Journey, The (3 page)

She expected the music to get louder, and it did. She expected the song to end soon, and it did. She did not expect a DJ to hail "My Sharona" as the new top-rated hit on
Billboard's
Hot 100 – or expect the announcement to emanate from an apartment stereo. Michelle passed the source of the sound and picked up her step.

When she crossed the street and reached the train station, she saw travelers, not classmates. No friends or Little Red Cabooses or black BMWs greeted her arrival. The brewpub, its trappings, and its dozens of merry patrons had simply disappeared.

Feeling nauseous, Michelle rushed past arriving passengers into the women's room and splashed cold water on her face. She grabbed a paper towel from the nearest dispenser and dried her cheeks but could no longer contain the moisture inside and started to weep.

This isn't possible.

"Are you all right, dear?"

Michelle turned to her left and saw a well-dressed woman, who appeared to be on the short side of sixty, stare at her with sympathetic eyes. The woman offered a tissue.

"Here. Take this. I have plenty."

"Thank you," Michelle said as she accepted the offering.

"Are you OK?"

"I'm OK," Michelle said.

"Are you sure? You don't look OK."

"Actually, I think I'm losing my mind," Michelle said, bursting again into tears.

"What's going on?"

Michelle pulled herself together and considered the question. How did someone, anyone, explain something like the last thirty minutes? She chose her words carefully. She did not know this woman or the nature or the seriousness of her bizarre predicament.

"I don't know. One minute I was checking out the house on the hill, surrounded by friends. The next I was alone walking through a town that had changed. Nothing makes sense to me. I'm scared. I'm really scared."

"Do you have a place to go?"

"I think I have a room at the motor inn, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure of anything anymore. I know this is Unionville, but it's not the Unionville I was in just an hour ago."

The older woman took a closer look at Michelle, put a hand to her chin, and then tucked her tissues back in her purse. She offered a hand.

"My name is Dorothy Purcell. I run a women's shelter four blocks away. Can I at least get you something to eat and a place to rest and help you figure this out?"

"OK," Michelle said, wiping her eyes. "I'd like that."

A few minutes later the two women walked out of the depot and headed south along Fourth Street and a secondary commercial strip that included a post office, two banks, and a bookstore that Shelly Preston had patronized often as a teenager. But it was another business that stopped Michelle in her tracks. She turned to her left and stared blankly across the street.

"Is something wrong?" Dorothy asked. "Do you see something?"

She dropped her arms to her sides and squeezed the life out of a soggy tissue. She sighed before slowly turning toward her new acquaintance.

"How long has it been there?"

"How long has what been there?"

"The barbershop," Michelle said.

"I'm not sure," Dorothy said. "It was there when I moved here in sixty-three. The building is much older, of course. Why do you ask?"

Michelle ignored the question and walked across the street as if walking in a trance. A boy on a bike yelled at the crazy jaywalker as he swerved to avoid what appeared to be an imminent collision. Dorothy allowed a car to pass and then joined Michelle in front of a narrow brownstone building the barber shared with a florist. A classic barber pole spun nearby.

"What is it? Is there something in the shop?"

Michelle glanced at Dorothy but said nothing. Shielding her eyes from the reflected glare of the sun, she pressed her face to a shiny window covered with words and graphics. A moment later she pulled away from the glass and flashed the older woman a weary smile.

"You say you know where I can get some rest?" Michelle asked.

"I do," Dorothy said. "It's just another block."

"OK, then. Let's go."

Dorothy put a hand on Michelle's back and gently guided her down the uneven sidewalk. They advanced about fifteen feet when a slim, handsome man of fifty opened the barbershop door and stepped onto the walk.

"Can I help you ladies?" he said.

Dorothy looked over her shoulder and smiled.

"I think we're OK, Fred. I'm just helping a new friend find her way."

When Michelle faced the man a second later, she leaned into Dorothy and grabbed an arm for support. Color that had returned to her face just as quickly disappeared. For several seconds, Michelle Preston Richardson gazed at a man she had loved and revered, a man who had taught her a hundred and one life lessons, a man who had been dead and buried for twenty-two years.

Daddy.

Michelle glanced at Dorothy and then at the barber. She took two wobbly steps forward and held out her arms before gravity took over and her world went black.

CHAPTER 5: MICHELLE

Unionville, Oregon – Tuesday, August 28, 1979

Michelle stared at the cold coffee in the foam cup and pondered her predicament.

She was in Unionville, all right, but not the Unionville of her high school reunion or even the Unionville of the twenty-first century. The morning paper at her side made that abundantly clear. Hurricane David, Lord Mountbatten, and
President
Jimmy Carter were not ancient history but rather the day's headlines. Somehow, someway a woman who rarely traveled more than thirty miles from home had traveled more than thirty years into the past.

When Michelle had rolled out of her shelter bunk at six, she had wasted no time getting to the likely source of the problem. She had raced back to the Franklin house and turned the place upside down in search of a portal that might return her to the future.

No room had been spared or possibility excluded. Michelle had even reentered the mystery chamber and given it a thorough inspection. But all she had found were a dozen bottles of seventies wines, dead insects, and a Crissy doll that had probably belonged to six-year-old Alice Franklin. She had returned to the shelter frightened, depressed, and despondent.

The apparent hopelessness of the situation did not sit well with the perpetual optimist. Michelle was a master problem solver who had always been able to break things down, find solutions, and act quickly. She had won awards as a high school teacher for innovative thinking. But nothing she had learned in nearly forty-nine years had prepared her for this. This was
The Outer Limits
on an endless loop, an affront to a rational mind, and a challenge that no normal person could possibly expect to manage, much less overcome.

What would she do? What
could
she do? Michelle wrestled with those questions and others as she stared at the not-so-hot beverage in the not-so-great cup.

"Welcome back," Dorothy Purcell said as she approached the small table in the dining area of the Unionville Women's Home. She sat down across from Michelle. "My assistant called me this morning and said you had gone for a stroll. I trust you enjoyed your tour of the town."

"It was OK," Michelle said glumly.

"You had a bit of excitement last night. Do you remember any of it?"

"Some. How did I get here?"

"You walked here, without assistance and at your insistence," Dorothy said. "You were out only a few minutes. The police and paramedics looked you over, saw that you were fine, and released you to me when they saw you had no identification."

"Oh."

"Care to tell me your name?"

"Michelle."

"That's a pretty name. Do you have a last name, Michelle?"

Michelle hesitated. She had every reason to believe Dorothy had her best interests at heart, but she was starting down an unfamiliar path. She decided to proceed carefully.

"I'd rather not say right now."

"I understand. There are women who come here every day who want to keep their names to themselves. It's not a problem."

Dorothy glanced at Michelle's left hand and then her face.

"Is there a husband or boyfriend I should know about?"

"No. It's just me." Michelle took a sip of her coffee. "What exactly happened last night?"

"You fainted. Our handsome barber does that to people," Dorothy said with a laugh. "But I suspect there was more to this episode. You looked at Fred Preston like you knew him. Do you?"

Michelle closed her eyes. Another pointed question. She wanted out of this Q and A.

"I don't think so."

"He doesn't know you either. But he is most definitely interested in your welfare. After he ran an errand, he stopped here to check up on you. You were already fast asleep. You demanded a sedative the moment we arrived and I gave you one."

Michelle raised her eyebrows.

"There is no cause for alarm, dear. Among other things, I'm a registered nurse."

Michelle tried to process Dorothy's words, but couldn't. The trauma of the previous evening had impaired her ability to connect many dots.

"In any case, Fred said he would be back, probably today or tomorrow. He told me to give you anything you needed to get back on your feet."

"That was nice of him."

"It was. Fred's a good man. But I couldn't tell him what you needed because I didn't know the first thing about you. Do you have someone you can stay with, say a friend or relative?"

"No."

Michelle pondered the lie. She had all sorts of friends and relatives in this town, including a few that would probably take her in, if only she could convince them that the middle-aged stranger before them was the ponytailed girl they loved and adored.

She recalled the stunning encounter with her father, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. She would have to think long and hard before approaching him again, not to mention her mother, her friends, and
herself
. Michelle, meet Michelle. How did she wrap her mind around that? She let herself drift a few seconds before Dorothy reeled her back to the here and now.

"How about a job?" the older woman said in a measured, steady voice. "If you'd like, we could set you up with an employer."

"Let me think about it," Michelle said.

"That's all I ask. Just know that we are here to help. We want to help. Our mission is to set women on better paths. If we can do that for you, we will."

"I appreciate that."

"We can talk more tonight. Right now, I have to put out several fires. When you get a chance, why don't you check out our jobs board on the back wall? We got a few new listings yesterday and you might see one or two that you like."

"I'll look them over. Thanks."

"OK then."

Dorothy got up and walked across the dining area, stopping only to greet another resident enduring her morning coffee. When she reached the door to her office, she glanced back at the far table and then at the jobs board and frowned. She had no doubt expected Michelle to jump on the opportunities it offered.

But Michelle Richardson had no intention of looking for a job in a time and place she desperately wanted to flee. She would not give up that easily. She would not accept her lousy hand. Not yet. She would find a way out of this mess no matter how long it took. So for the next three days she continued her search for the road back.

On Wednesday she retraced every step she had taken on the night of the reunion –
when
she had taken them. If finding the time portal meant entering the mystery chamber as the sun went down, she would make evenings at the Pennington mansion a ritual. If it meant wearing different clothes, like the secondhand attire she had purchased in a thrift shop, she would expand her wardrobe. If it meant doing the same things in slightly different ways to achieve different results, like Bill Murray's character in
Groundhog Day
, she would do that too. She would do whatever it took to get home.

Michelle repeated the process morning, noon, and night on Thursday, in between visits with Dorothy and meals at the shelter. On one occasion, she left Cass and Jimmy's mattress on the floor. On another, she put it away. She even offered a half-full can of Billy Beer as a gift to whatever twisted spirit occupied the stairwell. As Thursday drew to a close, she sat on the floor of the corner office, threw a borrowed blanket over her legs, and waited for a sign.

But the sign never came. It didn't come on Thursday night and didn't come on Friday. The house she saw was the one she had seen all week. By 7 a.m. Friday it was apparent that the creaky mansion on 313 East Riverside Drive contained little more than dust and debris. Whatever had shot Michelle, and most likely the Franklins, out of the present and God knows where had come and gone and wasn't coming back.

As Michelle trudged across the Main Street Bridge on her return to the shelter, she seriously considered another way out of her dire predicament, something deeply at odds with her indomitable spirit and her Christian faith. Stopping at the bridge's midway point, she looked down at a stretch of rocky rapids thirty feet below and found it disturbingly inviting. What better way to end a never-ending nightmare, she reasoned, than to extinguish the images that fed it?

So for more than thirty minutes Michelle Preston Richardson, a strong woman of presumably sound mind, weighed the pros and cons of ending her troubles with a single leap. Who would miss her, she thought? Who would care? She was an interloper in a parallel universe, a stranger in a time she was never supposed to see. Not as a middle-aged widow, anyway, and certainly not for the second time in thirty-one years. For all practical purposes, the woman leaning over the edge of the bridge did not exist.

But the more Michelle considered a final exit, the angrier she became. She
did
exist. She was as real as the town around her. She did not have many answers, but she knew that continuing to exist beat the alternative. She was a fighter, not a quitter, and would take on whatever fate threw her way. No matter what it took, she would make her way in this new world.