19. Covert Operations

19

COVERT OPERATIONS

When push came to shove, I still hadn’t told him everything. I couldn’t have. Bad enough that he knew I wasn’t really Deborah and that I’d landed in 1926 from a time more than a hundred years in the future. But to also reveal I was half Wilcox?

That, as my father might have said, was a bridge too far.

Okay, sure, I’d been lying to Seth for the past two weeks…out of pure self-preservation. But once he discovered I was a witch — once that insanely amazing kiss we shared somehow short-circuited my one reliable power and let him know exactly what I was — my brain had gone into instant damage-control mode.

It was one thing for him to realize I was a witch.

It would be something entirely different for him to learn that I was also a Wilcox, a member of a clan all the McAllisters despised. My lies had already stretched the connection between the two of us to the breaking point. If I told him who my mother was, where I’d been raised…I honestly didn’t know whether we’d recover from that revelation.

We drove back down to Jerome in silence, and although Seth was still the soul of politeness, opening my car door and walking me up the porch steps just like he always did, I could tell something was different. He didn’t try to take my hand, and he didn’t smile. No, he just bade me a good evening and then headed back to his convertible, even as I did my best to ignore the sinking sensation in my gut.

I didn’t linger there to watch him drive away like I might have a few days earlier. Instead, I went inside, glad that the house seemed dark and still except for one crystal-accented lamp on a table in the foyer.

That way, I could get upstairs before Ruth appeared to ask me how my date had gone.

Somehow, I managed to hold it together until I was safely in my room with the door closed behind me. Then I stumbled over to the bed and fell down on it so I could let the tears come.

Not noisy sobbing, though. I didn’t want to take the smallest chance that either Ruth or Timothy could overhear me. Better to lie there and allow the tears to silently slide down my cheeks, releasing all the worry and hurt and fear that had been building for the past two weeks.

This whole time, I’d never had an endgame in mind. How could I, when I had no idea how long I might remain lost in the past, thanks to a gift I couldn’t control and which appeared to have deserted me?

But some part of my mind and heart had envisioned a future with Seth McAllister. Despite the mess I was in, I knew I couldn’t deny how I felt when I was around him, how I was safe and happy…and also aroused by the smallest brush of his fingers against mine, even the way those clear blue eyes of his would meet my gaze.

If I couldn’t go home, I could make a life with him here.

At least, that’s what I’d believed, deep down in a place I hadn’t really wanted to acknowledge. Of course it hurt to think I would never see my family or friends again, to have them forever wonder what had happened to me, but I’d thought maybe I could work my way past all that if I had Seth at my side. After all, my father had done much the same thing, realizing that my mother had brought him to the twenty-first century out of love and desperation, knowing that was the only way she could keep him alive after he’d been gut shot by Samuel Wilcox, Jeremiah Wilcox’s villainous younger brother. My father had made his peace with saying goodbye to that part of himself, and I’d thought I could eventually get to that place as well.

Would I have told Seth the truth?

At some point, of course. On my own terms, when I thought we were in the right place for that kind of discussion. The last thing I’d ever believed was that such a moment would be thrust on me by what appeared to be a wildly combustible chemistry.

If I ever got back to my own time, I’d need to ask someone about that. Not my father — posing such a question to him would have been way too embarrassing, even if he was the only other person I knew who possessed the same odd gift of concealing their witch heritage— but maybe Angela, whose connection to Connor Wilcox had its own quirks and unexpected side effects.

Eventually, my tears stopped flowing. Ruth had thoughtfully provided a whole box of new handkerchiefs for me, maybe fearing I had allergies that would flare up when surrounded by all these junipers and cottonwood trees. So far, I hadn’t needed them, but I pulled one out now and wiped my eyes and blew my nose. The fine cotton was surprisingly soft, almost as good as a tissue from my own time would have been.

Now that I’d cried it out, I found myself calmer than I would have expected. Sure, things were still a mess between Seth and me, but I had to believe we could work through this somehow. After all, he hadn’t said he would expose me, hadn’t threatened to tell Ruth and Timothy, which might have endangered my somewhat shaky position as their houseguest. As far as I could tell, Seth intended to keep my secret.

And that made me feel worse than ever. He shouldn’t have to lie for me and be part of this cover-up I’d concocted for myself.

It was a horribly tangled web, one that I needed to unravel piece by piece…no matter what.

You have to stop, I realized then. You have to go to him and tell him the rest.

While that inner voice sounded confident enough, the cowardly part of me quailed all over again. What would Seth do once he learned I wasn’t just a witch from the future, but a member of the hated Wilcox clan?

I really didn’t want to think about his reaction.

On the other hand, I couldn’t keep lying like this. He had to know that in the world I came from, the Wilcoxes and the McAllisters were allies, were far more connected than he could even begin to imagine. He was smart enough to understand that some of what I revealed would need to be kept between the two of us, but if I ever wanted a future with him, then I’d have to tell him everything I’d been hiding.

Tomorrow, I would go and talk to Seth McAllister. It would probably be the hardest thing I’d ever done, but he needed to know everything. What happened after full disclosure…well, I supposed I’d figure that out when the time came.

Drained but also strangely light of heart, I set aside the handkerchief I’d been holding and started to get ready for bed.

Of course, getting a chance to talk to Seth was easier said than done. True, I supposed it would have been even more difficult if he’d still been working at the mine, but finding the opportunity to speak with him alone while he was manning the counter at his family’s mercantile presented its own set of challenges.

I reasoned that he would have to take a lunch break at some point, and probably the best thing to do would be to see if he headed for home or whether he only went around the corner to the English Kitchen to get something quick and easy. This wasn’t the sort of conversation I wanted to have in a public place, but still, better there than at the store. Besides, I could always try to convince him that we needed to talk at his house. Considering the topic, he’d probably want to make sure no one overheard us anyway.

This all sounded like a reasonable enough plan. I told Ruth I was going for a walk down Main Street, and while she seemed a little surprised that I’d want to be away during lunch, she didn’t try to stop me.

“I’ll just put a sandwich aside for you, dear, and you can have that when you get back.”

I thanked her and headed out. Just like almost every other day since I’d come to 1926 Jerome, the skies were brilliantly blue overhead, the sun warm, verging on hot. However, the little hat I wore helped to shade my eyes more than I’d thought it would, and the dress of fine, pale green cotton I wore was surprisingly crisp and cool.

After I started walking down the street, a few people smiled or even waved when I went by. Although I certainly hadn’t been partying hearty while I was here, I’d met enough of the town’s residents — McAllisters or otherwise — that we had at least a nodding acquaintance. Their acknowledgments helped to ground me a bit, making me feel as though I might have a chance at making a real life here.

If, of course, Seth ever forgave me for all my lies.

But just as I was approaching the store, a dark green truck drove past, clearly headed down the hill toward Cottonwood.

Seth was behind the wheel.

Goddamn it.

I almost pivoted on my heel and started walking back to where I’d come from, but some instinct stopped me. For one thing, Ruth might think it a little strange that I’d come right back to the house after telling her I’d be out for at least an hour or so, and besides, even if Seth wasn’t here, that didn’t mean I couldn’t go inside and get the lay of the land, so to speak. If his mother acted cold toward me, then I’d know he must have told her at least something of what had passed between us the night before.

If not…well, maybe I’d be able to get some information out of her.

And I had two whole quarters burning a hole in my purse, thanks to Ruth telling me I should have a little cash on hand in case I saw something I wanted to buy and handing the coins over as I was about to walk out the door.

I pushed the mercantile’s door inward and went inside the shop. It was much dimmer in there than outside, and I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the sudden shift in lighting.

“Oh, Miss Rowe,” Molly McAllister said. She stood off to my left behind the counter, and, judging by the bolts of fabric that sat nearby, must have just finished measuring material for one of her customers. “I’m afraid you just missed Seth. He had to drive down to Cottonwood to pick up a few things.”

Something I already knew, of course, but I did my best to feign dismay. “I sometimes think I have the worst timing in the world,” I replied. As far as I could tell, nothing in her expression or her attitude seemed to signal that she knew anything more about me than she already had, which meant Seth must have kept our conversation to himself. “But since I’m here, I’ll go ahead and look for a few things I’ve been needing.”

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 trees and 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.

Footsteps crunched away from the truck and then disappeared. I poked my head above the truck’s bed and saw it had been parked in an isolated spot with a partially boarded-up mine shaft a few yards away. Seth was nowhere in sight, which meant he must have already gone inside.

Something about the place felt strangely familiar, with the hillside looming above and the rocky, neglected road that dead-ended only a few yards away, and then it struck me.

This was the mine shaft where Bellamy had teased me about going inside…the one where I’d somehow slipped back in time, even if I still didn’t entirely know how such a thing could have happened.

What was Seth doing in there? Had he returned to the shaft to see if there was some piece of evidence he’d missed, something I’d left behind that might corroborate my story about tripping and falling into 1926?

Something about that theory didn’t feel right, but I honestly couldn’t think of any other reason to come back here. The place was desolate and clearly unused, a dead end that hadn’t panned out.

He still hadn’t appeared, which meant it was time for me to go in search of him. While I didn’t much like the idea of walking back inside that mine shaft, I had to admit that I couldn’t think of a more private place to hold a conversation.

And since I’d already resolved to tell him everything, I might as well get my ass in gear.

I scooched my way out of the truck bed and did my best to smooth my skirt, although, as I’d feared, the dress was rumpled and dirty, and definitely not crisp and pretty like it had been when I first put it on this morning. The cloche hat I wore felt tight on my head, so I took it off and tossed it in the bed of the truck, then pushed a few loose strands of hair off my face.

For some reason, I just felt more like me when I was bare-headed. And I needed to be the most “me” I possibly could when I made my confession to Seth.

An uneasy sensation stirred in my stomach as I approached the opening in the hillside. From here, I could tell that one of the boards seemed to have been attached in such a way that it was easy to be set aside as needed, just as it had been now. Everything appeared utterly dark inside, although logic told me he must be using a lantern or something to guide his way, and I just couldn’t see it from where I stood.

I really didn’t want to go in there.

Don’t be stupid, I scolded myself. Seth went in, so it’s perfectly safe.

Maybe. However, I couldn’t quite ignore the fact that it was inside this mine shaft that I’d slipped through time.

What if I slipped again before I had a chance to explain myself to Seth?

No, that was a ridiculous idea. It was my so-called talent that had hurled me back to 1926, not the mine itself. The location had nothing to do with it.

I gritted my teeth, told myself not to be a pansy, and walked inside. The beams holding up the walls and the ceiling were fresh, raw pine, not the age-weathered wood I’d seen when I went inside the shaft on a hot summer evening that seemed as if it was from a different lifetime, but otherwise, the place looked much the same.

Well, except the lantern that had been set on the gravel-strewn ground a few feet away — and Seth himself, who had just emerged from a little alcove sheltered by boulders toward the back of the shaft, heavy glass jugs full of amber liquid dangling from either hand.

“Deborah?” he said, his shocked voice echoing off the rock walls. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I found out you hadn’t told me the truth when you said you were doing inventory last night,” I replied calmly. “And that got me thinking that I might not be the only person keeping secrets around here. So, tonight I decided to find out what you were really up to.”

He shook his head. “It’s not safe for you to be here.”

“Why?” I asked, then nodded toward the jugs he held. “Are those what I think they are?”

Seth looked down at the bottles of moonshine, almost as if he’d forgotten he was holding them. “Yes. And we can talk about that later. Right now, you just need to get back down to Ruth and Timothy’s house.”

“I don’t even know how to get there from here,” I said, which was only partly true. Sure, I’d been crouched in the bed of the truck the whole time and therefore hadn’t seen exactly where he was going, but I’d driven up here with Bellamy, so at least I had a rough idea.

That didn’t mean I wanted to hike all the way back into town, even though I’d had brains enough to put on my sensible shoes for this little spying expedition.

His mouth flattened, and I could tell he was less than thrilled with me. What had seemed like a brilliant idea back at the house now seemed not quite so brilliant.

Then again, how was I supposed to know Seth McAllister was a bootlegger?

“I don’t have time to take you back into Jerome,” he said. “I have to get this stuff to Prescott before nine, or there’ll be hell to pay.”

That I could imagine. While I hadn’t done an in-depth study of bootleggers and their various activities, I had to believe they weren’t the most forgiving people in the world.

“I can wait here until you get back,” I said. “Or I can just ride along.”

If possible, his expression grew even more pained. “There’s no room,” he replied. “I have to carry this stuff in the cab so it can’t be seen by anyone I drive past, and I’m not about to leave you in the bed of the truck, not with night falling. It’ll be way too cold for you in that dress.”

Something I’d already thought about, so I wasn’t going to contradict him. “Then I guess I’ll wait here,” I said cheerfully. “I mean, no one else knows you came to this mine shaft, right?”

“No,” Seth responded, although he didn’t look very happy with my solution. “I made sure I wasn’t followed. But….” He stopped there, brows drawing together. “Why did you get in the truck, anyway?”

“Because I wanted to talk to you,” I said. “I wanted to tell you the truth.”

Now he appeared more confused than anything else. “I thought you already did.”

This was it. Even though my heart started to beat a little faster, and my stomach tightened at the thought of revealing who I really was, I knew I had to say the words. I had to leave the lies behind and let him know the real reason why I’d felt so compelled to hide my identity.

My mouth opened. “I — ”

Before I could get any further than that, however, a new voice echoed through the mine shaft.

“Just what the hell is going on here?” Charles McAllister demanded.