Come Back to Me by Jody Hedlund
~ 28 ~
“IT’SHEREINTHISGENERALAREA.” Marian stood in a large closet at the end of the spacious hallway room. “I believe this was once an antechamber. And if so, the vault would exist beneath it.”
“If it wasn’t completely filled in.” Harrison powered his wheelchair through the doorway.
Extra extension cords hung coiled on the wall. The shelves were crowded with packages of light bulbs, batteries, paper towels, paint cans, empty plant pots, and a fire extinguisher. Marian tried to picture the antechamber the day she’d taught Robert and Phillip to play hide-and-seek, the simple room with a desk, chair, and the tapestry on the wall concealing the stairway that led to the vault.
Will had lured her to the stairway landing where he’d been waiting to kiss her. And boy, had he kissed her. At the remembrance, a sweet ache lodged in her chest.
Harrison raised his flashlight and examined the walls carefully.
Marian crossed her arms over her aching heart, as if that could hold at bay thoughts of Will. After three days in the present, she hadn’t stopped thinking about him. If anything, her mind turned to him more often, picturing him in the manor, guessing what he was doing, imagining him carrying on his life without her.
Thankfully, Harrison hadn’t ridiculed anything she’d revealed about her stay in 1381. He’d seemed to accept her crossing through time as though it had truly happened, unlike Ellen, who’d shaken her head at Marian’s stories and told her she’d hallucinated, that everything she’d experienced had been a coma-induced dream state.
“You were only dreaming, Marian.”
“It was more than dreaming. And it was more than just a realistic vision.” Marian held up Dad’s list of time-space continuum speculations. “It had to have been a movement through the quantum energy field just as Dad indicated.”
“We both know Dad was never the same after Mom died.” The statement was Ellen’s kind way of saying Dad was crazy.
How could Marian disagree? Not after the years of commiserating about Dad’s fanatical research. In fact, Marian had been the one to complain the most. And now, after planting so many seeds of doubt, Marian wasn’t surprised Ellen couldn’t accept anything.
Ellen had shown her numerous online research articles with stories of recovered coma patients who also claimed to experience strange, very real dreams. At Ellen’s insistence that Marian’s coma stories were no different, Marian hadn’t been able to stop doubt from creeping in.
Ellen couldn’t be right, could she? Had her comatose dreams been so realistic that she was unable to separate out fact from fiction?
If Will hadn’t been real, how could her love for him go so deep? And if he hadn’t been real, why couldn’t she stop from sensing him in every part of the manor? Although the house was vastly different, there were times when she could feel his presence strongly—like now, in the closet.
She’d already tried testing the ampulla for residue, hoping she could somehow go into the past and communicate with Will, to at least say good-bye.
But after Ellen had injected the holy water into the IV, she’d rinsed out the flask with antiseptic and had done the same with the other two original ampullae that Marian had left in Harrison’s safe. Every trace of holy water was gone.
It didn’t matter. She probably wouldn’t have woken from her coma in the past to talk to Will anyway.
Swallowing the despair that kept lodging in her throat, Marian knelt and brushed a hand over the closet floor. Thick dust bunnies caught in her fingers. She had to stop focusing on the past and start living in the present, especially because she had work to do in finding more of the water for Ellen. “We could pull back the floorboards and do a little digging underneath. We might find evidence of the antechamber.”
Harrison knocked on the wall, testing the thickness of it. “Are you sure such a room would be here? It seems to me if the entryway room had once been the great hall, then it would have extended beyond the parameters that are currently here.”
Marian sidled past Harrison back out of the closet. The domed ceiling with its stained glass circles was tall enough to accommodate a great hall. She only had to imagine rafters across the open space to visualize the way it had once been, whitewashed walls instead of the carved oak paneling, unpolished wooden floors instead of glossy white tiles.
Had she only pictured the great hall in a coma-induced hallucination or had she really been there?
“I believe you. I absolutely do.” Harrison powered his wheelchair out into the hallway next to her. “But I fear we may tear everything apart to find an old cellar that has long been cleared of anything of value. Besides, if you already searched it and only found two ampullae, then what leads you to believe more may be there?”
She was relieved Harrison wasn’t trying to downplay the coma the same way Ellen was. In fact, he continued to pore over several volumes on the physics of time—volumes that had been among the books Ellen had boxed up from their dad’s library. He’d only grown more convinced that with the right vibration and wavelength, subatomic particles could shift in such a way to cause a body to overlap itself in two eras.
“You’re right.” Her shoulders sagged. “Why would anyone place more there?” Will certainly wouldn’t. Why would he have any reason to?
Harrison studied her, his eyes filled with both concern and compassion. “It’s hard to get your thoughts in order, love. I can’t even begin to imagine the adjustment of jumping from one era to another.”
She smoothed her straightened hair, brushing away remnants of dust and static. In the snug jean shorts and silky pink tank top, she felt strangely bare and immodest after the days of being clothed from head to toe in layers of garments. She’d adjusted to the past much more quickly than she’d believed possible. Hopefully, she’d get used to being back in the present just as fast.
She continued taking her vitals every day, monitoring her condition, waiting for the first twinge that something was wrong. Her body in 1381 wouldn’t last much longer—not without food and water. She wanted to remain hopeful—like Harrison—that all would be well for her present body. But they really had no way of knowing.
“Thank you for understanding,” she said. “You’ve been a good friend through all of this. I’m glad I have someone I can trust.”
Harrison rested the flashlight on his lap and tilted his head at her, his eyes wide and imploring behind his spectacles. “Marian, if you trust me, then why won’t you tell me more about the engraving you made on the piece of clay that was with the ampulla. Is it the location of the original spring?”
Wasn’t the piece of clay proof she hadn’t just dreamed everything? What about the time she’d brought back a posy?
“If we want to help Ellen,” Harrison continued, “we should have a go at a place that will give us a more certain outcome than we’ll get with excavating here at Chesterfield Park.”
He was right. She was wasting time by chasing down another ampulla rather than going straight to the source. Even though Ellen wasn’t showing any symptoms of VHL at the moment, that didn’t mean the tumors and problems had disappeared.
Ellen had already purchased her return tickets to Haiti and was planning to leave tomorrow. After being gone from the orphanage for close to three weeks, she was anxious to get back to her children and work, especially now that she believed Marian was fully recovered. She’d given Marian permission to do with Dad’s townhouse as she saw fit, assuming Marian would sell it and add to the profits of their enormous inheritance.
Marian, on the other hand, wasn’t ready to let Ellen leave, not until she found a way to give her a dose of the holy water. She was also worried for Ellen’s safety. They were all still in too much danger.
Marian’s one phone call with Jasper two days ago had only heightened her awareness that anyone anywhere could be plotting against them. At first Jasper acted happy to hear from her and asked when he could see her again. But when she confronted him about the phone call she’d overheard during her coma, he denied everything at first before growing silent and cold. A day later, he turned in his resignation at Mercer, confirming her suspicions that he was working for someone else.
What would Lionel or other companies do if they discovered she had knowledge of the location of an old wellspring? She suspected they’d stop at nothing to wrench that information from her—including hurting those she loved as a way to gain her cooperation.
“So?” Harrison peered up at her. “This is a massive deal, I know. But the source is what Arthur went after. And it’s what we need to be after too.”
She rubbed at a growing ache in her temples and wished she had as much certainty as Harrison that going to the source was the right thing to do.
“The sooner I know, the sooner I can instigate plans. Depending on the location, I may have loads of work ahead—arranging meetings with city council members, cutting through red tape, freeing assets to fund the project, and only heaven knows what else.”
Before she could answer him, she had the overpowering sense someone else was in the room. She spun around in time to see a broad-shouldered, muscular man step into the antechamber. His long dark hair was tied back with a leather strip, and he wore a familiar blue cotehardie with a sword sheathed at his belt and leather boots laced against his calves.
“Will?” Her heartbeat clanged wildly.
He didn’t turn but instead disappeared inside, the door falling closed behind him.
She lunged after him, fumbling with the door and swinging it open. The room was dark and contained the same shelves crowded with the same items from moments ago. There was no sign of Will, except she could hear the squeal of a distant door opening and cool musty air rising against her face. Was he descending into the vault?
“What’s happened, love?” Harrison asked behind her.
Marian blinked several times, desperate to bring Will into focus. If only she could look into his face for a minute and explain what had happened to her. But the sensation of his presence disappeared just as quickly as it came.
“Did you have a time overlap?”
“Yes, I saw Will. And he was heading down into the vault.” She pressed a hand against her chest, against the ache of missing him. Something squeezed hard, pinching and crushing all at once, so much that she sucked in a breath. A dull throb radiated in her left arm up to her neck and then jaw.
“Marian? You all right?” Harrison’s voice sounded distant, as though coming from a different part of the house.
She spun around to face him but couldn’t get her voice to work.
His brow furrowed. “You’re looking very poorly.”
The tightening in her chest choked the air out of her lungs. Was she having a heart attack? Although she’d never had one before, she’d studied the symptoms. Everything she was feeling pointed in that direction.
She motioned toward her heart.
Harrison watched her, confusion written on his face. He probably thought she was pining over Will, that she was grieving his loss. While that was true, she had to make Harrison understand she was experiencing very real chest pains. He had to call his physician and get help.
She swayed. Dark spots clouded her vision.
Suddenly she realized what was happening. Her body in 1381 had lasted as long as it could without the aid of modern advances. The past had caught up with her. She was on the verge of dying.