4. Spilling the Tea
4
SPILLING THE TEA
No one seemed to pay much attention to us as Seth and I were guided to a table by the man working the front desk, who seemed to be doing double duty as both the clerk and the restaurant’s host. Maybe a glance here and there as people looked up from their meals to see who the newcomers were, but nothing more than that, nothing that would have signaled they had an unhealthy interest in either of us.
Which I supposed made sense. My father had stayed in this hotel, true, and I had to assume his abrupt disappearance had been the subject of some gossip for a while before people found something else to occupy their attention, but he’d only been another traveler in a town that sounded as if it had plenty of people coming through on their way to the West Coast, and most likely no one who should have roused any particular interest.
And my mother had spent her entire time in Flagstaff staying at a boarding house run by Mrs. Wilson, and probably hadn’t visited the Hotel San Francisco at all. As Seth politely pulled out a chair for me and waited until I’d wrestled my bustle into submission — my mother had explained that she’d sort of collapsed it under her skirts so it would be flat enough to sit on, but in practice, that wasn’t as easy as she’d made it sound — I reflected that I was very glad Jeremiah had seen fit to have both Seth and me stay here rather than hustling me off to the boarding house. Although it sounded as if the place had been clean and well run, my mother had made a few comments that let me know she’d also been fairly closely watched while she was there, behavior that sounded as though it was kind of standard for the time.
Whereas I had Seth with me, posing as my brother. People would see him as the only chaperone I needed, and that should give us much more leeway to go around town without anyone paying too much attention to our activities.
Of course, he wasn’t my brother or my chaperone, and I certainly didn’t need him to protect my virtue…not when I knew I wanted him to shred that so-called virtue to pieces in the privacy of my hotel room.
I kind of doubted that would happen, though. While it seemed as if he wasn’t quite as angry with me as he had every right to be, I had no idea when we’d be able to reclaim the closeness we’d felt during that picnic up on Mingus Mountain, when he’d kissed me for the first time.
And even if he got to the point where he was ready to pick up where we’d left off, it would have looked extremely bad for me to be cavorting with my “brother” in my room. Too many people — guests, chambermaids, porters — came and went in the hotel’s hallways for me to believe risking such a thing would be very smart.
Sighing would have required too much work, thanks to that damn corset, so instead, I plucked the napkin from its spot next to my place setting and put it in my lap as Seth sat down in the chair opposite mine. To be fair, it seemed as if my body was getting used to the constricting whalebone, and I had to admit I thought I might actually be able to survive wearing the thing for hours and hours at a time.
I’d better. It wasn’t as if I had much choice in the matter.
The menus were simple pieces of card stock printed with the breakfast selections on one side and the lunch offerings on the other. To my relief, while there were a few dishes I didn’t recognize, most of them seemed familiar enough.
So, did my healing body want eggs and bacon, or a big plate of pancakes?
I had to admit pancakes sounded wonderful, although that was probably more because I hadn’t had them in forever than because they’d actually help me recover more quickly from that gunshot wound.
“Coffee?” asked a girl who looked no more than sixteen or seventeen at the most. She wore a high-necked black dress with a white apron covering most of it and a poufy little white cap that couldn’t quite hide her bright red hair.
“Yes, please,” Seth and I both replied at the same time, and a hint of a dimple showed next to her mouth.
“Coming right up.”
She sounded Irish to me, which I supposed made sense. Hadn’t there been a lot of Irish immigrants in the United States during the nineteenth century?
My recollections from the U.S. history classes that had once bored me to tears seemed to tell me that was the case, so I thought it wasn’t too surprising that some of those immigrants had made their way to the Arizona territories. I hoped she had family in Flagstaff, though; the girl seemed awfully young to be here on her own.
After she poured our coffee, she asked what we would like for breakfast. Seth ordered a big plate of eggs and ham and muffins, while I made a last-minute decision and also ordered eggs, although with bacon and toast.
Feeling virtuous for resisting the lure of those pancakes, I reached for the little pitcher of cream that sat on the cloth-covered table and poured some into my coffee. “Cream?” I asked, and Seth shook his head.
“No, thank you.” His blue eyes took on a wicked glint as he added, “I’m surprised you don’t remember that, sister. ”
It probably would have been too much to stick out my tongue at him, so I settled for shaking my head before I got down to the business of blowing on my coffee so it would be cool enough to drink.
Eyes still dancing, he did the same. “So, what’s the plan for today?”
Good question. I supposed if we really had been Prewitt siblings looking for “Eliza,” then we would have gone around town and talked to any people who’d known her, trying to see if we could turn up any clues that might point to where she had disappeared.
Maybe that was what we should do anyway. It would fit our cover story, and it would give Seth and me a chance to get out and about and learn a bit more about Flagstaff in the 1880s. Yes, my mother had told me the tale many times, but still, hearing the details from someone else was nothing like experiencing a place in person.
“We should talk to the people who knew Eliza,” I said, and for just a moment, Seth looked blank.
But then he nodded, as though pulling up the details of the story I’d told him the day before. “Yes, that sounds like a good idea. They might not have anything new to offer, but we won’t know unless we try.”
Before I could say anything in reply, the front desk clerk came over, holding a folded piece of white paper. “For you, miss,” he said, and handed it to me.
Mystified, I took the note from him and murmured a thank-you. As Seth looked on, equally confused, I unfolded the paper so I could read its contents.
A man’s hand, dark and slanted, one I’d never seen before.
Dear Miss Landon,
I hope this note finds you and your brother well. If it is not too much of an imposition, I would like to have the two of you over for tea at three o’clock this afternoon so we might discuss the particulars of your sister’s disappearance.
If you cannot attend, please let the desk clerk know, and he will pass the word on to me. Otherwise, I will see you both at three.
Your servant,
Jeremiah Wilcox
I blinked, and looked up to see the man still hovering near my elbow. “How kind,” I said, and gazed across the table at Seth. “Mr. Wilcox would like to see us for tea this afternoon. I trust that will not interfere with our plans?”
“Not at all,” he replied at once. “I know we can make room in our schedule for tea.”
Even though the note had said to let the clerk know only if we couldn’t make it, I still thought I should say something to confirm our attendance. “We will be there,” I told him.
“Very good, miss.”
He headed back to the front desk after that, and I refolded the note and tucked it into the beaded bag I’d found in the trunk with the rest of the clothes my mother had left behind.
“Tea, huh?” Seth said once the man was safely out of earshot. “What do you think he wants?”
“To discuss Eliza’s disappearance, it sounds like,” I said, then lowered my voice. “And a few other things, I should imagine.”
Seth only tilted his head slightly in acknowledgment, and we left the matter there. Most likely, Jeremiah wanted to make sure I was improving and wouldn’t require any further intervention by his healer sister.
However, I couldn’t help hoping that maybe he’d come up with a solution for Seth’s and my problem, and would tell us he knew exactly how he could send us back to 1926. It was probably asking a bit much to expect that Jeremiah Wilcox might be able to send us to our respective times.
And deep down, I didn’t know whether I even wanted such a solution. Living in the 1920s hadn’t been a laugh riot from beginning to end or anything close to it, but I had started to get used to the pace of things, how I didn’t have a phone clamoring for attention twenty-four hours a day, and how people seemed much more connected with one another than they did in my own time. Yes, witch clans, by their very nature, required a lot of person-to-person interactions, and yet it still didn’t feel quite the same.
I knew I was probably getting ahead of myself, and when our food arrived a few minutes later, I found I was able to eat a lot more than I’d expected. Maybe there was still a corner of toast and a few scraps of scrambled eggs left when I was done, but overall, I’d done a pretty good job of clearing my plate.
All the same, I knew I’d be just fine with skipping lunch and waiting for our tea with Jeremiah. Would there be little sandwiches and tiny cakes, like I’d had that one time my mother had taken my sister and me to a tea house in Prescott’s historic district?
Maybe by three o’clock I’d have room for something like that.
Since we didn’t have to worry about checking out of the hotel — Seth had already told me the rooms were ours for as long as we needed them — we only headed upstairs so I could fetch a shawl and he, his hat. The day was sunny and bright, with only a few wisps of clouds clinging to the very tops of the San Francisco Peaks, but I knew the air would be chilly despite the outwardly friendly weather. The trunk my mother had left behind had also included two heavy wool cloaks, both of which I’d hung up to get the wrinkles out, although I guessed I wouldn’t need them today.
Soon, though, since the first measurable snowfall often happened close to this time of year…unless Seth and I were somehow able to escape.
We asked the front desk clerk for directions to Mrs. Wilson’s boarding house, and he sent us over to Elden Street, a few blocks away from the spot where the hotel was located. On that late Thursday morning, the streets were crowded with heavy wagons hauling logs to the town’s numerous sawmills and drovers bringing in various goods that had arrived with the train. In fact, I could hear its sharp, piercing whistle even over the rumble of wagon wheels and the sound of enormous saws grinding away at the ponderosa pines that had turned Flagstaff into such a boom town.
“I hadn’t expected it to be so…lively,” Seth remarked as he guided me across the street, helpfully maneuvering the two of us around a couple of large puddles.
“Well, it’s a frontier town,” I said. “No mines, but the sawmills made people here plenty of money. It was either that or ranching, basically.”
“And your family did both.”
I paused to shoot a careful glance around us, but no one was standing near enough that they should have been able to hear what we were saying.
“Yes, the Wilcoxes made a lot of money in both lumber and ranching,” I said carefully. “They made good investments.”
Probably best to stop there. No one in the clan liked to talk about it too much, but it was still a poorly kept secret that the first generation of Wilcoxes had used magic to increase their fortunes, to make it seem as if they just had better luck than most people when it came to choosing which piece of land or which business to buy. That practice had continued for decades, and even now, I knew that part of the reason why the clan had prospered so much during my lifetime was that we had my cousin Lucas, whose magical gift was luck of the purest kind, calling the shots when it came to managing the family’s various trusts. When my mother was my age, her stipend had been five grand a month, but mine was double that, an increase not completely due to inflation.
The lift of Seth’s eyebrow told me he thought there was a lot more to the story than I was letting on, but he didn’t press the issue.
“It does help to have been some of the earliest settlers,” he said as we turned down Elden Street. “The McAllisters wouldn’t have had all that choice property on Main Street if we hadn’t been in Jerome from nearly the beginning.”
I hadn’t even thought about that, but I supposed it was true. McAllister Mercantile had a prime spot toward the end of the street, near the overlook where so many people paused to take pictures of the lower sections of the town and the Verde Valley beyond, and in fact, pretty much every other business on the street was either openly run by members of the family or at least owned by them. Their wealth couldn’t equal that of the Wilcoxes, true, but they were still doing pretty well for themselves.
“Sometimes it’s good to have a little extra help,” I said, and left it there. Even though there wasn’t anyone close enough to hear what we were saying, I still didn’t think it was a very good idea to openly discuss the role magic had played in both our clans’ prosperity.
A smile flickered at the corner of his mouth, but Seth didn’t respond directly, instead saying, “I think that’s the house over there.”
He pointed to a two-story home that was painted white and had green shutters and several red brick chimneys. A cute white picket fence enclosed the property, and I guessed that the flowers planted there were cheerful and lively during the summer. Now, though, almost ten days into November, everything had been trimmed back except the roses, which were still green and full enough, even though none of them were blooming at the moment.
For some reason, an odd little stir of worry went through me. So far, it seemed as if Seth and I were navigating 1884 better than either of us had probably expected, but this would be the first person — well, besides Jeremiah Wilcox — that either of us had talked to who would have known my mother in her guise of Eliza Prewitt.
What if I made some sort of awful bobble that exposed I wasn’t one of Eliza’s long-lost relatives at all?
Don’t be silly, I told myself as Seth and I crossed the quiet residential street. Mrs. Wilson would have only known your mother as Eliza, and would have no idea she was connected to the Wilcoxes at all. Just keep your head on straight and you’ll do fine.
I hoped that internal no-nonsense advice would be enough.
When Seth knocked at the door, the woman who looked out was young, probably around my age or maybe even younger, with curly dark blonde hair and big blue eyes.
“Mrs. Wilson?” Seth ventured, and at once, the woman standing in the doorway giggled and put her hand to her mouth.
“Oh, no,” the girl said. “I’m Miss DeWitt — Clara DeWitt. I board here. Mrs. Wilson is in the kitchen at present. Who may I say is calling?”
I had to admit I wasn’t too thrilled to have bumped into Clara. According to my mother, the girl was a serious gossip.
But there was no way for me to warn Seth about her, not when she was standing right there in front of us.
“We’re Louis and Deborah Prewitt,” Seth replied without hesitation. We hadn’t really discussed what our aliases would be, but it seemed as though he’d decided it was better to keep calling me Deborah. I had no idea where he’d gotten “Louis” from, however, unless that was a nod to “Eliza’s” supposed hometown of St. Louis. “Eliza Prewitt’s brother and sister.”
At once, Clara’s mouth formed into an “O” of surprise. But she recovered herself quickly, saying, “Have you come looking for her?”
“Yes,” I put in. “We were hoping Mrs. Wilson might have some information that would be helpful.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Clara said, her tone forthright. “It seemed Miss Prewitt was the sort to hold her cards pretty close to the vest. But come inside — you can sit in the parlor, and I’ll go fetch Mrs. Wilson.”
Well, at least Clara wasn’t going to leave us standing in the street. She opened the door a little wider and Seth and I headed inside, where she led us into a parlor so stuffed with figurines and framed photographs and various knickknacks that I was surprised there was still enough room for the two of us to sit down on the couch. After telling us again that she would fetch Mrs. Wilson, Clara disappeared down the hallway, presumably toward the kitchen.
“We need to be careful around Clara,” I told Seth in an undertone. “My mother always said she was a terrible gossip.”
“Thanks for the warning,” he replied in a similar murmur, although I saw the way his eyes glinted with amusement. Maybe Clara looked harmless enough on the surface, but anyone in our situation needed to guard against the kind of person who’d have no problem flapping her jaw all over town.
A woman paused at the entrance to the parlor, and at once, Seth stood in acknowledgment. The newcomer looked as if she might have been in her fifties somewhere, although, with her gray hair and her gray dress, she seemed older than that. Then again, people in the Victorian era generally didn’t age as well as their twenty-first-century counterparts.
“You’re relatives of Miss Prewitt’s?” she asked. Her eyes were a bright blue, the only really colorful thing about her.
“Yes,” Seth said. “I’m Louis Prewitt, and this is my sister Deborah. Eliza is our sister, and we were very close, so we volunteered to be the ones to come out west in search of her.”
“That was kind of you,” the woman said. “And please, sit down, Mr. Prewitt. I am Mrs. Wilson, and yes, your sister did stay here in my boarding house for a few weeks. But I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more than that — there was certainly no sign that she planned to disappear in such a way.”
Seth resumed his seat on the sofa, flickering a glance at me at the same time.
“I know it was sudden,” I ventured. “And obviously, we are very worried about her. So you have no idea why she might have up and left without a word of warning?”
Mrs. Wilson’s mouth tightened. “Well, I heard that she’d taken up with a man named Robert Rowe, and they both disappeared at the same time. Most people think they ran off together, but if that was the case, then why on earth wouldn’t she have told someone what she was doing or where she was going?” She paused there, eyes narrowing slightly as she took in the velvet-collared bustle dress I wore. “That’s very odd — your gown seems almost identical to one she commissioned from the dressmaker here in Flagstaff.”
So much for my na?ve belief that no one would notice my gowns were the same ones my mother had worn while she was here. Thinking fast, I said, “Oh, Eliza and I often wear similar clothing. I suppose it comes from being twins.”
I’d tacked on that bit about being twins since I was exactly the same age my mother had been when she traveled back to 1884. Maybe people wouldn’t have questioned me on the subject if I’d said I was a year younger, as that sort of age difference was hard to detect, but by making Eliza my twin, I thought it more plausible that I would have come all the way to Flagstaff in search of her.
Mrs. Wilson seemed somewhat startled by my revelation, but then she ventured, “You do look a great deal like her, although your coloring isn’t quite the same.”
“Oh, we’re fraternal twins, not identical,” I said. “Our mother comments on that often, saying she was glad we weren’t so much alike that she wouldn’t be able to tell us apart.”
A pause there, while Mrs. Wilson obviously stopped to decide whether my story sounded plausible. But then, what would have been the alternative? As she’d pointed out, my mother’s and my features were very similar to one another’s, although she had the dark, inky hair so prevalent in the Wilcox clan, while I’d inherited my father’s medium brown locks.
Luckily, the landlady appeared to take my words at face value, because she nodded and said, “I suppose that makes sense. While she didn’t speak much about her family in Missouri, it sounded as though she had some relatives who were sympathetic to her cause.”
“Yes, Eliza and I often confided in one another,” I replied, fighting back a smile. That wasn’t even a total lie — my mother had talked to me about her adventures in 1884 plenty of times during my childhood, so I suppose you could say I’d been her confidant. “And that’s also why Louis and I came in search of her. She looks on us as friends as well as her brother and sister, and we thought she might not be as threatened by us.”
After those words left my lips, though, I couldn’t help thinking it sounded as if we were trying to approach a shy runaway dog and not a grown woman, and I did my best not to grimace.
It wasn’t as if I could take them back now.
However, Mrs. Wilson didn’t seem all that put off by my comment. She nodded, her expression now a little sad, and she said, “I wish I had more information to give you. No one seems to have known much about Mr. Rowe, except that he came from back East somewhere and had enough money to buy a sizable piece of land on the west side of town. That’s still tied up, though, because while he made the deposit, he disappeared before he could pay the remainder. I suppose the Wilcoxes will take it over at some point, since Elijah Royer, the man who was selling the property, wants only to get out of town and head east as soon as he can.”
Interesting. Neither of my parents had mentioned that my father had only put down a deposit on the land. Still, that would have effectively taken it off the market…and had apparently been sufficient to send Samuel Wilcox into a murderous rage once he realized his prize had been snatched away from him.
“Did Mr. Rowe make any connections with any of the people in town while he was here?” Seth asked.
Mrs. Wilson shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of. He mostly kept to himself…which was why people took note of the few times he was seen conversing with your sister.” She hesitated there, her expression somehow worried and disappointed at the same time. “None of us could really make heads or tails of the situation. Your sister seemed like a kind, well-spoken young woman, and she did well with the children at the school. It was hard for all of us to believe she’d abandon them like that when she’d come so far to take the position in the first place.”
That was the one thing I knew my mother regretted about the situation — that she’d basically disappeared on those kids without telling them goodbye. Not that she’d had the chance, when Samuel had kidnapped her right from her schoolroom and taken her to the family cabin as bait, hoping to lure my father there so Samuel could take care of the troublesome interloper once and for all.
But the children in her classroom couldn’t have known any of that. All they knew was that “Miss Prewitt” had pretty much vanished into thin air.
“She must have had a good reason for disappearing,” I said, doing my best to keep my tone level. “I know she would never walk out on a responsibility unless she had no other choice.”
Again true. She’d gone through a rough patch all that time ago, but she’d always been a wonderful mother to my siblings and me — and a devoted partner to my father.
For a moment, Mrs. Wilson didn’t reply. Then she let out a melancholy breath and said, “I hope you’re right about that.”
Our interview with Mrs. Wilson hadn’t yielded much useful fruit, but that didn’t stop Seth and me from wandering around Flagstaff afterward, getting the lay of the land, taking note of the various landmarks my mother had mentioned to me — Mr. Brannen’s general store, the Methodist church where she’d been compelled to attend services so she wouldn’t attract attention to herself, the park that in modern times was another city block full of shops and businesses.
Some of the patterns of the streets were familiar, but others were utterly strange to me, and I realized how much the city had changed over the years, spreading not just east and west but north onto the shoulders of the mountains and south past the valley where one day Interstate 40 would cut a band through the hilly landscape.
“Where did you live?” Seth asked me after we’d made a round of the park and then deemed it time to head back toward Park Street and the big green-painted house Jeremiah Wilcox called his own. “Somewhere around here?”
No one was anywhere near us, so I thought it safe to reply honestly. “Not really,” I replied, and then gestured vaguely southward. “In my time, this is all built up, and there’s a highway called Interstate 40 that sort of bisects the city north and south. We’re south of it, kind of over by those hills.”
In a big newish house, a place where we’d moved when I was around five. Before then, we’d lived in an updated Victorian home just two blocks over from the street where all the Wilcoxes currently had their houses, but after my brother Patrick came along and there were five of us sharing two bathrooms, my parents decided we needed a house with more space. I’d always gotten the impression that they’d bought the first house because my mother wanted to live in a place that wouldn’t feel like such a culture shock to my father. However, he hadn’t seemed too bothered by leaving that first house behind and moving to a place that allowed each of us kids to have their own bathroom — and being on a piece of land that was just under an acre and offered a lot more privacy than the postage-stamp-size lot of the original home.
“So it’s much, much bigger in your time,” Seth said.
“A lot. I forget what the actual population is, but I think it’s just a little under a hundred thousand.”
“A hundred thousand people,” he repeated, now looking almost awestruck. But then a corner of his mouth lifted, and he added, “I hope they’re not all Wilcoxes.”
I couldn’t help grinning back at him. “Of course they aren’t. Still, the clan is pretty big. My cousin Marie — she’s the one who keeps track of all our genealogy — says we’re probably going to hit two thousand people in the next year or so.”
Much, much bigger than the McAllister clan, who were probably about a quarter that number at most. Not that it mattered in my day. It wasn’t as if we were going to war with each other or anything. Just the opposite, in fact.
If I somehow managed to return Seth to 1926, would his opinion of the Wilcoxes change now that he knew who I was? And now that he’d met Jeremiah Wilcox and seen he wasn’t the big boogeyman that generations of McAllisters had been led to believe, would he try to convince the other members of their clan that they might have been mistaken in their judgment of him?
And if he did so, would that change the timeline forever?
I had no way of knowing. As far as I’d been able to tell, my mother’s sojourn in the past didn’t appear to have changed anything in her future or about the clan in general. But she’d gone back with a set mission, one that didn’t involve a Wilcox at all…at least, only peripherally.
All I could do was try to follow her lead, touch as little here as I could…and hope like hell my mere presence in 1884 wouldn’t cause the sort of ripple effect I couldn’t possibly foresee.