Chapter 18
18
Bliss
He’d seen her.
This time, Duke had seen her.
She’d braved the terrible headache and the violent emptying of her stomach to get back to the world she’d nearly forgotten about, all so she could steal the bottle of aspirin her dad kept in the glove compartment of his truck. He always took a dose when he thought he had a hangover coming on, and he wanted it handy.
It made Duke mad when he had to rummage for something he figured he needed right now, like a bottle opener or a Bic lighter or the dried, stinky ground-up stuff he kept in a baggie.
Bliss wasn’t thinking about hangovers.
She wanted the aspirin because Doc Wiggins said Jack’s fever was going to kill him if it didn’t break soon. And she’d remembered, in a flash of desperate inspiration, that Gran had given her baby aspirin when she was little. Whenever she’d hurt herself, or gotten sick and had a temperature, that had been part of making her feel better.
Duke’s aspirin was for grown-ups, not babies or little kids, but it would have to do.
Too bad he didn’t keep penicillin around.
Having decided on a plan of action, dangerous as it was, Bliss had gone back on her promise to herself, after her last visit to the other place, that she would never risk another attempt. It had hurt too much, and besides, she was scared of getting stuck in the twenty-first century and having to be Duke and Mona’s kid again, instead of Katherine Bettencourt’s ward.
Tonight, after three or four days of sweating and tossing and turning and calling out to people who weren’t there, it looked like Jack was as close to dying as he could get without his heart stopping.
Katherine had been sitting with her young son day and night, trying to cool him off with a cloth she soaked in cold well-water, wrung out, and soaked again, hardly taking her eyes off Jack for an instant.
On this new journey, Bliss had expected to land in the cemetery, like she had before, but that night was different.
It was like being shot straight up into space without an astronaut’s suit; she was surrounded by jagged shards of ice-cold emptiness, and she couldn’t draw a breath for the life of her. The pain was searing, and she was aware of every part of her body, it seemed, all of the different pieces crashing into each other.
No wonder, then, that she’d fainted on impact, and when she woke up, dizzy and disoriented, it took her a while to recover, and still longer to realize that she was inside , not leaning on that old marker in the cemetery or sitting by the creek.
Wherever she was, it was darker than dark, but there were a few narrow cracks of light coming through one of the walls.
Was she in a barn?
No. There was no animal smell, no scent of dusty hides and hay and manure.
This was a house.
She was sitting on a box or a chest, she realized, and when she realized that, her confusion cleared up in a moment.
She was in the secret room in Bettencourt Hall, a place she’d explored often enough with Jack before he took sick.
But the streaks of light were too bright to come from lanterns or oil lamps.
Had she found another way to go back and forth from then to now?
She stood, waited until her knees felt strong enough to support her weight again, and crept to the wall to peer through the cracks.
The library was there, so this was Bettencourt Hall, but it had changed a lot .
There were fancy couches and chairs with flowers printed all over them, and the lamps were the modern kind, electric. A fire snapped and crackled in the huge fireplace across the room—and that, too, was different. In the house she’d just left, determined to get that bottle of aspirin from Duke’s truck and bring it right back to Katherine, there had been a smaller fireplace, made of simple river rocks and mortar, like the steps off the kitchen.
It seemed there were no people around, but that was a crap shoot, as far as Bliss was concerned. Bettencourt Hall was a big house with lots of rooms, even in the new-old days, where Katherine and Jack lived.
At least, Bliss hoped Jack was still living, that she could get the medicine and hightail it back to him and Katherine in time to be of help.
She waited for what seemed like a long time, then slowly and carefully pressed on the lever Jack had shown her. That done, she waited again, breathing as quietly as she could, and gave the wall a push at one end.
Sure enough, the bookshelf that hid the secret room slid slowly to one side.
Bliss stopped it with one hand when there was just enough space for her to slip through. After drawing a deep breath and offering a little prayer to the God Gran believed in, she made her move.
She was in the rear hallway, almost to the back door, when she saw the woman.
And the woman saw her.
All Bliss really registered was that this wasn’t Madison, the only person she had hoped to run into, and that this might not be the part of time Madison lived in, either.
The woman was small and slender, and young, too.
It looked like she was dressed up for a party, or planning to go out someplace fancy, because her dress was short and bright red, slim-fitting but ruffled from the neck to the hem. She wore a sparkly band around her head, and there was a black feather sticking up at the back.
While Bliss was looking at the woman, of course, the woman was looking back, taking in the homemade calico dress Katherine had made for her, the high-button shoes, everything.
“Hi,” Bliss said nervously, edging toward the outside door. She knew there was probably a bottle of aspirin here in the house, but trying to find it would take too long, especially if the woman decided to stop her.
The woman stared, her pretty, heart-shaped mouth in a perfect crimson O, and the glass of bubbly stuff she held in one hand dropped to the floor and shattered with a series of sounds that were almost like music, or tiny chimes.
“Gotta go,” Bliss added.
The woman’s knees buckled, and she folded gracefully to the floor in a faint.
Bliss bolted.
The moment she was outside, a powerful wind struck her, and for a few moments, the headache and the need to puke were back, full force.
Don’t send me back , she pleaded silently. Please don’t send me back before I get Jack’s medicine!
In an effort to compose herself, Bliss paused, looked over her shoulder at the house where magic happened.
Tonight, under a waning moon, the place was different. Very different.
Did that mean Duke’s camper and, worse, his truck wouldn’t be in the clearing, sheltered by the Grandfather tree?
She couldn’t take the time to mull the question over for another minute, she concluded, because Jack was so sick—his illness had started with a tumble into the creek and a bad cold to follow, and gotten steadily worse after that. The aspirin she intended to swipe might be the only chance he had.
Of course, there were no guarantees. Even if she got back in time, would the pills work?
If she knew Duke Morgan, they were probably past their expiration date.
She ran, ignoring the pain her stupid shoes caused, swiping at low-hanging branches as she tore through the woods, stumbled alongside the whispering creek, her eyes burning with tears the whole time.
The camper was there.
And so was the truck.
Bliss stayed out of sight, breathing hard, while she assessed the situation.
Until then, it hadn’t occurred to her that Duke might have been in town at one of his watering holes, which meant the truck would have been gone, too.
That idea struck her like a punch in the stomach.
There were so many things that could have gone wrong, and still might.
She waited a little longer, trying to see inside the truck, but it was dark in the shade of the Grandfather tree, and she was too far away.
Duke might be behind the wheel, like last time, either passed out cold or just waiting until his head stopped spinning.
She was going to have to chance it and get closer to find out.
He wasn’t in the truck.
Bliss let out the breath she’d been holding almost long enough to make herself faint dead away again and went around to the passenger side. Tried the door.
It wasn’t locked.
Duke was probably too fuddle-headed to remember to take simple precautions like that one.
With luck, he was in a snoring stupor, set to stay that way for a good long time.
Very, very slowly, Bliss worked the door handle.
It made a clanking, metallic sound, and she winced. Waited.
Unfortunately, the passenger side of the truck was facing the camper, not away from it, which would have been a little bit safer.
She waited for a sound from the camper, but nothing happened.
Still, there was a tightness in the air, like a rubber band pulled to the snapping point, fit to sting when it clapped back.
Terrified that she’d be discovered if she dallied too long, forced to stay, forced to explain where she’d been, only to be called a liar, Bliss yanked open the truck door with all her strength, climbed onto the running board, and fumbled wildly through the junk in the glove compartment, searching with her hand because she was using her eyes to watch the camper door.
Her ears felt like they’d come to a point, she was listening so hard.
Finally, just when she thought she might collapse out of pure fear and maybe wet herself, her hand closed around a small plastic bottle.
Aspirin.
It had to be aspirin, or all this would be for nothing.
And Jack would probably die.
Just as she jumped down from the running board of that rusty old truck, lantern light flared and then swayed inside the camper, splashing across the cracked, grimy glass of the little window by the door.
“Hey!” Duke yelled.
He was just a bulky shadow behind the lantern he carried, but there was no mistaking who he was, or what he’d do if he caught her.
Bliss ran, stumbling and groping her way into the dark woods, following the moon-dappled course of the creek, her heart swollen big enough to fill her windpipe and burn the back of her throat like she’d taken a big old swig of kerosene.
Behind her, keeping pace despite his size and the state he was in, but not quite catching up, Duke cursed and roared and threatened.
“Come back here, you little thief!” he shouted, nearly upon her by then.
Did he recognize her, in her strange other-world clothes?
Had he missed her at all, or even wondered where she’d gotten off to?
She didn’t know, and she didn’t want to find out.
One thing was clear: the house was too far away, and the woman was there, probably recovered from her fainting spell, and there was another of those sickening headaches somewhere in between, like an invisible wall.
A wall that would probably shatter Bliss if she tried to go through it.
Reaching the secret room again was clearly impossible, so she headed for the cemetery, for the old gravestone, the place where she’d come through the time wrinkle—if that was what it was—before.
The brush was high and thorny, and it tore at her skirt as she passed, with Duke storming along behind her, still shouting and breathing so fast and loud that she knew he must be almost close enough to grab her.
She got to the stone, clutching the bottle of aspirin, and climbed onto the cool, mossy surface of it.
At the edge of her vision, Bliss saw Duke, just a few yards away, scowl in fury and lunge toward her.
Then the humming sound came, drowning out his voice, and her head pounded like it might split wide-open. She shoved the aspirin bottle into the pocket of her dress, covered her ears with both hands as if to keep her skull from bursting, and held her breath.
She felt Duke’s hand brush against her side, then fall away, solid at first, then nothing more than a faint breeze.
After that, the world was quiet again, except for the usual night sounds, the scratchy chirp of bugs, the flow of the creek, the random hoot of an owl.
Bliss took several minutes to settle back into herself, and when she had, she shoved one hand into her dress pocket, terrified that the bottle of aspirin wouldn’t be there.
But it was.
She took it out of her pocket, squinted at the contents, visible through the clear plastic container.
It was about half-full.
She would see that Jack took the recommended dose—two tablets every four hours until his temperature went down. If Katherine objected, and she might, since there were no plastic bottles of aspirin in the world she knew, Bliss wasn’t going to let that stop her.
If she had to sneak those pills into Jack’s mouth and push them straight down his throat, that’s what she would do.