Wrong Face in the Mirror: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series) (16 page)

Sibyl had never known she’d gotten it wrong on both counts. It was Hart, not Sibyl
her husband had loved. And it was, physically at least, Stacia she’d killed once and then tried to kill again.

The scent of stale smoke
still hovered strongly in the air as Hart and her husband sifted through what was left of the contents of her loft. Against the advice of all her friends, Mrs. Harris had decided to plow the insurance money back into the old building, saying the business had been started by her mama and she didn’t intend to be the one to shut it down.

So before work started, this was Hart’s chance to make sure there wasn’t anything she treasured remaining intact. It seemed unlikely, even the furniture had burned, the rugs melted into what was left of the floor.

Alistair advised her to step carefully around the big hole in the middle of the living room where the boards had fallen through, leaving only the charred framework of what had once been the floor.

He was first into the bedroom and called back to her that it wasn’t so bad in here. She followed his voice and saw that though the window frames had burned and most of the furnishings on the west side of the room were in ashes, somehow her bed and the vanity beyond still stood in place.

He was the one to see something sticking out from under her blackened pillow and reached under to retrieve a small, faded brown book that she first remembered reading when it was bright and new back in 1947. She took it from him and, holding in her hands, her own copy of
Take Three Tenses
, she began to cry soundlessly.

“I’m sorry, hon,” Alistair whispered,
wrapping her into his arms, “You’ve lost more than any one person should lose in a lifetime.”

She looked past him into the crazed and cracked image in the mirror where she and the tall man in a
cowboy hat that she loved were reflected. She was getting used to that new image of herself, the one she would have to live with for the rest of her life, and no longer felt such a fraud. Somehow she knew that in one instant, Hart had willingly chosen to hand her life over for the woman who had played such a strange part in her years from the time they were both children.

She pressed her face against A
listair’s shoulder. “It isn’t all loss,” she whispered. “After all, we have each other.”

They were in the midst of an embrace when they heard someone clattering up the rickety remains of the stairs, heard a loud, “Wow!” apparently at the missing part of the living room floor, and then Bobbi Lawrence came into the room.

“Granny and I are getting ready to leave,” she said, her smile only a little embarrassed at having caught them in a caress. “I just had to say goodbye to you, Stacia. We haven’t known each other long, but you feel sort of like family to me.”

With a wave, she was gone, only calling back from somewhere down the stairs, “Hart! I meant to say Hart.”

Hart and Alistair were left staring at each other with wide, startled eyes.

                                   The End

Barbara Bartholomew became intrigued with the notion of time travel when she was a little girl and listened to her grandfather talk about the possibility that time was itself a separate dimension and discuss Einstein’s theories on the subject. Her first published short story was “Wheel of Fire” in
Analog
magazine, which saw a traveler venturing into Elizabethan times, and in the 1980s she wrote the time travel trilogy for young adults,
The Time Keeper, Child of Tomorrow
and
When Dreamers Cease to Dream
after an editor asked her what she would write if her choices were wide open. Now as an independent writer, she has made the same choice and likes to explore lasting relationships against a backdrop of a constantly changing fantasy world.