A Husband in Time

“Ayuh. After Bolton vanished, his friends, Bausch and Waterson looked after the place. Kept the taxes paid up and so on, always insisting Bolton would come back someday. Course, he never did.” Quigly shrugged and heaved a sigh. “The house was left alone for a short while, of course, after the two men passed. Went to the town for taxes, and naturally the town kept it up, hoping to sell it one day. Never did, though. Not until your Grandma Kate came along. And even when she bought it, she refused to change a thing.”

Jane could understand that reluctance to change this place. It had a soul to it, as if it were a living entity—or was that the lingering presence of the long-dead scientist she felt in every room?

“Hey, Mom?”

She turned, surprised that Cody’s voice came from a distance and not right behind her, where he’d been standing only seconds ago. “Codester? Where are you?” She stepped out of the master bedroom, into the hall. Cody stood two doors down, in front of that room at the top of the stairs. The one that seemed to have given him a scare before.

“I want this room, if it’s okay with you,” he said. Frowning, Jane went to where he stood near the now open door. He looked in at a rather ordinary-looking bedroom, with no furniture to speak of, and nothing exceptional about it except for the huge marble fireplace on one wall.

“I kind of thought this room…gave you the willies. Isn’t this where you thought you saw something before?”

“That’s why I want it,” Cody said. He looked at her and shrugged. “If there is some kind of ghost hanging out around here, I want to know about it.”

“Gonna analyze it until you convince it it can’t possibly exist?”

“Maybe,” he said, grinning. “So when are the movers gonna get here with my Nintendo?”

Two

1897

T hunder rumbled and growled in the distance, and Zachariah got up from the chair where he’d been keeping constant vigil to light the oil lamp on his son’s bedside table. Benjamin had always been afraid of thunderstorms. Just as Zach fitted the glass chimney into place, Ben stirred, as Zach had known he would.

“Father… Oh. You’re right here.”

“Where else would I be?”

“Working on the device, of course. You waste an awful lot of time sitting here with me, you know.”

“I like sitting with you.” Thunder cracked again, and Benjamin reached for his father’s hand, found it, and held tight.

“There, now. No need to be afraid, son. You know thunder can’t hurt you.”

“That doesn’t make it any less noisy, though,” Benjamin said, quite reasonably. “How much longer will it last, Father? It’s been storming all night.”

Zachariah pulled the gold watch from his vest pocket, opened it and then turned its face toward his son. “It’s only 9:08, my boy. It hasn’t been storming all night, only a couple of hours. And it will end any time now, I’m cer—”

His words were cut off by the loudest, sharpest crack yet, this one so loud it even made Zachariah jump a bit. At the same instant, the night sky beyond Benjamin’s window was ripped apart by a blinding, jagged streak.

“Father, the lightning! It’s hit something!”

Zach moved to the edge of the bed and gathered his son in his arms. “There now…” he said. “It wasn’t as close as it seemed.” But he kept his gaze focused on that one spot in the night where the lightning seemed to have struck. And as he watched, he rocked his son, whispered to him, stroked his hair.

Within seconds, a pinprick of light danced in the distant sky. And then it began to grow, and spread, until Zach recognized it for what it was. A fire. And from what he could see, it was the old Thomas barn, nearly three miles away, that had been hit, and that was now burning. No great loss. It was an old, decrepit building and hadn’t been used in years. The only thing inside, so far as he knew, was some musty old hay.

Benjamin fell asleep in Zachariah’s arms, and Zach remained right where he was all night long, holding his precious child and watching the growing blaze in the distance. Soon it illuminated the entire night sky. The barn was old, tinder-dry, and had gone up like a matchstick.

Zach ought to be working. He knew he should, for so very much depended on the success of the current experiment. And he was so close. So close.

Right now, though, Benjamin needed him. And right now he couldn’t bring himself to leave.

But as the sun rose high the next morning, and spirals of smoke still rose from the charred remains of the old Thomas barn, Zach gently tried to extricate himself from the bed without disturbing Benjamin. And he did. A bit too easily. As he got to his feet, it hit him that, sick as he was, Benjamin was normally a very light sleeper. He should have at least stirred when Zach got up from the bed.

A cold chill crept up his spine as he turned to face his son, who hadn’t so much as stirred in his sleep all night.

And then Zachariah Bolton’s heart froze over. He shook Ben’s frail shoulders gently, tapped his pale cheek. But there was no response. His son had slipped into a coma. The state that marked the final stages of his illness. Death was only twenty-four hours away now, perhaps less.

There was no more time. None whatsoever. He must act now, and if the experiment had side effects, then so be it. He’d suffer whatever he must in order to save his son’s life.

He reached into his vest, and removed the device from its pocket. There was no longer any reason to stay by his son’s side. Benjamin wouldn’t wake again. Not unless… Not unless this worked.

Leaning over the bed, he stroked his son’s coppery curls, kissed his forehead. “I’ll be gone for a little while, my Ben. But I’ll try to arrange it so it’s only an instant for you. I don’t want to leave you, but I must to get you healthy again. Understand?”

Benjamin’s auburn lashes rested on his chalk-white cheeks, and his breath wheezed in and out of his rail-thin body.

Zach straightened and pushed his hands through his hair. He looked like hell. He knew it without a glimpse at the looking glass. His clothes were rumpled, vest unbuttoned and gaping. The thin black tie he’d worn the day before hung loose from his collar. He’d planned, though. There was a small satchel in Benjamin’s wardrobe, with a change of clothes and the things he’d need. Including proof, should he be questioned. He took a moment to retrieve the satchel. No time to change. Not now. Ben could very well expire while his father worried over such trivial matters. But once Zach was gone, time would virtually stand still for his son. Time enough to bathe then. If he was displeasing to those he met, well, too bad for them. Not that he was likely to meet anyone at all. Each time he’d opened the portal, it had shown him an empty, unlived-in version of his own house. Not that he cared right now who he might meet, or what they might think of him.

He wasn’t thinking of himself. Not at all. He wasn’t thinking of society, either, or of the repercussions he knew full well might come from his tampering with nature this way. He flatly refused to consider those. The only thing on Zachariah Bolton’s mind was his son. His precious Benjamin. The only thing that mattered right now was finding a way to save his child’s fragile life. The child who was, right now, precariously close to death. And he could do it. Zachariah Bolton could do it. He could travel backward through time. He could go back to a time before his son had been exposed to the killing virus that was trying so hard to take him. And when he arrived there, he’d take Benjamin away, somewhere safe. So that when the virus pummelled Rockwell, Ben would be far away. He’d never be exposed. And when the danger had passed, he’d bring Ben home safe and sound. He’d never become sick. He’d never die. He’d be all right. Zach would return here, to this time, to find his son healthy and well again. With no memory of having been sick at all.

Zach’s heartbeat escalated as he pointed the device toward that spot in the very center of his son’s bedroom. He had no idea what the spot was. A wrinkle in the fabric of time. A rent. Whatever it was, it was only here, in this room, and he suspected it had been here, hovering in the air above the ground, even before the house was built. He’d attempted the experiment in numerous locations, but here and here alone had he found success. One night, when he’d been working in here so as to be with his ailing child, he’d discovered the portal purely by accident.

With his thumb, he depressed the initiator button. And a pinprick of light appeared in midair, at the room’s center. Holding the device steady, he turned the expander dial, and the light grew bigger, brighter, until it was a glowing sphere that extended beyond the ceiling and the floor. A mist-filled, glowing orb. But even that began to change. The mists cleared and took on forms, and in moments Zach was looking into what appeared to be a huge mirror. And the mirror reflected this very room back at him. Only in another time. He could clearly see that the wallpaper was different, and the curtains in the windows were different, and the furnishings. Everything. Right down to the small body bundled beneath the covers in the bed. Benjamin? Before he was taken ill, when he was well and strong and healthy? This was going to work. It was going to work!

He only hoped it didn’t kill him. Every test so far indicated there would be side effects. The tea cup Zach had pushed through the portal a few days ago had shattered. He’d made adjustments to the device and tried again. The apple he sent through had withered, and he’d made still more changes. The mouse…the mouse had died. And though Zach had recalculated and made even more changes, he couldn’t be certain he had it right this time. So, yes, there might be side effects. Serious ones. He just didn’t know what they would be, yet. But—he smiled a little—he was about to find out. “You’re going to be all right, Benjamin. I swear to you. You’ll be well again!” And Zachariah Bolton stepped into the light, and promptly felt a post wallop him right between the eyes.

Jane Fortune couldn’t sleep. There was simply too much on her mind. Oh, not the house. The house was perfect, she’d known that the second she saw it. The aging but elegant Victorian, standing like a guardian of the sea. The rocky Maine shoreline below. The songs of the waves that would sing her to sleep under ordinary circumstances.

Her new antique shop—Jane smiled at the words—was now a reality. She’d researched the area, made new contacts and stocked up on local finds. She’d been open for several weeks now, and business was brisk. The guest house—a miniature copy of the main house, perched at its feet as if the house had given birth to a pup—was perfect, just as Jane had known it would be. Even the nearby town, appropriately named Rockwell, was picture-perfect. The epitome of the New England fantasy. A place time and progress seemed to have forgotten. It boasted a corner drugstore complete with a soda fountain and a barbershop with an old-fashioned candy-cane pole outside. When she walked along Rockwell’s sidewalks, she half expected to round a corner and spot four men in flat-topped straw hats and handlebar mustaches singing about strolling through the park.

But as Grandma Kate used to say, when things seem too good to be true, look out, because they probably are. What if the business failed? What would she do then? Go running back to Minneapolis with her tail between her legs?

No. No, this move had been hard enough on Cody. She wouldn’t uproot him again. She’d make this work, somehow. She had to, for her son’s sake.

But financial worries were not the only things troubling Jane’s mind tonight. She was more concerned about her son than about anything else. Cody’s wish for a father had gnawed at her heart from the second he uttered it in the car that night. He was an intelligent child—gifted, the school officials called him. He knew he’d had a father once. But while Jane didn’t believe in lying to her son, she hadn’t told him the whole truth about Greg. He knew only that his father had been a talented musician who died when Cody was still a baby. She’d left out the rest. She’d never told Cody how taken in she’d been by Greg’s idealism and sincerity, and the beauty and meaning behind the songs he wrote and played in clubs around Minneapolis. God, when she thought now about how quickly she’d fallen in love with him…

She’d been a fool. Greg’s idealism had fled the second some L.A. big shot heard him play, and offered his band a recording contract. A pregnant young girlfriend who had made it clear she wanted no part of her family wealth, hadn’t fit in with his new and improved plans. She wouldn’t have wanted such a shallow and irresponsible man raising her son, anyway. She knew that now. But she also knew her son ached for the lack of a father in his life.

Oh, if only…

She looked wistfully at the painting on the wall beside her bed. Zachariah Bolton. His soft sable hair fell across his forehead, his brown eyes gleamed. The narrow black tie hung in two thin ribbons, and his vest was unbuttoned. The top of a gold watch peeked up from a small pocket.

The boy’s resemblance to her own son struck her again, and she figured that might be a lot of the reason she liked the piece so much. The two sat very close to one another, at a wooden table with an oil lamp at either end. Each intent on his own work, but still, somehow, aware of the other. You could almost feel the love between them. Father and son, she’d have known that even without Quigly O’Donnell’s narration. A father whose work meant the world to him, she thought, but who had never once allowed that work to come before his son.

If only Cody could have a father like that one.

Jane sighed, and relaxed deeper into her pillows. It was no use dreaming. She’d never find a man with those century-old values in the nineties. Not even in this nostalgic town. And she wouldn’t settle for less. She didn’t want another man whose career meant more to him than his own child. And she didn’t want an ambitionless bum, or an immature, irresponsible overgrown kid, either.

She wanted…

Her gaze wandered back to the man in the painting. His full lips were parted just slightly, his strong jawline was taut, as if he were grating his teeth, and he was shoulder-to-shoulder with the little boy. The passion in his eyes was for his work. But it was intense enough to make her wonder if it had ever been there for a woman. His wife, the boy’s mother, perhaps?

She smiled and shook her head. She was gifting the mysterious inventor with qualities he’d probably never had. The day after she and Cody moved in, Jane had made a trip to the Rockwell Public Library and borrowed several books on the town’s history. The chapters on Bolton all read much the same. He’d been a notorious womanizer. The Don Juan of the nineteenth century, one author had dubbed him. None had mentioned his wife. Poor, long-suffering woman.

And yet that passion in the eyes of the inventor called to her.

Oh, but all this speculation was silly. The man was no longer living. And that probably wasn’t passion at all in his eyes, but perhaps the beginnings of insanity. Once a man considered to be a genius, and far ahead of his time, Bolton had, the books claimed, crossed that fine line between brilliance and insanity. And from what she’d read, Jane thought the madness had begun to take over long before the death of his precious son. Two accounts said that Bolton had claimed he’d discovered a way to travel through time. He’d been ridiculed for that claim, and soon after he’d refused to discuss it. Some said it was that ridicule that had sent him into seclusion, as much as the loss of his son. Whatever the reason, he’d dropped out of sight in 1890-something, never to be heard from again.

A shame. A crying shame.

“Mom! Mom, hurry!”

The alarm in Cody’s voice pierced straight through every thought, to her very soul. Something was wrong. She jumped out of bed and ran into the hall, down it, and her heart was in her throat even before she exploded through his bedroom door and froze in place.

The moonlight spilled through the window and bathed the two forms in its pale, liquid glow. A rumpled, tousled man knelt on the floor, holding her son in his arms, so tightly she wondered if Cody could breathe. The man’s back was toward Jane, and his shoulders shuddered and convulsed as if he were sobbing. Cody stared at her from the darkness, wide-eyed, as the man rocked him back and forth.

“My son,” he kept whispering, his voice raw and coarse. “My boy, my son. Thank God…”

Jane’s heart seemed to grind to a halt. Without a second’s hesitation, she stepped into the room, snatched the baseball bat from where it leaned in the corner, lifted it and moved forward.

“Mom, no!”

Cody’s shout made the lunatic who held him pause and stiffen, as if just realizing someone else had come into the room. And Jane hesitated. Instead of bringing the bat crashing down on his head, she just held it there, ready, poised. Her throat was so dry that the words sounded raspy and harsh when she said, “Let him go. Let him go, right now, or I swear…”

And he turned very slowly, still hugging Cody tight, to face her. The movement bringing him out of the light, so that his face was in shadow. His brows drew together, and he seemed puzzled. Confused.

“Please,” Jane said, and her voice wasn’t quite as demanding or as confident this time. Her hands shook, and her grip on the baseball bat was none too steady. “Please, take whatever you want. Just don’t hurt my son.”

“Hurt him?” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. Tormented, pain-filled, and weak. “No, I could never… I love him. He’s my son, my Benjamin, my…” Blinking as if to clear his eyes, he turned to stare at Cody’s small, frightened face.

Jane lowered the bat, reached out a hand, flicked on the light switch. She saw the man jerk in shock, saw the fearful glance he sent up at the light fixture on the ceiling above him. Then his gaze returned to the top of Cody’s head, because he held him too closely to see much else.

“He’s my son,” Jane said, calmly, gently, and her eyes were fixed to Cody’s. The man was obviously insane. “His name is not Benjamin, it’s Cody. He’s my son. Please…”

The man gave his head a shake. With deliberate tenderness, he clasped Cody’s small shoulders and moved the boy away from him, just a bit. Enough so that he could stare down into Cody’s face.

“You’re…you’re not Benjamin….” he whispered, and the pain in his voice had tears springing to life in Jane’s eyes.

“I’m Cody, mister. Cody Fortune. I had a dad once, but he died when I was a baby. That’s my mom.” Cody pointed. “Her name’s Jane.”

The man’s brows rose. He shook his head slowly, and tears filled his eyes. “Lord,” he whispered. “You’re not… But…I thought…” Blinking repeatedly, he gripped the bedpost, pulled himself to his feet, but remained bent over, his free hand pressing to his forehead. Finally, he straightened, and turned to face Jane fully, right beneath the overhead light.

She saw his face, and her jaw fell. She caught her breath, forced her shock into submission. But then she noticed the clothes he wore, and her heart flip-flopped all over again.

Dear God, he was the image of the man in the painting.

“I’m sorry,” he said, glancing down at Cody. Then facing Jane, he repeated, “I’m so sorry I frightened you both. I…” He took a step toward her, but swayed a little, and grasped the bedpost to hold himself up.

“Th-th-that’s okay,” Jane said, and she wiggled her hand at her son. Cody ran to her, and she held him tight, never taking her eyes off the stranger. “Um…look, how did you get in here?”

He frowned, and looked around the room as if for the first time. “It’s…it’s different.” He closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

Jane gently pushed Cody behind her, then took a backward step. She forcibly ignored his resemblance to the inventor she’d been mooning over so recently, and refused to think about his clothes. “You’re, um…sick or something, aren’t you,” she said, almost as if to convince herself of it. “You’re disoriented and you wandered in here by accident. I understand, all right? I’m not going to press charges, or anything like that.”

The man’s eyes opened. They were a bit dazed, clouded with pain, but they were also intelligent, perfectly sane and utterly sincere brown eyes. Brown eyes that looked so familiar it was downright uncanny. “What year is this, Jane?”

What year—

Jane swallowed hard and refused to so much as allow the thought to enter her mind. “Nineteen ninety-seven,” she told him, as casually as if it were a question she answered every day. She nudged her son with her as she took another backward step into the hall.

The man’s head jerked up fast and his eyes widened. “Nineteen…” Then he looked above him, at the light fixture in the ceiling, and when he lowered his head again, he grimaced in agony. “No… No, I went the wrong way. I came forward instead of going back. This can’t be, I…” Still ranting, he lunged forward, toward Jane, but he never made it. He went down like a giant redwood, in a heap at her feet.

And that was when she noticed the gold wire-rims on the floor beside him. The satchel in the middle of Cody’s bedroom floor. The little black box. She swallowed hard and told herself she was letting her imagination run wild. She bent down over him, reached into his vest pocket and pulled out the pocket watch—the exact same pocket watch she’d seen in the painting. And then she looked more closely at the small black box on the floor. An odd-looking remote control that looked an awful lot like the box the inventor was tinkering with in the painting.

“He asked what year it was. Said he’d come forward,” she muttered. And she mentally revisited what Sheriff O’Donnell, and the library books, had told her about the genius scientist who’d lived here. That he’d claimed to have invented time travel…and then he disappeared.

“But that just can’t be…”

“Mom?”

She rose, and turned to face her son.

“Can we keep him?”

Jane braced her hands on the edge of the bed, bending almost double as she tried to catch her breath. The man was no lightweight, that was for sure. Getting him into the bed had been no easy job. And whoever he was, he could use a shower, a shave and a clean change of clothes.

None of which, she reminded herself, was her problem. All she had to do was go downstairs, call Sheriff Quigly O’Donnell and have this intruder taken away to a jail cell.

Except that she hadn’t placed that call just yet. And she was in no hurry to, for some reason.

“Mom, is he sick?”

She glanced at her son, shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably. You’d better go wash your hands, Cody. It might be catching.”

Cody didn’t go. “Maybe he’s not sick, Mom. Maybe he’s hurt.”

Jane slipped her arm around her son’s shoulders and squeezed. “You must have been scared to death.”

“Nah. At first I thought he really was my dad. That he’d come back somehow—even though I know that’s impossible. The way he was hugging me and all.” His chin lowered just a bit. “It was kinda nice.”

Jane’s throat tightened. Time to change the subject. “How did he get in here, sweetheart?”

Cody shook his head. “There was this big light, right in the middle of my room. Round. Like…sort of like a train tunnel, only light instead of dark. Really light. It hurt my eyes.” Jane frowned, but her son kept on talking. “Then the light was gone, and he was laying on the floor.”

“Lying on the floor,” she said automatically, her gaze pinned to the man in her son’s bed.

“That’s what I said. Mom, you think he’s a ghost?”

“No, Cody, I don’t think he’s a ghost.” She frowned at her son. “And I didn’t think you believed in anything as non-scientific as that.”

“I don’t. But what about—?”

“Come on,” she said, feeling uneasier by the second. A train tunnel, indeed. “Let’s go call Sheriff O’Donnell.”

“Mom, we can’t!” Cody pulled his hand free. “He needs help! He’s sick or hurt or something! You can’t go putting him in jail!”