Leaving Lavender: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series Book 3) Read online

  Leaving Lavender: A Time Travel Romance

  Leaving Lavender: A Time Travel Romance

  Published by Barbara Bartholomew at Amazon Kindle

  Copyright 2013 by Barbara Bartholomew

  Leaving Lavender

  Book Three in the Lavender, Texas Trilogy

  Barbara Bartholomew

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  1895

  Chapter One

  2027 Oklahoma

  Chapter Two

  1904 Lavender

  Chapter Three

  1904 Lavender

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Prologue

  1895

  Seeking refuge in the pantry to avoid being caught red-handed in the act of stealing freshly made doughnuts from Mrs. Myer’s kitchen, Eddie and Betsy inadvertently became eavesdroppers.

  Though both were habitual treat-snatchers, neither tended to the latter sin, Betsy being too moral and Eddie because she was so clumsy she usually got caught. But now Betsy grabbed her stepsister’s shoulder, cautioning her to silence as they heard their mutual parents come into the kitchen, whispering to each other.

  It was the whisper that did it, Eddie thought as she stared into Betsy’s blue eyes. Christmas was coming and they were whispering. No doubt something of interest to their daughters was about to be said.

  Thirteen-year-old Eddie was hoping for a new bat, her old one having been cracked and taped together for the last season, while almost thirteen-year-old Betsy had spent the last weeks hinting broadly that a particular pink confection of a dress would suit her golden complexion nicely.

  They held their breath and listened.

  The first voice they heard was that of Betsy’s mother, who had also become Eddie’s stepmother when she married Eddie’s father four years ago.

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to start taking this seriously, Evan,” Mama said. “She’s really hung up on this idea.”

  The two girls exchanged glances. Which ‘she’ was the topic under discussion? Eddie felt sure it was her. Betsy had a talent for pleasing others and a positive gift for staying out of trouble, but Eddie didn’t even have to look for ways to earn disapproval. Trouble came looking for her.

  This was particularly embarrassing, however, being caught where she had no choice but to share the discussion of her misdeeds with her sister. It was hardly fair considering that Betsy had wanted a fresh, hot doughnut even more than Eddie.

  “Hung up?” Evan Stephens, Eddie’s dad and Betsy’s stepfather, asked, interested as always when his lovely wife swung into modern slang.

  “Mesmerized. Compulsively interested. Stubborn as a mule about wanting to escape Lavender,” Cynthia Stephens elaborated. “She used to mention it once in a while, but now it’s all the time. She dreams of adventures and travels that will take her beyond our little world. Surely you know that, my love?”

  Before her father had a chance to answer, Eddie nodded enthusiastically. She wanted to see the places she’d heard about—Dallas, Washington D.C., Paris, China. She couldn’t bear the idea of being forever locked into the little Texas town of Lavender with its surrounding rural acres. She’d only been an infant when the town made the decision to allow her great-grandfather to perform magic or science or whatever that cut them off in time, unable to cross the unseen boundary that walled them off to themselves.

  Oh, she understood well enough. Back then more than a dozen years ago, they’d meant well. Grandpa Tyler had been their doctor and he’d told them that the influenza that was killing too many would grow worse and destroy whole populations if they allowed it to escape.

  But that was then. Now they were getting close to the beginning of a new century, the 20th, where things would be so different. That old danger was gone and it was time to move on and free their children from the past.

  She certainly wasn’t the only one who felt that way. In her own mind, she elected herself spokesperson and was about ready to burst from the pantry with its shelves of canned and dried foods when Betsy, who so often seemed almost able to read her mind, clapped a firm hand over her mouth. The younger girl, who was three inches shorter than her sister now that Eddie had taken off into an unseemly growth spurt, frowned fiercely, warning her not to take a step or say a word.

  “Haven’t heard her say all that much lately,” Evan’s deep voice protested. “I thought she’d gotten past that stage.”

  His wife gave a deep sigh. “That’s because she knows you can’t help her get out of Lavender. She knows I’ve made the trip more than once with Betsy as company and she figures next trip over, she can go along.”

  Something that sounding like kissing made Eddie wrinkle her nose with disgust. Really! Mama and Papa were too old to be acting that way in public. Though, of course, they didn’t know that two of their daughters were hearing what was going on.

  “Never, never, never,” Papa said softly. “I won’t risk that again. You and I will not be on opposite sides of the barrier that guards Lavender from the rest of the world.”

  “Of course not, darling,” Mama said reassuringly. “I don’t want that either, but Eddie has the natural urge of the young to adventure and she thinks I can lead her to it.”

  “How come Betsy doesn’t seem to feel that way if it’s so natural?” he asked grumpily.

  “Well, they’re very different, of course, but Betsy’s probably already had more than enough of walking on the wild side. She’s seen both worlds and loves the one she’s in now.”

  Eddie looked at Betsy and the other girl glanced away, avoiding her gaze.

  “I just don’t know what to do about it. As long as she thinks I’m the key to getting out of here, she’ll hound me about it.”

  “You don’t think we should tell her the truth?” Evan sounded startled.

  “That’s the last thing I want,” Cynthia Stephens told her husband—and without intending to—her daughters as well. “If Eddie knew that it wasn’t me, but Betsy who was able to step across the line in time, there would be no stopping her.”

  They kept talking, but Eddie didn’t hear another word. She stared straight into Betsy’s wide blue eyes with a feeling of elation. They didn’t have to depend on the grownups to get out of Lavender. They could do it all by themselves.

  Chapter One

  2027 Oklahoma

  Zan sipped at his drink and wondered how soon he could leave. Tonight his minder was one of his brother’s junior executives, Harding Blake of the Connecticut Blakes, and his job for the evening was both to keep little brother entertained and from committing any major faux pas.

  So far Zan hadn’t done anything awful that he knew of, but he sure as hell wasn’t having fun either. He wished that new kid, the summer intern, could have been here instead of one of Geoff�
�s guys, but Jerry Caldecott was only fourteen and inviting him to an adult party that would last way past his bedtime was out of the question.

  Jerry reminded him of himself at that age, eager and excited and already in advanced schooling with outstanding grades that portended a brilliant future. Jerry was somebody who understood when he talked math or physics or how soon they would get the next ship design underway. He wasn’t stuck in the past like Harding Blake and the rest of his brothers’ associates. Zan stared at the Burecheo painting on the wall of the headquarters building without seeing it and considered Geoff. He loved his brother, he supposed, but he could be so boring with his talk of finances and markets.

  Like most of the people here. Not that Zan was any judge. He recognized that himself. He didn’t like many people and had almost nothing in common with anyone he met. From kindergarten on, he’d been a strange kid in a strange land, his brain busy with matters beyond the understanding of those around him.

  Not that he was proud of that, any more than he took pride in the fact that he’d finished high school at twelve, college by the time he was Jerry Caldecott’s age, and now at the relatively young age of twenty five had multiple advanced degrees under his belt. He could no more take credit for this than that he’d been born with black hair and green eyes. Geoff liked to say it was a trick of fate, but Zan knew it was a matter of genetics.

  Now he watched the revelers around him and let his mind focus on the current design matter he was trying to work out in the lab, quickly becoming so absorbed in thoughts of his work that he was no longer mentally in the room, but picturing an intricate problem in a crucial linkage and only coming back to his physical self when he blundered into a waiter and found himself on the floor as a tray of drinks flew down around him. The large tray itself landed on his head with a bang while fluid poured over his formal clothes and glass shattered around him.

  He heard Harding’s shouted expletives, the shrieks of the crowd and then his brother’s voice from somewhere above him. “Another Alexander Alston special,” Geoff, well experienced, turned the incident into a joke, then the guests placated, asked, “You okay, Zan? That was a heavy tray. Didn’t give you a concussion did it?”

  Quickly Zan accessed his own condition. His head hurt, but he’d not lost consciousness and had no sense of rising nausea. “I’m fine, Geoff,” he said, shrugging off the apologetic assistance of the waiter to get to his feet. “Not your fault,” he told the man. “I’m afraid I let my mind wander.”

  He barely noticed that quite a number of people were staring at him as he stepped from the damage site leaving others to clean up, his mind still half preoccupied with the design problem he’d been so close to solving. Damn! He’d been so near. What had that waiter been thinking to get in his way like that?

  He didn’t let the incident bother him for long. He tuned out the sound of Geoff sounding off at Harding for letting it happen and went back to the complicated work that was going on in his brain.

  All his life, Alexander Alston had found adventure and excitement in what was going on in his own mind and, with very little awareness that he’d just walked away from the party of the year, he went back to his own thoughts and calculations as he was escorted to his auto, the familiar coordinates indicated, and then was driven toward home.

  He was only vaguely aware that he’d once more disappointed his brother and the other people who worked around him.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but that the new rocket he’d envisioned was coming into a reality in his mind.

  His life had always been like this. By the time he was two, his parents were really worried because their second son was nothing like the first. Fearfully they’d sought expert advice and, at first, been told that little Alexander was slow to talk and to relate to other people.

  Zan could have told them that happened because he was so busy with the thoughts inside his own mind. And as for people, one seemed much like another, and not very interesting.

  His concerned parents followed the advice of the pros and saw to it that their younger son got all the special help he needed, annoying him considerably. They also told their older son that it was his job to look after his little brother. As a reward they got him a Golden Retriever puppy which he promptly named Prince.

  The puppy chose Zan instead of Geoff, tagging after the little boy as he moved through their home, and managing to save him from disaster on more than one occasion. And Zan, who only tolerated at first having his face licked by a bouncing puppy, learned what it meant to love at least one creature.

  That didn’t change when, a few years later, he proved to have an exceptional talent for math and a few other things. It was only in paying attention to the ordinary life around him that he didn’t measure up.

  He was thirteen and, pushed ahead by his own quest for knowledge, he was surrounded only by people much older than himself when Prince died suddenly. That was how he learned about death and loss.

  The other subjects came easily and the experts told his parents that his intelligence was off the charts. He was a genius. This scared them. They didn’t know how to bring up this strange boy and feared what would become of him.

  It was so much easier to love and care for Geoff, who was not only an excellent student at a normal level, but was popular with all his classmates and already had a pretty girlfriend.

  Zan couldn’t even walk from one room to another without being abstracted by the concepts growing in his own brain. His only friends were crazy old people who did things like win the Nobel Prize.

  By the time he’d reached his late teens, Zan’s ideas and inventions were coming to international attention and he’d finally risked loving another pet. He named this one himself. Einstein was a golden like Prince. When his brother, newly graduated with a master’s in business from an elite eastern university suggested they set up a business together, Zan agreed because he didn’t want to hurt Geoff’s feeling.

  At his brother’s guidance they’d come out to the newly formed spaceport in western Oklahoma and started a little business Geoff had named Alston Adventures.

  These days the whole world knew the company made successful by Geoff’s business brains and Zan’s brilliant ideas.

  Zan had a few casual relationships with women that didn’t work out for some reason. Geoff married Nancy, who took on a management job with the company, and they had two children, both girls on whom their grandparents doted.

  Still the most important warm and living creature in Zan’s life was his dog Einstein. He was fond of his parents and his brother, he supposed, but it made him uncomfortable if they tried to kiss or hug him. The dog made no demands on him other than regular food, water, exercise and a bed to sleep in at night.

  Otherwise he was consumed by the ideas that danced in his head.

  1904 Lavender

  Every town had to have a rebel and Eddie supposed she was it. She still saw herself as the little girl who was always running too fast, playing too hard, and saying the wrong thing. Even now that she had just celebrated her twenty second birthday, she felt like a stranger in Lavender even though she’d never known life in any other place.

  This afternoon, however, like a good citizen she walked into the school auditorium with her family, nodding politely at the greetings aimed in their direction. She stayed close to the side of the woman who was the only mother she’d ever known, having married her father some thirteen years ago.

  Cynthia Stephens was into her forties now, but lovelier than ever, though her three daughters worried she was getting too old to work as hard as she did. The same went for Papa, who was even older and though he was training a new young assistant, served with his wife as Lavender’s medical team.

  Papa’s hair was turning white around the edges, a distinguished look in Eddie’s eyes, but Cynthia’s gleaming brown hair still showed no threads of change.

  Her youngest daughter, Sylvie, the only child born to Cynthia and Evan, now ten years old, looked very
much like her mother, but Betsy, her other biological daughter, resembled neither of them. At twenty one, just months younger than Eddie, she had curls that glowed golden in the sun, delicate fair skin, huge blue eyes, and a nose that was small and straight. She was, in other words, adorable and it said a lot for her personality that Eddie didn’t feel green envy more often than two or three times a day when she thought of her stepsister.

  Fewer people were in attendance than for a regular community meeting, but still the auditorium was half full, which was a tribute to her sister’s skills. At first she’d told her stories only to Eddie, who had proved the perfect, non-critical audience. They’d been in their mid-teens when Betsy first took up storytelling on a serious basis and her accounts had been full of glamor and disaster with most of the characters dying in the end.

  Betsy considered a story a huge success if she brought tears to Eddie’s eyes by the conclusion. Her sister wasn’t the only one who liked those stories and fairly soon a small crowd of young people gathered on Friday evenings at the gray and pink house where the Stephens family lived and centered their medical practice.

  Gradually the numbers outgrew the house and Grandpapa Forrest arranged the use of the school auditorium on alternate Saturday afternoons so that farm families, in town for their weekly shopping, could join the townspeople in a bit of recreation.

  Sometimes Betsy read from one of the precious books in the school’s small library, available previously only to teachers using them in the classrooms. The town’s only printing press, owned by B. J. Helper, who had inherited it from his father, belonged to the Lavender News, which published a weekly one page news sheet for the town.

  Recently B.J. had printed the first edition of Betsy’s latest production, necessarily brief because neither paper nor printing supplies were in abundance after all the years Lavender had been locked behind its self-imposed barriers, a town lost in its own time.

  And since the town’s books, in spite of the most cautious usage, were wearing into shabby near non-existence, Betsy’s storytelling talents were much prized.