The Ghost and Miss Hallam: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series Book 1) Read online

  The Ghost and Miss Hallam

  The Ghost and Miss Hallam

  Published by Barbara Bartholomew at Amazon Kindle

  Copyright 2012 by Barbara Bartholomew

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  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 One

  The world owed him. To be precise it owed him sixteen years. Moss Caldecott drove his shiny new Corvette down the Kansas highways, hardly aware of where he was going. He was free. He could go anywhere he liked. That was what mattered.

  More conscious that he was leaving the prison in Leavenworth where he’d been housed since he was in his late teens, he headed south, crossing the Oklahoma border a little after the lunch hour, stopping at a little town in a main street café for meatloaf and mashed potatoes, topping the meal off with apple pie and ice cream.

  The meal was the best he could remember eating since he used to go to Pizza Hut back home with his buddies. He sat, lingering over his coffee, and thinking about where he was going and what he would do. This was something he hadn’t needed to think about in a long time.

  Mom and Dad were gone now and his little sister was an adult and had gone on to a life of her own somewhere. Even after she’d grown up, she hadn’t bothered to contact him, so now he wouldn’t try to push himself on her.

  Realistically speaking he had no remaining family and that was something else society owed him that could never be repaid, the years he’d lost with his parents and the little sister he’d barely known.

  A bitter and angry man, he knew there was nobody he needed to be concerned about. After Mom and Dad died, all personal contact with community had been cut away. He was a thirty four year old man who had only himself to look after.

  He didn’t have to worry about money to live on. His parents had left a substantial trust fund in his name, sure that someday the truth would come out and he would be freed. That was the worst part, that they hadn’t lived to see this day.

  They would love being able to know he was speeding across the Kansas line into Oklahoma in the red Corvette that he’d longed to possess back when he’d last been a free man.

  Man! He snorted at the idea. Eighteen, he’d been barely eighteen when convicted of a murder he hadn’t committed and sent away forever. The only reason they hadn’t demanded his life was because of his youth and plenty of people protested that decision.

  He hoped they were all alive to read recent newspaper accounts that told them they would have been wrongly killing a boy. Another man, caught and convicted of other horrible crimes, had confessed to ‘his’ murder. He hoped they felt guilty that they’d put an innocent boy away, but it would hardly make up for all they’d taken away from him.

  He’d spent all his young manhood in that federal prison; it was the life he’d lived and he hardly knew how to be free. Now all he wanted were two things: the car he was driving which gave him freedom to go where he wished, and wide open country with lots of space between towns and farms and not many people. Never again in his life would he be confined, locked up in any sense.

  He needed to feel his independence.

  It was disconcerting to find out how much things had changed since 1996. He was a Rip Van Winkle, awakened to find the world he’d known had gone away. Everything from gas prices to clothing styles was different. Towns he used to know were unfamiliar and even the equipment he saw being used in the fields had updated.

  In his mind, nothing would be different. He would step out of prison into a world that had stayed in place while he was gone, still there to receive him. He would go home to the house in California and see Mom and Dad and little Cynthia and have his friends drop by or maybe go with them to a high school football game.

  Of course he’d known it wouldn’t be that way, but since he was locked up for life and would never see that day of freedom, he could imagine things anyway he wanted.

  And now, unexpectedly, freedom was here and he was out on his own after spending all his adult years supervised and structured. He knew a lot about prison and the men who lived there, but in a real world sense he was still a teenager.

  He willed himself to relax and enjoy what he did have. Dad had died of cancer, but he figured with Mom it had been just plain grief for the loss and disgrace of her son. Every minute he had suffered, they had suffered more. And now, there was no way to make it up to them.

  Yeah, the world owed him!

  This part of the country lay in dry and crispy summer, the land practically begging for rain. It was still beautiful in its own way and, thankfully, largely unchanged for thousands of years. He drove through the bare Antelope Hills and figured they’d looked much this way when Coronado and his party came through here looking for cities of gold.

  As the afternoon wove on, he saw an occasional deer and once a coyote raced across the road. Wild turkey clustered in abundance and he thought that he would like to have a camera. He could buy a camera. He still wasn’t used to being grown up. Last time he was a free man, his summer job provided money to put away for college. Extras were presents from his parents, who though well endowed, tried not to be too indulgent. Even though they had a comfortable income, they wanted their children to grow up to be hard-working and independent.

  He laughed at the cosmic joke that had happened to them all and the sound was harsh and angry inside the sports car.

  There was little traffic on these roads today and he felt a need to let go, to test the limits of the Corvette’s control and speed. For a few minutes he moved like the wind, letting all his packed in anger loose with the car, racing, racing . . . and then he saw it.

  A truck, pulling in from a side road, the driver not expecting opposing traffic any more than he did. A truck driver who had probably traveled this same lonesome road day after day without meeting anyone and therefore got a little careless.

  Time went into slow motion like a replay in a football game so that he had time to swear and pray, to fight futilely to bring the speeding car to a halt, to hope that big lumbering truck managed to get out of the way.

  And it went fast. He saw the big black wall of the truck’s cab looming in front of him. No way to swerve and avoid that huge immovable object.

  Then the world exploded and he didn’t have to think anymore.

  Oil fields employees on their way home from a long day’s work were the first on the scene. Practical men used to hard work and hard happenings, two of them raced toward the accident scene while the other pulled out his cell phone to call for help.

  The truck driver was pinned inside, but he was alive and groaning. It would take the state troopers with their jaws of life to get him out, but they could hear him babbling on about not remembering to stop and how the guy had been driving like a bat out of hell.

  The little car now melted into the big truck, a red splash against black, looked hopeless. And there was a man inside that!

  Moss
had been wrong. Because of active oil fields in the area, the roads were busier than he’d supposed. Even before the Oklahoma Highway Patrol cars’ screaming sirens reached the site, half a dozen pickups had pulled over to offer help. These tough men shook their heads at what they saw on the side of the road.

  Heading back from the grocery store in the little town of Cheyenne, Lynne slowed to a cautious speed as she approached flashing red and blue lights, trying not to look at the crushed vehicles as she drove by the accident scene. It was one of her few fears about driving in this isolated ranch country, she would be first to arrive after an accident and have to be the one to render first aid to victims, dealing with blood and mess until help arrived.

  But it hadn’t happened today. Plenty of people were there to help, two Highway Patrol cars, a sheriff’s car, and a number of passersby had stopped to render aid so she would only be a nuisance if she added to their number.

  This one looked really bad so she drew a deep breath as she drove by and said an internal prayer as her contribution to the well being of the victims. She hadn’t much hope that somebody hadn’t been seriously injured or even killed. She hoped it wasn’t anyone she knew.

  She tried to comfort herself that such was unlikely considering she’d been here such a short time. So far she’d made few acquaintances and even fewer friends.

  She’d been sent here as a punishment for her sins, but this evening she felt lucky just to be alive.

  Driving a little more slowly along the darkening country roads where chances of running into a deer or other wild animals increased as the day ended, she pulled into the long drive that led past a good-sized pond lined on the south bank with cottonwoods. She paused briefly to observe two does getting their evening drink from the clear water, then drove on toward the farmhouse, a depressing sense of loneliness descending on her like the mist-like fall of night.

  She’d grown up in an urban community in a home housing a large family. She and her sister had shared a bedroom when she was younger. When she’d gone away to college, she’d shared a dorm room and then an apartment. Never had she been even close to being this alone and though she would never confess it to her disapproving family, being out here scared her.

  Oh, she had to admit things weren’t too bad when the sun shone brightly overhead and she could lose herself in the journals of Maud Bailey Sandford, but when night came down and the reality of all the miles between her and the nearest small town, of the vast empty spaces around her set in, then each sound startled her and her heart sank to hear the coyotes cry in the night.

  What was a New Jersey girl doing in this hot, dry landscape that looked like something from an old western movie with its red hills and canyon carved badlands? No wonder old Maud’s writings got a little weird sometimes.

  At least the writer had lived out here by choice while Lynne reminded herself resentfully that she had been sent here for a summer’s work as a sentence set by her parents, who professed themselves very disappointed with her recent behavior.

  My life! She thought angrily. Not yours. Ma and Pa, you have no right treating me this way. She’d started using the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ terms to address them back in her rebellious teens just because it annoyed her female parent so much.

  The yard light was automatic and so shone around her as she parked near the house and used her key to get in the back door, wishing she’d thought to turn on the lights in the house when she’d headed for town. She hadn’t intended, though, to be returning after dark, but her errands had taken longer than she’d expected.

  The house echoed with emptiness, her high heeled shoes clattering noisily against the old wood floors. She kicked them off, leaving them in place as she went from room to room, switching on lights until the house glowed from one end to the other.

  Only then did she go back out, still bare-footed, to collect her purchases from the little gas-efficient car that she’d been assigned by her irritated parents for getting around this summer. It took three trips to bring everything in and she found her cherry chocolate ice cream and frozen meals dripping as she stowed them away in the freezer. Next time she’d have to remember to take an ice chest along if she wanted to get her food back in good shape.

  This place was so darned inconvenient! However had the brilliant Maud Sandford stood the whole experience? Lynne sighed. Not only had she stayed put in this awful place, she’d seemed to actually like it.

  An admitted extrovert who drew her energy from being around others, it was beyond her imagination to understand the opposite type personality that actually seemed strengthened by time alone. It was a lesson she hoped never to learn.

  As soon as summer was over, she would run back home to busy New Jersey just as fast as the wheels on her little car would take her. She might even dump the car at Oklahoma City and just hop the fastest flight home.

  In the meantime she had to wait the whole summer and keep her little nose to the grindstone in researching Maud Sandford’s life for her mother’s new book.

  Feeling very put upon, she nuked a pasta primavera, ate it with a glass of the bottled tea she’d purchased in town while she watched television news, feeling wistfully that she was at least touching the real world and its events. Though the world didn’t seem to be rolling along any better than it had been when she left home. A shooting at a mall in Utah, a robbery at a bank in Oklahoma City, political malfeasance. Nothing about the accident scene she’d witnessed. Maybe that meant nobody had died, she hoped so.

  Or maybe an accident out in the remote western part of the state didn’t quality as news in the city.

  Clicking off the news, she put on music instead and went back to Maud’s study to get the first in a line of brown clad volumes of her journal from her bookcase. Maud Bailey Sandford had started keeping a journal on a regular basis on her sixteenth birthday and had written in it for years so she’d left a good number of volumes.

  Lynne had glanced through this first one when she arrived two days ago, but so far she’d put off starting serious reading. The way she had it worked out, reading about an old woman’s life was bound to be downright dull. She wasn’t looking forward to beginning the task.

  She reminded herself that the sooner she got started, the sooner Mom and Dad would allow her to return home. Good Lord, here she was nearly twenty five and she was letting her parents dictate how she should spend her summer.

  Of course, there was the little reason why they were so mad at her. She blushed to remember and decided she did owe them a summer of obedience to make up.

  She began to read, skimming through the first entries that detailed Maud’s birthday celebration with family and the suggestion of her mother that she start keeping a journal. The gift she’d been most excited about was a new filly, a beautiful roan she called Salome, a gift from a neighbor which she was to break and train herself. Slightly intrigued, Lynne scented romance in the air and began to read.

  Mama says Salome is really too costly a gift for me to accept from a man but since I am already in love with my beautiful filly and as I have persuaded her that it will break my heart to part with this wonderful creature, she has not absolutely forbidden it.

  If Papa were home, he would prevent it, but since he is in Kansas at the moment, he has no such opportunity. He does not like Edward either and would not have him make me presents. Mama does not seem concerned about what Papa thinks and more than ever I feel that he will not be coming home so it is just the two of us now out here on this wide spread of land. Papa chose to move us here and now he is leaving us alone, but it is just like him. We haven’t enough money to return and the old home is gone now, so we will just have to make the best of it.

  A sudden loud crash jerked Lynne from her absorption in the spidery handwriting. She jumped up and raced in the direction of the sound, which seemed to be coming from one of the two unoccupied bedrooms at the back of the house.

  A lamp lay smashed on the wooden floor, still dangling from its electric cord.
Drat! She was in real trouble now as she had been strongly impressed with the need to keep everything as it was and to damage nothing. The old farmhouse had been left just as it had been when members of the family had last been in residence decades ago.

  The trustees would never believe that the stupid lamp had fallen of its own accord while she was occupied in the front of the house. She picked up the pieces of glass and put them in the trash. If she’d had a cat, she would have supposed it had knocked over the lamp, but she wasn’t allowed any kind of pet.

  Maybe a mouse knocked it over, she thought idly, then laughed at the thought. It would have to be a very large mouse and she would bet anyway that the trustees, who were so very picky about this place, saw to it that no vermin entered the house.

  The broken lamp cleared away, she found she was no longer in the mood to work and instead watched a mindless television program and then went early to get ready for bed, having checked all the locks a second time as she expected she would every night she was here.

  She heard the coyotes began their nightly howl as she emerged from her bath and, naked as a nymph in a Grecian legend (there had to be some advantages to being the only human being within miles), left the hall light on so that its glow extended into the old fashioned bedroom where Maud Sandford had slept for so many years. She crawled into Maud’s high-postered bed and prepared to go to sleep immediately the way she always did back home.

  It didn’t work quite that way and she decided to indulge in one of the over-the-counter sleeping pills she’d bought in town after two unaccustomed sleepless nights since arriving in this place.

  In spite of the fact that she was not used to so medicating herself, she was ages falling asleep and when she finally did it was to a thick unpleasant unconsciousness that was full of anxiety and fears she was too drugged to fight.

  She fought to wake up and when she did, sat up with a jerk. The light had gone out and she lay in total darkness and listened to the sound of someone moving cautiously through the house.