Wrong Face in the Mirror: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series) (6 page)

The figures said that she had over ten thousand dollars in her account. That wasn’t just some money. That was a fortune. She guessed she could afford a television and a computer.

She
located another Mary Roberts Rinehart novel, this  one called
The Circular Staircase,
found herself engrossed with the plot and amused by the main character
.
Reading until nearly midnight, she fell into exhausted sleep on the sofa to dream of nothing more threatening than a herd of cows that mooed at her.

She kept thinking she heard Nana telling her it was time to get up and do the milking and she’d yelled back that it was
Helen’s turn. She’d milked the previous evening.

Being county sheriff wasn’t an eight-hour-a-day, five days a week job. Even though it was
Sunday Alistair reported into his office in the town of Wichita just to the left of the county jail.

He said a brief, “Morning,” to Mary Sue who was part office assistant and part assistant jailer. “Only got a couple of regulars,” she said with an equal lack of enthusiasm. Mary Sue had warned him when he hired her that she was not a morning person and not to try to carry on a conversation with her until after she’d had at least three cups of coffee.

He nodded and went on to the interior office from which he conducted official business and began to attack the always mountainous paperwork, much of it online these days. This was the one part of the job he hated, but with characteristic stoicism he made a practice of doing first what he most detested and then moving on to tasks he more enjoyed.

He was, of course, interrupted half a dozen times but by mid-morning was beginning to reduce the workload enough to allow himself a second cup of coffee and a few moments research online. Not finding much more relevant about Medicine Stick and its demise, he leaned back in his chair, sipping his coffee and considering options.

Usually in a murder case he went looking for possible witnesses, if not to the crime then to the circumstances around it. But in this one, the death could have occurred as long as fifty four years ago. Who’d still be around?

Then he remembered Mayleen Carson. She lived in Mountainside and when he’d been called to her house after a
break-in, she’d told him she’d grown up in old Medicine Stick. She had to nearing eighty. He decided to take a little drive into Mountainside this morning.

She was sitting on the front porch of the little white cottage in the modest south
side of Mountainside, rocking gently in the wide swing, an e-reader telling a story at her side.

“Morning, Sheriff,” she greeted him with a slightly anxious air. “Nobody’s dead or hurt are they?”

Quickly he shook his head. He sometime forgot that it scared people when he showed up unannounced. They feared he came bearing bad tidings.

“My apologies, Mrs. Carson, I should’ve called ahead. I just wanted to ask you some questions about old times.”

She switched off her story and gestured him to a nearby lawn chair. “I suppose it’s about the Medicine Stick murder,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

She nodded. “Word gets around real fast here in Mountainside.”

“We don’t even know for sure it is a murder,” he began cautiously.

“You think that poor person shot herself to death in that old store? Doesn’t seem likely to me.”

“Well, we don’t know when it happened.”

“Whole place has been covered with water ever since the lake was built. That was 1947. I was fourteen going on fifteen and the store was the only building of that fashion in the whole town.”

He sighed. It was amazing the way news could travel in this place. “Guess I should have put it on TV.”

“It was on the morning news. Just a little line or two, guess news from out here isn’t too important on the big city television.”

He sat thoughtfully, considering how to proceed. Well, if this was a normal murder case, he would ask . .  .

“Suppose you want to know if I have any idea who it could have been.”

He nodded. “That thought occurred to me.” Sharp as a tack was Mayleen Casey. He hoped when he got old, he kept his wits about him this well. Hell, he hoped he was doing that well right now.

“Well, I don’t know. ‘Course Harry Cowles and his wife didn’t get along. We could hear ‘em shouting at each other all the way down the block and you could tell by the way he looked at her that he wanted to kill her.” She paused, considering. “Don’t think he had it in him, old Harry. Anyways they moved to Heavener to live near their daughter when we were put out of Medicine Stick.”

He watched her go through a mental roll call.
“Sandy Taylor now, he liked to beat on Carrie. I member my dad, he went down to talk to Sandy about that and Mom tried to talk Carrie into taking the baby and leaving him.  He was no problem when he was sober though and Carrie kept thinking she’d talk him out of drinking.” She leaned forward confidingly. “Can’t see any reason why he’d shoot her though. Sandy was more into using his fists.”

“I can’t see why anybody would
beat up a family member either,” Alistair agreed. “But it happens all the same.”

The swing continued to
move slowly and he batted away a fly, thinking it shouldn’t be too long now before the first freeze. He and everybody else in the community hoped that fall weather would bring much needed rain. For the last three years, rain had come so sparingly that the whole area seemed to be turning into a desert.

“You didn’t happen to know a girl by the name of Stacia?” he asked abruptly, not knowing the question was coming out of his mouth until it did.

The old woman laughed softly. “Sheriff, I may have trouble remembering what I ate for supper yesterday, but things from back when I was a girl are clear in my mind as though they just happened. Clearer, in fact. But Stacia wasn’t a girl when I knew her. She was in her twenties, I’d guess. Red hair, brown eyes, glamorous as a movie star. Looked a little like Susan Hayward. I wanted to grow up to be just like her.”

He tried not to betray his shock. “So there was a Stacia.”

“Stacia Larkin. Your granddad was real gone on her, but then so were half the men in Medicine Stick.”

“My grandfather? But he didn’t live in Medicine Stick. At least not that I’ve ever heard.”

She shook her head. “No, he already had the ranch where you live now, though not the nice house, of course. Your dad and mom built that as I guess you know.”

“My granddad?” he said again.

“Why not? He was only about the age you are now and his wife had died leaving him with just the one little boy.”

He could remember his grandfather well enough. He’d been seventeen when Jon Redhawk died and it had been a blow from which he’d not quickly recovered. He used to
follow after the old man who had taken him fishing and hunting and even taught him some of the old Kiowa trail skills. Withdrawn and not very talkative even with his only grandson, it was hard to imagine him losing his head over a young woman.

He shook away the image of his grandfather with a
yen for a wild young red-head. He got to his feet, thanking Mrs. Carson for her time. He’d found out the key bit of information he’d been seeking. There had been a Stacia in Medicine Stick. Now he just had to figure how Hart had come by that knowledge.

It was odd that even if she’d forgotten her own history, she should be shocked by what she saw on the new television with its satellite access to the larger world. Surely somewhere deep in her mind was an awareness of the world she’d lived in for twenty six years of life.

She found herself blushing and embarrassed at not only the jokes on the comedy shows and the situation in which characters lived and accepted as normal, but even the commercials.

You’d think she’d stepped right out of an Amish past where people rode around in buggies and girls wore long dresses and bonnets. None of the mores of this world were familiar to her and she finally decided that television didn’t represent actual people like those living around her. Of course, what could she know? Since she’d come back to herself her only experience of life had been in her brother’s home mostly in the company of two little girls and within the locked confines of a prison where she was exposed to  only the most trusted of prisoners, most of them men who had been locked up for decades like old Mr. Jeffers.

She was even more horrified when she found an all-news channel and discovered the shape the world was in. It was a wonder, she decided, that anybody dared step out their own front door.

She finally settled for watching a string of shows about a man who was a sheriff in a small southern town and had a small freckled-face son, a sweetly rounded aunt, and a deputy who was too funny for words, but so vulnerable she felt sorry for him.

After that she found a movie channel where she watched
Bette Davis in
Now Voyager
which made her cry but in a kind of happy way.

Anyway the evening passed more quickly than had the others she’d spent alone and she found herself at ten p.m., turning off more of the horrible news to bath
e and put on her nightshirt and then settle into bed with the new book she’d bought when she was in town.

It looked interesting. She’d picked it out both because of the cover which showed a picture of a young girl in a long, old-fashioned dress
, and because of what she’d read on the flap.
Daughter of the Earth
was about a German settler in pioneer Texas who fell in love with a young man from far away who had come to initiate camels into Texas life. This sounded different and the girl seemed to be the type to have some gumption to decide things for herself.

She’d read the first few pages,
chuckling a little over the description of the family’s chickens. That was so like chickens, she thought, then wondered how she knew anything about barnyard fowl. From what Tommy had told her, she felt sure that she’d been raised in town.

She sank into the story, becoming completely immersed in the life of the German girl so that she felt like she was seeing through her eyes and walking in her shoes.

And then a flicker at the corner of her eye and she looked up, then turned around with a puzzled frown, forgetting to be fearful.

Mesmerized, she sat numbly looking into an enlarging oval of light beyond the circle of that cast by
her lamp. Unconscious when her book slipped from her grasp, she rose to her feet and walked forward as the landscape of a different world exposed itself as the oval enlarged and, as she stepped forward, slowly swallowed her up.

Immediately she knew where she was and that it was the place she was supposed to be. The days she’d passed since she awakened in the hospital did not vanish, but lingered only as a distant memory from long ago as she felt
cloth around her legs and she knew she was no longer wearing a short nightshirt, but a just below knee-length skirt and a white blouse, one of her favorite outfits, with high heels that walked with difficulty in the sandy street.

She was home in Medicine Stick and when she glanced at her own reflection in the window glass as she went into Millers’ Store, she knew what she would see there: a young woman with long red hair and an admittedly lovely face, her lips bright with crimson lipstick, her cheeks
lightly pinked from delicate rouge.

She knew who she was and where she was and walked confidently in through the door to greet Mr. Miller.

It wasn’t until she was in her own bed at home and ready for sleep that Stacia began to wonder. Mom always said she had too much imagination for her own good, but the thoughts that kept popping in her head were stranger than anything she’d experienced before.

In fact she got up to peer into the mirror over the little dressing table to examine her own appearance, half expecting to see a woman with a
delicate face, huge blue eyes with long dark lashes and black hair instead of her own flaming red.

She drew in a breath of relief as she saw her own face and her own hair.

“I declare, Stacia, you are so vain,” her sister’s voice drawled from the other bed in the room. “Quit admiring yourself and turn out the light.”

Her sister was only eighteen, years younger, but she could be
so bossy that sometimes Stacia felt Helen thought she was the older sister.

“I’ll turn out the light when I’m ready,” she said, but then went ahead and pulled the string to turn off the naked light
bulb that hung from their ceiling. The Larkin home was modest and full of family, but most every other house in town was similar so neither Stacia or Helen was particularly discontented. You didn’t feel poor when everybody else around you was poor too.

Well, almost everybody. Jon Redhawk was what her mom would call ‘comfortable’ with
his nice little house and a good living from the ranch he owned not far from Medicine Stick. He was good looking, too, in his own way, though she thought sometimes he looked like an old Indian chief.

But
she felt nothing special for him, nor for any man she’d met thus far, and she was determined to hang on until she met a man she loved so much she didn’t have any choice but to wed. If it didn’t happen, then she was content enough with her life as it was. Although most of her friends were long married, Stacia hung on to life as the oldest daughter of the Larkin home, longing for something she didn’t quite understand.

“I’m not vain,” she remembered to tell Helen.

“Then why were you staring into the mirror?”

For once she was honest about her inner feelings. “I was trying to figure out if I’m me,” she said with all the dignity she could master.

Helen responded with a hoot of laughter and loudly snuggled into her bed, making the springs creak.

But Stacia lay asleep for a long time, thinking about her memories of another woman in another time and when she woke up, she opened her eyes to that other woman’s bedroom.  Getting up, she went to a different mirror to look into the face of a dark-haired woman with a
high cheekbones and large eyes.

“I am Hart Benson,” she whispered the words softly. “They told me that’s my name and surely they know.”

A break
-in at a house on the edge of Wichita required priority attention from the sheriff on Tuesday morning and Alistair preferred to personally meet with the elderly couple who had been invaded during the previous evening.

Sibyl and Raymond Forrester
had been friends of his grandfather, though they were a good many years younger, and his folks had continued to be friendly toward them after Granddad died. He owed them at least a personal visit after what must have been a frightening evening.

They were both
approaching eighty and Raymond was in shaky health, though Sibyl still was going strong. He was a tall, thin old man with only wisps of hair left on his head. She was of moderate build with a determined face and pure white hair.

Sibyl Forrester
greeted him with her customary polite manner, though her voice trembled as she said, “So comforting to have you come over, Alistair.”

“Don’t know where you were last night though,”
Ray added gruffly, obviously trying to conceal the fact that he’d been as disturbed as his wife by the burglary. “Could’ve been murdered in our beds.”

Alistair settled without debate into one of the big chairs in the small living room and looked around at the familiar furnishings. He couldn’t remember anything changing here in his lifetime: not the  old green chairs that must have been purchased decades ago, nor the crocheted doilies that adorned chair arms and the small table in front of the sofa where rested
Sibyl’s favorite mementoes. Brown tinged photos of her parents wedding day set on one end of the table, while another of Ray’s mom and dad was on the other end.

Pictures of grown children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren looked down on him from the wall. The place smelled of cleanliness and lemon furniture polish, though behind that there was a closed-in scent of age and too little fresh air.

“Well, Alistair, what are things coming to when you can’t even sleep in peace in your own house?”

“We certainly slept peacefully enough through the whole thing,”
Sibyl challenged her husband, obviously feeling that he was being rude to Alistair who had failed to prevent the invasion.

“I just came by to have you tell me what happened,” Alistair said, not unfamiliar with the reactions of those
victimized by criminal actions. They needed someone to blame and he was convenient, but they really didn’t mean it.

“We told the deputy,”
Ray said in disgust. “Though I’m not sure he took any of it in.”

“Now,
Raymond, that was Clarence Harding’s boy and Clarence was in my second grade class years ago.”

“That don’t mean the boy is worth ten cents,”
Ray disputed.

“Actually Joey does a good job and is getting better everyday,”
Alistair commented mildly.

“Oh, my goodness!”
Sibyl Forrester jumped to her feet. “I’m so sorry, Alistair, I’m just not thinking straight this morning and I didn’t offer you refreshments.”

Alistair held up a restraining hand. “That’s all right,
Sibyl, I really don’t need . . .”

The thought that a guest would come to their home without being offered food and drink was apparently so troubling to
Sibyl that she didn’t wait to let him end the sentence, but trotted off in the direction of the kitchen.

He turned to her husband. “Surely,
Ray,” he said plaintively. “You can tell me what happened and what was taken.”

The old man chuckled. “You’ll have to forgive us, son. This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to us in years. Neighbors have been calling to see which of us was killed in the wild home invasion they got wind of and staying on line to commiserate with us about the way the world is going to the dogs.
No worse than it ever was, I reckon, considering what I remember about the days when we were growing up at old Medicine Stick.”

Normally Alistair loved to hear
Ray’s stories of olden times, but today he interrupted. “What was taken, Ray?”

“Not much.” He got slowly to his feet, motioning to Alistair to follow. “The indignity of it is that they took stuff right from our bedroom and neither one of us woke up.”

He led the way to a bedroom where a double bed was neatly made up and covered with a rose coverlet. He went past the bed to point at a blank space on the wall, then turned to walk over to the dresser where an old lacquered jewelry case dripped modest costume jewelry, some of the items scattered on the rug on the floor.

“Joey Harding told us to leave everything as it was until the insurance people came in. Only thing we really valued,” he went on. “
Sibyl had a diamond pendant that was handed down in her family. She treasured that necklace and now it’s gone. That and the picture that was on that wall.” He pointed once again.

“Were the stolen items valuable, Jim?” he asked, then added, “And who knew you had them?”

“The diamond was, but as for the picture, it was just an enlarged copy of a photo of my wife’s graduating class at old Medicine Stick. Most of the people in it are dead now.”

Hart sat in her library, smiling and greeting the usual visitors and suggesting books based on their reading habits. She’d thought she’d feel locked up in here, but instead it seemed safe. Here she didn’t have to worry about the things she couldn’t remember, or the things she was beginning to remember, but could just focus on her job among the books she loved.

She especially needed that security today as her mind kept unreeling in a jerky uneven fashion
, memories, but not those she’d hoped would come back, Hart Benson’s memories. Instead the life she was replaying was that of a red-haired woman named Stacia Larkin.

A  woman she’d seen murdered and lying dead on the sand, her
brown eyes wide open and staring. How could she have Stacia’s memories and at the same time see her sprawled in death in front of the old store at Medicine Stick?

It all seemed so real. Even as she studied the problem, she was back there again, remembering spending her tenth birthday with her family. Her little sister Helen had been two that year and times were even harder than usual. Mom had sewed a rag doll for the little girl and Stacia had helped out at the store to buy candy and fruit for her sister and brothers.

She had two brothers: Frank and Lucian, their ages falling between her and Helen. She was the oldest and Helen was the youngest. All of them had red hair except Helen, whose was only barely red. Her hair was a brown that glinted with red lights in the sun.

Considering the teasing she’d endured as a youngster for her red hair, Stacia thought
her sister should be grateful. Not Helen, she pouted because she wasn’t like the rest of them.

She’d had to be told her own name in this place and time. They’d explained her age, educational background, about her brother and his family. They’d said her parents had been killed in a traffic accident when she was in her late teens and though she’d been supported by the trust fund left by her
grandparents, her half-brother had been her guardian and she’d lived with him and his family for the short time until she went away to college.

Nobody had to tell her about Stacia Larkin. Now that she’d been reawakened, she could follow a clear trail from her earliest
memories until her twenty fourth year. After that everything went blank.

But that’s because I died
, she thought. After you are dead you don’t remember.