5. Any Port in a Storm

5

ANY PORT IN A STORM

When Seth reappeared after about a ten-minute absence, I did my best not to show how relieved I was. Sure, his cousin Helen — who looked like a porcelain doll come to life — had been friendly enough, doing her best to keep me entertained with stories about Jerome and its various points of interest, including the store Seth’s parents owned and the English Kitchen — known in later days as Bobby D’s, an awesome barbecue restaurant — which served authentic Chinese cuisine.

“You’ll have to try it after you’re settled,” Helen said. She’d sat on the sofa while I perched in a side chair. It felt a little strange to make ourselves so comfortable when he wasn’t even home, but she didn’t appear to have a problem with the situation. “Perhaps Seth can take you.”

Was she trying to set us up?

Not that I thought I would mind too much, but still, I shouldn’t be thinking about hook-ups or even having dinner with a guy while I was here. No, I needed to be figuring out how the hell I was going to get back to the twenty-first century.

I made a noncommittal sound, and luckily, Seth walked in the front door of the bungalow only a minute later, saving me from further awkward conversation.

“It’s all set with my Aunt Ruth,” he informed us. “You’ll just need to pack up the things I brought you.”

The thought of having to stay with strangers didn’t appeal to me very much, but I did my best to remind myself that they were McAllisters, and even though they weren’t strictly family, they were still witches, which meant we had more in common than they might think.

“Thank you so much for arranging that,” I said, wearing a smile I hoped looked genuine. “But I’m not sure how I can pack when I don’t have a suitcase.”

“Oh, you can borrow mine,” Seth replied immediately. “It’s not as if I’m going to need it any time soon.”

Probably not. Witches and warlocks weren’t world travelers at the best of times, and I had to imagine the opportunity for travel was even more limited in a place with no interstate highways or commercial flights, just Model Ts and whatever other cars were common in the 1920s.

And railroads, I supposed, but I had absolutely no idea if there was any rail in the area other than the trains they used to transport the copper ore from the United Verde down to the smelter in Clarkdale. The only reason I knew about that at all was because there was a great brewery that called itself Smeltertown, located in Clarkdale down the hill from Jerome, and the name had intrigued me enough to prod me to look up some of the local history.

“Then it seems I’m indebted to you once again,” I said, and Seth just gave an awkward hitch of his shoulders.

“Well,” Helen said, rising from her seat on the couch, “it looks like you have everything in hand, so I’ll be heading home. But Deborah, if you start having headaches or any other kind of odd aches and pains, please let me know. I don’t think it’s very likely that you have a concussion, since you don’t have any sign of physical trauma, but sometimes these things can come on a person out of the blue.”

“I’ll do that for sure,” I promised her, although I knew that wasn’t the problem here. No physical trauma at all…just the mental trauma of being trapped somewhere more than a hundred years before I was born.

But I knew I had to keep it together as best I could. Freaking out wasn’t going to help me, and at least it sounded as if I was going someplace safe and stable, and not too far away. Things could have been a lot worse; I knew I was very lucky that Seth McAllister was the one who’d found me, considering what I’d heard about some of the rough types who’d inhabited Jerome during its early mining days.

Helen said goodbye and headed for home, leaving Seth and me alone in the house. Still looking a little awkward, he said, “I’ll go get that suitcase.”

He went down the hall to his bedroom while I waited in the front room. The clothes he’d given me were still stacked on the washstand in the bathroom, but I didn’t see the point in moving them out here. Maybe it would have been a little easier to pack with some more space to spread out, except for the part where I honestly didn’t have much to pack, not when I was already wearing a good third of what he’d given me.

A moment later, he returned with the suitcase — a small leather case that probably wouldn’t have held much more than what I planned to put in it — and handed it over to me. “Here you are,” he said.

“Thank you,” I replied.

What else could I say?

I took the suitcase and went into the bathroom and, with an overwhelming sense of inevitability, put the other changes of clothes he’d given me inside. While I had no idea how long I was going to be stuck here, I somehow doubted that the tiny wardrobe was going to be enough to get me through my tenure in 1920s Jerome. Would I have to wash everything every third day and hang it up on a clothesline?

Maybe. I had the vaguest of vague ideas that maybe washing machines had already been invented by now, but I also had the impression that dryers had come along a lot later.

Not to mention that I had a whole hell of a lot more to worry about than simply keeping up with my day-to-day clothing needs.

The suitcase was packed, so I headed back to the living room. Seth hadn’t sat down and instead hovered sort of nervously near the sofa, as though he hadn’t quite known what to do with himself while I was otherwise occupied.

Well, that made two of us.

“All packed,” I said, and lifted the suitcase I’d just filled as my way of proving those words. “So I suppose we can go to your Aunt Ruth’s house now.”

He nodded, although his expression wasn’t exactly what I could have called enthusiastic. Was he also wishing that I might be able to stay here with him?

“Let me carry that,” he said, coming over so he could take the suitcase from me. It wasn’t nearly heavy enough to be any kind of a burden, but I had a feeling that he was doing his best to be chivalrous. “It’s not far to Aunt Ruth’s, but it’s hilly, so it’s something of a climb.”

Although I’d only been living in Jerome for less than a month, I was already all too aware that the simplest walk could turn into a challenging hike, thanks to the steep hillsides where the town had been built. I’d always thought of myself as being in pretty good shape — I did yoga and ran several miles daily back home in Flagstaff — but I knew my calf muscles were already a lot more toned now than they’d been before I relocated to the former mining town.

Current mining town, I reminded myself as Seth and I exited the house. I noticed he didn’t stop to lock the door and wondered if that was common practice around here, or whether it was only the McAllisters who could be that casual about security. True, locked doors didn’t constitute any sort of a barrier to a witch or warlock, but still, enough rough types lived here, whether working at the mine or being some kind of hangers-on to the mining community, that I would have thought he’d be a little more careful.

As we walked, though, he told me a little about Uncle Timothy and Aunt Ruth, how Timothy had been a blacksmith who’d gradually transitioned to working on cars. It sounded as if the mines still used mule teams to move the ore around, so his original skills were often called upon, but he’d made himself invaluable by also being able to bore out a carburetor or rebuild a transmission.

“And with Daphne married a few months ago, all their children have moved out,” Seth went on. By that point, we’d reached Hull Avenue, and I was really wishing I had on my hiking boots or even a pair of sneakers rather than the heeled lace-up shoes I was wearing now. True, the heels were sort of chunky and therefore much sturdier than a pair of stilettos would have been, but still, they weren’t the most practical thing in the world. “So Ruth and Timothy have plenty of space for you.”

“It’s very kind of them to take me in,” I said. I’d almost said “nice,” but I was doing my best to imitate the speech patterns of the people I’d met so far, and “kind” just seemed more like something a young woman from the 1920s would say. “I hope I won’t be too much in the way.”

“Their house is big enough that I doubt you’ll be bumping into each other much,” Seth responded, reassuring me somewhat. “Although, don’t be surprised if Aunt Ruth puts you to work. She’s a great baker and likes to make treats for other members of the family and also for Monroe’s, a café down on Main Street.”

Baking wasn’t anything I’d ever gotten into, but I had to hope that all Ruth McAllister would want me to do was sift flour or pit cherries for pies or something equally mindless.

“How interesting!” I said brightly, hoping I didn’t sound as intimidated as I felt.

Apparently not, because Seth only nodded. “Her pies are always the star at our holiday gatherings.” He paused there before adding, voice a little too casual, “Oh, and she asked me to come to dinner tonight. She thought it might be better for you to have a familiar face there on your first night at their house.”

Those words relieved me more than I wanted to admit. I’d already imagined myself sitting at Ruth and Timothy’s dining room table and not knowing what the hell I was supposed to say or how I was supposed to act. Having Seth there would make the situation much more bearable.

“Oh, that’s good to hear,” I said, then went on, “That is, if you didn’t already have plans.”

He chuckled then, a warm, rich sound. His voice was just as handsome as his face, not too deep, but resonant and friendly, the kind of voice I could imagine as a radio announcer or something. That was one thing I’d noticed about the people I’d met so far in Jerome — which, I had to admit, wasn’t many. They all sounded like regular people, not the stylized voices I’d heard in old black-and-white movies. Had all that been an affectation?

Maybe. I reminded myself that I was in 1926, and I vaguely recalled that movies back then didn’t even have people talking at all, just those funny little frames in between the action that spelled out what the actors were saying. So maybe they started to sound odd later on when movies had real talking in them. Not being a scholar of vintage cinema, I couldn’t even begin to guess.

“No plans,” Seth said. “Sometimes I have dinner with my family on Sunday nights, but they understood that today I was a little busy. Otherwise, I’ll eat at home, or maybe get something from the English Kitchen or one of the other restaurants here if my cupboard is bare.”

From the way he talked, it sure sounded as if he led a pretty solitary life. It also seemed very obvious that he was alone, that he wasn’t married or even engaged or seeing someone.

Did people date in the 1920s?

Of course they did, I thought. They probably called it “courting,” but they still went to the movies and on picnics and maybe out to eat.

And they danced, too, something I’d never been particularly good at. I had to hope Seth wouldn’t ask me to go dancing with him — assuming there was even a place for that sort of entertainment around here — because my Charleston was pretty rusty.

It was a silly thought. He was only helping out someone he’d literally stumbled over. We didn’t have any real connection, and I needed to remind myself of that, no matter how good-looking he might be.

All the same, I had a hard time banishing the mental image of me in a gorgeous beaded flapper gown while he wore a tuxedo…something I wasn’t sure even existed in Jerome…and he dipped me in a pretty good imitation of Fred and Ginger doing the tango.

When did Fred Astaire’s film career begin, anyway?

Those crazy thoughts flew right out the window, though, as Seth paused in front of a big Victorian house painted pale blue with darker blue and white accents, and said, “Here we are.”

It was a very pretty home, large without being imposing, with red and white roses blooming in front of the expansive front porch and stained-glass windows flanking the front door and also ornamenting the turret off to one side. In fact, I thought I recognized the place, since I’d walked along this street a few times while getting acquainted with the town. In my day, the house was sage green with dark green and rusty red accents, but still, the overall shape of it was the same.

As pretty as it was, though, I couldn’t ignore the quiver of unease in my stomach. Everyone I’d met so far had been extremely nice, but that didn’t change the fact that Seth was going to leave me here with a couple of strangers.

We went up the steps and didn’t even need to knock, because the front door opened as soon as we set foot on the porch.

A woman who looked as though she was probably in her mid-fifties stepped out and beamed at us. Even I knew her high-piled blonde hair — with some silver strands showing here and there — wouldn’t have been the style in this era, although her dark plum drop-waist dress and black kid shoes seemed pretty of the moment.

“This must be Miss Rowe!” she exclaimed, coming forward so she could take my hands in hers and give them a hearty squeeze. “It is so good to meet you.”

“Thank you for taking me in like this — ”I began, but she only released her grip on me so she could wave away my comment with her free right hand.

“Oh, it’s nothing, child. I was just so sorry to hear of your predicament. I’m Ruth McAllister, and soon you’ll meet my husband Timothy. I hope Seth told you that we have plenty of room, so it’ll be a pleasure to have you here.”

“He did,” I said, even as his mouth quirked and his dancing blue eyes told me that he knew his aunt — or maybe she was really a cousin, and only referred to the other way because of the difference in hers and Seth’s ages — could be a little overwhelming. “But still, it has to be something of an imposition to have a stranger in your house.”

“Not at all,” she replied at once. “But where are my manners? Come inside, the both of you.”

She ushered us into a foyer that was decorated with fussy-looking antiques. No, I told myself, they weren’t antiques, just heavy Victorian-style furniture, something that looked antique to my eyes even though it was probably only twenty or so years old at that point.

“Did Seth tell you he was coming back for dinner?” Ruth went on, and I nodded.

“Yes.”

I’d almost added that it was kind of her to invite him over, but then I wondered if she would read more into my relief at his being there for dinner than I wanted her to.

Or maybe I was overthinking the whole thing.

She didn’t appear to notice my carefully neutral response, because she took the suitcase from Seth, saying, “Thank you for walking Miss Rowe over here, Seth. We’ll want to get her settled, but you can come back at six, as we already discussed.”

The dismissal was clear, and it was obvious enough that Seth didn’t intend to argue. “Sure.” Then he paused and looked over at me. “I’ll see you this evening, Miss Rowe.”

I inclined my head. “I’ll see you then.”

After all, what was I supposed to say?

Don’t leave me here?

That would have been way too dramatic, and the last thing I wanted to do was call any more attention to myself than I already had.

So I lifted my hand to wave, and he waved as well, murmuring again that he’d see me soon.

“Well,” Ruth McAllister said briskly. “Let me show you where you’ll be staying.”

I had to admit it was a very pretty room, located on the second floor of the house and in the turret, giving me a curved wall on one side of the space, set with big windows that allowed an absolutely amazing view of Jerome and the Verde Valley beyond. Seth’s house, being situated much farther down the hill, hadn’t offered nearly as good a vantage point, and after Ruth showed me to the space — and mercifully added that she’d allow me some alone time to unpack — she said she’d be downstairs in the kitchen and that she expected me to join her there.

To help with dinner? That seemed an odd thing to do to a guest, but then, I had to admit I wasn’t exactly sure what my status was here. Houseguest? Boarder?

Putting that thought aside, I hung my two remaining outfits in the large walnut wardrobe placed on the wall opposite the windows, then headed over there to get a good look at my surroundings. This entire street, like the one in my own time, was lined with houses that clearly had been built at least twenty or thirty years earlier, mostly Victorian in style, with carefully tended front yards. The street was gravel instead of asphalt, and the colors on many of the homes had shifted over the years, but otherwise, the setting was still recognizable enough.

As was Jerome; I knew the town had been granted historic landmark status way back in the 1960s, and therefore all the buildings had been preserved rather than torn down to make way for newer, more modern structures. Now they definitely looked much fresher, but the outline of the town was basically the same as the one I’d come to know and love.

A faint haze of smoke lay over the place, though, probably from all the various coal-fired boilers and furnaces in the town, and maybe also from the smelter down in Clarkdale, although inside, I couldn’t really smell anything, thank God. No worries about environmental impacts back in the 1920s, that was for sure.

But even the smoke wasn’t enough to hide the beauty of the landscape, or the blue skies overhead. From here, I could catch an even better glimpse of Sedona’s red rocks and the rolling, golden contours of the Verde Valley. Once again, it didn’t seem all that different from the world I knew, except I thought the road leading away from Cottonwood and toward Sedona was narrower than it was in my time, with only a single lane in either direction.

Well, back then, there hadn’t been nearly the tourist presence of modern times. These were all working towns, whether mining or farming or ranching, not the sort of places people generally came to sightsee despite their natural beauty.

However, I knew I shouldn’t be concentrating on the view. No, now that I was alone, I needed to try my best to end this little trip down memory lane and get back where I belonged.

Unfortunately, I was scared shitless to try.

For the past ten years, I’d done everything I could to stifle my supposed gift, to make sure I controlled it and not the other way around. It had never been as simple as just telling myself that I wanted to travel a certain distance in time. The few occasions I’d made the attempt, I’d either gone in the opposite direction from planned, or way overshot and landed where I’d never intended to be.

And I still didn’t know exactly how I’d ended up here and now. Was it only that being knocked unconscious had allowed my particular brand of magic to cut loose, finally free from the constraints I’d placed on it over the past decade?

I supposed that was one theory. It made more sense than anything else.

Another unknown was why it had sent me back to June 1926, of all times. Not that I was a scholar of McAllister family history — far from it — but from everything I’d heard, it sure sounded as if the 1920s had been a quiet, prosperous time for the clan that had once been the Wilcoxes’ enemies. It just didn’t make much sense for me to be here.

Of course, this all could have been completely random. It wasn’t as if my talent hadn’t excelled at sending me to unexpected places on more than one occasion, although nothing had been as extreme as my current excursion to times before.

I let out a breath and went to sit down on the bed. It was a narrow thing with a white iron frame and a quilt in soft, pretty colors of rose and sage and mauve covering the mattress, which gave alarmingly under my weight and which I guessed was probably stuffed with feathers.

Good thing I wasn’t allergic.

How to go about this?

It had been so many years since I’d consciously tried to make my talent move me around in time that I had to stop and think about it for a long, hard moment. Problem was, I knew that every time I’d made the attempt, I’d screwed up royally.

I supposed some people would argue that I’d also messed up big-time while knocked out cold, which would seem to indicate I was pretty much screwed no matter what I did.

My stomach churned uneasily at the thought, and I did my best to ignore it. Admitting defeat before I even got started didn’t seem like a very good strategy.

Maybe I was wasting way too much thought on this, though. What if I didn’t try to think about how many years and months and days I had to travel, and instead only imagined when I needed to go and did my best to move things along that way?

It was worth a try…even as I realized that if I was successful, I’d appear in my own time right in this very spot, and therefore would materialize in someone’s bedroom.

Well, I’d deal with that situation if and when it happened. Trying to explain away inadvertent trespassing seemed a lot less fraught than remaining stuck in 1926, no matter how nice everyone here seemed to be.

Just in case, I got up from the bed and moved over to the window seat and sat there, my hope being that even if the furniture had gotten shifted around over the years, the window seat probably would have remained in the same place. From what I’d been able to tell, the people who owned the historic houses here in Jerome were all about preserving them rather than gutting them down to the studs to make them over into their particular vision of what their home should be.

The sun was already high enough overhead that it wasn’t hitting this side of the house. Even so, the temperature in this upstairs room was warmer than I would have liked, and no doubt would just get worse as the day wore on. About all I could hope was that there’d be a nice evening breeze to cool things down once the sun slipped behind Mingus Mountain in the early evening.

If, of course, I was even around to worry about sleeping in a hot room.

I closed my eyes and breathed in and breathed out, doing my best to slow everything down, to push away the anxiety that had been bubbling under the surface ever since I arrived here in 1926. While I didn’t meditate, I’d done enough yoga that I was pretty good at smoothing down the rough edges and allowing myself to focus on a single thing.

In this case, my room in my childhood home in Flagstaff, which I knew my mother hadn’t touched, thinking I’d be back whenever I got tired of working at the store and wanted to return to more familiar surroundings. I’d decided to visualize that room because it was much better known to me than the one in my rented house here in Jerome — and also because I worried that if I started thinking about that particular bedroom, I’d think about Seth as well, about his quick, friendly smile and the astonishing sapphire of his eyes.

And I couldn’t let myself think about him. The last thing I wanted was to allow any thoughts of people and things in this time and place to trap me here. Besides, the important thing to focus on was a when, not a where. If I was successful, I’d still be here in Jerome, simply because my gift only allowed me to travel in time, not in space.

Thinking of my room just as it had looked before I packed my bags and left for McAllister territory seemed to be the smartest thing to do. With any luck, I’d get back within a few hours of when I left.

Walls painted a serene sage green, shining wood floors. Upholstered headboard and furniture that was a fun mismatch of wood and iron, things that shouldn’t have gone together but somehow did anyway. I’d completely redecorated the space my first year of college, knowing I wanted to leave behind the girlish pastels that had suited me just fine when I was younger but now seemed cloying, almost silly. And because I’d chosen everything myself, I knew the room very well, right down to the seeded glass vase that sometimes held pussywillows and sometimes cottonwood branches, depending on the time of year.

The image was so clear in my mind that it almost felt as if I was sitting there, rather than in the prim, pretty room that had once belonged to Seth’s cousin Daphne. If I reached out, would I be able to feel the smooth curves of the vase that always sat on my dresser?

Better not to try. I didn’t want to touch something nearby that would fling me out of my imagining.

Instead, I sat there, holding on to that mental picture, doing my best not to force anything, only to be in the moment…a moment I hoped would morph into one more than a hundred years from now.

A knock at the door. “Miss Rowe? Seth’s here, and we’re getting ready to sit down to dinner.”

My eyes flashed open. The same turret room surrounded me, with the white iron bedstead to one side and the jewel-toned stained glass bordering the windows, although the day outside had darkened, and I could tell far more time had passed than I’d thought. Was Ruth McAllister angry with me for not appearing downstairs as I’d promised several hours earlier? Her voice didn’t sound annoyed, so maybe she thought I’d taken a nap and had left me alone to sleep.

Whatever had happened, it seemed clear her arrival had broken my concentration.

So much for that.

“I’ll be right down,” I said.