Come Back to Me by Jody Hedlund
~ 6 ~
ALLTHROUGHOUTTHENIGHT and into the next day, Marian waited anxiously for another bizarre time overlap. She couldn’t deny she wanted to experience it again, especially so she could catch a glimpse of the blue-eyed man.
Squeezing her eyes closed, she held her breath and waited a few seconds before opening them, hoping to spot him. But everything in Chesterfield Park’s magnificent library was just the same as before, and Dad’s papers remained scattered across the glossy mahogany table in front of her—the papers from the safety deposit box that she’d been studying for the past three hours since returning from visiting her dad at the hospital.
While out, she and Harrison retrieved her purse from the Canterbury Police Station. Though someone had rummaged through it, nothing had been taken. Then they stopped by Mercer Labs, and Marian investigated Dad’s office, which had still been in complete disarray. She’d hoped to find solid evidence of something but hadn’t.
Now after reading Dad’s papers dozens of times, she was growing frustrated with herself. With a sigh, she moved away from the table and crossed to the windows. Not only did she love the library with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, but she loved the towering windows that overlooked the spacious back gardens of Chesterfield Park. The sculpted shrubs, the flower beds in full bloom, and even the maze were visible from the library.
Sunlight poured over the wisteria that covered the stone walls and cascaded down sides of trees and bushes. The vibrant purple contrasted with the bright green of the fresh grass, new leaves, and full hedges. Even a special archway was covered in wisteria and ivy, creating a shaded canopy.
Her sights locked in on a man at the far edge of the garden, and her heart picked up its pace. Was he the man from her vision?
She leaned closer and watched the figure. He was kneeling, and when he straightened, she released a breath of disappointment at the sight of the weathered old face. It was only Harrison’s gardener.
Her gaze strayed to the ampulla resting in the center of the chaos on the table. Should she taste more of the residue so she could experience another peek into the past?
Her feet seemed to have a will of their own, carrying her back to the table. Her fingers had a will of their own too. In an instant, the ancient vessel was in her hands.
She stared at the open mouth of the container. It had only taken a few grains. Did she dare try a few more? The rational part of her warned against it. Too many unknowns existed. What if this time she was stuck in the overlap longer? And what about afterward? Would she sleep again for twenty-four hours or had that happened because of how tired she’d been from everything else?
Did any of it matter?
Before she could rationalize further, she licked her pinky, stuck it into the bottle, and then rubbed it around, hoping some of the grains would stick. She scraped back and forth and all around, then finally pulled her finger out.
For a long second she stared at her skin. She couldn’t see any residue. It was likely all gone. This wouldn’t do anything.
Even so, her pulse sped faster as she stuck her pinky into her mouth. According to Dad’s list of speculations about crossing time, all she had to do was picture the handsome stranger and she’d likely overlap with his era again—whenever that was.
She closed her eyes and attempted to visualize him. She only got as far as picturing his face when a strange warmth bathed her.
Her eyes shot open. Brilliant sunlight nearly blinded her, and a cool breeze teased her loose hair. Gone were the glass windows and walls of books. Instead, she stood outside the back of the house, except this was the smaller Chesterfield Park, the one without the spacious side wings, the one in which the library wasn’t yet a part of the manor.
She took in the simplistic flower beds without any of the modern brick edging, the dirt paths instead of the marble walkways. To the west where the greenhouse was supposed to be, a low structure built of gray weathered boards and a slate roof with wide double doors filled the space. It had to be the barn.
Her pulse thrummed with sudden excitement. This couldn’t be just a hallucination. It was too realistic. Had the holy water residue again worked within her in such a way that she’d breached the time-space continuum?
Any good scientist would want to test for herself the reality of her experience. But how?
An array of purple and yellow posies danced at her feet amidst spindly grass. She stooped and plucked a posy, bringing it to her nose and drawing in the scent of light sweetness. She ran her fingers over the petals, feeling the velvet. Nearby, several bees swirled among a patch of clover, their buzzing the only sound in the yard. Bending again, she broke off a blade of grass and then stuck it into her mouth, crunching it between her teeth and tasting the earthiness.
All evidence from her five senses pointed to the reality of her standing in the past. She straightened and took a small step. If she was having a hallucination, how would she be able to move?
Again she glanced around at her surroundings, this time taking in the thickly wooded area that bordered Chesterfield Park on the opposite side of the imposing brick wall that she’d seen from the front of the mansion. Overhead a hawk circled, its long wings outstretched. It resembled one of the birds in the dome in Chesterfield Park’s hallway room, one she’d never seen in the busy metropolitan Canterbury area during any of her visits.
“Should I have the maid make a coffee?” a voice called to her.
No, she silently pleaded to the vision. Don’t go away yet. But even as she tried to cling to the outdoor scene, the library surrounded her once again.
She tried to conjure the quiet garden, but the soft hum of Harrison’s wheelchair told her she was in the library. When she dared to look, she was sitting in a chair at the table, her head resting upon her arms amidst the scattered research.
Had she fallen asleep? Fatigue clouded her head, and her eyelids felt heavy with slumber. With a yawn, she stood and stretched.
“Or I can have her lay out tea?” Harrison drew nearer.
She peered out the windows. The greenhouse, with its glistening glass rooftop, graced the yard, and the gardener stood where she’d last seen him.
Had she really stepped outside into the past? It had all happened so quickly that it could have been just a vision.
The same exhaustion she’d felt after her first ingestion swept over her. She wavered and leaned against the table to keep from collapsing.
“Marian?” Harrison’s voice was edged with concern.
If the residue caused the minuscule energy particles within her to vibrate at higher frequencies, then it stood to reason the use of such energy would tax the body.
She fought the drowsiness even as she groped at a nearby chair, needing to sit. Something fell from her hand and fluttered to the floor. As she lowered herself back into the chair and glanced down, every function within her body silenced.
It was the posy.
A shiver raced up her backbone.
“Marian love, what’s happened?”
She retrieved the delicate flower, brought it to her nose, and breathed in the faint fragrance again. It was real. Totally real.
Trembling, she held it out in her palm to show Harrison.
He drew closer, his brows slanting as he took it in.
“Do you grow posies in any of the gardens?” She already knew the answer. She was well aware that Chesterfield Park’s gardens contained only elegant and cultivated species of plants, not wildflowers.
As she relayed her experience, Harrison didn’t touch the posy but instead stared at it reverently.
When she finished, he released a low whistle. “Well done, you. This posy is a massive deal. Absolutely massive. Precisely what we needed to confirm the holy water does more than just give visions.”
She gazed in wonder at the tiny piece of the past that had come with her. Gently she placed it on the table, expecting it to disappear but praying it wouldn’t.
“All the more reason to keep sorting out Arthur’s tricky clues.” Harrison swiveled in his wheelchair to face the disarray she’d left on the table. “Any luck?”
“I’ve read each paper over and over, but I’m no step closer to unlocking their mystery.” Harrison had read through them too, although reluctantly, insisting he didn’t expect her to share the information with him. She’d assured him she needed his help, that Dad had probably expected her to show him the contents of the safety deposit box and seek his input.
“Knowing Arthur, I daresay he has a specific reason for each and every item he left you.”
“Why couldn’t he spell it out and make this easier?” She yawned and fought away the fatigue still hovering over her, beckoning her to slumber.
“Because he knows you’re every bit as bright as he is and will figure it out in two shakes.”
“You had more faith in his research than I ever did.”
“I could listen to him easier because I wasn’t the one he was neglecting for the research.” Harrison’s soft comment hung suspended in the air, inviting her to unburden her hurts.
She shuffled several sheets. Harrison should know by now she wasn’t as expressive as Ellen. Dear Ellen had never had any trouble baring her soul, especially to Harrison. But Marian . . . she’d never had the luxury of giving way to her emotions, not when she needed to stay strong for Ellen and Dad. Besides, she always had so much to accomplish and never enough time to wallow in self-pity for more than a few seconds.
Harrison pointed to the sheet listing ten different Bible verses. “I see you’ve written out each of the verses using the King James Version.”
“Yes, and not surprising, they all have to do with the passing of time.” She rubbed her hands over her arms. Even with a crackling fire on the hearth and the floor heaters pumping out air, the library contained a chill that had required her to don her gray cashmere sweater above the ruffled silk blouse she was wearing with her flared dark jeans.
“What do you think they mean?” she asked. “And why did he choose these specific verses?”
“Perhaps to show that the Creator supports the fluidity of time and isn’t bound by the past, present, or future?” Harrison picked up the next paper, a diagram of a Gothic-looking stone head with a beard, mustache, long curly hair, and a protruding tongue. “How about this one? Did you discover anything about it?”
“A little.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket only to see Jasper had called two more times. She’d answered his first call earlier in the morning, and he’d been anxious when he hadn’t heard from her yesterday. She’d told him about the near-robbing and her need to hide away and catch up on sleep at Chesterfield Park. But she’d refrained from mentioning the strange visions and the ampulla.
As a fellow distinguished scientist, Jasper would never understand what was happening to her. How could he, when she was having difficulty explaining it, even to herself? He’d probably tell her she was under too much pressure and volunteer again to come over and be with her.
For now, she’d keep ignoring him, at least until she could come up with a plausible excuse for what was going on.
Instead she pulled up the internet page that described the statue head. “It’s the carved capital of one of the columns in Our Lady crypt of Canterbury Cathedral.”
“That’s what I thought.” Harrison studied the black-and-white drawing. The page had been ripped from one of Dad’s books, Archaeologia Cantiana, Volume 13, written in 1880. Plugging the title into an advanced internet search had easily given her access to the book, which contained a detailed discussion of the architecture of Our Lady, the central chapel beneath Canterbury Cathedral.
She’d learned the stone head was at the top of column F on the north part of the underground chapel. All the other pillars had carvings too, mostly of monsters, dragons, and other mythical creatures. Out of them all, why had Dad chosen the human head?
She retrieved another sheet from the table. “Dad also ripped out the page containing the floor plan of Our Lady.” The yellowed paper was from the same book, and she’d easily located the position of column F on the diagram.
Although she’d once walked through the crypt during a tour, she hadn’t taken much interest in the columns that held up the chapel’s ceiling and lent support to the structure above it. Compared to the more spectacular architectural feats elsewhere in the cathedral, the crypt had paled in comparison. Now she wished she’d paid more attention.
Harrison placed the page with the carved sculpture next to the floor plan. “What message is Arthur communicating through these two pages?”
“What does this particular column in the crypt have to do with his research?”
“That’s the million-pound question, isn’t it?” Harrison began to power his chair around the table toward some of the other papers.
“Dad didn’t need to be quite so mysterious with what he left.” In fact, he could have told her more when they were on the phone the other day.
Even as her frustration mounted, she knew he wasn’t totally at fault for his evasiveness. She’d made it clear in recent years that she was no longer the little girl who worshipped the ground he walked on and believed everything he told her. She’d snubbed his conversations about his research often enough that he’d spoken of it less over time.
Harrison came to a stop at the opposite end of the table. “With Lionel Inc. going after you so aggressively, it’s quite possible they’ve known about Arthur’s Tree of Life theories for some time. Even if not, Arthur wouldn’t want a discovery of this magnitude falling into the wrong hands.”
Did Lionel suspect that the holy water could not only heal but also enable a person to cross over time? And what would they do with the holy water if they accessed it? Maybe that’s why Dad had been so secretive, because he didn’t know the long-term ramifications.
Harrison picked up two other pages from the table. One contained several paragraphs about the Priory of St. Sepulchre, founded in 1100 in Canterbury on St. George’s Street.
The other sheet discussed in more depth how the monks sold the holy water to pilgrims visiting Canterbury Cathedral, water the St. Sepulchre nuns provided from a wellspring somewhere on the nunnery grounds. Harrison read the paragraphs, his eyes narrowing with each word.
When he finished, he placed the two wrinkled papers side by side on the table. “If I had to hazard another guess, I’d say Arthur hoped to see into the past—or cross over there—so he could work out the location of the original spring at St. Sepulchre.”
“That’s what I was thinking. But after a quick online search for the history of St. Sepulchre, I learned Canterbury’s Archeological Trust excavated the old convent about ten years ago. They unearthed a cemetery but found nothing more than the skeletal remains of nuns, along with tokens from a Roman graveyard. There’s no mention of a discovery of a wellspring.”
“Quite right, but archaeologists aren’t looking for wellsprings. Such an excavation would require much deeper digging with specialized equipment.”
Her thoughts ticked in an unending rhythm, just like the ticking of the pendulum in the large longcase clock in the corner. “So do you think Dad’s still living in the past?”
Harrison’s attention shifted to the posy. “As mad as it sounds, I think we have to give him the benefit of the doubt until he proves otherwise.”
She fingered the small flower, the living proof something was different about the holy water, that it had life-giving qualities that defied explanation, that maybe it had indirectly originated from the Tree of Life from the Garden of Eden—or at least from one of the seeds.
Even if she was beginning to grasp the importance of her dad’s discoveries, she still had so many questions. “How can a body be in two places at once?”
“It’s highly unlikely a body and soul could straddle two eras indefinitely. My guess is that he’s at risk for losing his life in one or both places.”
As fascinating as it was to think of her dad stepping back in time as she had, not only was he in a life-threatening coma in the present, but who knew what kind of dangers he might face in the past. “I hate that he’s put his life in jeopardy, Harrison.”
“Don’t worry, love.” Harrison’s voice rose with bravado even though worry creased his forehead. “Knowing Arthur as I do, I’m sure he planned out every move before setting his plan into motion.”
If her dad had indeed traveled back in time, then he’d been in the past for almost five days, likely to some point in the Middle Ages when Canterbury’s St. Sepulchre—the source of the holy water—was still in existence. How would a modern man survive in a place so radically different?
“We need to bring him back.” Her sights shifted from one full bookcase to another around the room, as if they held resources that could help her. “Whatever he’s doing isn’t worth the possibility of him dying.”
Harrison nodded at the piece of paper containing Dad’s scribbled thoughts regarding time crossing. His expression was somber. “Read numbers three and four on his list.”
She’d already read the list numerous times, but she reached for the sheet anyway. “Number three: People seem to recover from their visions or movement into the past at varying levels and lengths of time.”
“Number four: There are no indications full recovery can always be made. I speculate that if a person dies while having the vision or movement into the past, then the body remaining in the present will also die—and vice versa.”
Harrison pressed his lips together and stared at the sheets, tapping his long fingers against the table. “What if we need to track down more holy water and give him another dose?”
She touched the ampulla. “So you think another dose will heal him?”
“If the old tales are true, then the holy water has the capability to heal the sick. Certainly coma falls into that category.”
“Could we try the granules from this ampulla?” She grazed the worn engraving on the flask. “The residue is powerful. Maybe it would be enough to heal him.”
“I don’t think so. But we can always give it a go.”
God had probably created the Tree of Life with a chemical compound with unique physiological properties, making it a one-of-a-kind substance not found anywhere else except in that tree. She and Harrison could speculate all they wanted on what such a compound was capable of doing, but the truth was, they were likely only skimming the surface. They couldn’t know anything for certain until they found more and began testing it.
Was that what her dad had intended for her to do? Find more holy water? Revive him? So that then he could direct them to the location of the wellspring which would allow them to do further experimentation on the water?
Her pulse surged with a new sense of anticipation and energy. “You said there are only three of the St. Thomas ampullae left in the world—well, two now, since we have this one. Can we locate the others?”
“Such a task is doubtful. Arthur likely attempted to acquire them from various museums and didn’t get anywhere. But hopefully, he’s left us clues for how to find more holy water some place.”
Harrison powered his wheelchair, backed away from the table, and steered toward the door. He gave a few brief instructions to Drake, who bowed and then hurried away.
“Ready?” Harrison fiddled with his bow tie, tightening it into place. “Time to get on with it, then.”
“Where are we going?” She began gathering up the papers.
“We need to work out a way to save Arthur. And since his clues seem to be pointing us to the crypt of the cathedral, let’s have a look and pray we’ll find the answers we need there.”