Megan sat cross-legged in the center of her bed with the ruffled hem of her long white cotton nightgown tucked securely beneath her.
She'd brought the kittens into the bedroom and placed one of them on each side of her and had dragged the braided rug Deacon liked close to the side of her bed.
"Your job," she told the assembled warm bodies surrounding her, "if you choose to accept it, is to drag me back to the here and now if I get really weirded out. All right, guys?"
She shivered once, despite the fact that the mild June night was far from chilly, and looked at the dark pressing in against the walls of open windows. She'd thought when she first moved in that she'd have to find some way to drape those windows but soon realized that was a city dweller's concern. There was nothing for miles that she needed to shield herself against. And because of the terrain on which it had been built, the height of the house at this corner was such that anyone standing outside, trying to look in, would have to use a ladder.
It wasn't what she needed to be concerned about right now, but worrying about a nonexistent prowler seemed, temporarily at least, safer than worrying about the prowling she was getting ready to do.
She'd found a soft old leather ring binder in a box of schooldays memorabilia she'd retrieved with the other things she'd brought from her father's attic. In it, she had placed the two troubling diary entries and a supply of notebook filler paper she had bought for the journal. It lay now on the bed in front of her, along with her pen and the small computer-generated guidebook to Dr. Kent's friend's journaling technique.
She picked up the instruction book and glanced at it, although she'd already read it several times.
Carefully, she replaced it on the bed and looked at Deacon. "It says I can use my journal to—to skip around; I can use it to explore conversations with completely new people; I can explore my reactions to things I've done or go back and do those things in a completely different way." She chuckled reluctantly. "Sounds like a schizophrenic's dream to me."
But probably no more of a schizophrenic's dream than the life she had been living for the last two days.
She closed her eyes, considering all the strange events of those days. As many as there had been, they all seemed to fall into only three groups: semicoherent pleas for help in a strange handwriting in her journal; visions of the young girl, at Jake's house and at the waterfall; and fragmented memories of words and actions that had never happened and of a man she had now seen identified as Sam Hooker.
Were those groups related?
Of course they were, at least two of them anyway. But the third, the diary entries, seemed far removed from Lydia's innocent love for Sam Hooker. Could they be coming from her own subconscious?
If not, this journaling technique would never work. If not, she'd really fallen through the looking glass, and she didn't remember how Alice had gotten home.
She clasped her hands tightly and looked at the notebook on the bed. Which would be the safest for her to explore?
Lydia. If any of them could be safe.
And when?
She'd had no trouble with her journal until June 3. If, as Dr. Kent insisted, she could go back and forth in this thing, why did she have to risk dating it?
She wouldn't, she decided. She'd just let whatever surfaced, surface.
Because there was no way she was writing June 3 or 4 on any of the pages. Not yet, anyway.
"Okay," Megan whispered shakily. She opened the book, settled it in her lap, and read the journal instructions for this exercise.
Picture the person you want to speak with. Remember everything you can about that person. Close your eyes, summoning all the details you can to the forefront of your mind. Now relax. Feel yourself sinking deeply into a place where you and that person are together, where that person's thoughts are open to you. Relax and go deeper. Let go of your disbelief. What do you wish to say? What do you wish to know? Nothing in this place can harm you. Relax. Breathe deeply and evenly. Relax. Pick up your pen. Now write.
Megan stared at the blank page for a long timeless moment, breathing deeply, searching within herself until she found a peace and calm she seldom felt. Who are you? she wrote across the undated page. What do you want?
The answer came almost instantly:
August 3, 1870
Lydia Tanner—her book
Megan gripped the pen. She wanted to throw it from her, the way she had thrown the notebook the night before. But she wanted answers, and this trip into her psyche was the only way she knew of even beginning to get them.
Who are you? she wrote again. What do you want?
And just as quickly as before, the words came.
I hate it here. Aunt Peg is the worst kind of snob. She finds nothing but fault with my clothes and my manners, even with my calling her Aunt Peg instead of Aunt Margaret. I believe she truly hates my father, but that is at least an honest and understandable emotion for someone who insists he was responsible for my mother's death. What I find completely reprehensible is her attitude toward my brother Peter. For her, he does not exist. How can I survive the next two years?
Thank God, I will soon leave here for normal school. Surely I will not find such bigotry among the good Sisters with whom I shall board.
Oh, Peter. I miss him, his laughter and his mischief, so much. He will be grown before I return. And I miss the freedom of wandering in the beautiful woods near our home. And Granny Rogers. And, of course, and without saying, I miss my beloved Sam.
How well he knew me to give me this book in which to confide my thoughts and my fears.
Can he know me so well, can he be so considerate of my feelings, and not love me, if only a little?
Could he have said what he said to me the week before I left and not love me, if only a little?
In two years when I return, I too will be grown, truly a woman and not the child Sam thinks me to be now. Perhaps then he will not fear letting me know the depth of his feelings.
The flow of words stopped as abruptly as it had begun. "Well," Megan said. She looked over at Deacon, who sat at attention on his rug; at the kittens, who had migrated toward each other and were now curled together in a ball; at the pages in the notebook in front of her. "Well," she repeated.
Of all the strange experiences of the past two days, this was perhaps the strangest.
She had been aware of holding the pen. She had been aware of the words springing to life in her mind before being transferred to the page by the actions of her hand.
But they were not her words.
They were the words of an innocent girl with her whole life ahead of her.
She looked back at the pages. They were not in her handwriting.
The handwriting was familiar, though. She had seen it before, just that day, scrawled across the pages of another diary, screaming for help.
On a hunch, Jake drove through the woods, as close to the ridge as he could get without headlights, parked, and hiked the remaining distance to the top. Where had that vehicle been earlier? Nothing had come down the county road, unless it also had been traveling without lights.
It made no sense, these strangers' incursions onto the property, unless his DEA-mentality paranoia wasn't paranoia and Renfro or some of his buddies had a non-taxpaid stash or crop somewhere in the hills. But he'd found no sign of a crop, no sign of any activity other than the proof of visits, more than one, in what almost appeared to be an undirected search.
And what had Rolley P hoped to gain by sending his storm troopers in on Megan? Had it been no more than incompetence? Or was there more connection than coincidence?
He shifted his weight to his right leg as he leaned his back against the trunk of an ancient oak tree and looked out over the panorama spread before him. Dark-shadowed and moon-washed or illuminated by harsh summer sun, it never ceased to amaze him that man had once thought he could civilize these hills.
He still found evidence of their attempts in abandoned homesites marked by nothing but caved-in cellars or a foundation planting of jonquils to memorialize those efforts.
He'd flown over this area at night. The darkness was in its own way as awesome as the lights of a large city and as revealing and, except for small isolated pockets where someone had managed to blast out a road and maintain it, went unbroken by any artificial light for miles to the south, to the east, and even, once past a few small towns on the edge of the national forest, to the west.
So why now was he seeing a single, wavering dot of light high on the next ridge to the east?
He straightened away from the tree, concentrating on that light. A flashlight? Maybe. Maybe something stronger. But unless his perception was way off, it wasn't a spotlight being used to blind a deer. And unless his perception was way off, it wasn't too far from the skeletal ruins of an old cabin.
And once again on Megan's property.
He might be able to drive over there without headlights, without killing himself or losing his truck in a ravine, but he doubted it. And even without lights, the straining noise of his truck engine would announce him.
Attempting to walk it tonight was futile also. Whoever was there would be long gone before Jake got halfway down this hillside, let alone up the next.
But tomorrow, he promised, with the horse and with Deacon, he would. And tomorrow, maybe, he'd finally figure out what in the hell was going on.
Here on the mountain. And with Megan McIntyre Hudson.
After he slept. After he rested. After he got his head on straight and could begin to think clearly about his reaction to her.
He was in his house, on his long comfortable couch, with his head sunk deep into Mattie's down pillow when he realized that he probably wasn't going to sleep. Not here anyway. And it wasn't because of the pain in his leg.
"Damn," he muttered, rising in a long, controlled stretch before bending to massage the damaged muscles in his left thigh.
He wouldn't sleep because he was here and Megan was alone except for a dog, in a house too close to the road in spite of overgrown roadbeds and locked gates.
He wouldn't sleep because Mattie's pillow was a poor excuse for someone soft, and for the first time in longer than he wanted to remember, he wanted someone soft beside him in the night. He wanted Megan beside him.
"Right, Kenyon," he said to the darkness surrounding him. "And what you need to do is run down the mountain, and then you can be the one who bursts in on her in the middle of the night."
But what if their friends on the mountain decided to come a little closer to civilization? What if Rolley P decided to send some of his boys back out on some other trumped-up charge? What if one of Renfro's buddies decided Max might have left something worth finding in the house?
Jake rubbed his hands over his face, sighed, and swung his feet to the floor.
No, he wouldn't sleep: not here, anyway. And since he didn't believe Megan would issue him an invitation to sleep with her, he supposed he wouldn't sleep anywhere.
He took the Jeep, because it was the most easily maneuverable and because it was parked pointed downhill, the way it had been two nights ago, and he could make the trip without alarming Megan or advertising it to any prowler. He turned the key without starting the engine, eased into neutral, released the emergency brake, and guided the silent car down the hill to a point just below the creek where he could watch Megan's house but not be observed by any middle-of-the-night caller.
Her bedroom lights were on.
For the first time in years of surveillance, he felt like a peeping tom.
He eased back against the door, trying to get comfortable and wishing he'd brought his truck so he could stretch out his legs. He'd watched her sleep the last two nights; it seemed as though he had always watched her sleep. Why shouldn't he watch over her tonight?
Why should he?
Megan McIntyre Hudson was a grown woman, one who had lived in and survived Washington, D.C., had worked through and survived a South American civil revolt, had walked out of a jungle and then faced down some real predators when the press took after her. She had done all that without his help; why was he so convinced she couldn't make it through the night alone in a locked house with a trained guard dog for company?
And why was her light still on after three in the morning?
Maybe because she was having trouble making it through the night alone?
"Get real, Kenyon," he hissed, as he felt overworked muscles protest throughout his body. "You're sitting here in the dark like some lovelorn testosterone-driven jock guarding his lady love. You've lost it, probably irrevocably."
Why now? At a time in his life when he had finally turned his back on all the turmoil of the last several years and was beginning to work his way back into the human race, how could someone from his past, someone he hadn't wanted to get to know then, have destroyed his hard-won calm?
And why Megan? Even in her full glory as the senator's daughter and Roger's wife, she'd never been a great beauty. Now, after all that had happened to her, she looked more like a waif someone needed to care for.
Maybe that was it. Helen had accused him of being bitter because he'd lost his white-knight streak. Maybe the streak was working its way out of cold storage at long last. It was about time, he thought. If that was the case, he could live with this need that had somehow been created in him to care for her.
He yawned, tired beyond belief but knowing he wouldn't sleep. Yeah. He could live with knowing that at long last his humanity was returning. Strange how often he'd seen someone in law enforcement lose it. Strange how easily it slipped away, almost unnoticed. Strange how hard it was to get it back.
He yawned again, flexed his shoulders, and rubbed his face, pleased with his deductions. Pleased that at last he could understand why he was camped out in the front seat of his Jeep in the early morning hours, watching over a house that didn't need it and a woman who not only didn't need it but probably didn't want it.
Human compassion. He liked the sound of that. A good reason.
Yeah, and if that's true, he told himself, this front seat is a waterbed in an air-conditioned suite in the Manhattan Plaza Hotel. . . .
He must have slept: he was too cramped in too many places not to have, and the sky was just beginning to show tinges of gray. Sometime since he'd closed his eyes, a light mist had fallen, clouding his windshield and bringing a welcome but mildly uncomfortable chill to the air. Jake twisted his head and his arms, trying to stretch in the confines of the car, and drew in a deep breath. The sounds of awakening birds and other creatures and the clean fresh early-morning scents were almost worth having spent the night in this torture chamber.
Megan's light was still on.
Damn.
He started the engine—maybe he was carrying this silent surveillance too far—and drove to her house. When she didn't meet him at the front door, he knocked lightly, and it eased open beneath his knuckles. Only Deacon, waiting patiently in the front hall with a complete lack of concern, kept him from going on full alert.
He saw a small glow coming from the kitchen—the fluorescent tube over the range, he knew—and a larger one spilling out into the hall from Megan's bedroom.
"Megan?" he said softly, angry with her, as he had been last night, for needlessly putting herself at risk but not wanting to wake her if she had fallen asleep.
When she didn't answer, he eased down the hallway and looked in on her. She lay stretched diagonally across the bed, hugging a pillow to her and with her bare feet peeping out from beneath a long white cotton nightgown that looked like an overlong Mexican peasant blouse, but with a wide ruffle at the hem and white embroidery on the top ruffle instead of varied bright colors.
She slept, but it was not an easy sleep. Deep shadows beneath her eyes and the tracks of tears, most dry now but still visible against too-pale cheeks, gave testimony to that. Before going to bed she'd folded the bedspread and put it aside, and at some point she had kicked off the sheet. And of course, she'd opened every window so the room was as chilly as the front seat of his Jeep had been.
He shook his head. He was still angry with her, but telling her about it could wait until she woke up. He was here now, so he didn't have to worry about her not locking doors or closing windows. Far from the sophisticated city woman he had spent years thinking she was, Megan McIntyre had a distressing vulnerability about her, a defenselessness all out of sync with what she had lived through. And a hell of a dainty little foot.
Which she would probably plant somewhere on his body if she caught him watching her.
Carefully he pulled the sheet up and spread it over her, the pillow, and the notebook and pen he saw peeping from the other corner of her pillow. Not the black one, he mused, but an old, soft, brown leather one.
She whimpered when the sheet settled over her, smiled in her sleep, and turned more fully toward the pillow.
And now Jake found himself in the surprising position of being as jealous of that pillow as he had been of his dog earlier.
"Bah, humbug," he muttered, then carefully, quietly, turned out the bedside light and left her room.
He was here. She knew the moment he entered the room, even though she supposed she was still asleep. If she were awake, she'd feel the tension that tainted all their waking hours. Sometimes she wanted to scream at him; sometimes she wanted him to scream at her, to accuse her of all those ways she knew she wronged him. But that would do no good, because there could be no resolution for those wrongs.
And sometimes, as now, she wanted to reach for him and draw him into the bed with her, to hold him as she now held her pillows. But that would do no good either, because most of their tension sprang from his wanting to do more than just hold her and from her knowing she could never, ever, give him more.
She had to be asleep. Awake, she would find herself cringing from him, no matter how hard she fought it. But asleep—oh, in the blessed peace of sleep she could take the kindness and care and comfort he gave her. Take them, treasure them, and yes, fall more deeply into that wonderful peace.
My brother lived.
So sure that he had died when struck by Puckett's bullet, I had not been able to bring myself to ask about him. And Sam, I learned later, not knowing that I had seen Peter fall, had no reason to suspect I thought him dead.
The wound was minor—if having a chunk of flesh torn from one's shoulder by a deadly piece of lead can ever be called minor—and he was able to be up and about by the time Sam returned with me to Granny Rogers's cabin.
Granny's wonderful dark eyes clouded for a moment when Sam carried me into her cabin, but then she became all bustle and business, settling me in her best bed and shooing the men—for now I must count Peter as a man and no longer a child—from the room.
Her examination and her questions were strangely similar, both gentle and probing. She left me for a long while and returned carrying her best china teacup, full of a faintly tinged warm liquid.
"Drink it all," she said, as she sat beside me on the bed. I did, though it was a vile concoction, and handed back her precious cup. She set it on the table beside the bed and leaned forward, taking me in her arms and hugging me tightly. "You will heal," she told me. "You will have your womanly flow. And no one outside this house will ever know what you have endured."
On the day after my return, my brother Peter rode into the small community of Prescott on the Fort Towson road for supplies and mentioned in passing that Granny Rogers was ill with a fever and that I was caring for her because Sam was away on a Lighthorse mission. On his return, Peter stopped by our house, but he told me it looked as though no one had been there during our absence.
Granny prepared her teas and poultices for me several times a day, and I did begin to heal. And I did have my womanly flow. Only then did I break down and cry. I had not realized how much I feared that I carried the seed of one of those animals.
After Sam had carried me in and placed me in Granny's bed, he did not touch me again. And although I always knew he was nearby, I did not see him except when he came to the cabin for his evening meals.
By the time the good ladies from the Presbyterian church at Prescott decided it would be safe to visit fever-ridden Granny Rogers, I was able to be up from the bed to pass myself off as the nurse, while Granny put herself in her best bed, making sure her newest and best quilt was adequately displayed, and assumed the role of languishing patient.
No one ever knew I had been taken.
No one ever knew Peter had been shot.
No one ever knew I was dead inside.
Not then, anyway.
Our father finally returned to our house, not with a wife but with several workmen who immediately began construction of a rock outhouse behind the main house. "Jones has one," he muttered, so I immediately knew he had been down along the Red River visiting some of the wealthy plantation owners, but not for what reason.
And he was not disposed to tell me, for he was very angry with his children.
"What do you mean, spending all your time up here when we have a perfectly good house for you at the foot of this hill?" he said.
So he took us home, chastising us all the way, never looking to see that both his children bore visible wounds.
He also said, "I didn't raise you and educate you to have you acting like a servant for someone beneath your station."
And: "If you're hanging out in hopes of that halfbreed noticing you, stop it. I won't have you wasting yourself on him. I won't have you ruining your chances with a decent man."
I spoke then. "A decent white man, don't you mean? How do you think your son feels, hearing you say things like this?"
He looked as though I had struck him, not because of the truth of my words but because I had dared to speak at all.
And I almost told him then that no decent man of any blood would want me if he knew my secret.
"You are going back to your Aunt Margaret's just as soon as I can arrange it."
I wouldn't, but I didn't speak to him of that.
I didn't speak to him of much of anything.
I didn't do much of anything.
I stayed in my room, and on those rare nights when I fell into troubled sleep, I woke to find I was biting on my pillow to keep from screaming.
Peter did his best to cheer me, to try to tempt me from the house and the isolation of my room.
"Aw, come on, Liddy," he said one day in early July. "You know the creek is going to be just right for wading. If we wait much longer, it will have dried up to nothing, and the pool will be as hot as the rocks around it."
I could not return to the creek.
"Come on, Liddy. We haven't been to see Granny Rogers in weeks."
I could not travel that road.
"If you can't get out of the house now, how are you going to teach this coming year?"
I couldn't. I knew that. And knowing that, I also knew there was no reason for me to apply to the Nation for permission to teach or even for permission to remain in my father's house. I didn't need permission to remain a prisoner in the house, in my room. I knew that as the white child of an intermarried white citizen I had no standing with the Nation, but because of my brother's citizenship, and of course my father's, they probably would not consider me illegally present. In the eyes of the Choctaw government, I simply did not exist. How true that evaluation was.
In spite of all of Peter's coaxing and finally begging, I refused to apply for permission to teach, an act of stubbornness that held much more fear than strength. Even I knew that. But because I had not applied, I was surprised when Jeremy Hoskins, newly appointed to the Nation's school board, came riding up to my father's house late that summer. He carried with him a completed application, letters of reference from Sam Hooker and a half dozen other respected citizens, and an appointment for me to teach at the school at Prescott.
I thanked him, overwhelmed by the trust that had been placed in me and totally convinced I could not live up to it. I waited until he left to panic, to run from the house to that portion of the rear garden that had not been destroyed during the construction of the latest, still uncompleted, symbol of my father's status.
Peter did not come to coax me back into the house. He did not appear at all in the corner of the garden where I cowered. But after a while—long enough, I later realized, for Peter to have run to Granny Rogers's house and returned—Sam appeared.
He stood beside the rail fence on which climbed the remains of Peter's mother's wild roses, tall and silent and infinitely sad while he studied me. "You have not fared well since returning to your father's house," he said, as though my returning to that house were the cause of all my problems.
"I can't teach," I said. "I appreciate what you have done for me, but I can't go among people. I can't pretend that nothing has happened. I can't pretend that I am the same person who once lived in this body."
"You're a brave woman, Lydia Tanner. You proved that to me more than once. Nothing can hurt you in Prescott. No one will hurt you in the school, I promise you. You wanted this. You prepared yourself for it. Now you must do it."