Timewatch (5 page)

“You seem upset. Is everything all right?”

Geraldine bit her lip and then admitted, “Not really. Just after Charles dropped us off here yesterday, he broke up with me.”

“I'm so sorry, my dear. May I ask why?”

Geraldine drummed her fingers on the arms of the chair. “He said there was a distance between us, that I wasn't ready to marry him, not fully committed to him.”

She stared unseeing at the sailboats dotting the harbor. Then she went on. “But I don't want to talk about Charles right now. I just want to thank you for treating me to this little holiday and to apologize for my attitude about your moving here to St. Ives—in a former fish-loft, no less!”

An excellent location, Henrietta used to say, because the light was so good here that all the artists were moving into these places, thought Marjory. Her cousin had painted some wonderful scenes of the old houses climbing the hill, the church with its high, square tower, and an Iron Age fort with its small round huts.

Geraldine brushed some strands of hair off her face and asked, “It's really pretty here—St. Ives is picturesque and charming with those quaint little shops and the views—but how can you live in such an out-of-the-way place away from all your friends? You used to love the museums, plays, and restaurants in London.”

“I understand. I left a perfectly good flat in London where I'd lived all my married life—forty wonderful years with your uncle—to come here.”

“Was it worth it, Aunt Marjory, all those years with Uncle David and then to lose him?”

“Love is never wasted, Geraldine.”

“I wonder. The men in my life keep leaving me—first my father by dying—and now Charles.” She stopped, unable to go on.

“Even with all its ups and downs, life is a precious gift, not to be despised.”

The two women sat in silence for a time until Marjory said, “I feel very fortunate to have made new friends and found new interests.”

“Like the megaliths.”

“Quite so. Now there's something I'd like to talk to you about. An elderly cousin of mine is asking his Morgan relatives to join him there in his home for two weeks. He's even sent me an airline ticket. How would you like to come with me?”

“Where?”

“San Francisco.”

“It might be a good idea. I was really excited by the last book I've just finished editing. The author said that if I was ever in San Francisco, I should look him up. This would be the perfect time to get away. So much has been happening the last few days,” she said bleakly.

Like getting dumped by Charles, a young man old before his time, so set in his ways. Marjory would never forget what had happened on the holiday the three of them had just returned from. She had been following the track that wound its crooked way through the gorse up to the quoit, a massive tomb built with huge stones individually weighing tons, capped by a gigantic stone slab. Remembering what—or rather whom she'd seen there—made Marjory catch her breath. Afterward, wanting the company of her niece, she had hurried back to the caravan. Geraldine had instantly known that something unusual had happened.

“Are you all right, Aunt Marjory? You look so pale.”

“Quite all right, dear.” She really had received a jolt, but she hadn't wanted to upset Geraldine, who tended to worry too much over everything.

“What happened?”

“I saw someone.”

The Boyfriend—she couldn't help thinking of him as one of those stock characters in a morality play for he always seemed to be playing a role—was staring at her as though she had just come down with an acute case of advanced senility, although she was only 61, not old for this day and age.

“Who was it?” Geraldine asked.

“A woman. She just appeared. She hadn't been there a second earlier. You know that place on the track, how nothing bigger than a rabbit could hide there in the gorse.”

“How was she dressed?” asked Charles.

You had to give him credit. He was all business when it counted. Gone was the tentativeness, that air of constantly reinventing himself that alternated between upper-class hauteur and diffidence. Poor boy wins scholarship to Oxford, graduates with doctorate, and becomes a lecturer in history at the University of London. Very satisfying in some respects, but he seldom looked happy—even though he had been engaged to Geraldine for some time.

“The woman was dressed very simply in some kind of long blue dress fastened with a cord. She wore a twisted gold necklace—I think it's called a torque—and a gold bracelet around her right arm. Her long fair hair fell to her waist. Oh, and she was holding out her hand to me.”

“An admirable description, Mrs. Bennett. You say it was a torque she wore?” asked Charles, his tone respectful now. He obviously hadn't expected her to know anything about his specialty, Celtic history.

“Quite sure. In a museum I saw the exact same thing, a solid, tubelike thing that went close around the throat.”

“Did she talk to you, Aunt Marjory?”

“No, Geraldine, she didn't. After she held out her hand to me and smiled, she vanished.”

“Sounds like you've seen a real, live ghost!”

Twenty-nine and still her niece retained a childlike enthusiasm. Better that than the world-weary airs that some of her contemporaries affected.

Marjory remembered the solemn, quiet child she had first met when her brother had married Geraldine's mother, Helen, a widow. It had taken a while with trips to museums and the seaside to win the child's trust. One day, just before they were going on some excursion or other, Geraldine had blurted out that she wished her friend could come with them.

Only too glad that at last her niece was making friends, Marjory had answered, “Of course, as long as she receives permission from her parents.”

“She doesn't have any.”

“She must have a guardian.”

Geraldine had turned pale and fidgeted in agitation before whispering, “She lives in heaven where my real daddy is.”

Marjory thought back to the time when Geraldine had been so ill that the doctor had warned the family that she might die. Had she experienced what some called a near-death-experience before being resuscitated? Researchers had found that after what they called an NDE, people were different, some more psychic. Was this what had happened to Geraldine? Could she be seeing something or someone real, not a purely imaginary friend?

“I expect people see a lot of weird things out here, what with stone circles and enormous stone graves positively littering the English landscape.” Turning to Charles, she asked, “Perhaps you've heard of the Dragon's Project?”

Frowning now, his lean frame slightly stooped and looking down at her from his superior height of six foot plus, Charles replied stiffly, “Vaguely. Weren't they investigating megaliths? I believe they used psychics.”

She was quick to note the hint of disdain in Charles's tone of voice, as though the mention of the word
psychics
had left a bad taste in his mouth.

“They used scientists, also, to take measurements and monitor the energies at the sites. Professor John Taylor of King's College, London—where you lecture—and a Dr. Balanovski found magnetic anomalies with a magnetometer at a standing stone near Crickhowell in Wales. Some unusual signals were also found when monitoring with ultrasound at the Rollright Stones in Oxford.”

“A fault of their equipment, perhaps?” suggested Charles.

Marjory shook her head decisively. “That was ruled out. Radio signals behave oddly, too, in the vicinity of the monuments. People have seen strange lights and heard sounds that can't be explained.”

“Has anyone else had those kinds of experiences?” asked Geraldine.

“Yes, three people, one of them a scientist, saw some amazing things at the Rollright Stones.”

“Such as?” Charles was definitely challenging her. She saw Geraldine throwing him an irritated look.

Mildly, Marjory said, “Someone saw a gypsy caravan pulled by a horse—a caravan that hadn't been there a minute earlier. Many other people have seen unusual things.”

“You're full of the most fascinating stories,” said Geraldine.

“Hardly surprising. I was a reference librarian before I retired,” she explained to Charles. “Old habits of researching information die hard, but now I can please myself and look up what I like, for example, megaliths in which I've become very interested.”

Charles was thawing. He no longer looked quite so dour.

“Has this project come up with any explanation for these oddities you've just mentioned?”

“Several, but nothing definitive. Some scientists believe that people have these experiences here because these sites have a higher radioactivity than the surrounding countryside, or special magnetic backgrounds. It seems that the megalith builders may have understood something of this and used these areas to induce trance states. For instance, some of the stones have cuplike depressions where one can recline with one's head resting on the stone. In this way, by putting certain areas of the brain in direct contact with the stones, altered states can be induced.”

Geraldine shivered. Rain-laden wind had begun blowing over the bleak countryside where the few stunted trees provided no shelter. And it had grown dark, too.

Marjory asked, “Would you like to go back to the caravan?”

“Yes, I think so. It's getting rather cold out here.”

It was warm inside the caravan. The little circle of light cast by the lantern helped her understand better how the first Neolithic settlers in the region must have cherished their fires, which warded off not only prowling beasts but evil spirits, too.

Humanity seemed so puny in the face of the elements. It was a wonder the race had survived. Was it their felt inadequacies that had made them so determined to dominate the earth, to prove their right to be here?

Geraldine interrupted her reverie by asking, “How about a nice cup of tea, Aunt Marjory?”

She looked up with a start to see her niece looking with some concern at her. “Why, yes, I'd love one.”

Charles was staring off into space, a distracted look on his face. For a few moments, she wished she were tucked up in her little cottage in St. Ives, but then she wouldn't have seen the woman.

Geraldine began fiddling with the tea things and then said, “About that woman you saw. I've been trying to puzzle it out, why she appeared to you. Could there be a special reason why you saw her?”

She might have known that Geraldine wouldn't leave the matter alone. Ever since childhood, she would get hold of something and wouldn't let it go until she was satisfied that she had learned everything about it that she could.

“Are you asking why it was I and not someone else who saw the woman, or why that particular person appeared on the road?”

“I'm not sure. Maybe both. Is there anything more you can tell us about her?”

Her niece was sharp and very intuitive. Somehow she had sensed that there was more information. It was only a small thing.

“A name came to mind: Bryanna. I have no idea who she might be—or might have been,” Marjory corrected herself.

After a few moments of silence, Charles rubbed his chin and asked, “If the woman you saw was a Celt, what was she doing near the quoit? That tomb was built much earlier, in the Neolithic period. So what connection, if any, would a Celt have with it?”

Marjory shook her head. “I can't say, but I've read that people in later times may have used the stone circles for religious ceremonies.”

“But this isn't a stone circle like Stonehenge, which, I grant you, early peoples may have used for astronomical calculations such as indicating the equinoxes. The structure here was used as a grave.”

“So the lady was just another day-tripper, like ourselves,” said Geraldine flippantly.

Charles flushed in irritation. He opened his mouth to say something and closed it as Geraldine put a restraining hand on his arm. A moment of awkward silence ensued before Geraldine announced, “I bought some crisps to go with our tea, if anyone would like some.”

Charles brightened visibly at this, and Marjory was grateful for her niece's tact.

Later that night as she settled into her bunk in the rented caravan, she had remembered the letter Caleb Morgan had sent her. Why had he invited her to his home? What was so important that she had to leave her comfortable life here and involve herself in goodness knew what?

Yet she had to go. Caleb's letter had a sense of urgency about it that she could appreciate because after seeing Bryanna, she, too, had felt an urgency licking along her nerves.

“Aunt Marjory?” asked Geraldine softly, recalling her aunt to the present in St. Ives. “Thank you so much for asking me to come with you to San Francisco.”

Marjory patted Geraldine's hand. “We'll have a good time, just like we used to do when you were little and we went all over together.”

Geraldine nodded assent, but under her thick sweater her thin shoulders shrugged as though in disbelief.

CHAPTER 7

“Thank you for treating us to a wonderful lunch,” said Laney, smiling at Caleb, as they were leaving the restaurant on Pier 39.

“My pleasure,” said Caleb with an old-fashioned politeness.

This was the life, thought Dan, looking beyond the pier at the sailboats scudding along before the freshening wind. He didn't give a damn about streetcars or any of the other tourist attractions of San Francisco. He was enjoying being here with his daughter, Laney—thanks to Caleb, who had sent them two airplane tickets—and not having to worry about a thing.

So far, it had been the perfect vacation. Since they'd arrived a few days ago, Caleb had relentlessly played tour guide and host extraordinaire, escorting them in the morning to the little shops along Ghirardelli Square and then to his office building. From the gleam in his eyes and the way he had strutted around, you could see how proud he was of his tower.