I rushed on. “You and I have a strange relationship, I’m the first to admit, with all sorts of unresolved shit from another time period. It’s my belief that we were once married. I know how insane this all sounds, but it’s true, Derrick. You have to help me. I have to find your brother. He’s the only one who knows what happened because he did it. He did something to alter the timeline as we all knew it and only my sister and I can remember what’s right.”
Derrick blinked in slow motion and the effect was unduly eerie, reminding me of an old-fashioned celluloid doll with leaded weights in its otherwise hollow skull. I waited, ill and overheated with nerves, second-guessing my intentions. Seated to Derrick’s left, Robbie was shooting me warning looks but I ignored him for the time being.
“Derrick,” I pleaded.
He reached across the two feet of plastic table separating us and clenched my right forearm; I couldn’t restrain a gasp at the sudden movement but didn’t dare fight his hold.
“Who else have you told?” The question fell somewhere between threat and entreaty. To think this was anything less than life or death would be a grievous error.
“No one but you and Robbie.” Sweat glided down my spine; I was lying through my teeth and prayed he couldn’t tell.
Derrick increased the pressure on my arm; his gaze was unfaltering as he spoke with hushed intensity. “You will never mention these things to another living soul. Never. You will forget the name ‘Fallon’ and immediately cease inquiring after someone who doesn’t exist. Do you hear me? Someone who does not exist.”
I gulped back the instant urge to counter, recognizing both his sincerity and my mistake in trying to pry such hazardous information from him.
Robbie sat in wide-eyed silence.
The long, slender bones in my forearm ached beneath Derrick’s grip.
“Never,” he repeated.
I nodded acquiescence and he released his hold.
Less than ten seconds later Robbie and I were again alone in the booth, watching as Derrick retreated through the busy crowd without a backward glance.
Chapter Seventeen
Landon, MN - March, 2014
MY DAUGHTER’S NAME WAS ON MY LIPS AS I WOKE.
Millie Jo…
I’d been dreaming of her just seconds earlier, my oldest as a little girl. Of all my children, Millie was the one I most associated with this space, the bedroom she and I had once shared. As a young mother in 2004 I’d nursed my baby to sleep in this very bed, watching the stars rotate across the dormer windows. Her absence was so profound I might have been missing a limb, or my very heart. My eyelids parted to the white ceiling above my old twin bed, cloaked now in dimness, and I swore the sweet scent of her lingered, hovering nearby. Close – but completely out of reach.
A low, aching moan clogged my throat. I grabbed a pillow and muffled my weeping, picturing her round baby face, her abundant brown curls which I’d often arranged in two pigtails. Her bright hazel eyes and the lisp it had taken her years to shed. I saw her scampering from our bed to hurry down to the kitchen where she knew Grandma and Aunt Ellen would be making pancakes or biscuits. Where coffee would be brewing in preparation for a day spent at the cafe, where the local crowd would appear for breakfast or lunch or evening beers; where the world as I knew it was secure and unchanged and blessedly dull.
I saw Brantley and Henry, my dear, naughty twins, whose resemblance to their father was more evident every day. Our boys, whose conception had occurred on a night in the Montana foothills, beneath a sky blazing with stars, the summer that Mathias and I first met Case and the Rawleys. During that trip to Montana we had, at long last, discovered the remains of a woman named Cora, a woman with whom I believed I shared a soul. Whose skull returned with us to Minnesota for a proper burial, within sight of the homestead cabin which, in life, she meant to inhabit with Malcolm Carter.
I saw my sweet Lorie and my little James, our two youngest. Lorie, named for the woman mentioned in a letter written by Malcolm Carter in 1876, whose exact relationship to Malcolm we’d never discovered. Lorie with her sweet disposition, who followed me as if magnetized, constantly begging to help with the baby. I saw her lower lip tucked between her teeth as she concentrated, attempting to fasten a diaper on her new brother, giggling over his legs that never stopped kicking. I saw her patting her doll’s back to “burp” her the same way I burped James. I saw my baby boy’s wide blue eyes and hair that stood on end. I saw all five of my children and their faces lent me the strength to sit up, to endure this day. I refused to believe they were lost from me.
And the first step was to contact the couple I’d known as my in-laws for the past eight years.
I spoke to Diana Carter later that morning. She answered their landline on the second ring and I pictured their spacious, farm-style kitchen, a room in which the perennial scents of spice and cloves lingered. Barring illness or the occasional other obligation, we ate dinner there every Sunday, along with Mathias’s sisters, and their husbands and children; it was a Carter family tradition. I heard the sink running in the background, along with the radio and the sound of Tina, the oldest sister, asking who was calling.
“It’s Joelle’s daughter, Camille,” Diana explained to Tina before coming back on the line. “Sure, hon, come on over. You’re welcome to look through anything in that attic.” She giggled, adopting a conspiratorial tone. “Don’t tell my husband I said this, but if you were to, you know, take anything with you, I would have no complaints. In fact, bring along a box
