsewhere, so I didn’t even have to hesitate before responding to that fateful knock.

Sure enough, Seth stood outside on the porch, relief clear in every line of his handsome face.

“Good afternoon, Deborah,” he said. “Would you like to go for a drive?”

I didn’t even hesitate. “Love to,” I replied.

We drove into Cottonwood, back to the restaurant where he’d taken me for dinner the week before. Maybe it would have been prettier to go up to our picnic spot on Mingus Mountain, but with him in his good clothes and me in a dress and heels, it just made more sense to return to a more civilized place.

At that hour of the afternoon, the restaurant wasn’t very full. Seth asked the hostess for a quiet spot, so we sat in the back of the place, far away from the counter where people were drinking coffee or eating slices of pie.

And that was actually what we ordered — apple for him, berry for me, accompanied by a couple of tall iced teas. After our waitress dropped off the food, I felt as if it was finally time to ask the question I’d been holding back for the past fifteen minutes.

“So…you got your family business handled?” I inquired, and he nodded, looking far more cheerful than I’d seen him in a while.

“Yes, it’s all taken care of,” he replied. “It’s nothing I’ll need to worry about ever again.”

That was all he said, but because I’d already read between the lines, I knew the consort kiss had been a swing and a miss for the McAllister prima -in-waiting. She was probably feeling as disappointed as he was relieved.

But although some part of me could be sympathetic to Abigail for missing out on having someone handsome and smart and kind as her consort, a much, much larger part was simply happy that Seth had been knocked out of the running, and the two of us could go back to the way things were.

What that meant exactly, I didn’t know for sure. I hadn’t spent all my time while he was waiting to audition to be the new McAllister clan consort simply moping or weeding the garden — no, when I was alone in my borrowed room, I’d tried several times to send myself back when I was supposed to be. And on each occasion, I’d utterly failed. Maybe I could have done more, made multiple attempts each day, and yet I wasn’t sure whether that would have made any difference at all.

How long was I supposed to wait before I resigned myself to being here permanently? It had already been almost two weeks, and it sure felt as though two more weeks would pass, and two more after that, and….

At some point, I’d have to admit I didn’t have the power to get back to the twenty-first century. I hoped Bellamy McAllister wasn’t too wracked with guilt over daring me to go into the mine, and I prayed my family would someday be able to get past the strange disappearance of their middle child. After all, my father had left behind his own family and friends to make a life with my mother in the modern world, so this sort of circumstance wouldn’t be quite as strange for them as it might have been for a lot of other people.

In the meantime, I reassured myself that all my tenure here in 1926 Jerome was slipping by in the past, and therefore neither I nor anyone else I knew had even been born yet, and if we hadn’t been born, then they couldn’t know I was missing. Or at least, I hoped that was how it worked. Not being an expert on time travel despite my dubious gift…or maybe because of it…I couldn’t really say for sure.

The only thing I knew with any certainty was how much I cared for Seth McAllister, and how much it had hurt to think he might be Abigail’s consort. All those worries had been for nothing, apparently, and that meant Seth was free to pursue a relationship with me.

Since it didn’t look as though I was going anywhere soon, either, how long was I going to place caution over the truth of my heart?

Judging by the thrill that went through me as our gazes met across the table, not for very long at all.

“That’s good news,” I said. Then I paused, wondering how bold I should be. Even though I’d been in 1926 for the greater part of two weeks, I still didn’t have a completely firm handle as to how a young woman my age was supposed to act.

Then again, sometimes you just had to say, screw it.

“I know it was a couple of days,” I went on. “But it felt like forever.”

“You missed me?” Seth asked, face lighting up like a kid who just found out Santa was real.

“Of course I missed you,” I replied. “I don’t think I really understood how much I enjoyed our time together until you had to step away for a while.”

He was quiet for a moment, sun-browned fingers playing with the handle of his fork. “Well, there’s no need for that to happen again,” he told me. “So we should do something fun to celebrate.”

“Isn’t this fun?” I asked, only half-joking. That pie was damn good.

Amused crinkles showed around his gentian-blue eyes as he grinned back at me. “Sure, it’s fun,” he said. “But I was thinking about something a little more interesting than a couple of slices of pie. How about we drive into Prescott tomorrow night and have dinner there?”

I had to admit that sounded like a fun outing. Despite living in Jerome for nearly a month in my own time, I still hadn’t driven over the mountain to visit the former state capital. Sure, I’d gone there once when I was a kid, but I had to admit there hadn’t been much about it that wowed me, except maybe the big park in front of the historical courthouse downtown. Well, that and the decidedly Wild West–themed restaurant where we had lunch and I’d had the best chocolate milkshake ever.

All the same, it also seemed like quite a drive to take on a weeknight, probably at least an hour each way. That might have been generous, considering I had no idea what the roads in 1926 looked like. Then again, a big part of the journey would be taken up by traveling the switchbacks on 89A — well, Highway 79 in the 1920s — and even in the newest and smartest self-driving car in the world, you could only go so fast because of all the mountainous hairpin turns.

“We won’t be out too late?” I asked, knowing how dubious I sounded.

Another of those brilliant smiles. “I don’t have a curfew, Deborah. Did my aunt Ruth give you one?”

I couldn’t help making a face. “Of course not. I was only worried about you being out so late when you have to get up and go to work the next morning.”

He made a dismissive sound before scooping up another bite of apple pie. “It won’t be late enough to make a difference. So…I can pick you up at six-thirty tomorrow?”

What would be the point in protesting further? I wanted to spend the evening with him, and he was a big boy. He knew that missing a little sleep wouldn’t be a huge deal, even if we ended up coming back much later than expected.

Besides, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was looking forward to taking that scenic drive in his convertible. My hair might be a mess by the time we were done, but it would still be a lot of fun.

“It’s a date,” I told him.

As promised, Seth was at the door to Ruth and Timothy’s house right at six-thirty to pick me up. Any diffidence Ruth might have tried to hide over me seeing Seth was now completely gone, telling me the only reason she’d been concerned was his standing as a possible consort to Abigail. But with that fun little trial by fire now over with, it sure seemed as if we had her blessing. Not, of course, that she was the one to give said blessing — that would be Seth’s parents’ role — and yet I got the impression the McAllisters weren’t too upset by our budding relationship.

It made sense, in a way; all witch clans needed to intermarry with civilians to avoid the dangers of inbreeding, and even though I might have been a little problematic to some of them due to my memory loss, I was still a young, healthy woman who would make a good addition to the family. Also, as time wore on and no one appeared to claim me, they were probably thinking it was clear that whoever I was, I certainly didn’t have a husband or even a fiancé, or surely they would have heard of someone trying to find me.

That would never happen, of course, for the simple reason that anyone who knew of my existence wouldn’t be born for decades.

We climbed into Seth’s ’24 Dodge — which was a sweet ride, no matter what century you were in — and headed up the highway. Because we’d be out after dark, I brought a borrowed wrap of Ruth’s along, although it currently rested in my lap along with my purse.

Between the wind noise and the rumble from the car’s flathead engine, there wasn’t much use in talking. That was all right, though. For me, it was enough to be sitting there with Seth only a foot or so away, to see his fine profile caught by the light of the late afternoon sun whenever we moved out of the shadow of a stand of trees or a rocky outcropping.

We went past the little picnic area where we’d shared a meal nearly a week ago, but it slipped by quickly enough as we continued to climb, now surrounded by a ponderosa forest that again didn’t seem all that different from how it looked in my own time. The real change I noticed was when we came down the western side of the mountain and into Prescott Valley, which didn’t seem to contain anything except some widely scattered farms and ranches. In the twenty-first century, it was filled with tracts of homes and the inevitable mini-malls and shopping centers, but now all I saw was miles of dry golden grass punctuated by the occasional split-rail fence and grove of trees, all of which appeared to indicate a nearby homestead.

I had to admit this version of the landscape was a lot prettier.

Prescott itself hadn’t sprawled nearly as much, either, and consisted mainly of the neighborhoods of older homes close to downtown I remembered from the time when I’d visited with my parents when I was around ten. Of course, those houses now were shiny and new, some of them so freshly built they didn’t have trees planted yet.

The courthouse was the same, though, as were a lot of the buildings in the town’s historic section, even if the businesses that occupied them were utterly different.

Well, except the venue where we appeared to be headed.

Seth pulled up to the curb and parked in front of the Palace Restaurant, the same place my parents had taken us kids when we visited Prescott. As far as I could tell, it didn’t look much different, although I noticed the word “bar” was conspicuously missing from the signage.

Another casualty of Prohibition, I supposed.

I must have been staring, because Seth asked, “Is this place familiar to you?”

Surely it couldn’t hurt to say it was. In fact, it might help to let a few details start to leak out, if only to give everyone hope that my memories might begin to come back at some point. After all, if I was going to entertain even the slight possibility of remaining here in the past, I’d have to figure out some way of telling him the truth about who I was and where I’d come from.

No matter how awkward such a conversation might turn out to be.

“Maybe,” I allowed, then looked around the street, from the row of buildings to our right to the imposing courthouse and its park to our left. “Something makes me feel as if I’ve seen it before, although I can’t say for sure.”

Even that measured response appeared to be enough to cheer him, because he was smiling as he came around to open my car door. “Well, then,” he said, “let’s go in and see if anything else jogs your memory.”

He took me inside, which again didn’t seem all that different from the restaurant I remembered. Possibly a few of the details about the enormous carved bar weren’t quite the same, and the waitresses wore black dresses with white aprons rather than the replica-Victorian getups that seemed to be the restaurant uniform in my day, but still, my surroundings weren’t too dissonant.

Even though it was nearly eight, the place was still busy enough. We had to wait a few minutes for a table, but soon enough, we were guided to a nice, quiet booth in a corner, a spot where I thought no one would pay too much attention to us.

“What do you think of Prescott?” Seth asked after the maitre d’ left us to peruse the menus.

“It’s bigger than I thought it would be,” I replied.

His mouth quirked. “Is that because you’re comparing it to Jerome and Cottonwood?”

“Possibly,” I allowed. “Or maybe I do come from here, but because I can’t remember for sure, something about it doesn’t feel quite right.”

“I suppose I could see that.” He stopped there, as if searching for what he should say next. Then his expression brightened and he added, “Maybe you’ll see someone here who recognizes you.”

Absolutely zero chance of that happening, but I wouldn’t tell him that, not when he was looking so hopeful. It sure seemed as though he also believed I didn’t have any kind of significant other, thanks to the way no one had shown up in Jerome in search of their missing fiancée or wife.

Which meant Seth must believe no barriers stood in the way of us pursuing a relationship. Not exactly true — this wasn’t my time, even if it was sort of my place, at least in an adopted sort of way — but since it didn’t seem as if my powers wanted to send me back where I belonged, why should I try to fight the connection between us?

For all I knew, I’d zapped myself to 1926 because my often wonky gift had somehow realized the only man for me was alive back then, and not in my present.

Stranger things had happened in the witch world, after all.

“Maybe,” I allowed. “I suppose we’ll just have to see what happens.”

Seth seemed satisfied with that response, because he nodded and then looked down at the menu.

Meaning I should probably do the same thing. Just like the restaurant where we’d eaten in Cottonwood, this place seemed to heavily favor steaks and pork chops and fried chicken. I supposed I shouldn’t have expected anything else, but still, I found myself craving a salad or pizza or even some Indian food.

However, while I didn’t know much about the history of dining out in America, I could guess that cuisines from other countries probably weren’t too common in the western states, despite the Chinese food I’d eaten on my first date with Seth. If I ever got home, then I could stuff myself silly with curry or shawarma or pad thai.

In the meantime, the roast chicken plate seemed the best choice if I wanted to avoid anything too heavy.

Seth and I looked up from our menus at almost the same time, and a smile flickered around the edges of his mouth.

“What did you decide on?” he asked.

“The chicken,” I replied.

“Their steaks are very good,” he said, and for a second, I could only stare at him blankly.

Then I realized he was probably trying to hint that I didn’t need to settle for chicken if I was only doing so because I was worried about the cost of the meal. Obviously, he would never come right out and say such a thing aloud.

“I’m sure they are,” I said easily. “But I’ve been eating a lot of heavy food lately. Chicken just sounds better to me tonight.”

At once, he appeared to relax. “Oh, I can understand that, especially with how warm it’s been the past few days.”

I smiled at him in response, and the waiter came over and took our orders. While we were waiting for our food, we chatted about the weather and about his work, how they were planning to start blasting a new open pit for the mine, and how I needed to prepare myself because it could get very loud.

“We do our best to make the pits not too visible from town,” Seth went on. “But there’s not much we can do about the noise.”

Probably not. In my time, you could still see the terraced remnants of the pits as you were driving up toward Jerome from Clarkdale, but once you were in the little settlement itself, you barely could tell they were there. Yet another thing that hadn’t changed as much as I’d thought it might.

“Thanks for the warning,” I said. “And I suppose it will get dustier, too.”

“Much,” he replied with a grin. “I’m sure you’ll hear Ruth complaining about it — and I have a feeling she’ll put you on dusting duty.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” I said. “I like being able to help.”

While my own family had never subscribed to the “idle hands are the devil’s plaything” mindset, I and my sister and brother still had our fair share of chores to do around the house. My father had been born in the mid-1800s, after all, and even though he’d adapted to modern life remarkably well, he was a little more strict than some of my friends’ parents, and expected his children to do their part to keep the household going, even if the work mostly consisted of emptying the filter on our robot vacuum/mopper rather than getting down on our hands and knees to scrub the floor.

“I like that,” Seth said, his gaze now admiring. “You’re always willing to pitch in. Ruth says you’ve been a big help.”

About all I could do was shrug — well, that, and hope the lighting inside the restaurant was sufficiently dim so he wouldn’t notice the way I blushed. “I’m glad,” I said. “I don’t want to be a burden on her, not after she and Timothy have been so kind about giving me a place to stay.”

Seth looked as though he was about to respond, but the waiter came back with our plates of food, and we had to pause the conversation so we could thank him and get started on our meals. Once again, the lack of any wine to accompany those dishes stood out immediately to me. It just felt weird to eat at a fancy place like this and be drinking only water. Our waiter had offered tea, but unlike a lot of my college friends, I didn’t care to drink caffeinated stuff late in the day unless I wanted to be up all night.

But eventually Seth and I resumed our discussion, not about anything earth-shattering, just more little tidbits about Jerome and the McAllister family.

“And I got a new cousin,” he went on as he reached for a roll from the basket the waiter had brought over. “Little Ruby. She came a bit early, but she’s healthy and happy, so everyone’s excited about that.”

Somehow, I managed to stop myself from startling at that piece of news. I supposed the McAllisters might have had more than one Ruby among their ranks, but some quick mental math told me that no, this had to be the same Ruby who’d been prima for years and years, hanging on way past the time when she would have preferred to leave this life and join her late husband, all so she could wait until Angela was ready to take over as head of the clan.

I couldn’t say anything about that, though…just as I’d known I couldn’t warn Seth about how the Great Depression was looming over them all, and that in a few more years, a lot of this bustling prosperity would be gone forever. The McAllisters had weathered the storm all right, just because witch clans had resources that regular people didn’t, but still, that didn’t mean they weren’t in for some rough times, watching as the mine closed and all the people associated with it left, looking for opportunities elsewhere. In the end, Jerome had dwindled to a point where only a hundred or so McAllisters remained, with the rest of them moving to Payson or Prescott or even Wickenburg in an attempt to diversify their holdings and work in places where they could still earn a decent living.

All that had turned around starting in the late 1960s and moving on into the twenty-first century, but it had been touch-and-go there for a while.

“Ruby’s a pretty name,” I said as I reached for my glass of water. “Is it one you use a lot in your family?”

“Not really,” Seth replied. “To be honest, I don’t know where my cousin Miriam got the name from. I suppose she just thought it was pretty, too.”

That made sense — my mother had chosen my name because she’d heard it on a TV show and liked it, and my father had agreed — so I supposed there wasn’t as much difference in choosing baby names between then and now as I might have thought.

Still, it was extremely weird to think of Ruby McAllister, who’d always sounded to me like a somewhat terrifying old woman, as a tiny baby lying in her crib.

At least I knew she had a long, long life ahead of her, with a man she loved and two healthy sons who grew to adulthood and were prominent members of the clan. Maybe she’d been a little sad that she never had a daughter, someone who could carry on her direct line as prima, but according to everything Angela had said about her great-aunt, Ruby had never spoken a word about any regrets over having sons rather than daughters.

Seth and I chatted a little more, and then we were finished with our meals and he quietly handed two dollar bills over to the waiter. I’d been in 1926 long enough to begin to get used to how inexpensive everything was, but it still boggled my mind that we could effectively have a steak dinner at a four-star restaurant for only a couple of bucks.

As with so many other things in this new world, however, I didn’t comment on that astonishing fact. No, I waited for Seth to come over and help me out of my chair — those gentlemanly little touches were also something I’d had to get used to, although I thought I liked them very much — and then we headed outside to the spot where we’d left the car parked at the curb partway down the block.

Just as he was opening the convertible’s door for me, a green truck passed us by and turned down the alley behind the restaurant. The man driving it had hair a shade lighter than Seth’s, with a remarkably similar profile.

“Was that your brother Charles?” I asked, and Seth startled, then put on a smile that didn’t look terribly convincing.

“It could have been,” he replied while I got into the passenger seat and he shut the door. “We often have to make deliveries here in Prescott.”

At nine-thirty at night? I wanted to ask, but I held my tongue. While Charles’s presence here at this hour might have seemed odd, I supposed it was possible he had to do these deliveries after the store was closed for the day. It wasn’t as if they had a huge staff at the mercantile, just Charles and Molly and Henry McAllister.

Instead, I waited until Seth had gotten behind the wheel before saying, “I hope it’s not too dangerous, driving up and down Mingus late at night.”

Although he was in profile to me, I couldn’t ignore the flicker of relief that passed over his features. Was he glad I’d made such an innocuous comment?

“Oh, it’s not too bad,” he replied as he pulled away from the curb. “We have to be careful in the winter because of the ice, but otherwise, there’s nothing to it.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. Although using self-driving cars had greatly reduced overall accidents, the nav systems could still have trouble when a deer decided to run across the road or a monsoon downpour appeared out of nowhere and reduced visibility to almost nothing. And if we still had accidents despite having every modern safety device available to us, I had to believe the twisty route up and over Mingus presented even more difficulties in these noisy, rickety-feeling cars of the 1920s.

But I only nodded, and soon enough, we’d gotten up enough speed that further conversation was nearly impossible. As we drove back to Jerome, though, my intuition wanted to tell me that there was a lot more to Charles McAllister’s presence in Prescott tonight than Seth had let on.

Whether I’d ever be able to find out what he’d been up to, though, was an entirely separate question.