Chapter 25
25
As Madison ran on, leaving Liam behind, it was as though a great unseen vise was tightening, tightening around her head.
Sickness boiled, bitter and vile, into her throat.
She’d gone only a hundred yards or so before she was forced to her knees by the sheer force of the pain.
She clutched her stomach, leaned forward and vomited.
The pain was excruciating, intolerable, intractable.
Her vision blurred, then was blanked out by a dazzling eruption of light.
“Keely,” she choked out. “Keely! Where are you?”
The strange light brightened, blazing around Madison like a consuming fire.
She swayed. Then, with all the strength that remained to her, she fought her way to her feet, unable to see into the glare that surrounded her. Teetering, nearly falling again.
“Madison.” It was a female voice, not Keely’s, but that of an adult. “It’s you!”
Madison blinked, desperate to clear her vision, and made out the shining shape of a woman, rimmed in light. Her clothes were of another era: skirts long, blouse fitted, with puffy sleeves. And she was clearly pregnant.
“Keely—” Madison whispered. This was her fault; she should never have allowed Liam to bring his children to the woods behind Bettencourt Hall, knowing what could happen.
“She’s here,” said the woman, stepping forward into a patch of leaf-dappled shadow. It was easier to see her there, where the light was muted.
Keely must have been standing behind the stranger, at least partly, for her appearance startled Madison, made her heart leap and flail in her chest.
Madison held out a hand to the child.
Keely hesitated, looking deathly pale, but then she stepped forward, took Madison’s hand. Madison wrenched her close, held her even more tightly than she’d held Cavan just minutes before.
Keely huddled against Madison’s side, whimpering.
Madison lifted her eyes to the woman’s pretty, and faintly familiar, face.
She had caramel-colored hair, done up in a bun at the back of her head, and her eyes were pale amber. Her protruding stomach indicated that she might give birth at any moment.
“Bliss?” Madison said, stunned by the insight, knowing this couldn’t possibly be her old friend, all grown up.
“It’s Caroline now,” came the soft response. “Caroline Bettencourt. But I was Bliss Morgan once—a long, long time ago.” A wistful smile touched her full mouth. “Or somewhere in the future. I couldn’t say which.”
Madison felt as though she’d been gut-punched.
This cannot be happening.
But it was happening.
“How did—how could...?” Madison was unable to frame the question.
“Go quickly,” urged Bliss-now-Caroline. “There’s no time to talk. I haven’t come this way in years, but it feels different. I think—I think the passage is closing, probably for good.”
Madison stumbled backwards, pulling Keely with her, never taking her eyes from Caroline’s gentle but worried face. “Were— are— you happy?”
“Yes,” said Caroline. “I’ve left messages for you in the margins of Katherine’s journals. But you must go now, and hurry!”
Madison turned then, suddenly convinced that if she and Keely lingered too long, they might never get back to their own time. To Liam and Cavan and Charlie. And that was unthinkable, so she bolted, dragging a stumbling, still-whimpering Keely along with her.
Almost immediately there was another blast of pain and light, so intermingled that she could not separate them. Beside her, Keely screamed.
They fell, the two of them, face-first into the stubbly grass.
Madison couldn’t look back—she didn’t have the energy. Or the courage.
Keely was the first to get back on her feet, though her hand still clasped Madison’s in a fierce grip. Her clothes—shorts, sneakers, a little sun top—were smudged with dirt, and she’d skinned her knees badly enough to bring tiny speckles of blood to the surface of her flesh.
Madison was scrambling to stand upright when she heard Liam’s voice and the sound of brush and tree limbs being shoved aside.
“Keely!” he shouted. “Madison!”
Keely let out a huge, wailing sob and then cried, “Daddy!”
Liam appeared. With a confounded glance at Madison, he gathered his little girl up in a single motion of his entire body, held her.
Long moments passed, and then Cavan and Charlie were on the scene.
Cavan’s grubby little face was raw and red from crying.
Charlie bounded over to Madison and leaned his full weight against her calf.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Keely sobbed, “I’m so sorry—”
Liam murmured something in the child’s ear, but he didn’t set her down.
His gaze moved to Madison, questioning. Bewildered.
“What just happened here?” he asked.
Madison had no answer—at least, not one that would be believed. She wasn’t sure she believed it herself.
“I’m not sure,” she said, and that was the blunt, unvarnished truth.
I left messages for you in the margins of Katherine’s journals. She heard the words of the woman she’d known only as Bliss in the back of her mind.
Keely pulled back in Liam’s arms, peered earnestly into his face. “I felt sick— really sick— and there was this lady—”
Liam kissed his daughter’s grubby little forehead. “Shhh,” he said.
His gaze was still fixed on Madison, and it was searing into her flesh like a branding iron. Was it residual fear, or anger?
Madison was still dazed by the experience herself, and all the questions she might have asked piled up in the back of her throat, like a physical logjam.
“I need to get the kids home,” he said, in the voice of a stranger. A cold stranger.
He finally put Keely down, and she wobbled beside him, clung to his hand for balance. “We have things to talk about.”
“I am too a McKettrick!” Cavan burst out, glaring at his sister.
Liam turned to the boy, rested a hand on his head. “You sure are, buddy. And no matter what anybody says, I am your dad, and you are my son.”
Madison felt strangely helpless as she watched this exchange. She was definitely on the outside looking in, she realized, and that wasn’t likely to change.
“Thank you, Madison, for whatever it was you did,” Liam said, and his tone was so flat, so grave, that Madison didn’t know if he was actually grateful, or if he was furious with her.
With that, and nothing more, he turned, took his children by the hand, both silent now, and left Madison and Charlie behind.
Madison watched until they were out of sight, her arms wrapped around herself, shivering even though it was a hot day.
When Charlie whined despondently after a minute or so, Madison lifted him into her arms and took one step, then another, not quite trusting her balance.
The headache and the nausea had subsided, but she still felt as though she’d been wrung out like a wet dishcloth, and the confusion was overwhelming.
Had she just seen Bliss Morgan, all grown up?
Or had she suffered a psychotic break?
Unfortunately, the latter seemed a lot more likely than the former.
People were born and lived and finally died, but they didn’t travel through time. They didn’t go back and forth between one reality and another.
Did they?
History was full of impossible, inexplicable disappearances. Had at least some of those lost people slipped away into some unseen dimension, where the rules of time and space didn’t apply?
That was a terrible thought, so terrible that Madison raised her fingers to her temples and tried to rub some sanity back into her brain. If she tried to explain the experience she and Keely had just shared to Liam, he wouldn’t believe her. How could he? And yet he would want answers. That was a given.
And what would Keely be able to tell him?
Surely she was too young to even begin to comprehend such a crazy anomaly.
Would the girl think Madison had somehow caused it? That she’d meant her harm?
Would Liam listen to his daughter’s account and come to a similar conclusion?
Madison knew she wouldn’t be able to bear that.
She’d realized, that morning in the hardware store, that as much as she loved Bettencourt Hall and Painted Pony Creek, they would be meaningless without Liam McKettrick. Somehow, in just a few short weeks, he’d imprinted himself on Madison’s very being, like an invisible tattoo that could never be removed.
There would be no point in staying here at Bettencourt Hall if he turned his back on her.
And he would do just that if he believed for one moment that she presented a danger to his children.
What would she do if she lost this man she wasn’t sure she’d had in the first place?
Go back to Boca Raton and take up her old life? Build another business from the ground up? Have babies with someone else’s sperm and raise them alone?
None of those options held any appeal, not now that she’d faced the fact that she loved Liam, loved him in ways she hadn’t guessed were possible, and she had from the moment she’d stormed into the Hard Luck Saloon and set eyes on him for the first time.
She’d been too distracted by her own umbrage in the moment to realize that her life had turned in an entirely new direction when he grinned at her.
These thoughts and others like them careened and collided in Madison’s head like carnival rides run amok as she headed for home.
By the time she’d gotten as far as the cemetery and begun gathering up the various tools Liam had left behind, Madison’s face was wet with tears.
Sympathetic, Charlie whined in commiseration as he accompanied her to the house, where she dumped the tools on the floor of the sunporch and took refuge in the kitchen, always the most comfortable, convivial part of Bettencourt Hall.
She splashed her face with cold water at the sink, reassured Charlie, and then headed for the library.
It was time to read Katherine’s journals.
She gathered the stack from the end table, balanced them on her lap, and sorted through them until she’d put them in chronological order.
The earliest volume outlined Katherine’s early years of marriage, and there were no marks in the margins.
It was ordinary stuff, mostly—the sewing of a dress, the baking of bread, things she’d planted or harvested in the garden, assorted weddings, funerals and christenings. Katherine described her love for her husband, Charles, and her sorrow over his death, sometimes in prose, sometimes in poetry. Charles had died of pneumonia when their son, Jack, was three years old, and Katherine had made it clear that she had no intention of marrying again.
She’d known she couldn’t replace her husband, for there wasn’t another man on earth like him, though it was possible, Madison conceded numbly as she read, that Katherine might have changed her mind later on.
Madison hoped so, but she had her doubts, because Katherine’s musings reminded her of herself. Once she’d made up her mind about something, she rarely changed it.
Had she married a man like Liam, for instance, and then lost him to death, she wouldn’t be able to bury her love with him. She’d have loved—and mourned—him forever.
Presently, she moved on to the second volume, and again, the notes Caroline had promised were absent. Katherine wrote beautifully of cherished memories, of her lively son, of their strange and magical home.
Magical. What had the woman meant by that?
Madison sat up very straight, intrigued, when the descriptions began.
Sometimes, in beams of dust-flecked sunlight pouring through the library windows, I see my beloved Charles. I see others who have lived and loved and, yes, died in this house, too. I’ve mentioned these experiences to precisely no one, of course, because who would credit such tales as truth? I would most likely wind up in one of those dreadful asylums, where they hide the insane away, out of sight. Those poor, bothersome souls! They are prisoners, both of their own minds, and the doers of well-intentioned evil... No, I cannot tell anyone that there are rooms in this house, secret hiding places, where improbable things happen, where items appear and disappear, where mirrors reflect other times, other people, even other places...but I can record them here.
Madison sighed, closed the journal for a minute or so, trying to absorb what she’d read before going on.
There were more instances of impossible occurrences to follow, and Madison felt a rush of uneasiness, pondering them. It seemed as though Bettencourt Hall was a vortex of some kind, the hub of a wheel, mostly still, but occasionally spun by some unseen force, moving faster and faster, throwing sparks.
Sparks of magic.
She stopped reading long enough to brew a pot of strong tea—she needed steadying, bracing up—and to feed Charlie, but her mind was whirling, striking sparks of its own.
When she thought she could handle more incomprehensible revelations, she read on.
Most of Katherine’s accounts were mundane after that second volume, but in the fourth journal, she found what she’d been waiting for and, at the same time, dreading.
Katherine wrote of a “little visitor” who called herself Bliss.
Katherine’s son, Jack, had found her sitting beside the creek, looking lost.
Her clothes were odd, unsuitable for a little girl, revealing her arms and legs the way they did, and her shoes left Katherine thoroughly baffled. The soles were formed of a grass-stained, pliable substance she’d never seen before. She’d wondered, not once but many, many times, if this was another trick of that mischievous house.
Despite these and other misgivings, she’d cared for the little girl, seeing that as her Christian duty, at least in the beginning, and soon enough she’d come to love little Bliss as the daughter she’d never had.
Bliss’s margin notes began to appear three quarters of the way through the fourth journal, which bulged with recipes and plans for the vegetable garden and a moderate amount of local gossip.
I’m hoping you’ll find my words one day , read her first entry, scrawled in a childish hand. Maybe you’ll come across Katherine’s books sometime, and you’ll read my message and know I’m here.
Then, further along, Do you remember me, Madison? When you knew me, I was called Bliss, but when I married Jack, I changed my name to Caroline, because I wanted everything to be fresh and new.
Madison’s eyes smarted, and her heart tripped over a beat or two. “Bliss,” she whispered. “Of course I remember you.”
She read on, and with each scribbled addition to Katherine’s entries, she became more convinced that Bliss’s story was true.
It wasn’t one she intended to share, except, perhaps, with Liam.
Clearly, Keely, probably running away from Cavan after delivering the news that he wasn’t Liam’s child, out there in the woods behind the cemetery, had somehow been pulled into that other place. The place where Bliss had grown up, married, and changed her name to Caroline.
And now she was surely dead, on this side of reality anyway.
That saddened Madison deeply.
She’d seen Bliss— Caroline— that very day, still young, visibly pregnant, earnest.
As Madison—and the rest of the world—measured time, not only would Caroline have grown old and died years ago, so would the child she was carrying.
Because it was too painful to explore the implications of that, Madison turned her mind back to the messages of the journal.
Caroline’s decision to change her name must have been a way of adapting to the life she found herself in, a way of leaving behind her hardscrabble childhood with her modern-day parents. It was, to Madison, also a symbol of the courage it would have taken, in such a situation, just to move forward in the simplest, most basic ways. To make the most of who she was, where she was, and with whom she was.
Today—or more than a century ago—Keely had been pulled into another time, and miraculously, Caroline had somehow found the child soon after she made the transition, and, recognizing her modern clothing, was determined to return her to her rightful world, to her father and her brother.
Keely belonged here , with the people who loved her, and Caroline had been wise enough, compassionate enough to risk not only her own well-being—perhaps even her very life—but that of her unborn baby, to turn a frightened child around, pointing her toward home.
Intermittently tearful, Madison read on, stopping only to consume a cheese stick for protein and down a tall glass of water.
Charlie had found his way onto her lap the moment she sat down again on the library sofa, and he remained there until long after night had fallen.
Even without the time travel element, Katherine’s thoughts and observations were fascinating, simply because they described another era so vividly that Madison almost believed she was there with her ancestress, experiencing it all, but it was Bliss’s notes, coming thicker and faster as time passed, that seeded themselves in her mind and began to grow.
Bliss/Caroline wrote of an early twentieth-century childhood—she’d gone to a one-room school, where she’d learned to love words, both written and read.
She’d made friends, good ones.
She’d worked side by side with Katherine, hoeing in the garden, watering, harvesting when the time came. She’d picked apples and pears, cherries and peaches in the orchard with Jack, some to be preserved in jars, others to be dried and stored away in the pantry, or simply devoured at their juicy best, and he’d taught her useful things, like how to fish for trout and bass, how to chop wood, how to dig for wild onions and other tubers down by the creek.
Madison bit her lip, imagining the orchard, now neglected and overgrown, when it was alive and productive, and made up her mind to restore that forgotten acre of dead, gnarled trees, and plant new ones that would bear fruit.
It was on the last page of the last journal that Caroline had written the words that both chilled and restored Madison.
Five years ago to the day, Madison, I saw you again. I was down by the creek when the little girl appeared, and I knew I had to get her back to where she belonged. I’m so glad you were there to receive her. I write this to assure you that the passageway, at least the one between my time and yours, has closed. I’ve tried, just to be sure, and I’ve never been able to go back.
I believe the woods and the cemetery are safe places now. You need have no fear, for yourself or for the children, that such a journey could happen again.
I’m convinced it won’t.
Also, because you might be wondering, my baby was born healthy and strong. Her name is Adelaide. Her brother, Gideon, came along three years later, and he, too, is a sturdy and happy child.
Alas, Katherine has been “gathered to her people,” as she would have put it, but she died gladly and gratefully, having lived a full life and seen two grandchildren come into the world.
Be well, Madison. I wish we could have known each other longer.
That was the last of it.
Madison pressed herself into a corner of the sofa and sat up very straight, crying many tears, with many emotions behind them.
When she eventually set aside the final journal, she was immediately sleepy.
She took Charlie outside briefly, and then the two of them climbed the stairs.
Reaching her bathroom, Madison removed her clothes—she’d been so caught up in the aftermath of the incident with Keely and Caroline and the contents of Katherine’s journals that she hadn’t realized she was filthy—took a quick shower, pulled on a nightshirt, brushed her teeth and toppled onto her bed, not even bothering to crawl under the coverlet.
Hours later, after a deep and blessedly dreamless sleep, she awakened to bright sunshine streaming through the windows and to Audra, who was standing in her bedroom doorway.
“I brought you coffee,” Audra said, crossing the space to set a steaming, fragrant cup of brew on Madison’s nightstand.
“When did you get back?” Madison asked, yawning as she sat up.
“About half an hour ago,” Audra replied, frowning as she perched on the edge of a nearby chair. “Charlie about barked his brains out, greeting me. You didn’t hear him?”
“Nope.” Madison shook her head, feeling mildly ill as memories of the day before crawled back into her mind. She wished she could write the whole thing off as a crazy dream, but she couldn’t. The incident in the woods had been all too real—how else could she explain Bliss’s notes in the margins of Katherine’s journals?—and she had no earthly idea how to process the implications.
This was something she would have to be with, to walk alongside.
And it was entirely possible, even probable, that she would never understand.
“You look terrible, Mads,” Audra observed regretfully. “I wish I could tell you to stay in bed all day and get over whatever it is that’s got you tied up in knots, but your grandmother’s memorial is today, and the catering crew is due in—” she paused to check her watch “—two hours.”
Madison groaned. She tried to come up with ways to tell Audra what was bothering her, but she knew her friend would be more than skeptical, and she couldn’t deal with that on top of managing Coralee’s celebration.
“I’ll make breakfast,” Audra went on when Madison didn’t speak, “while you get dressed and ready for the day.”
Grateful, Madison nodded.
Half an hour later, she was wearing her favorite sundress, a pink-and-magenta floral with spaghetti straps and a hem ruffle. She’d pinned up her hair and applied light makeup, and when she looked into the full-length mirror in her bedroom, she saw a normal woman, someone sensible and competent. Sure of herself.
Inside, however, she felt like a ghost haunting her own life.
Alone.