Chapter 4 #2
“See ya,” the sheriff replied, giving him a casual salute with two fingers.
“Nice to meet you, Karen.”
“Call me Goldie,” she corrected. “Everyone does.”
“Goldie. I like that. Happy Thanksgiving, Goldie.”
“Happy Thanksgiving,” she smiled.
Stu said goodbye to the waitress as well, then turned and left through the lobby. Goldie stepped timidly away from the wall pegs toward Eli’s table. “I don’t have to sit at your table. I can see you’re finished.”
“No, please,” he gestured. “I’ll have dessert while you have dinner. I skipped lunch, so I’m making up for it.”
She smiled politely and sat down, even though she didn’t want to. She had been practically brainwashed to be suspicious of lawmen from her years with Markie.
“So, you’re having Thanksgiving dinner with Stu?” she asked.
“Kind of,” he replied, offering no further explanation. He gestured to her left hand. “You sure you’re okay?”
“You’re pretty obsessed with how I feel.”
“Wellll,” he drawled in his slow, cowboy way. “This morning, you told people you didn’t know where you were or how you got here. Then, you went runnin’ around in thirty-degree weather without a coat—”
“I didn’t run,” she interrupted. “I was—curiously exploring.”
“Now you’ve got gauze wrapped around your hand.”
“Not my best day,” she admitted.
“You also told Clara that, yesterday, you felt like you were dying.”
She recalled what she had said to the lady in the gift shop while he continued: “And on your first day here, you apparently weren’t even here. Nobody saw you.”
“God, you’re nosy,” she observed.
“Occupational hazard,” he explained.
The waitress came over to verify Goldie wanted the meatloaf. She did, and she also ordered a Coke. The sheriff ordered pumpkin pie. After the waitress had gone, she responded to the lawman.
“I went to the library in Denver to do some research on Sparkledove,” she offered. “At the bus station, I cut my hand on a broken soda bottle. Okay? Happy, Officer?”
“We’ve got a historical society right here in town,” he replied. “It’s like a museum.”
“Run by the guy who is both its president and the city’s mayor. I wanted unbiased research. Regarding my confusion this morning, I occasionally suffer from short-term memory loss. It’s usually triggered by a traumatic event.”
“Interesting,” he said. “Did you recently suffer a traumatic event?”
She hesitated before answering, then decided she had nothing to lose by telling the truth.
“My boyfriend of seven years dumped me for someone new,” she admitted. “Some young college girl. Wears clothes that look like they came from a locker room hamper. He’d been cheatin’ on me for months, but I just found out about it yesterday.”
“Ouch,” he empathized. “Yeah, I guess that would do it. Seven years,” he mused. “Must’ve met him when you were quite young.”
“I did.”
“I’m sorry… I understand heartbreak. Guess these are heartbreaking times for people all over the world,” he said.
“Yeah. That’s true,” she agreed, realizing he was referring to the war.
The waitress delivered Goldie her Coke and Eli his pie. After she returned to the kitchen, he changed the subject. “Let’s talk about something different. Something good. Wait ‘til you see Sparkledove decked out for Christmas.”
“Nice, huh?” she asked.
“Very. My folks used to bring me and my sister to some of the holiday events in town when we were kids.”
“So, you weren’t born here?”
“No, but I was raised not far away. And the covered bridge at the end of town, have you seen it yet?”
“No.”
“Mayor Banyan claims it’s the only authentic New England-style covered bridge west of the Mississippi. Don’t know if that’s true, but it sure is pretty to walk through on a snowy night. It has viewing windows on either side.”
Goldie smiled politely and knew what a covered bridge was, but she’d actually never seen one in person.
She’d done some traveling, but not as much as other people.
Markie had taken her to Mexico a couple of times to meet with drug suppliers, but the month in Vegas for her aunt was by far her longest and greatest distance as a solo traveler.
The rest of the dinner conversation was pleasant but one-sided.
She didn’t know anything about Karen Maraschino, Senior Writer for Adventure Escape Magazine, or the events of November 1942.
So, she kept the conversation focused on the sheriff.
He was amiable enough and answered her questions, yet he was somewhat vague with his answers.
He was raised in a little town “not far away” and went to a community college, but never specified where.
He joined the Army Air Corps, hoping to become a pilot, but never got his wings.
When Goldie asked why, he simply shrugged, “Didn’t work out.
” He remained in the Air Corps doing what he described as “other stuff” until March of 1942.
Then, he was discharged, but again, he didn’t explain why.
He came to Sparkledove shortly thereafter.
He had a local sweetheart named Lila and fell in love with both her and the town’s Victorian charm.
But by the time he’d returned from service, Lila had moved away.
Goldie asked if they wrote to each other while he was in the army, and he responded, “Some.” By pure chance, he met the mayor, Charles Banyan, having lunch at Clancy’s Bar & Grill, and the two hit it off.
Between Eli’s community college education, military service, and youth, the mayor decided he’d be a good candidate to replace the town’s elderly sheriff, who had recently passed away, and offered him the job.
Having no other prospects, he accepted the offer and took to the role and townspeople like a duck to water.
That was nine months ago. He was twenty-eight and, according to Banyan, one of the youngest sheriffs in the state.
While, in a way, this was a lot of background, it left as many questions as answers.
Eli kept Goldie company throughout her meal, and she was grateful that the conversation didn’t involve any further questions about her former boyfriend.
After dinner, he said goodbye and limped his way through the hotel lobby and out the front door.
Goldie, meanwhile, was called over to the registration counter and informed that Charles Banyan had called and left a message that he’d pick her up at 4:00 p.m. for Thanksgiving dinner the following day.
She borrowed the first aid kit, went upstairs, saw that the bathroom at the end of the hallway was empty, and decided to take a long, hot shower.
As she stood in the curtained bathtub with the water running down her, she checked her body to see if anything was different.
Everything seemed the same except the hair situation.
Then she started to think about other things.
Did women shave their legs in 1942? Did they shave under their arms?
Had tampons been invented yet? Had Pamprin?
She obviously had some things to figure out.
After returning to her room, she got dressed in a fresh blouse and slacks, changed the wrapping on her hand, and by 7:30 p.m., she found herself bored out of her mind. She had no internet, cell phone, TV, or radio, and she hadn’t even seen magazines in the lobby.
“No wonder men went off to war,” she said in ignorance. “There’s nothin’ to do.”
She wondered when she went to sleep whether or not she’d wake up the next morning in Sparkledove, back in present-day Manhattan, or somewhere else in another time.
The 60s might be good, she thought. The Beatles, Stones, go-go boots, bellbottoms. She was a devotee of music from the 60s, 70s, and some of the 80s and had a romantic, although not entirely accurate, understanding of those decades.
By 8:10, she couldn’t stand to be in her room anymore.
Her hair was mostly dry, so she stuck a piece of gum in her mouth from the pack she’d bought in Denver and grabbed her coat.
She discovered there were gloves in her pocket as she went downstairs, returned the first aid kit, and then started to take a walk around town.
In the quiet of the evening, and now having had all day to process what had happened to her, Goldie had time to organize her thoughts.
She still clung to the belief that she was in a coma, and this was all just an elaborate dream.
But her cut hand and the length of time she’d been in this “dream” contradicted that.
Dreams were random and flitted from place to place.
This had been one long, continuous sequence of events.
Then, she thought about praying. She looked up at the sky while walking and quietly murmured: “I suppose there’s somethin’ really important I should say about now, but I got nothin’ except, ‘What the fuck?’” Then she noticed all the stars and her breath disappearing against an endless black canvas of faraway twinkling white lights.
“Wow,” she admitted to herself, cracking her gum loudly. “Nice.”
She walked away from downtown and found herself on a street where old house after old house seemed to have a story to tell.
Through the window of one, she saw a man tending a blazing fire in the fireplace and smelled the pine logs from the smoking chimney.
She passed another house where children had made turkeys from cut-out handprints on paper and were taping them to a window.
Everyone had a home. A sense of place. Everyone except her.