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

  “So everybody had to leave?” For the first time Betsy entered the conversation. “There’s nobody living out here. This is empty country. So why are we here?”

  Zan’s mouth pressed into a tight line. His eyes hardened. “Not empty,” he said. “There are things to be bought and sold here. We’re in the market to make a purchase.”

  Eddie tried not to shiver. This wasn’t the Zan she knew. She tightened her grip on Einstein, holding him against her for safely. “What do you want to buy?”

  “I want to lose our tail.”

  “Tail?” Betsy asked in bewilderment.

  “All the security that follows us, all the people whose job is to keep me ‘safe.’”

  “But that’s why Betsy’s uncle let us go with you . . .”

  “I feel bad about that, but I really had no choice.”

  Up until now he had seemed almost younger than his actual years, but she hardly knew this determined man. This wasn’t the Zan with whom she had fallen in love.

  Nobody seemed to know what to say so they drove for several miles before Betsy accused, “You’ve kidnapped us.”

  Eddie started to laugh at the idea, but Zan nodded. “I’m so sorry, but in a way that is what’s happened. “

  The subsequent silence overwhelmed Eddie. She had to say something. “We need to walk the dog. It’s been hours and hours inside the car.”

  “Not yet,” Zan said. “It isn’t safe to get out of the auto here. There’s still some radiation contamination.” When he saw they didn’t understand, he elaborated, “The bombs set off in this area left the soil contaminated. If you step foot out of this vehicle, you could get radiation poisoning.”

  “Is that dangerous?” Betsy’s voiced wobbled.

  “Deadly. Not that you’d just drop dead,” he went on when he saw how alarmed she looked. “There’s been a serious cleanup, but the risk is still high that you’d slowly die.”

  Eddie blinked. “I don’t think we should walk the dog.” Einstein whined as though he realized they were talking about him. “He can just relieve himself on the seat for all I care.”

  “But what about us?” Betsy objected. “Eventually we’ll have to . . .”

  “We’re nearly out of the contaminated zone,” Zan soothed. “Then we’ll make a stop.”

  Eddie was beginning to feel she owed Moss Caldecott a huge apology.

  They rode in silence for a while after that. Betsy fell asleep, slumping against Eddie so that she felt comforted, bookended as she was between Einstein and Betsy.

  She must have gone to sleep herself because the next thing she knew, the auto was pulling to a stop in front of a ramshackle building that looked as though it had been weathered by the winds for decades.

  Wind-swept sand blew down the streets, obscuring the view of other, equally worn looking buildings. It was a village of graying wooden buildings, the one nearest displaying a huge sign that hung only partly attached. The letters that had once been painted on the sign had faded away so that it could no longer be read.

  “We can safely get out here,” Zan announced. The dog was already awake, but Eddie had to give Betsy a little shake to bring her out of deep sleep. Eddie watched her expression as she remembered what had happened, than begin to look around.

  “Are you sure it’s safe?” Eddie asked. “How can you know?”

  Zan gestured toward the dials and gauges in the front display on the auto. “The indicators are that we are well within the safe zone.”

  An anxious Einstein was first out of the auto, jumping over Zan’s legs to reach the outside world. Zan followed, standing politely aside to allow the two women to exit. Before they could move, three armed men rushed toward them and though no one pulled a gun out of its holster, it was obvious that could happen any minute now.

  “Alexander Alston,” Zan said in clipped fashion. “As arranged.”

  They were shown inside where they found the interior of the building more comfortably furnished with chairs, sofas, a dining table and such, though it still felt like it had been primarily designed as a warehouse. Eddie and Betsy were, thank goodness, immediately shown to a modern bathroom. Eddie looked around for a possible escape route, but there wasn’t so much as a window.

  Besides where would they escape to? This blighted war-torn landscape offered few possibilities for independent survival.

  They were fed sandwiches and warm sodas while the dog was given dry dog food and a bowl of water.

  The sandwiches were made from canned meat, Eddie was fairly sure it wasn’t dog food, and dry bread. No lettuce, tomatoes or other vegetables were provided. She was hungry enough to eat anything, though she asked for water instead of the soda and was handed a bottle of water by one of the men.

  Zan was off in a corner with another man, talking earnestly. “I should have known,” Betsy commented in a low voice. “Any guy you fell in love with was bound to turn out to be bad news.”

  “There’s sure to be some reasonable explanation,” Eddie returned huffily. “Anyway, who says I’m in love with him?”

  The ate standing, glad to be on their feet after so many hours riding, but only a few minutes passed before Zan and the other man joined them. An unfamiliar gadget was pressed to Eddie’s arm where the identification chip had been implanted and she struggled to escape it.

  “It’s all right,” Zan assured her. “No harm is intended.”

  She looked at him with wide eyes. She might be mildly attracted to him but that didn’t mean she trusted everything he said. Not anymore anyway.

  She had little choice, however, as Zan and one of the other men held her in place and the little gadget buzzed against her arm. The same thing was done to Betsy and then to Zan himself.

  Zan nodded in satisfaction. “We have new identities,” he said.

  The three of them were led outside. Instead of the elegant auto they’d arrived in they saw a rather plain looking brown colored car, neither old or new. It was a vehicle nobody would pay much attention. Anybody could own it, certainly not a famous scientist or two very well-off young women.

  A satchel was handed to Zan. He actually opened the front door of the car himself by turning a handle, motioning Eddie to get inside. Then he opened the back door, told the dog to get inside and then looked at Betsy in a way that was almost an order.

  She raised her eyebrows questioningly. “I’m riding with the dog? I’m sure he prefers Eddie.”

  Zan didn’t say anything and then the men with the guns took a step closer to them. “Taking too much time,” one of them said in a menacing voice.

  Betsy got in, closing the door behind her, and Zan got in front with Eddie. The auto moved away slowly at first, then quickly picking up speed.

  Zan smiled so that even his green eyes lighted. “We should be safe now,” he told Eddie.

  “Safe,” she echoed in disbelief.

  Betsy uttered a few muffled, but indistinguishable words that Eddie was sure her mother didn’t even know were in her vocabulary and leaned across the back of the seat to speak to Zan. “Just tell me where you’re taking us,” she yelled. “That’s the main thing I want to know.”

  “To Lavender,” he said as though he was surprised that she would ask such a question. “We’re going to Lavender of course.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Eddie finally found her voice though it did come out a little squeaky. “If I’m not mistaken we’re heading in the wrong direction if you’re intending to go to Texas.”

  “Lordy, you can’t even get into Lavender and why would you want to anyway! Besides we have other plans. I’m going to California so I can find my father.”

  “Betsy, I understood your dad was abusive and that was why you and your mother fled to Lavender,” Zan commented, sounding like the voice of reason. “Why would you want to locate him?”

  Eddie spoke up in her sister’s defense. “Anybody would want to. Don’t you think I’d like to see my mother and ask her what was wrong with me that she just
left like that without a backward glance. You’d have thought she would have considered taking me with her. I’m her own child.”

  Zan seemed confused. “So you’re looking for your mother too?”

  “I can’t do that. She left Lavender in 1883. She must have passed away ages ago. But Eddie’s father was about the same age as Uncle Moss and Aunt Lynne; there’s a big chance we can find him in the here and now.”

  “That’s right,” Betsy agreed from the back seat. “And I want to say to him, ‘Michael Burden, why did you treat me and my mother the way you did?’”

  Eddie recognized instinctively that it was more than that. Betsy wanted to know why her own father hadn’t loved her. She hoped it was all some kind of mistake and he’d tell her how he’d desperately missed her all these past years and longed to see her again. It was the dream of most abandoned and mistreated children, even those who had found second families and as much love as they’d hoped for.

  “You didn’t want to just go sightseeing?” Zan asked, as though he were trying to sort things out.

  “That too,” Eddie agreed, “though that was more me than Betsy. You see Lavender is such a little place. I wanted to see a world without walls.”

  “Lavender is walled in?”

  “In a way. Oh, you can’t see the walls, but they’re there.”

  He nodded as though finally understanding. “Even on this big earth of ours, we have walls of sorts.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “I suppose not.”

  He was such an enigma. She could only get information from him in dribs and drabs. She looked out at a changing landscape, now showing bits of green here and there instead of the dried out, yellowed area through which they’d driven for the past hours.

  No point being subtle. “We’re out of the war zone now?”

  He nodded. He shuffled through a stack of papers he’d take from the satchel given to him back at that strange stop. “You’re Ema and Kathy Martin from St. Louis. I’m your brother Thomas. We run a wholesale foods business we inherited from our late parents. Remember that.”

  “Am I Ema or Kathy?” Eddie asked.

  “Ema. That’s what your new chip will indicate.”

  “Eddie never forgets anything,” Betsy contributed grumpily.

  Zan turned to look reprovingly at her.

  “Kathy,” she said reluctantly. “Does the dog get a new name too?”

  He nodded. “Of course. He was chipped too. We don’t want them to track us through his I.D. He is now called Prince.”

  “Bet he won’t remember that,” Eddie joked.

  Zan glanced reprovingly at her. “That’s why we had to go through the bad lands, obviously, to leave our old identities behind. Those men . . .”

  “Those really scary men,”’ Eddie contributed.

  “Those men offer such services for a very high price, but now we are new people with no connection to Alston Adventures or to Alexander Alston or his brother.”

  “Hey!” Betsy yelled from the back seat. “Did we just leave my uncle and his family in danger?”

  “They’re perfectly safe. The only reason you and Ema are a risk is because I brought you with me. It wasn’t until we left the ranch that they got really interested.”

  “Thanks tremendously,” Betsy said sarcastically.

  Eddie couldn’t help but think there was a whole lot more to this than had been related so far. “I feel sure you had a good reason for what you did, Thomas.”

  He smiled approvingly at her.

  “Told you she had a good memory,” Betsy said. “She won’t make any mistakes, but as for me, I’m another matter.”

  Zan ignored the golden haired beauty in the back seat. “The last thing I wanted to do was to put you and Betsy in any danger, but the situation was such that more lives than you can imagine are involved. And it is my responsibility to do something about it. Besides, they don’t want to kill us, they just want to take us into their control and the amount of time I could keep us safe at the ranch had dwindled to hours. I had no choice but to act and your uncle’s dilemma offered a way out.”

  “What are you, Zan, some kind of big time criminal who wants me to hide you among my friends and family in Lavender? Well, I can tell you right now I won’t do it, not even if you shoot me!”

  “Thomas,” Eddie corrected Betsy gently. “And I’m sure he’s not a criminal.”

  “Oh, Eddie, you’re so naïve.”

  “Remember, Kathy, she’s Ema. And I’m your brother Thomas.”

  The day was darkening as they sped across countryside where green shrubbery and grass were a welcome sight and they were beginning to see a greater number of other cars.

  “I won’t shoot you, Kathy,” Zan went on, “but I hope I can persuade the two of you to take me to Lavender and not to hide out, but because my presence here is dangerous to others. But I present no risk to the people of your hometown.”

  “What do you want in Lavender?” Eddie asked. “Refuge?”

  “Only temporarily. I hope to find something there. It seems, Ema, that your great-grandfather was a very unusual man, a scientist of great renown in Europe until some ideas considered outlandish in his time drove him from his profession and sent him to live in a small town in Texas where he could continue his work in peace.

  “He believed he had developed equations, knowledge, that would activate motion through time.”

  Eddie stared at him. “What a ridiculous notion,” she said lightly, thinking of Lavender now setting back in 1904 where her grandfather had placed it.

  Betsy sat in silence, listening to them.

  “I am hoping he left notes of some sort that I can work from in those journals you mentioned. You see, I am a weapon that others would use. So far the largest part of the plans is in my brain; they were meant to move people from this to new homes on other planets. But I have learned just recently that they are being converted to other purposes. That I have created not a world saver, but a world killer.”

  The only sound within the auto was that of Einstein snoring.

  Zan who was trying to remember that he was Thomas felt actual pain at the expression of horror on Eddie’s delicate face. These two girls had grown up in a time before the trench warfare of World War I, before the bombings of World War II. They didn’t know about mustard gas or agent orange or biological weapons.

  The sight of the damaged Texas panhandle and parts of New Mexico had horrified them. They had no idea of the burned out spots within this country where missiles had fired small nukes, driving the surviving population into crowded centers. The ranch and the peace around it was protected because of the significant biological and wind power that came from that location. It was in a way an oasis of peace.

  And as for the rest of the world—countries that used to be friends were now enemies, enemies were friends, and all those relationships could shift again tomorrow.

  As far as he’d been concerned, the population pressure could only be relieved by migration away from the planet and he’d been deeply involved in the means of transport and the development of the first colonies. He’d hoped to go live there some day himself when his work was well enough under way.

  But his own brother had sold them out. He could hardly imagine the pressure placed on Geoff to make that happen. Maybe they’d threatened his family. Perhaps they’d offered him temptations he couldn’t refuse.

  He could not stay here and be only a tool for destruction.

  He tried to explain himself. “If we had some idea of the work your grandfather did, how he managed to place Lavender as an island in time, we could relieve some of the population pressure and provide a safe haven for hopeless people at the same time. Right now, at this moment, Eddie . . .”

  “Ema,” she reminded him.

  He smiled. “There are people throughout the world living in unimaginable conditions. Thousands of children die of starvation and disease every day. If we could transport them to a time in the past
with low population and the means to survive . . .”

  “That’s a big ‘if’, Thomas, and you have to remember that the Lavender community is just a little place with a population of only a bit over a thousand.”

  “But it’s a start,” he said eagerly, “and it would take me out of the equation. Don’t you see, Eddie . . .Ema, I’m the weapon. I have worked out the process, but I haven’t told them yet. But when they get it out of me . . .”

  “Just don’t tell them,” Betsy snapped from the back seat.

  His laughter was without mirth. “It’s not that easy. With the drugs we have now, nobody can keep a secret for long. I have to stay out of their hands. They say they only want to make these weapons for good, to keep us safe from our enemies, but you know how that is. Even if we stick by our intentions, somehow secrets get out and soon others have the same power.”

  “Oh, Thomas,” Eddie said with real pain.

  “If you’ll only take me to Lavender where I can look for any notes your grandfather might have left. Just a few clues and I think I can find my way.”

  Tears dripped from her brown eyes. “You don’t understand, I can’t take you anywhere. As far as we know, only one person can go in and out of Lavender and we have no idea why that is.”

  They both turned to look at Betsy. “No,” she said in a low voice.

  Zan looked at Eddie. She managed a wobbly smile. “It took me almost eight years to talk her into bringing me here for just a little visit. She can be stubborn.”

  “No!” Betsy said again, more forcefully this time. “I love Lavender and its people with all my heart and it took me and mom in when we were in desperate trouble. You talk about how you’ve invented these terrible things. We’ve seen what happened in the Texas panhandle and in New Mexico and who knows where else. I won’t take you into Lavender, not ever.”

  Wheels were turning in Zan’s brain. Betsy and Eddie couldn’t even imagine how desperate the situation was. They couldn’t know that there were spots in the U.S. that no longer existed, and others crowded with refuges. The ranch in Oklahoma hadn’t been just lucky to miss the violence, that area of the country was particularly well guarded because of its natural energy resources and, in spite of similar protection, parts of the Texas panhandle had been hit anyway.