5. Reconnoitering
5
RECONNOITERING
I was a little surprised that the route we took was so similar to the one I still drove in the twenty-first century when I wanted to be surrounded by the beauties of Oak Creek Canyon rather than using the interstate.
Then again, a canyon was a canyon. There wasn’t any real way for the highway to go anywhere except where it had always intended to be built.
We had to go back down to Cottonwood again so we could scrounge up a couple of suitcases since there weren’t any stored anywhere in the house, and even if we’d wanted to bug Charles again — which I knew I sure as hell didn’t — the mercantile wasn’t open on Saturdays. But we found two modest cases at the general store that I thought should work. In fact, because neither of us was exactly working with a substantial wardrobe, all our clothes would fit and still leave room to spare in case we picked up a few extra pieces in Flagstaff.
Not that I really wanted to think about staying there that long. But, as our experiences in 1884 had taught us, we didn’t always have as much control over our circumstances as we would have liked.
The night before, we’d made dinner together — the pork roast we’d bought at the butcher, scalloped potatoes, and sweet peas with butter — and then made slow, leisurely love before falling asleep in one another’s arms. It was good to wake up on that fateful Sunday morning and know I wouldn’t have to face this alone, that Seth would be there with me every step of the way.
Because there was no internet to help with hotel reservations and Flagstaff phone books were in short supply in the Verde Valley, we’d decided to wing it and drive straight up there and hope for the best. After all, even going the slow way, the drive would only take a little over an hour, so if we couldn’t find a place to stay, we’d simply turn around and come home and try to regroup.
An ignominious hiccup, sure, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
We’d still have time to get this fixed.
Or at least, that was what I kept telling myself.
A few clouds had gathered overnight, but they didn’t seem like the type that would drop any precipitation, not even up in Flagstaff. Still, I was glad that I’d picked up an overcoat at the mercantile on the day we’d arrived.
I had a feeling I’d need it.
Once we got past Old Town Cottonwood and the neighborhoods of historic homes that had been built in the teens and twenties, the landscape opened up, became farms and ranches. It was strange to see the places where the local Safeway and other stores had been located now nothing but empty fields, their harvests already gathered in against the coming of winter. I supposed those parcels of land had been sold off to developers piece by piece, until finally almost all of this country had become tracts of homes and strip malls and big-box stores.
Odder still was Sedona, which had a small smattering of shops and a couple of motels clustered near what would become the super-touristy Uptown but in 1947 wasn’t much of anything yet.
The red rocks were the same, though, as was the glowing gold of the cottonwoods along the banks of Oak Creek. And when 89A began to wind its way into the canyon, that felt even more familiar, since I was surprised to see that the trout farm along the creek existed even now, as did the Indian Gardens general store, although in the current era, it appeared to be mostly a shop and a Texaco gas station rather than a place people went for breakfast and lunch, as well as to stock up on local wines and honey and other goodies.
After that, the road really began to rise, and I was glad we were in this big, sleek Chevy rather than Seth’s old convertible. True, that vehicle had done a pretty good job of going up and over Mingus Mountain, but still, this car felt much more powerful and was a hell of a lot quieter as well.
“None of this has changed very much,” I said, and Seth allowed himself to glance away from the road to take a look at me.
“It hasn’t?”
“Not really,” I replied. “I mean, some of the picnic areas haven’t been designated yet, but the general store we passed a couple of minutes ago is still in business in my day, and that apple orchard” — I pointed at a large planting of bare-limbed trees off to our left — “is still around in the twenty-first century. Of course, it’s now part of a big national park called Slide Rock, but the trees remain, and so do those cabins.”
He spared one look for the little tourist destination. “That’s good to know. Then maybe Flagstaff has a lot that’s the same, too.”
“We-ell….” I allowed, then stopped.
Although he kept his eyes on the curving, ever-rising road ahead of us, he asked, “It’s very different?”
“Flagstaff grew a lot over the years,” I said. “But honestly, I don’t really know for sure what it’s like in the 1940s. There wouldn’t be a freeway yet, just Route 66, but I know it must be a lot bigger than Cottonwood. Everything boomed after the war when all the soldiers came home and went back to work and started businesses of their own.”
“What was the war about?”
Oh, God. There was a can of worms I really didn’t want to open, especially since I only knew the barest outlines of the conflict, which had ended almost a hundred years before my time.
“It was complicated, just like most of that stuff,” I replied. “But I suppose the simplified version is that a terrible man rose to power in Germany in the aftermath of World War I, and he joined with Italy and Japan to fight the Allies — the U.S. and England and a bunch of other countries. When our soldiers went in to liberate Germany after Hitler committed suicide and everything sort of collapsed, they found that the Germans had been systematically murdering millions of Jews and other people they deemed ‘inferior.’”
Seth was too good a driver to allow himself to be completely distracted by what I’d just said — especially since we’d just reached the series of switchbacks that would bring us up out of Oak Creek Canyon and into the miles and miles of ponderosa pine forest that surrounded Flagstaff — but I could still see the way his hands tightened on the steering wheel.
“That’s…horrible,” he managed.
“It was. I guess it was impossible to get a completely accurate accounting of everyone who died in that war, but between the millions of civilians who were killed and those who died fighting on either side, it was probably more than seventy million people altogether.”
At least, that was what I vaguely remembered reading in my U.S. history class in high school. I had to admit that I hadn’t hung on to all the facts, because even though so much time had passed, World War 2 felt somehow far more immediate and tragic than any of the other wars I’d studied.
“I can’t even imagine that,” Seth said, his tone flat.
“Neither could I. It was just too much.” I paused there and deliberately lightened my tone. “I was just trying to say that Flagstaff is probably booming right now, so I don’t think many people are going to notice a couple of strangers passing through, especially with the way it’s situated right on Route 66. They must get lots of tourists coming to see the Grand Canyon and all the other points of interest in and around the city.”
Seth gave a thoughtful nod at those words, but afterward he fell silent, clearly concentrating on the treacherous switchbacks that led us even higher above the canyon. The route was familiar to me, as I’d driven it plenty of times before, but I knew how scary it had been that first time when I’d been behind the wheel, how I wasn’t sure I could trust the car’s self-driving mechanism to guide me through without going right over the side of the cliff.
I’d survived just fine, of course, but I thought I should probably respect the very real tension Seth must be feeling as he negotiated the curving, narrow road that Sunday morning.
Eventually, though, we reached the top and began driving through the forest. No turn-off for the big parking lot where local Navajo artisans came to sell their wares, and I guessed that must have been a more modern addition to the highway.
But it was beautiful up here, a different kind of beauty from the high red rock walls and lush vegetation of Oak Creek Canyon. Even though the windows were rolled up, I could almost taste the tang of the ponderosa forest, feel the cool wind against my face and hear the soft murmur of the pines.
Funny how this felt so much more familiar to me than Flagstaff of 1884, even though the outlines of the San Francisco Peaks above downtown had been exactly the same as I’d remembered.
Everything else had been different, though, while this highway hadn’t changed very much, except for the style of the signage and the way the lines had been painted on the asphalt. It felt like…
…well, it felt like going home.
Only this wasn’t my home anymore, was it? I’d chosen to move to Jerome.
Because you knew you could go back to Flagstaff at any time, my mind whispered at me, but that didn’t feel quite right.
I knew why, of course. It was because I now loved Seth McAllister, and his being was so entwined with his funky hometown that I really couldn’t imagine him living anywhere else.
And that was fine. I liked being in Jerome, and I knew it would be wonderful once the two of us could safely stay in the twenty-first century and start a life together there.
Besides, it wasn’t as if Flagstaff was on the other side of the planet. A drive of an hour or so, and we could be there any time we liked.
Probably not in the middle of January, though. It would be cold enough in Jerome, thank you very much.
In 1947, there was no roundabout funneling us to either I-17 or downtown Flagstaff. No, the road continued straight ahead, and Seth gave me a questioning glance.
“Keep going,” I told him. “Eventually, this highway will intersect with Route 66, and then we’ll want to turn right and go toward downtown. That’s probably the best place for us to find somewhere to stay.”
He nodded. “Should we get your talent going to hide both of us? I know we’re still outside the city limits, but — ”
“Already taken care of,” I said with a smile. “I did it as we were entering Sedona, just to be safe. Probably the odds of encountering any Wilcoxes there would have been pretty small, but — ”
“You’re amazing,” he said, lifting one hand off the steering wheel so he could reach over and give my fingers a brief squeeze.
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
Seth only shook his head and then immediately returned his attention to the road. Good thing, too, because we were coming into Flagstaff’s city limits, and I knew both of us needed to stay sharp. We’d studied the map the night before — and had it safely stowed in the glove compartment in case we needed to take a peek while we were on the road — but looking at lines on a piece of paper wasn’t anything close to experiencing those locations in person.
It was very different. Sure, the mountains were the same, sporting a light dusting of snow similar to what they’d worn when we’d escaped from Flagstaff just two days earlier, but the city was both much larger than it had been in 1884 and much, much smaller than it was in my time. This part was open fields with lots of grazing cattle, and I remembered how much ranching had fueled my hometown’s economy in those early days. No sprawling suburbs yet, that was for sure.
Seth guided the car onto Route 66, and although a lot of it was very different, I recognized the Riordan house on my right, which I thought had been built in the 1890s or somewhere around there. Just beyond was Northern Pines University.
No, it’s not Northern Pines yet, I reminded myself. It’s some kind of school for teachers or something.
The campus was much smaller, of course, but at least it was located in the same general spot as its modern-day version, and that made me feel a bit better. And as we got to the border of the real downtown section, a familiar building a block off to our left made me sit up.
“Turn left here, on Leroux Street,” I told Seth, and he dutifully cut across oncoming traffic — to be fair, those cars were still a safe distance away — and slowed down. “There, on the left. The Weatherford Hotel.”
“You know it?” he asked, sounding surprised.
“Sure,” I replied at once. “It’s still standing in my time. They do a fun pinecone drop there on New Year’s Eve, sort of the Flagstaff version of the ball dropping in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.”
Had that even been a tradition in the 1920s? I had no idea, but because Seth didn’t ask me what the heck I was talking about, I had to believe he’d at least heard of it.
No parking lot, unlike the Weatherford’s modern incarnation, but there was plenty of room at the curb, which seemed like a hopeful sign. Surely it would be a lot more crowded around here if the hotel was at capacity.
I reached for the door handle, but Seth said, “Wait,” and I stared back at him, wondering why he wouldn’t want to get settled so we could plan our next step.
“What is it?”
“Here.”
And he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small box.
Was that…?
Sure enough, he opened it to reveal an antique gold band studded with diamonds.
“Where in the world did you get that?” I asked. It wasn’t as if we’d stopped to go jewelry shopping somewhere along the way.
He gave me a sheepish smile. “At the general store. They had a small case at the back that had some pawned jewelry, so I took a look while you were picking through the baking supplies. This band looked like it would fit you, and since we’re pretending to be husband and wife….”
His words trailed off there, and he seemed to be studiously avoiding my eyes.
“It’s perfect,” I said as I took the ring from its box and slid it onto my left hand. “I should have thought of this. There are plenty of married people in my day who don’t wear rings, but I have to believe that’s probably not too common in 1947.”
“I’m glad you like it.” Another hesitation, and then he added, “It’s not a proper engagement ring or anything, but….”
Before he could say anything else, I leaned over and placed a kiss against his cheek. “Like I said, it’s perfect, and it will help a lot to make people believe we really are married.”
“Good,” he said, and his jaw set. “I guess we need to go see about getting a room.”
“Not quite yet,” I replied, to which he gave me a startled look.
“Why not?”
“Because,” I said as I dug through my purse, “I think I need to wipe that lipstick off your cheek before you can be seen in public.”
Our luck seemed to be holding, because not only was there no sign of the Wilcoxes descending en masse to demand what we interlopers were doing in their territory, the Weatherford had several rooms available, and soon enough, Seth and I were checked in and hanging our clothes up in the closet. Although the furniture looked different, the layout of our hotel room seemed oddly familiar to me, and I realized when I went into the bathroom to wash my hands that I’d actually been there before. A friend of mine from college had thrown a New Year’s Eve party at the hotel after her roommate told her there was no way she was going to let a bunch of noisy revelers keep her up until all hours.
Well, that girl always had been kind of a stick in the mud.
Still, it was nice to know the Weatherford was yet another landmark that hadn’t changed too much over the years. The sense of continuity was oddly comforting, as though the doings of the witch clans hadn’t affected much of the day-to-day business of my hometown.
The ring Seth had given me fit perfectly, almost as if it had been waiting there in that selection of pawned jewelry for him to find. I watched the diamonds glitter under the bathroom lights and thought of how natural it felt as it encircled my finger, even though I generally never wore rings on my left hand — or many rings in general, since they tended to get in the way when I worked and I’d fallen into the habit of leaving them off unless I was going to a party or some other kind of special event.
When I emerged from the bathroom, he was standing at the window and looking down at the street some three stories below.
“So…what now?” he asked.
Our vague plan had been to “reconnoiter,” but now that we needed to get down to brass tacks, I wasn’t sure how we should proceed. Probably most people who owned businesses in the downtown area would know who Jasper Wilcox was, but if we went around asking point-blank as to his whereabouts, I had to believe word would get back to him pretty quickly about a young couple who were wandering the historic section of the city and trying to find out how to locate him.
I doubted that would end very well.
“We should probably try to see if Jasper is living in Jeremiah’s big Victorian on Park Street,” I said. “If he is, great. If not, then we’ll have to work a little harder to pin him down.”
Seth had turned away from the window to face me, but his expression was dubious. “Are you sure that’s even safe?”
“I have to believe it is,” I said. Although I knew I sounded confident enough, inside I had my doubts. What if my identity-hiding gift — amplified by the amulet — worked just fine when we were at a distance but would be severely strained if we ventured that close to where Jasper might be living?
Unfortunately, we couldn’t pick and choose where we conducted our search. We had to do whatever we could to figure out where Ruby was being hidden, and since the primus’s home on Park Street was our only real starting place, we wouldn’t be doing ourselves any favors by avoiding it.
“We’ll be in a car,” I said. “We can drive away quickly if anything happens.”
One of Seth’s eyebrows lifted, but he came over to me anyway and took my hands in his. “A really conspicuous car. Besides, do you think we’d be able to outrun Jasper Wilcox’s magic if it turns out he does detect us?”
All right, the Chevy Stylemaster was pretty flashy, with that two-tone paint job and those wide whitewall tires. On the other hand, I’d seen quite a few shiny, conspicuous vehicles on our way to the hotel, as though people couldn’t wait to rush out and buy the newest models now that the war was truly over and they could start indulging themselves again.
As for Jasper’s magic….
“Yes, Jasper’s a wild card,” I said. “And I know it’s a calculated risk. On the upside, if he isn’t there, then we’ll know we can concentrate our search elsewhere.”
Seth was silent for a moment before giving a reluctant nod. “All right. Let’s go take a look.”
The street where Jeremiah and his siblings had once lived was only a few blocks from the Weatherford, certainly within walking distance. However, the last thing I wanted was to get caught on foot if it turned out the current primus still lived there — or any other Wilcoxes, although of course they would be cousins and not brothers and sisters. Jeremiah had been the last Wilcox primus to have any siblings.
Well, at least until Connor…and his long-lost half-sister Addie…had come along. The family historians were still trying to figure out exactly how she’d managed to circumvent the Wilcox curse.
Park Street was located just west of Flagstaff’s downtown, and I was relieved to see that all the old Victorian houses appeared as if they’d been well cared for over the intervening years, their paint bright and their yards neat and tidy, even if most of the trees were bare and the grass had already turned yellow from multiple sub-freezing nights.
Seth drove slowly because it was clearly a family neighborhood, with kids playing tag in one yard and riding their bicycles up and down sidewalks that hadn’t been there in the 1880s. None of those kids seemed dark enough to be Wilcoxes, so it appeared the clan had moved elsewhere by this point and had sold what were probably valuable properties, since they were so large and conveniently located near downtown without being right in the heart of things.
We slowed even further as we came closer to the house that had once been Jeremiah’s. The paint had been lightened a little, with a sage green body rather than the dark green it had been painted in his time, but still, it was recognizable enough. A big black car was parked in the driveway, and I felt my heart give a nervous thump.
Seth’s jaw had set, but he didn’t say anything, only continued along the street as though nothing was out of the ordinary about us driving through the neighborhood.
Then the front door of the green house opened, and a little blonde girl in a darling bright blue wool coat came running out, followed by a boy who looked a few years older, his hair sandy in contrast to the girl’s almost flaxen locks. A moment later, a man and woman — the children’s parents, I assumed — emerged and locked the door behind them.
The man had light brown hair a few shades darker than his son’s, while the woman was nearly as blonde as her daughter. Maybe she’d helped nature along a bit — in my experience, most children that blonde had hair that darkened somewhat as they grew older — but still, it seemed pretty obvious to me that this family couldn’t be Wilcoxes.
Because that sure as hell wasn’t Jasper, with his night-dark hair.
“I guess he did move,” Seth remarked. We’d reached the intersection with Birch Street by that point, so he slowly made a right turn so we could head back in the general direction of the Weatherford. “Now what?”
“We’ll have to figure out where his house is now.”
Right then, I would have killed for my phone and a connection to the internet. Then again, I had a feeling that if Jasper had lived in the twenty-first century, he would have made sure to hide his phone number and address.
Whereas they weren’t nearly as security conscious in the mid-twentieth century.
Our room had a phone — something I guessed wasn’t typical for these times — but I hadn’t spied a phonebook anywhere. Maybe they kept them in the lobby or at the front desk.
“He might be listed in the phonebook,” I suggested, and Seth tilted his head.
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know much about them. I’d say a third of the households in Jerome back in 1926 had phones, but no one talked about phonebooks much because everyone pretty much knew everyone else.”
That made sense. Even in an era of texts and emails and video calling, it looked to me as though most of the McAllisters still preferred to communicate in person whenever they could, and only fell back on their phones when they didn’t have any other options.
“Well, it’s worth a try,” I replied. “If we strike out on the phonebook thing at the hotel, I’m sure some of the businesses downtown probably have them. But let’s try here first.”
My instincts were proved correct, because the clerk at the front desk — the same man who’d checked us in earlier and already knew us as Deborah and Seth Richards, here from Phoenix on our honeymoon — immediately pulled the book in question out from under the counter and handed it over to us.
“You can’t take it up to your room,” he said, sounding apologetic. He was probably about twenty years older than Seth and I, with brown hair smoothly combed away from his face and friendly hazel eyes. “But I can give you a notepad and pen so you can jot down anything you need.”
“That would be fine,” I assured him, and waited while he grabbed those two items and laid them down on the counter next to the phonebook.
Seth picked up the pen and paper the clerk had provided and took them over to a seating area a few feet away, with two loveseats and two chairs grouped around a coffee table. Once we had both sat down on the couch, I picked up the book and started rifling through the pages.
One thing was certain — the Wilcoxes had definitely been fruitful and multiplied since the 1880s. There were several pages of them, outnumbering just about every last name I saw except maybe Johnson and Smith. My finger ran down the page, then stopped at a listing.
Jasper Wilcox, 2138 E. Hutcheson Drive.
The address was followed by a phone number, and I wrote it down as well, even though I didn’t think I’d be picking up the phone and giving Jasper a call any time soon.
“Bingo,” I said, and shot a triumphant grin at Seth. “Found him.”
“What about the other Wilcoxes?”
“There are way too many to write down,” I replied, and handed the phone book over to him so he could see for himself.
He grimaced. “You weren’t kidding.”
“Nope. But I guess it couldn’t hurt to see if any other relatives live on the same street.”
It turned out there were two — Matthias Wilcox and Isaac Wilcox.
Were they some of the goons who’d accompanied Jasper on his kidnapping mission?
Impossible to say with the information we had on hand at the moment. However, I guessed they must be men who were highly placed in the clan, or they wouldn’t be living on the same fancy — well, I assumed it must be, since primas and primuses pretty much never lived in slums — street toward the north end of downtown. In my own time, it was an area of older homes that had been carefully preserved and where the houses rarely went up for sale, since they were passed down from generation to generation.
That sure seemed to me like the sort of place where Jasper would have landed after he — or his father, or his father’s father — had decided to sell the big Victorian Jeremiah had once owned. The current neighborhood where Jasper lived was more secluded, farther away from the hustle and bustle of downtown, and I guessed that would suit him just fine.
A man who engaged in kidnapping and God knows what other dark deeds would definitely want to live someplace where his activities wouldn’t be scrutinized by his neighbors.
“Okay, we found him,” I said as I closed the phone book and shoved the piece of paper with all the addresses and phone numbers in my pocket.
“Now we just have to figure out what to do next.”