Beyond This Time: A Time-Travel Suspense Novel (8 page)

“Oh yes indeed. Miss De Carlo mentioned being surprised by his warmth. Well, to get on with it, her reluctance dissolved and she soon waltzed gracefully around the room. Suddenly, without warning, she found herself back in the chair, book in her lap. A soft chiming sound echoed in the room, she glanced to the mantle clock. It read seven o’clock. The hour hadn’t budged more than couple of seconds. The clock was still chiming off the same hour as when the ghost had first appeared.”

“Mitch and I noticed the same thing. It’s like we got stuck in time when our ghost man first appeared outside the car. And it happened again in the shower, when I was transported to Birmingham. Maybe that’s the explanation for why the coffee didn’t finished dripping even though I must have been gone long enough. At least long enough for the hot water to run out.”

Rayson nodded. “Some folks say time has no meaning in the afterlife.”

“Sort of a time continuum?”

“If you’re meaning everything grinds to a stop, then I reckon so.”

Kat laughed and patted his chubby ebony cheek. “Pop, you gotta get out more; go to a few sci-fi movies. Even watch a couple of episodes of
Star Trek
, they’re very entertaining.”

“Kathleen, the good book is plenty entertaining.”

“So are Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Kat muttered like a grumpy little girl.

Rayson cleared his throat, the prelude to resuming his oration. “Now, Boyd Turley’s tale is an entirely different matter. For some years his family lived apart, divided. One side claimed the other stole a whole peck of money their late daddy intended to be equally divided between his two boys. Boyd assured everyone he never found the money and if he did, he most surely would give his brother an equal share.”

“This is real helpful,” Kat complained.

“You might be surprised how helpful, if you hushed up and listened,” Rayson responded.

At this point Kat surrendered. Pop had no intention of speeding up the process. He’d get around to addressing her questions in the ‘by and by’. She sighed and snuggled against his chest, comforted by his familiar aroma of Old Spice and Ivory soap. Listening to the steady rhythm of his heart, for the first time in days she felt safe.

“Strange things began happening to him around Easter. The first things he heard were the noises. Not the banging or clanking you’d expect from any self respecting ghost, more like rubbing. Sometimes from the front room, other times the bedroom. This went on close to two weeks. One morning, just before he crawled out of bed, the whole room switched around on him. The furniture, bedspread and curtains took on different colors. Suddenly the walls were painted, not wallpapered. It looked like his folk’s old bedroom all over again. He said this image only lasted a few seconds, and later on he figured he went back to sleep and dreamed it all up.”

“I can surely understand his thinking,” Kat said. “I keep asking myself the same thing, could I have been asleep and dreamed it all? Especially now that I think about how those old tupelo trees along the road shrank and out of date cars appeared and disappeared. It was like a magic show.”

“You want to hear the rest of my story or not, Kathleen Ruth Templeton?” he interrupted.

“Sorry, Pop. Please go on.”

Rayson grunted, and then nodded solemnly. “Boyd Turley was sittin’ in the front parlor when he saw his daddy—who’d been dead for quite some time—cross the room carrying several rolls of wallpaper. Naturally curious, Boyd followed. He watched from the doorway of the bedroom as his daddy unrolled the wallpaper and began applying the paste. To his amazement, his father placed dozens of twenty and fifty dollar bills over the paste and proceeded to paper the walls. When Boyd ripped into the paper later on that same day, he found the missing treasure hidden beneath the delicate rosebud patterns.”

“That story didn’t help me much, Pop. Especially since I’m not searching for missing treasure.”

“Are you seeing people that ain’t there? You told me about the man and the firemen doing things they already done. And that’s the same thing.”

Properly chastised, Kat mumbled an apology, “Sorry, sir.”

“The last story I will share is the most closely related to your situation.”

“Then why didn’t you start with that one?”

“Don’t be pulling attitude on me, girl,” Rayson snapped. “Now, this whole incident appeared to be triggered by a school outing. The day before the trip, a little school girl received a phone call. The caller used her proper name and warned her to not go. Claiming it would end tragically, and if she went along, she would die.”

“What happened?”

“That gal was so spooked she stayed home, is what happened. And sure as molasses, the school bus ran off the road and a good number of children did perish.”

Kat sat up and twisted around to stare wide eyed at her father, her heart flipping somersaults in her chest. “That’s like my phone call. The voice very clearly warned me not to cross over. To stay here.”

“
Not
to cross over?” Rayson’s brow wrinkled. “I thought you and Mitch already—”

“No,” she interrupted. “No, on Sunday morning we barely stepped over the Park Street center line before turning back. We never went all the way across.”

“So what is your thinking on the meaning of your phone call?”

“Even though the voice said not to cross, I have a deep down feeling I’m meant to go all the way.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I wouldn’t have seen and heard those things otherwise. Pop, I just know something is waiting for me on the other side. Something important.”

“What about the warning?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you positive the things you saw, the people and those fire trucks, were from another piece in time?”

Kat hesitated; her earlier omission had finally sneaked up and bit her on the behind. She should’ve told Pop the whole story. And so she did, explaining how everything pointed to 1963—the prank calls, the computer printout with the matching names, dates and times. Concluding with Dreama Simms’ recollections of the house burnings all those years ago.

“I’ve known Dreama since I was a boy. She and Lettie Ruth ran around together in New Orleans, got into trouble together too.”

“Then you must know what happened with her singing career?”

“I do. But we ain’t gonna talk about it.”

“Pop!” Kat’s frustration peaked. Not only would her aunt remain a mystery forever, now Pop had added Dreama Simms to his ‘Ain’t gonna talk about it’ list.

“If she wanted folks knowing her business, I imagine she’d do the tellin’,” Rayson said.

“How about a hint? Just a baby-sized clue about why she gave it up.”

Rayson rubbed his hand across his throat, his eyes far away. “She can’t sing anymore,” he said. “And that’s all you’ll be hearing from me.”

Kat got up and stomped into the kitchen. She took her annoyance out on the ice trays, banging them on the counter with such force the cubes jumped out and skittered across the floor.

“When you’re done beating my ice trays to death, come on back in here,” Rayson called.

She ground her teeth to keep from responding with a caustic remark. If Pop knew how completely frustrating and annoying she found his behavior, he’d be delighted. Some days she was convinced he only lived to aggravate his only child.

When she returned to the living room, instead of finding an impish glimmer in his eyes, she saw something else. She sat beside him and placed her hand on her father’s cheek, turning his head until she could see his face. Frightened eyes stared out of his face.

“What you’re planning on doing troubles me.” He took a shaky breath. “1963 was such a hard period here in Alabama that I fear for you.”

“Don’t be afraid for me, Pop. I know this is right. You do understand I have to go?”

“I understand, child. It’s just that lots of good folks got hurt … or worse.”

“Good folks like Lettie Ruth?”

He stared into her eyes. “You thinking she’s what this is all about?”

“Possibly. You see, she’s my only connection to 1963.” Could the static ridden voice on the phone belong to her missing aunt? Had Lettie Ruth reached across time by offering Kat a tantalizing glimpse of the past and beckoning her to step closer? Or was her aunt the voice warning her to stay away?

Go or stay? Move backward through time or forget the whole thing and go forward? This was the same as asking a child to choose between eating their dessert or vegetables. Kat’s dessert was the thrill. The adrenalin rush of having the opportunity to jump back in time. A chance to make things right so Pop wouldn’t have to suffer so much.

On the vegetable side, whatever happened to Lettie Ruth could come full circle and trap Kat as well. The warning—
Don’t Cross
—might be the one truth in all this.

“What should I do, Pop?”

“I don’t suppose you’ll know until you get there.”

=SIX=

At this rate
, she and Mitch would be standing eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose, and toe-to-toe until the sun came up. He’d arrived on her doorstep minutes after she’d returned from Demopolis and they’d been at it ever since. They’d been criss-crossing through the pros and cons of Kat taking a time journey across Park Street, until the topic resembled a well-plowed field.

Sighing dramatically, Kat broke the stand-off and moved to the sofa. She glanced over her shoulder at Mitch, still rooted to his space in the middle of the room. “You’re a hard headed Pennsylvania Yankee, James Mitchell. You can’t think past your own opinion.”

“That’s because the only other opinion is complete and unadulterated lunacy.”

“See there, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.” As she spoke, a small part grudgingly admitted there might be a bit of truth in his assessment. A trip through time did sound ludicrous. What exactly did she hope to accomplish once she’d arrived in the past?

As though tuning into to her thoughts, Mitch asked, “Why do you want to go back anyway? Is there a reason you haven’t told me?”

He looked so worried Kat almost canceled the whole project johnny on the spot. But the reason she felt so compelled to return to that turbulent period was personal and beyond Mitch’s understanding. This was a rare instance where race divided the Red and Black unit.

Mitch had never experienced discrimination because of his ginger-red hair and freckles. He’d never been shopping in a department store and had every step shadowed by store security because of his color. His family, friends or neighbors weren’t beaten or shot or hung from a tree branch because they drank out of the wrong water fountain. In other words, he’d never been black.

No white male, or female for that matter, could truly grasp the significance of the civil rights movement. To Mitch, the sixties were historically interesting. To Kat, they heralded the dawn of self-awareness for African-Americans. For the first time, blacks united to demand the same rights taken for granted by white citizens. The right to vote, to eat at a lunch counter, to attend the school of choice, to be allowed in a dressing room in a department store. These rights were what Lettie Ruth fought and died for.

“I have to go back,” Kat said, answering his question after several moments of soul searching. “I’m doing this for my family. For Pop. He’s lived with Lettie Ruth’s disappearance hanging over his head for years. Not knowing what happened to her is eating him up on the inside.”

“If no one figured it out in the last thirty-seven years, what makes you so certain you’ll be able to do any better?”