Leaving Lavender: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series Book 3) Page 7

  Betsy waited until microscopic chips were placed in their upper arms that would allow them access to funds before telling her aunt and uncle their plans.

  They’d just finished dinner and were lingering over a dessert called chocolate gravy, which tasted a little strong to Eddie who was not accustomed to chocolate, when her sister brought up the matter.

  “We plan a little trip,” she announced.

  Everybody but Jerry looked up. The fourteen-year-old was concentrating on his dessert so seriously that Eddie quietly slipped her own plate in front of him.

  “That sounds like fun,” Lynne said brightly. “Beach or mountains or something else? I feel like getting away a bit.”

  Oops! Eddie looked anxiously at Betsy. How was she going to get out of this? The last thing either one of them would want to do was hurt Lynne’s feelings by telling her she wasn’t invited this time. After all her kindness to them, it would seem so ungrateful.

  She waited for what Betsy would say. Betsy looked at her. Of course, Eddie was always the one to come right out and say the blunt things Betsy couldn’t manage.

  She opened her mouth and the words came out. “Just us,” she said.

  Uncle Moss dropped his spoon, which rattled on the wooden surface of the floor. He didn’t bother picking it up, but yelled, “No way! That’s just not going to happen.”

  “That doesn’t seem wise, dear,” Lynne’s soft voice was almost lost in her husband’s thunderous protest.

  Jerry didn’t look up from his chocolate gravy topped with whipped cream.

  Now that Eddie had broken the ice, Betsy had no trouble going on. “That’s why we came here,” she said, then smiled so that her dimple showed. “Well, one of the reasons anyway. The first and best one was that I was longing to see you and have you meet Eddie.” Her smile went from one member of her family to another, finally lingering on Jerry, who looked up as though compelled.

  He had a dab of whipped cream on his nose. “Where you going?” he asked.

  “I thought we would buy a car and just set out to see a little of the country.”

  She didn’t mention looking for her father, which didn’t surprise Eddie. From what little time she’d spent here, she knew Moss Caldecott cherished extremely bitter feelings toward Mike Burden, the brother-in-law who had abused his sister and her daughter so severely that they’d fled to sanctuary in Lavender. Even she wondered if Betsy was right in wanting to find her father. The meeting was almost certainly bound to be a great disappointment.

  But she couldn’t blame her for at least wanting to see him. If it was possible for her to meet the mother who had abandoned her as an infant, she would have jumped at the chance.

  “You can’t do that,” Moss insisted, so earnest his face had reddened.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not safe. The only way I’ll let you travel is if your aunt and I go with you.” He glanced at his son, who having finished Eddie’s dessert as well as his own, was following the conversation with keen interest. “We’ll even take Jerry. That way he can’t get into trouble.”

  “I’m not sure . . .” Lynne never got a chance to finish her conversation because Eddie interrupted.

  “You won’t let us?” How many times had she been told she couldn’t do something when she was growing up? Even Evan, who hadn’t demanded more than once or twice that his daughter call him Papa rather than by his first name, had learned not to challenge Eddie directly.

  It was like waving a red flag in front of a bull or staring directly into a wild animal’s eyes. If somebody issued an ultimatum, insisting she would not do something, somehow she just had to prove them wrong.

  She was soft hearted. She could be coaxed, persuaded, argued into a change of mind, but she would not be ordered.

  “I absolutely forbid it,” Moss assured her, his eyes flashing.

  “Now, Moss,” Lynne said.

  “I don’t want to go,” Jerry protested. “Zan is helping me with this project for school.”

  Betsy’s dimples were showing and laughter shone from her eyes. She was enjoying this, Eddie realized with chagrin.

  “I didn’t mean to be rude,” she apologized to Betsy’s uncle, “but though you may have a right to tell your niece what to do, you have no such authority over me.”

  Betsy chortled. “Nobody does,” she informed her uncle. “Not even Papa would dare now that she’s grown up.”

  “We’re providing the finances. Surely that gives us some right to an opinion in the matter. And as for you, Eddie, I know my sister considers you as much her daughter as Betsy and Sylvie. She would expect me to look after you.”

  “Mama knows better, Uncle Moss,” Betsy said demurely. “All she asked was that we look after each other.”

  Lynne startled them all by rapping on the table. “I will finish my sentence this time,” she said. When all eyes were on her, she went on, “They have a point, Moss. They are not the age of your son. They are grown women. We fell in love and married when I was only a little older and you must admit we faced opposition ourselves and didn’t let that stop us.”

  Husband and wife exchanged a look so loving and intimate that Eddie had to glance away.

  Betsy grew impatient with the pause. “We are going,” she told her uncle in a polite but firm tone. “It’s why we came here.” She glanced at her sister. “All of Eddie’s life and most of mine, we’ve been closed into a world so small that we could ride horseback across it in less than a day. We’ll be going back to that, but in the meantime we want to feel the distance, to determine our own journey. Please don’t be hurt that we want to go by ourselves, but it’ll be the only chance at independence we’ll ever have. And, as for the money, Uncle Moss, you said yourself that it was ours to do with as we like, a gift from Mama.”

  A knock sounded at the front door and Jerry went to answer it, but Moss refused to be distracted. “You just don’t understand. Things have changed. They are so much more dangerous than when you lived here before. We have our own little world here in the southern plains, but the rest of the world, the rest of the U.S., isn’t like this. You two will be like babies venturing out into a world you don’t begin to understand.”

  Eddie’s attention drew away from the debate between Betsy and her uncle as she heard Zan’s deep voice. She couldn’t tell what he was saying to Jerry, but just the sound of him sent vibrations through her.

  Jerry came back to the table, leading Zan and that big dog of his. “Zan says there’s a guy at the gate, saying he’s here to deliver feed, but he can’t get in.”

  Moss looked annoyed at this interruption to his conversation with his niece. “If it’s Cheyenne Feed and Seed, they know their way in.”

  “Said they couldn’t get past the gate,” Zan said. “And it’s not Cheyenne Feed, but some company I didn’t recognize. Thought they might not be on the up and up.”

  Moss frowned. “I have been hearing of thefts of equipment and animals. No telling what pretext thieves might use to get into the ranch, but you would think they’d try to break fences, not come in through the front gate.” He got to his feet. “Guess I’d better go look into it.”

  Jerry followed him while Zan0p accepted Lynne’s invitation to sit down and have a dish of the chocolate gravy she’d made from a recipe handed down through Moss’s family from Maud Sandford, who had been part of the original settlement of the ranch in pioneer days.

  Eddie couldn’t help being disconcerted when he chose to take the chair Jerry had vacated, the one next to her.

  Zan felt a little guilty as he sat down at the dinner table. He was concerned about Jerry and Moss, considering that the feed truck at the gate might very well be a ruse to get to him. But Moss would think it very strange if he went trailing after them. The rancher had already commented on how he’d had trouble lately getting his deliveries made.

  He couldn’t know that Zan preferred anyone coming onto the property be recognized by a member of the family as having a right to be
there. He’d done some thinking in the last few days and faced some hard facts. His brother had betrayed him and powerful interests wanted him in their control. He didn’t intend for that to happen.

  Then he saw the large brown eyes of the woman seated next to him and came close to forgetting everything else but Edith Stephens sometimes known as Eddie. His time at the ranch was coming to an end. He was well aware that he was already under siege and that he was lingering, not wanting to leave Eddie.

  “I’m afraid we’ve been having a little disagreement, Zan,” Lynne seemed to feel compelled to explain.

  He looked at her in surprise, than looked from her face to Betsy’s. Both women seemed a little flushed. “An argument?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” Betsy said. “It’s just that Eddie and I are planning a little trip, just the two of us, and Uncle Moss doesn’t approve. He thinks we don’t know how to take care of ourselves.”

  “You’re leaving?” he asked the question of Eddie.

  Her long lashes rested against her face as she avoided his gaze, her auburn hair glistening in the summer sunshine coming in through the multi-paned window on the other side of the table.

  She nodded.

  “We’ll only be gone for a little while,” Betsy said, “sight-seeing and all that. We’ll be back here to say goodbye to everyone before we go home to Lavender.”

  He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t let this happen. “Back to Lavender,” he repeated.

  “Moss thinks we’ll be in danger out in the big world alone,” Betsy went on mockingly. “Like we’re little girls who shouldn’t be on our own.”

  He thought of that larger world. It was a damn scary place. “It isn’t the way it was a few years ago,” he told Betsy “Things have changed.”

  Betsy stood up so abruptly that her chair fell backwards. “Not you, too! What do you know? Most likely you’ve been looked after ever since you were discovered to be the boy genius.”

  The words were insulting the way she said them. They put him back where he’d been before when his parents and just about everybody else treated him as though he was some strange and limited little boy. In a way, it was how he’d been two months ago before he met Eddie.

  Something about the young woman from Lavender had opened his mind and resources to a new level. That and finding out what Geoff had been doing.

  He hadn’t just thought through things these last few days. He’d done a whole lot of research as well and he was made fearful by the knowledge of this thing he’d unintentionally set in motion.

  And now he was about to lose Eddie before they even had a chance to get acquainted.

  Moss and Jerry came back in. “It was some kind of mistake,” Moss told them. “The delivery wasn’t one I’d ordered.”

  “You sent them away?” Zan asked.

  Moss nodded, his attention already back on his family. “Now, Betsy,” he said. “I know you girls are anxious to be independent and off on your own, but I don’t believe it is what your mother would want.”

  “Mama never said you were stuffy, Uncle Moss,” Betsy observed fondly.

  “Stuffy! That’s the last thing anybody could say about me, but you and Eddie simply don’t realize what you would be getting into. You grew up in a simple, protected environment. I’m sure you were surrounded by good people . . .”

  “Not always,” Eddie interrupted. “Not everybody’s good no matter where you are.”

  “That’s right,” Betsy agreed, “remember that man who was jumping out at girls from behind the courthouse and . . .”

  “I remember,” Eddie agreed hastily, not wanting to shock Betsy’s aunt or young Jerry.

  Zan frowned questioningly at Eddie. “Betsy’s uncle is reluctant for the two of us to set out on our own to do a little traveling. It’s something we . . .I have always dreamed of doing.”

  “Oh.” Zan saw that Moss was holding on to his calm only with great effort and that Betsy and Eddie, in their innocence, were equally determined.

  “Why don’t you allow me to escort them, Moss? I could see that they were safe and didn’t travel to the wrong places?”

  “You?” Moss demanded. “But you have your work.”

  “I’m been feeling the need for a little vacation and I think you know I can be trusted with your nieces.” He just hoped Zan didn’t recall that little kiss he’d exchanged with Eddie.

  “It’s a reasonable compromise, Moss,” Lynne told her husband eagerly. “Zan is a man of the world, he knows his way around, and a little change would do him good.”

  Moss frowned. “I’m not so sure he wouldn’t need somebody to look after him.” He raised a hand before Zan could voice a response. “We know you’ve been carefully guarded most of your life because of your unique skills.”

  “I have resources at my command.” Zan knew better than to lose his temper with Moss. If he did, the game would be over.

  “You know he’s trailed by security wherever he goes,” Lynne pointed out. “They’d all be carefully guarded.”

  “I want to go too,” Jerry decided.

  “No!” his parents shouted together.

  Betsy had only been holding her tongue because she couldn’t get a word in edgewise. “That’s awfully nice of you, Zan, but I don’t think . . .”

  “Awfully nice,” Eddie echoed, staring dreamily up into Zan’s face.

  Open-mouthed Betsy observed her sister, who was behaving so uncharacteristically. It took a couple of minutes for her to finally say in a meek little voice, “If you think it would be safer, Uncle Moss, then we will accept Dr. Alston’s escort.

  Of course the argument didn’t end there. It went on for half the night and two hours before the rest of them gave up, a yawning Jerry departed for bed. Finally Moss gave in, saying he supposed it would be okay considering that Dr. Alexander Alston was protected not only by private guards, but by half the government agencies of the U.S.

  Zan wasn’t the only one to recognize that he was mainly allowing them to go because he didn’t know how to stop them.

  He tried not to feel guilty that the first thing he meant to do when they were on their own was to dismiss the security that gave Moss what thin confidence he possessed in Zan’s ability to keep his nieces safe.

  Larger issues were at stake here than the safety of three young people.

  Chapter Ten

  Eddie’s heart jumped in her chest as they drove through the gates Moss had opened for them, waving wildly at Betsy’s uncle as they left the Caldecott ranch. Uncle Moss wore a sour expression on his face, making it clear he still didn’t approve of this venture, but he lifted one hand in response to their farewell waves.

  “He’s praying for our safety,” Betsy said. “I believe he’s worse than Papa about letting us go out on our own. You’d think we were newly hatched and the world just waiting to gobble up little chicks like us.”

  “He’s dead right,” Zan said. “He’d shoot me if he knew the truth.”

  Betsy and Eddie exchanged glances. Zan often said strange things, but this was the strangest. He’d practically volunteered to go along with them and yet he acted anything but happy about this trip.

  “If you really don’t want to go, you can drop us off in the first city where we can buy our own car,” Betsy snapped. “Then you can do whatever it is you want to do. I only agreed to your company to please Eddie . . . I mean, to please Uncle Moss. So if you drop us off at the first opportunity, everybody will be happy.”

  Except me. All Eddie’s excitement had sunk deep into her stomach where it set like a lump of dough. Zan didn’t want to go with them. How foolish she had been to think he’d agreed because he wanted to spend more time with her.

  Zan didn’t even seem to hear Betsy. He’d tuned them both out and gone somewhere deep in his own mind the way he sometimes did.

  Betsy gave a little snort and turned to watch the scenery flash by. Eddie comforted herself by patting Einstein’s gorgeous head. The retriever snuggled close t
o her side and settled into a nap.

  Zan, of course, had programmed the auto and Betsy, absorbed in observing the countryside and the little towns through which they passed didn’t seem to notice that they weren’t driving in the direction expected. They were headed due west and he hadn’t even asked them where they wanted to go.

  The auto traveled at increasing speeds as they moved into the first country she’d seen that seemed largely uninhabited. As the August morning progressed she became concerned as the land grew more barren.

  Betsy frowned now at the sights that flew past her window. She turned to gaze questioningly at Eddie. “Where are we?” she asked.

  Eddie certainly didn’t know and Zan, literally lost in his own thoughts, didn’t seem to hear. Finally she reached past the dog to give his shoulder a shake.

  Startled, he came out of wherever he’d been to stare at her.

  “Where are we, Alexander?” she demanded.

  “New Mexico,” he said. “What’s left of it.”

  She’d read about New Mexico. Sunny, desert, even mountains in places. Santa Fe, the old west, silver mines.

  Somehow she’d not thought it would look this bad.

  “The first bomb was built in this state.”

  “Bomb?” she questioned, confused.

  “Bomb,” he asserted. “The big one. An atomic bomb. Could wipe out a whole city.”

  She stared at him in horror. He smiled without humor. “These days we’re talking about world killers.”

  She shivered. “Was this place bombed? Is that what happened?”

  He stared out the window at what appeared to be the abandoned foundation of a building, just broken chunks of rock where a few weeds grew in the cracks. “It was war. The survivors fled.”

  Eddie knew well enough that war could happen even in her own country. She’d grown up on stories of the terrible war between the states, told by people who had lived through those days. But surely, with all the years that had passed, people were wiser, better.

  She didn’t even want to hear about who had attacked whom or who were the good guys or the bad guys. It just made her sick to think about it. Was this what Moss had been talking about when he’d warned them they had no idea what they were getting into when they left the ranch?