Ryan gestured to where the SUV had been parked. It was gone. “Yeah, but how? We need to start walking, I guess.”
“Then let’s go,” she replied, starting off and looking at the pendant in her hand, unable to put it on because the necklace clasp had broken. “I’ll guess we’ll never know if this pendant had anything to do with the quest. Matt, maybe you can look at the words within it to see what they say.”
He agreed to do it once they had a chance. They compared suggestions on a story about their disappearance as they walked, from alien abduction to getting lost in the countryside, but each invited more questions and lies they all had to keep straight. It wasn’t going to work and they knew it.
Finally Eric suggested, “Maybe we should just say we don’t know. We came back for the necklace, found it, and when we turned back to the SUV, it was gone. We didn’t hear it leave and just don’t know what happened. We still had the keys.” He looked at Ryan. “You still have them?”
The big man felt in his pockets and pulled them out. “Yes.”
“Okay,” Eric continued, “so we started walking back, hitched a ride or whatever, and only when we got to your aunt’s house and your aunt freaked out did we know something was wrong, besides the SUV being stolen, I mean. That’s when we heard we’d been gone however many days it turns out to be. I think I lost track.”
“That might be a good idea,” Ryan conceded. “It keeps us from getting into a bunch of lies.”
Matt agreed but added, “The only problem is people will want some sort of answer.”
Anna offered, “We can just say, ‘so do we’.”
Eric nodded. “The best lie is a simple one.”
After a few minutes, Ryan stopped. In the excitement of returning he’d forgotten something. “Anna, let’s see if you can heal me here.”
The others stopped, exchanging a dubious look. Before they could talk him out of it, Ryan used his keys to scratch a cut into his palm. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do. Grimacing, he held it out to her as she sighed.
“This really could have waited for a better time. Don’t get your hopes up,” she reminded him.
“C’mon,” he replied, “think positively. You have to believe in it. You’ve done it before. You can do it.”
She sighed and he suspected she wasn’t really into it. Did he have to be dying before she tried? Apparently not, for she took his hand in hers and closed her eyes. She appeared to be making an effort, but nothing was happening. She opened her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Ryan,” she said. “It’s not working. I don’t know why.”
“Try again!”
“I did. I don’t know what’s the matter. Maybe none of that works here for some reason.” Seeing him about to protest, she added, “Look, you know I would love to heal Daniel as much as you. You believe that, don’t you?”
He opened his mouth to urge her to try again, but then stopped himself. “Yes, I do, but–”
“No buts,” she replied. “It isn’t working. Maybe it will work some other time, but not today. Okay? Can we just leave it at that?”
He sighed heavily. It couldn’t have all been for nothing. There was no way God would do that to him. To Daniel. He’d try again with her later and see what could be done, but he couldn’t just give up. Maybe they could somehow take Daniel with them on another quest, if it came to that, and she could heal him there. Surely that would work and if he came back with them, he wouldn’t return to being injured. That would just be cruel.
As they continued, Eric kept the flashlight shining, hoping a car would soon stop for them, and one finally did. The friendly driver asked too many questions about what they were doing out in the middle of nowhere, and Anna, seated in the front, did her best to fend them off. She spied a newspaper folded up between seats and read the date aloud. Two weeks had passed. Desperate to get away from the questions, she asked for the nearest place to catch a taxi and they soon had a quieter ride, suspecting the questions would get a lot worse, and they were right.
A covered lanai was the ideal place to wait out an afternoon thunderstorm, and warming her bones was another reason Erin Jennings had moved to Florida. Once one past a certain age, such things made the hours easier. She chuckled to herself. She hadn’t aged all that much since learning to call this world home, even though it sometimes felt like it inside. She had other ways to make the signs of time’s passage vanish, but there was a limit on how much she could do before people started talking, and so here she was.
She put her legs up on the recliner and watched the rain fall over her screened-in pool, sipping a favorite zinfandel, for wine was one of the few things of her youth available here, everything else having been modernized into oblivion. The ornate wine glass was etched with an armored knight atop a charging steed, a sight that reminded her of a friend long lost. She hadn’t seen him in many years and didn’t know his whereabouts despite many fruitless searches. These days it seemed everyone could learn anything about anyone, thanks in large part to the internet, but try as one might, some people simply never surfaced. She didn’t know if she’d recognize him anyway, for nearly twenty years had passed since they and two other friends had last been together.
They might not recognize her, either, especially with a different name and a new life as a banker’s wife. Despite starting over, she was a student of history and spent time researching medieval times, becoming something of an expert, albeit unknown.
