Christmas Ghosts - Fiction River (6 page)

“Know what?”

“I hear my brother’s voice. Pretty much all the time.”

“Your—your—
dead
brother?”

“Yes.” She spread her hands in a helpless gesture. “I wouldn’t blame you if you hightailed it right back to your broken-down Tin Lizzie, but that’s the way it is. I thought maybe I was losing my mind from being alone so much, like those pioneer women you read about, but now you’re here, and I still—that is, Holland is still—”

“He’s still talking to you.”

She nodded.

“So,” Peter said. He turned his body to face the grinning phantom hovering in the doorway. “So, was your brother about your height? Kind of a skinny kid? Laughed a lot?”

Her eyes widened, and the color receded from her cheeks. “Peter! Can you
see
him?”

“I see something,” he said grimly.

“But you
see
him? I only
hear
him!”

“I was afraid to tell you. That’s how I found the house. He showed me.”

Holland said, in a tone thinner than any she had heard from him before, “Surprise, Maddie!”

“Holland,” she said, very low. “What do you mean? I mean, Peter won’t want to—”

“You were lonely,” Holland breathed. “So—” His voice trailed off, as if he had left the room while he was still speaking.

She cried, “Holland!”

“He’s gone,” Peter said. “He’s not there now.”

She put her hands to her cheeks. “Oh! I was always telling him to go away, but he never listened!”

Peter crossed to her, and took her hands away from her face. “What were you going to say?” he asked gently. “Peter won’t want to—what?”

She looked down at their joined hands, and her voice trembled with fresh grief. “Holland always tried to fix things.”

“Good for him.”

“He’ll come back,” she said uncertainly.

“Maybe he doesn’t need to come back.”

She lifted her face, but slowly, cautiously. “What do you mean?”

He squeezed her fingers. “He brought me here, Madeleine. To you. I needed someplace, and you needed someone.”

“Peter,” she said. “Do you think you might want to stay?”

“Do you think you might ask me to?” He wasn’t smiling, and he watched her face, trying to guess at the emotions whirling behind those milk-chocolate eyes. “You need a hand, I think.”

“I can’t pay you.” She pushed back the strand of hair, but she held his gaze. Brave, that was Madeleine. Scared, but facing her fear.

He released her hands, but he stood where he was, understanding he shouldn’t rush her, willing her to see into his heart. “I don’t need money,” he said. “I need someplace I belong.”

The smile that broke over her face nearly took his breath away, and he had to shove his hands in his pockets to keep from taking her in his arms. He hadn’t known this girl for more than a few wintry hours, but she touched him just the same. She made him want to do everything right.

Her eyes sparkled as brilliantly as the sun on snow. “Well, then. You can set the table. The flatware’s over there.” She indicated the breakfront with her chin.

He had to step over the shepherd lying on the rug to do as she asked. He told himself he wouldn’t say anything further, not now. He could wait. But they would have a great deal to talk about in the days to come.

As he laid the table, something flitted across the kitchen, a shadow, or the ghost of a ghost. He jerked up his head to see it, but it moved too quickly, gone before he could focus on it.

Madeleine, measuring coffee into the percolator, lifted her head, listening to something. She smiled mistily across the room at Peter. “Holland says, Merry Christmas,” she said. “And welcome home.”

Peter stood still, his hands full of forks and spoons, and gazed wordlessly at yellow-haired Madeleine Love.

Christmas. Home. It seemed he would celebrate after all.

Behind her, her brother’s ghost waved farewell, faded through the wall and disappeared.

Introduction to
“A Ghost of Time”

Western traditions also fascinate Dean Wesley Smith. Under several of his pen names, he has written
amazing
Western novels. I keep asking him to write more, but he’s focusing on short fiction at the moment, which is good for those of us at Fiction River. Over the years, he’s written more than 200 short stories, and he’s busily helping WMG Publishing reprint those stories.

Like me, Dean has never met a genre he couldn’t meld with another genre. The first short story he ever sold, published in a science fiction award volume, was a romance. He has written a lot of romances, under different names, and actually anticipated the futuristic post-apocalyptic subgenre that has now hit the genre.

As subscribers to Fiction River know, Dean adores time travel. He used his award-winning editing skills to edit our previous volume,
Time Streams
. His Christmas Ghost story combines his love for time travel with his love of the old west.

He writes, “Last year I wrote a story from Duster Kindel’s point of view and have always wanted to go back to a story in his world. I was also born and raised in Boise, Idaho, where the mansion in this story is located. And my historical family is named Edwards and they had a mansion in that same area. So I just took all the parts and ran with them.”

A Ghost of Time

Dean Wesley Smith

One

Sherri Edwards brushed her long black hair out of her face and stared at the beautiful stone mansion sitting back in the oak trees like she had seen a ghost. The front porch wood railings between the polished marble columns shined with a gleam she had only dreamed about. The smooth river-stone walkway that led from the dirt road up to the house seemed far wider than she had ever imagined. And the drapes that she could see through the huge windows hung perfectly.

The entire mansion was shaded by huge old oak and cottonwood trees, giving the grounds a feeling of a southern plantation. She could see through the trees and past the main building and carriage house to the Boise River beyond down the bluff.

She had seen pictures of the Edwards mansion in its glory, but could not believe it had actually existed that way. It was exactly how she hoped to have it look when she finished the remodeling in 2016.

Yet here she stood in 1898, on the edge of the pathway leading up to the mansion, seeing her own home for herself in all its original glory, seeing it before years of neglect and abandonment had reduced it to something that needed to be torn down, not restored.

There had been many times over the last year that she had regretted the impulsive buy of the old mansion just because it had her family name attached. No one who had lived in it had actually been a relative, but in her haste to buy the old place in 2015, that hadn’t mattered in the slightest.

Bonnie Kindle took Sherri’s arm gently as a proper lady in the 1890s would do, to make sure she was all right. “Hard to imagine you are actually standing here, isn’t it?”

“Impossible,” Sherri said. She had been in the past for three long days now and it still seemed far too much to believe.

“Not impossible,” Bonnie’s husband, Duster Kindle, said. “You are actually here. You want to pinch her, Bonnie, and prove it?”

Bonnie glanced over at Duster with a look that only a wife can give a husband as Sherri laughed. “If seeing Silver City before it became a ghost town and the two-day painful horseback ride here to Boise didn’t convince me, no amount of pinching is going to do it. And that’s not to mention just how uncomfortable these dresses are.”

“Good point,” Duster said, smiling.

Bonnie and Sherri were dressed in 1890s dresses. At the Boise Hotel, Bonnie had had to help Sherri get into her cotton summer dress of light blue. The women in the West in this time period really wore a lot of clothes as far as Sherri was concerned, far more than was needed for a warm May afternoon. She had a small chest, so she had opted to not go with the bra that felt more like a prison device, but the dress had forced her to wear petticoats.

Duster Kindle had on a light brown duster-length leather coat and a brown cowboy hat. Under the duster he had on a faded plaid shirt and a form of jeans.

On the ride from the old mining town of Silver City, he and Bonnie had told Sherri about some of their lives in the old West in different timelines. Sometimes they stayed together, sometimes they split up, living for upwards of thirty or more years in the old West, starting usually from 1868 and going up to the turn of the century and sometimes beyond.

In fact, Duster had already been back in time for over thirty years and as they had gone into the Boise Hotel, a number of people had called Duster “Marshal.”

As far as Bonnie and Sherri were concerned, Duster had only left the old mine above Silver City two minutes before they did. But he had lived thirty years longer and it showed on his face and in his silver hair under his hat when he met them.

It didn’t matter. Duster had explained to Sherri before they suggested this trip. When they returned to their regular timeline, they will have only aged a few minutes.

“And if we die in the past?” she had asked at one point as they were trying to coach her on what it was like to live in 1898.

“You automatically get returned to the cave alive in your normal timeline,” Duster had said, a frown on his face. “The timeline just sort of spits you out since you don’t really belong there. But trust me, you don’t want to do that. Death is seldom pleasant in the old West.”

She hadn’t argued with that, since it sounded like the voice of experience talking.

Bonnie had also just nodded and looked away.

These two had been her best friends since high school and all the way through college. She had been there when they met, and stood up with Bonnie at their wedding. But she had never known that for the last few years of her time they had been traveling in time.

She still, even standing in 1898 Boise after being in the past for three days, was having a very difficult time grasping that fact.

“So are we going to go knock on the door or just stand here staring?” Duster asked. “I got to admit, this is a beautiful area, but it’s getting warm, even in the shade.”

Around them the Boise Avenue area of widely spread mansions stretched along the ridge overlooking the Boise River. In 1898, this area was where the truly rich lived and every mansion was on acres of land with servants’ quarters and carriage houses.

The road out from Boise along the ridge and river was a wide and fairly rough dirt lane through the trees. That rutted road looked very different from the 2015 paved road called Boise Avenue.

Sherri took a deep breath. She had come back in time with Bonnie and Duster to try to understand what had happened to the owner of the Edwards Mansion in 1898. Supposedly the owner had committed suicide and haunted the mansion ever since, making it impossible for anyone to live in the place.

He had killed himself sometime this evening.

She had never seen a picture of the owner, but she knew he had had enough money to keep the house maintained and in his estate for almost eighty years after his death, even though no one lived in it. The mansion had finally been sold in the 1970s. From there it had gone through years of neglect and twenty different owners who couldn’t stand the ghost that supposedly haunted the place.

She hadn’t actually seen the ghost, but she had had workers run from the place, and it had gotten so bad, no one was willing to come to work for her. Somehow, she had to figure out what had happened to come up with some way to stop the ghost from haunting her home.

Until she had bought the old mansion, she hadn’t believed in ghosts.

Of course, she didn’t think time travel was possible either, yet here she stood in 1898, about to walk up to the house she had bought one-hundred-and-seventeen years in the future.

Sherri forced herself to take a deep breath of the warm afternoon air and then nodded. “Let’s do this.”

Duster followed as the two women moved carefully up the smooth stone walkway and then up the polished stairs to the wide porch with its comfortable-looking wooden chairs and couches. Sherri felt like she was walking into a dream. She had imagined this porch like this after she finished the remodel, almost right down to the same type of period furniture.

As they had planned, the two women stood slightly to one side and Duster knocked on the door. There was a brass knocker to one side and Bonnie pointed to it after he knocked and Duster just shrugged.

Sherri really loved her two best friends. They had a relationship that she could only dream about. Maybe someday, if she ever found the right man. Maybe they would be at her wedding. If they weren’t off running around through time somewhere.

Then the door handle rattled and was pulled open.

And there stood the most handsome man Sherri could have ever imagined. He had pitch-black hair, slightly long and over his shirt collar as was the fashion of this time. His face was clean-shaven and seemed to have been chiseled out of stone, and his deep brown eyes looked like they could see through anything.