3. Déja Viewed

3

DéJA VIEWED

I opened my eyes and blinked. The ceiling above me didn’t look familiar at first, and then I remembered how those broad beams in their crisscross pattern decorated the ceiling in the living room of my rented bungalow in Jerome.

That had been a hell of a dream…or maybe a nightmare. Memories came flooding back to me — the mine shaft high above the former mining town and current tourist destination, the way I’d tripped and fallen…and had felt as though I continued to fall for centuries in the spiraling dark, slipping down a rabbit hole deeper than anything Alice in Wonderland had ever encountered.

But….

The curtains at the windows in the house I’d been renting were filmy and pale, hung there more as accents and to add a little privacy than to keep out any light. In contrast, these were blue-checked gingham, hanging from a simple wooden pole rather than the dark bronze versions that had decorated the bungalow’s living room.

I sat up. For a second or two, the not-quite-familiar room spun around me, and I set a hand down on the sofa where I lay to steady myself.

No, that wasn’t right, either. I knew the couch at the house I’d been renting had been a warm cognac leather, while this was some kind of silky jacquard fabric, a deep blue to coordinate with the gingham curtains at the windows.

Except…that fireplace was the same, wasn’t it? The bungalow had been built in the typical Craftsman style and dated to the late teens of the previous century, and so the fireplace was wide, with built-in bookcases to either side and pretty smoke-blue tile surrounding the firebox. This one looked identical, as far as I was able to tell.

So, maybe there are two houses in Jerome with the same fireplace, I told myself. Didn’t they use to mail-order house kits out of the Sears catalog back then or something like that?

I supposed that was remotely possible. However, it didn’t explain where I was, or how I’d gotten here.

You tripped and fell, I thought then. And Bellamy went to get help and they took you here.

Again, mostly plausible. All the same, even if I’d been hurt and my friend had brought the cavalry to pull me out of that mine shaft, it didn’t explain why I’d ended up here rather than my house. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have my keys with me.

Except, I realized in a moment of panic, I didn’t. The little bag that had held my cell phone and house keys and I.D. must have slipped off my shoulder when I fell, because it sure as hell wasn’t anywhere near where I was sitting.

In consternation, I swung my legs off the side of the couch, determined to stand up despite how swimmy I was feeling. Before I could get any further than that, though, a man came out of the hallway that led to the bungalow’s two bedrooms and then paused, staring at me in shock.

About all I could do was stare back at him in response. I knew I’d never seen him before, because I would have remembered the cleanly chiseled, almost boyish features, the head of wavy brown hair…the clear blue eyes that seemed to focus on me like laser beams. He was dressed kind of oddly, in a white linen shirt and brown trousers I thought might be wool, with suspenders to hold them up. It definitely wasn’t the sort of outfit I’d expect someone to be wearing in Jerome in June, not when we were right at the beginning of the hot season.

And he was a warlock. The twinge I experienced as he entered the room told me he couldn’t be anything else.

“You’re awake,” he said, his voice a friendly baritone, and I blinked, forcing myself to focus on him and not his clothes.

“I am,” I said. “Was I out for long?”

“A whole night and then some,” he replied. “I’m Seth McAllister. Who are you?”

Seth McAllister. Seth McAllister. Had I met a Seth during the almost month I’d been living in Jerome?

I didn’t think so. No, I couldn’t pretend that I knew every single McAllister in the world, not when they were scattered all over the Verde Valley and even out in Payson or over in Prescott, but….

For some reason, my gaze slid past him to a calendar mounted on the wall, not too far away from the window. It had a black and white picture of an old-fashioned truck on it, with a fancy border that went all around the picture and down onto the section that displayed the date and year.

June 1926.

It was like a punch to my gut, and I could only be glad that I hadn’t stood up yet after all.

No, that date had to be wrong.

Except….

I looked back at Seth McAllister, standing there in those clothes that made him look as if he’d raided a vintage store or something. He appeared completely natural in them, not like he was wearing a costume.

And I’d never seen him before or met anyone in town with that name.

My screwy “talent” for playing with time had messed with me before, but nothing on this scale. Somehow, though, when I’d fallen and hit my head, it had gone wild, sending me back into the past.

Well, that or I was having the mother of all nightmares.

Seth didn’t seem like someone out of a nightmare, though. No, his expression was worried, even as he stood a careful distance away from the couch where I’d been lying, as if he didn’t want to frighten me by getting too close.

Oh, I was frightened, all right, but not by him. It wasn’t just that I’d catapulted myself back in time by more than a hundred years and had no clear idea how the hell I’d ever get back to where I came from.

The world of the Arizona witches in the 1920s was very, very different from the one I lived in. Back then, the McAllisters and the Wilcoxes had been mortal enemies. True, they seemed to have mostly stayed out of each other’s territories, but that didn’t mean awful things might not have happened if they’d crossed paths for whatever reason, magical duels or sideways-flung curses or God knows what else. Any public displays of magic like that would have been disastrous, considering how hard we all worked to make sure the civilian population had no idea who we really were.

I was half Wilcox.

But…I didn’t really look like a Wilcox. I wasn’t as dark as they usually were and instead favored my father in looks, with medium-brown hair and blue eyes.

And I didn’t bear their name.

Seth McAllister was still staring at me, a certain wariness beginning to creep into his expression, and I realized I’d been sitting there without replying for way too long. Sure, most people would have excused me for being utterly gobsmacked, but I knew I needed to say something.

“Dev — ” I began in answer to his question, then realized “Devynn” wasn’t a common name even in my own time, and therefore definitely unheard-of back in the 1920s. “Deborah,” I said quickly. “Deborah Rowe.”

There. It was close enough to my real name that I was pretty sure I’d respond to it without too much hesitation, and I also guessed there wasn’t any problem using my actual last name, not when it wasn’t even a witch clan name. My paternal grandfather — whom I’d never met, since he’d remained in the past with the rest of my father’s relatives — had been a civilian, while my witch blood on that side came from my grandmother’s family, the Winfield clan. They were located on the other side of the continent in Massachusetts, and there was a good chance the McAllisters had never heard of them. There hadn’t been a lot of contact between the various clans back then, and even in the modern world, the friendliness among the three clans in Arizona — and the Castillos in New Mexico, where Angela McAllister’s daughter Miranda was the prima — tended to be the exception rather than the rule.

And thank God and the goddess Brigid who the McAllisters prayed to that I’d inherited my father’s gift for concealing my witch nature. For me, just as it was for my father, that talent was pretty much a “set it and forget it” kind of thing, which was probably why it had continued to function even while I was passed out after my descent into a different time, because I had to consciously turn it off.

Otherwise, Seth surely would have known right away that I was a witch.

He couldn’t know. He couldn’t know anything about me except my name.

“Well, Miss Rowe,” he said politely, “I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance. You gave us all a good scare.”

“I did?” I replied, doing my best to look doe-eyed and utterly guileless.

“Yes,” he said. “I found you in the mine yesterday evening. Do you have any idea what you were doing there?”

At once, I shook my head. Because, despite my history degree…I’d focused on medieval Europe…I knew so little about the world of 1926 that there wasn’t much chance of me cooking up a plausible explanation for my sudden appearance here. About all I could do was use the only excuse available to me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t remember anything at all.”

His brows drew together. Again, I couldn’t help but be struck by how handsome he was, from the way his thick brown hair waved back from his brow to those chiseled lips, not pouty at all, but still the kind a girl could easily imagine herself kissing.

Oh, no, I told myself. You are not going to think about him that way, no matter how good-looking he is. You need to use every available brain cell you’ve got to figure out how to get yourself home.

“You don’t remember how you got in the mine?”

“I don’t remember that,” I said, “and I don’t remember anything before it, either. I know my name is Deborah Rowe, and I know I’m twenty-two years old. But anything else just seems…gone.”

Now he appeared downright confounded. “You mean you have amnesia?”

“I suppose so,” I replied, still doing what I could to look utterly innocent and confused, rather than my true state of mind, which was a lot closer to scared shitless. “That is, that’s what it’s called when all your memories are gone, isn’t it?”

“That’s what I’ve read.” He hesitated for a moment, as if not quite sure where he was supposed to go from here. “I suppose I should have my cousin Helen come talk to you — she’s a kind of nurse,” he added.

Probably the clan’s healer. Obviously, he couldn’t refer to her that way, not to a woman he had to believe was a civilian, but the point was clear enough.

“And she knows about amnesia?” I asked, not worried about how dubious I sounded. I had to believe pretty much anyone in the same situation would have been skeptical.

“She knows about a lot of things,” Seth said. “And she had a look at you last night, but she said she couldn’t find anything physically wrong. But now that we know we’re working with some kind of memory loss, it’s possible she might be able to offer some helpful advice.”

Strangely, his words relieved me a little. If this Helen person had already examined me — no doubt looking for some sort of head trauma — and hadn’t detected anything that proved I was a woman out of time, then it was probably safe to talk to her now. After all, my talent seemed to be working perfectly at concealing my witch nature, and even though I still wore my modern clothes, there really wasn’t much about me that could prove I hadn’t been born at the start of the twentieth century, just as Seth himself must have been.

“I’m feeling kind of sticky,” I said then, which was only the truth. The little bungalow was uncomfortably warm, and I had to believe it would get even hotter as the day wore on. No sign of modern conveniences like air conditioning around here, that was for sure. I hadn’t even spied a table fan or a ceiling fan, although I thought they must have been invented by 1926.

Most likely, they were still luxuries in an out-of-the-way place like Jerome, Arizona.

“Do you mind if I get cleaned up first?” I went on.

A sudden flush touched his cheeks, and I realized he was probably embarrassed at the thought of me using his bathroom.

Men in 1926 were clearly different from the guys I’d known in the mid-twenty-first century.

But he sounded steady enough as he said, “No, of course not. Let me show you where the bathroom is. My mother also put together some fresh clothes for you when I went over to the store last night.”

“‘Store’?” I echoed, although I’d already guessed at the answer.

“McAllister Mercantile,” he replied, an obvious note of pride in his voice. “My family’s owned it for generations. My mother took a few things from the stock there.”

“I’ll have to find a way to pay you back — ”I began, but he only shook his head.

“It’s the least we can do for someone stranded here in our town,” he told me. “But I’ll show you where the bathroom is.”

Finally, I pushed myself up from the sofa…only to have the room tilt around me. I stumbled, and at once, Seth was at my side, placing a strong hand under my elbow while I tried to steady myself.

“Thanks,” I said. “I must be a little woozier than I thought.”

“Do you need to sit down again?” he asked, expression all worry, but I shook my head.

“No, I’m all right. I think it was standing up that put me off balance. I’m already feeling better.”

And I was. Those few seconds of dizziness had disappeared as quickly as they’d come, and now I felt much improved…or rather, I felt about as good as I could, considering my unpredictable talent had just flung me back in time more than a hundred years, and I couldn’t begin to figure out how to fix the situation.

Almost as soon as Seth had taken my elbow, he let go, apparently guessing that I was all right to walk now. In a way, I almost regretted that he hadn’t continued to support me.

I liked the feel of his hand on my arm.

But then he was walking me down the short hallway to the bathroom, which was in exactly the same place as it had been in my rented bungalow.

Was this really the same house?

Although the bathroom’s location and basic layout were the same, with a sink and toilet and claw-foot tub, everything else was radically different. Small white hexagon tile with a dark blue border covered the floor, and although there was a bathtub with a reassuring set of faucets that told me they at least had running water here, that was about all I could say for it. No sign of a showerhead, no little curtain you pulled around yourself for some privacy.

I’d never been into baths, had always been a long, hot shower kind of girl. The thought of having to get clean by taking a bath didn’t exactly entrance me.

Well, you’re not taking a bath now, I reminded myself. You’re just freshening up a bit and changing your clothes. You can worry about the bathtub later.

“You can meet me in the living room when you’re done,” Seth said, not quite meeting my eyes. “It’s kind of a good thing you showed up on Saturday evening — since it’s Sunday today, I don’t have a shift at the mine.”

“Do you have to go to church?” I asked. It wasn’t just idle curiosity; while I knew the majority of the McAllister clan was steadfastly pagan, I somehow doubted they’d be able to put their leaning toward alternative religions as much on display in the 1920s as they had in the twenty-first century. I wanted to know how they handled things.

Seth’s gaze was still directed somewhere near the floor. “Oh, we have prayer meetings at various family members’ houses on Sundays. That’s how we’ve always done it.”

Meaning, I guessed, that they observed their old religion in private. It was kind of surprising the civilian population in town hadn’t asked a lot of questions about that, but from what I was able to recall, the McAllisters had been some of the first settlers and town founders here, and maybe no one wanted to poke them about their religion.

Whatever. Some people in my own clan were religious, but a lot more were cheerfully agnostic. It wasn’t as though I was too worried about missing church. No, after hearing how my mother had had to drag her bustled butt to the Methodist church in Flagstaff every Sunday when she was back in 1884, I was just glad to know I wouldn’t have to do the same thing here.

“How interesting!” I said, which I hoped was more or less the way a woman in 1926 would have responded. “And thank you for showing me the bathroom. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“Take as much time as you need,” Seth replied. “Come find me in the living room when you’re done.”

I nodded, then stepped inside the bathroom and closed the door. He’d already laid out some clothes on top of the little wooden washstand, so I peeled off my jeans and shirt and socks and everything else, and put on the garments he’d provided. The undies were more like little cotton tap pants, and the bra was closer to a bralette than anything I’d ever seen, just a flimsy piece of cotton with some lace trim.

Luckily, I’d never been an underwire kind of girl.

A narrow slip went over the underwear, and I selected a dress with a demure green flowered print that buttoned up the front. It was shorter than I’d expected, hitting barely below the knees, although I didn’t know whether that was the actual style or whether I was just tall for the period.

Well, not much I could do about that.

Silk hose that had to be held up by garters had been tucked into the pair of brown heeled lace-up shoes Seth had left for me, and for a moment, I balked, thinking there was no way I was going to wear those things, especially when I knew June in the Verde Valley regularly pushed into the nineties, sometimes hotter.

But I also didn’t want to give the wrong impression. I knew a whole lot less about the 1920s than I would have liked, and yet I had the feeling that a woman who went around without hose would be considered “loose.”

Better to suck it up and deal with those hose, even though I had no idea what I was doing.

The struggle took me a couple of minutes, and when I was done, I still had some bags at my ankles. It couldn’t be helped, though.

He’d also helpfully provided a box of hairpins. One thing I did remember about the 1920s was that a lot of women wore their hair short, but there was no way in the world I was about to lop off my hair, which I’d been carefully growing ever since my senior year of high school and now hung midway down my back. Luckily, though, I’d watched enough YouTube videos to know how to put it up in a pretty bun, something that came in handy during those hot summer days.

So I finger-combed my wavy locks as best I could — I’d spied a wooden comb sitting on the washstand, but I thought it would be rude to borrow something of Seth’s without asking — and then wrapped my hair around my hand to make the nautilus-style bun I’d perfected the summer before, placing it low on the nape of my neck in my best attempt to mimic the hairstyles of the period. When I was done, I thought I looked pretty much like someone you’d pass on the street in 1926 without even taking a second look.

Good thing I’d never pierced my ears more than once, and that I’d been wearing plain gold hoops when I slipped back in time. Seth didn’t seem to have given them a second look, which told me that, even if they weren’t quite what most women of his time wore, they also weren’t odd enough to invite comment.

Ditto for the gel polish I’d abandoned right after I graduated from college, figuring that I’d be working with my hands a lot at Rachel’s store and that it was probably better to keep things simple. While I thought that some women in the 1920s wore makeup and nail polish, I had a feeling the glittery purple I’d sported last before I went with naked nails would have raised a few questions.

There wasn’t a clock in the bathroom, so I had no idea how long my primping had taken. However, Seth didn’t seem too impatient when I returned to the living room, which made me think I hadn’t made him wait more than ten or fifteen minutes.

Was that a spark of admiration in his eyes when I entered the room?

No, I was probably imagining things.

He’d been sitting on the couch but stood up right away as I entered the room. “Feeling better?” he asked, and I nodded.

“Much.”

“Those clothes you were wearing — ”he began, then stopped himself. Appearing to sort through his words, he went on, “I beg your pardon, but they were somewhat odd. Where did you get them?”

Sometimes, pretending to have complete amnesia could be a real plus. “I have no idea,” I lied. “I didn’t recognize them — but then, I don’t remember very much.”

“Of course,” he said quickly. “I probably shouldn’t have asked. Now that you’re ready, do you think you could speak to my cousin Helen? I’m hoping she’ll be able to unravel some of this mystery.”

“Sure,” I said. “Although I don’t know how much I’ll be able to tell her.”

“That’s fine,” he assured me. “But I think it’s better if you at least talk to her a little. Are you all right with going to her house? She lives just down the street, so it isn’t much of a walk. I thought that might be better since she has small children.”

I had to hope someone would be watching the kids while she held the interview, or I didn’t know how much she’d be able to accomplish. The Wilcoxes — well, most witches in general, from what I’d seen — tended to marry and start families early, so it wasn’t as though I hadn’t had plenty of chances to babysit and be around little kids, starting with my sister Jessica’s two-year-old son Duncan and ranging to any Wilcox cousins who needed some cheap babysitting so they could go out to dinner or the movies or whatever.

Maybe that had been part of the reason why moving to Jerome had been so appealing. So far, no one had asked me to watch their kids, giving me that much more free time to do what I liked.

“If you’re sure it won’t be too much of an imposition,” I said.

Seth immediately shook his head. “It’s fine,” he replied. “Helen’s husband Calum can watch the children while we’re talking.”

It seemed the McAllisters were a little more progressive about that sort of thing than I might have expected from people living more than a hundred years ago.

“Well, then,” I said. “Let’s go talk to Helen.”