Now and Forever (70 page)

Abigail took a step backward. "No."

"Help me get down from this tree and I'll give you something special."

"You're a monster," Abigail said. "I want you to go away."

"Hey, I may not be a
Vogue
model but isn't that monster business getting kind of personal?"

Abigail clutched Lucy tighter. She didn't understand everything the monster said but she had to pretend she did. You had to be clever to best them. "If you're not a monster, then what are you?"

#

Somewhere between "Hello, little girl," and "Bring me a ladder," Dakota had lost total control of the situation. The sky was growing darker, the wind was howling and, unless she missed her guess, those were snowflakes drifting past her nose.

"Listen, kid, think of me as your fairy godmother. Now will you please find somebody to help me down from this tree?" Historically fairy godmothers got good press and from the look of interest in the kid's eyes she'd said the right thing.

"Are you a fairy godmother like in Cook's stories?"

"Absolutely."

Now all she had to do was provide some physical evidence. Whispering a silent prayer to the goddess of women-stuck-in-maple-trees, Dakota released her death grip and waved her left hand in the air.

Her six silver rings reflected the fading light and she milked the effect for all it was worth, moving her hand in a wide arc like a crazed traffic cop. Her crystal bracelets proved even better. The kid seemed downright spellbound as the stones refracted the light into arrows of pure color.

Thank God good taste had never marred her talent for overstatement.

"Are they magic?" The child's tone was downright reverential.

In for a penny, in for a pound.
"Yes, and if you help me get down from this tree, I'll prove it to you." How hard could it be to dazzle a little girl with an eye for gaudy costume jewelry?

"If they're magic, why can't they get you down from the tree?"

"They're a different kind of magic," she hedged. A logical kid. Just her luck. "They don't do tree magic."

"You're not a
real
fairy godmother."

Dakota tried to look demure. "Why do you say that?"

"Fairy godmothers are pretty."

"Like you're another Shirley Temple?" she muttered under her breath. She forced herself to bestow her best smile on the little darling. "Maybe I'm a different kind of fairy godmother."

"No." The child shook her head. "There is only one kind."

"Listen, kid, I'm trying real hard, but you're making it awfully tough to like you."

"I do not like you either." The little girl's trembling chin punctuated the words.

Dakota cautiously shifted her weight over to a lower branch and pretended the creaking noise wasn't a portent of disaster. "You're not going to cry, are you?"

On cue the kid's eyes flooded with tears.

Dakota wrapped her legs around the trunk of the tree and eased herself down a good eighteen inches to another miserably scrawny branch. "There's nothing to cry about."
At least nobody called you a monster.

The kid's mouth opened wide and she let loose with a wail loud enough to be heard in the next county.

"Jeez." Dakota grabbed for the next branch down and breathed a sigh of relief when it didn't crack beneath her weight.
Maybe if you'd paid more attention to aerobic conditioning and less to aerobic eating...
"Crying never solved anything. Why don't you tell me what's wrong?"

The child clutched her pathetic excuse for a doll and mumbled something.

Dakota leaned forward. "What was that?"

"Papa doesn't..." The rest of the sentence was whispered into the doll's head and punctuated by noisy sobs.

Stay out of it, Dakota. Whatever it is, keep your nose out of it.
Kids weren't her strong suit. Most people found their honesty charming but it scared the hell out of Dakota.

The branch creaked loudly. "What about your papa...?"
Does he have a nice ladder I could borrow?

The plain little girl fixed her with an unnervingly adult gaze. "Papa doesn't like me because I'm not pretty."

That was quite a non sequitur. It took Dakota a moment to get her bearings. "I'm sure you're wrong."

"Mrs. O'Gorman says it's so. And so does Rosie and William and Cook--"

"What does your father say about this?"

"He says I'm incor--"

"Incorrigible?"

The kid nodded. "And that I must leave tomorrow for the Girls School of the Sacred Heart in Boston."

Dakota sighed. It was straight from a segment on
Oprah.
"And you were running away?"

"I won't go away to Boston. Mama ran away and that's when Papa stopped loving me."

Dakota's heart lurched.
I don't want to hear this.
She had her own thwarted destiny to worry about. She didn't need the child's problems too. Kids got annoyed with their parents every day of the week then forgot their annoyance by bedtime. "Your mother ran away?"

"To Philadelphia."

Dakota took a deep breath. Now they were getting somewhere. "And where do you live?"

The child pointed beyond the clearing to the west. "The big white house."

"And where is the big white house?"

"It's--" The child froze and tilted her head.

"What's the matter?" Fear rippled up Dakota's spine. She'd heard the noise too. "That's only the wind in the trees." She winced as the branch trembled. "Hey, wait a minute! Where are you going? Don't--"

Too late. The little girl vanished back into the woods as the branch Dakota was clutching groaned, cracked in two, and sent her crashing the rest of the way to the ground.

#

"I am sorry, Mr. Devane, but I fear we have not seen Abigail in weeks. Perhaps you did not know we have sent our dear Jonathan to his grandmother's in--"

"I regret the inconvenience, madam. I bid you good day." He inclined his head in the stiff and formal manner for which he was known, then turned sharply on his heel and headed for the door. The sun was dropping low in the sky and he intended to find the child before nightfall.

"Mr. Devane!" She stepped forward and placed a hand on his arm. "Have you spoken with Mistress Williams? Abigail oft spends time with Margaret's youngest...now what is her name? Lilly? Daisy? Rose! That is it. You must speak to Mistress Williams. I am sure that she--"

He neither slowed his pace nor met her eyes. "Thank you, madam."

With that he bounded down the porch stairs, mounted his chestnut stallion and was gone before the woman could draw another breath.

It struck him how little he knew about the child's daily life, with whom she spent her time. He had assumed she passed her days alone, amusing herself either in the house or frolicking on the wide expanse of yard that was to have been Susannah's English garden. That she had companions was a revelation to him.

He was familiar with the Williams house, a ramshackle bedevilment of wood and brick, situated on the other side of town near the encampment. That the child had managed to find it amazed him. She would need to traverse not only considerable open fields, but a densely wooded area that many a learned man found challenging.

And there was the matter of twelve thousand troops, scattered from Morristown to Jockey Hollow to Franklin Ridge. They had felled trees, commandeered property, and generally brought bedlam to the area. The men were ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-tempered and he feared for the child's safety should she cross their path.

Still, she was a bright child with a talent for geography, unusual in one so young. He enjoyed a similar understanding of place, knowledge of terrain that had stood him in good stead during his brief alliance with the Continental Army. He wondered what other traits they shared then laughed bitterly as he remembered that a shared bloodline was most likely not among them.

#

Dakota lay face-down in a pile of leaves that smelled like wet squirrel. Not that she'd smelled many wet squirrels in her day but, like skunk, it was one of those things a woman never forgot. Her knee throbbed where she'd hit the ground and she was reasonably sure her ankle was either broken or badly sprained.

Lifting her head, she looked up at the darkening sky. Fat white snowflakes landed on her cheeks and lashes and, if possible, it was even colder than it had been a few minutes ago. If she hadn't been so foolhardy, she'd be with Shannon and Andrew right now, facing their combined destiny like three time-traveling musketeers. She refused to believe her own destiny was to be found nose-deep in dead leaves.

Her psychic antennae were still all out of whack. Somehow she'd picked up on that little girl's temper tantrum and twisted it around until it became a plea for help. Pretty easy to see which one of them needed help. At least the kid knew what century she was living in.

"Damn," she whispered. If only she could home in on Shannon and Andrew's whereabouts. For weeks she'd felt as if they were Siamese triplets, attached at the psyche. But now there wasn't so much as a blip on her internal radar screen. The balloon had been in trouble when she bailed out. Were they in the same century? The same country? Were Shannon and Andrew still alive?

She closed her eyes and emptied her mind of all but the image of her two friends. If they were anywhere nearby, certainly she'd pick up something. A vibration, a sound, a deep sense memory that could lead her to them.

The silence within was profound.

Her hands began to shake and she dragged them through her short, curly hair.
Calm down. This isn't the end of the world.
She'd just fallen out of a tree. That would be enough to shake up anybody's neurons. She'd try again in a few minutes. All she had to do was give her aura a chance to settle down and she'd be back in business.

Besides, she had more pressing problems to deal with. Survival, for one. If she laid there much longer she'd be a prime candidate for hypothermia. She had no intention of ending her days as a bear's Tastee-Freez.

She sat up, trying to pretend her ankle wasn't throbbing like crazy. Her immediate wish list wasn't that difficult. She needed shelter; she needed clothing; she needed to find a bathroom.

 
When she'd asked where the child lived, the girl had pointed beyond the clearing, toward the west. That was as good a place to start as any. She didn't know what she would say once she got there, but time was running out. Her ear lobes ached from the cold; her fingers and toes were numb from it. Her brain would be the next to go.

She tried to stand up but her ankle gave way. "Damn," she whispered. "Damn damn damn."
Are you going to let a little thing like a broken ankle slow you down?
The snow was beginning to stick, both to the ground and to her person.
Think past the pain. The pain doesn't exist. Just get moving!

She scrambled to her knees and was about to go for broke when she realized that wasn't a woodpecker she heard in the distance but a horse's hooves, and they were coming closer.

Dakota Wylie's First Rule of Survival: when in doubt, run for cover.

She dove into a huge pile of leaves and began to pray.

#

Patrick's chestnut hated the snow. The stallion was skittish in the best of times and the accumulating snow made him almost impossible to manage. Patrick breathed a sigh of relief when they left the town proper and plunged into the woods. The multitude of evergreens formed a natural shield from the worst of the storm and the nervous beast quickly calmed.

Moments later, to Patrick's dismay, a white-tailed deer leaped from the bushes and bounded across the path, directly in front of them.

The chestnut whinnied and reared; Patrick fell backward and landed in a huge pile of leaves.

The chestnut, unperturbed by his predicament, stood a few yards away, rooting through a mound of snow-frosted grass in search of something edible.

"Watch it!"

Patrick tilted his head. The voice sounded to be that of a female but there was something sharp about the tone that was most unattractive. A young man, perhaps. One too youthful to grow whiskers but too old for the nursery. The chestnut rooted more deeply into the leaves, tail twitching with interest.