A Wife In Time. Cathie Linz
no blue light here anymore!”
“Don’t panic. Try and remember exactly what we did. Maybe if we reenact everything exactly, we’ll end up back where we started, in our own time.”
Susannah nodded. It sounded as logical a suggestion as any she could come up with. “I got to the top of the staircase here and saw the blue light coming from the room. Then I moved from the landing over to this doorway. It was almost as if I was being drawn forward. There was this same flickering candlelight, but the brightest light—that strange blue light that isn’t here anymore—was coming from the rocking chair over there by the second door. I reached out to touch it, but it disappeared as I stepped through this second doorway.” As she softly spoke the words, she went through the motions she was describing. Then she stepped over the threshold, with Kane right on her heels, almost tripping on the hem of her red velvet dress.
“Did it work?” he demanded. “Are we back in our own time now?”
Peering out the third-story window, Susannah said, “I don’t think so. Hey, did you know that there’s a mirror up here aimed at the front porch? From the angle it’s set at, you can see who’s at the door.”
“Would you stop gushing over the furnishings,” Kane exclaimed irritably, “and do something useful instead.”
“I never gush,” Susannah haughtily informed him before another thought struck her. “I remember something else. For one second, I’m sure I saw a face in that strange blue light. The face of that woman in the portrait. Elsbeth.”
“Look, I’m willing to acknowledge the possibility of time travel here, but I draw the line at ghosts,” Kane stated emphatically.
Help!
Susannah’s eyes widened. “Did you hear that?” she whispered.
“Hear what?”
Help me!
Susannah’s breath caught, at both the painful urgency of the woman’s voice and the realization that she was hearing it inside her head. Could it be...Elsbeth? Was she communicating with her?
Did you bring us here? It was more a thought on Susannah’s part rather than a deliberate attempt to talk to the now-invisible ghost. She could see no sign of Elsbeth’s presence, but she did feel something.... She shivered and ran her hands up her bare forearms.
Are you there? Susannah felt the silent confirmation rather than heard it.
Did you bring us here?
Again the silent confirmation.
But why?
This time Susannah heard the whispery reply in her mind: To help me.
“Help you how?” Susannah asked aloud.
It was as if her spoken words temporarily cut off the silent bond between herself and Elsbeth, if that’s what it was, for there was no longer any reply. And Susannah’s own sixth sense told her that she was temporarily on her own here, aside from an irritated-looking Kane.
“I said I could use some help,” Kane told her.
Was that what she’d heard? Kane asking for her help? Had she just imagined the ghostly presence communicating with her?
“Would you stop going all mistily sentimental on me and help me out, here?” Seeing her hesitation, Kane quickly added, “Do you want to be stuck in the past forever? Women don’t even have the vote yet.”
Sighing, Susannah acknowledged that he did have a good point. Their first priority had to be finding a way home. The idea of helping out a ghost did sound a little farfetched. Not that the concept of jumping a century in the blink of an eye was an everyday occurrence, either. “What do you want me to do?”
Stepping back inside the room, Kane said, “Try pushing on the walls.”
She did so, while asking, “What are we looking for?”
“I don’t know. Anything unusual. A time portal, maybe.”
“Sounds like something out of a science-fiction novel,” she noted with a nervous laugh. This entire situation was too bizarre for words. So much of it felt dreamlike, yet there was a hard-edged reality to it that dispelled any hope she had that she was dreaming.
Between them, they pushed on every square inch of wall space in the relatively small room. Nothing happened. After nearly an hour had passed, Susannah became more and more discouraged. As a last resort, she closed her eyes, clicked her heels together three times and whispered, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”
Upon opening her eyes, the first thing she saw was the derisive expression on Kane’s face. “Stop looking at me that way! It worked for Dorothy,” she said defensively.
“Well, it didn’t work for us,” he noted.
His glance lowered to the low neckline of her dress, which Susannah was disconcerted to discover he appeared to be studying with more than casual interest. Suddenly the words he’d thrown at her in the convention center that afternoon came back to her. A Mata Hari who played bedroom games with younger, married men—wasn’t that what he’d said? Or something to that effect. With that in mind, Susannah didn’t like the way he was eyeing her one bit.
She was tempted to put a hand up to shield her exposed skin from his hot gaze. But that would be admitting that he bothered her, and she wasn’t about to give him that advantage over her. So she threw back her shoulders instead and narrowed her eyes, as if daring him to make a comment. When he did, it was far from what she expected.
“Where did you get that necklace you’re wearing?” he demanded curtly.
Now her hand did fly up, to cover her necklace rather than her skin. “Why do you want to know?” she countered distrustfully.
“Because the woman in the portrait along the stairs is wearing one identical to it.”
“Elsbeth?” Stepping into the hallway and down a few steps, Susannah studied the portrait of Elsbeth Whitaker. Kane had blocked her view when she’d hurried upstairs an hour before. Now she could see the black bunting draped around the portrait. That hadn’t been there when the tour guide had talked about the painting in their own century. Susannah was familiar enough with Victorian tradition to know that such bunting was only used on a portrait to indicate the subject’s death. Her heart fell.
“She’s died already. We’re too late to save her,” she murmured.
“Save her?” Kane repeated. “Listen, I may not know much about time travel, but even I know that you’re not supposed to mess with things like life and death. What if this woman later had children who went on to become mass murderers or something?”
“Then why did she bring us here?”
“Who said she did?”
“I do. I can feel it here.” She pressed her palm against her heart. She’d also gotten confirmation from Elsbeth, but she didn’t think this was the best time to confess she’d communicated with a ghost. For she now felt sure that that’s what she’d done—communicated with Elsbeth. She hadn’t imagined it.
“Is the woman some kind of relative of yours?” Kane demanded.
Susannah shook her head. “I don’t have any relatives in Savannah.”
“How can you be sure?” he argued.
“Because I recently did a family history—a family tree, if you will—for my parents’ anniversary and I traced our ancestry back to the 1700s. Elsbeth Whitaker’s name didn’t show up, I’m sure of it.”
“Then how do you explain the necklace? It’s exactly the same as yours. Were a lot of them made during that time?”
Again,