Free Wrong Face in the Mirror: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series) by Barbara Bartholomew

lingered only as a distant memory from long ago as she felt cloth around her legs and she knew she was no longer wearing a short nightshirt, but a just below knee-length skirt and a white blouse, one of her favorite outfits, with high heels that walked with difficulty in the sandy street.
    She was home in Medicine Stick and when she glanced at her own reflection in the window glass as she went into Millers’ Store, she knew what she would see there: a young woman with long red hair and an admittedly lovely face, her lips bright with crimson lipstick, her cheeks lightly pinked from delicate rouge.
    She knew who she was and where she was and walked confidently in through the door to greet Mr. Miller.

Chapter Nine
    It wasn’t until she was in her own bed at home and ready for sleep that Stacia began to wonder. Mom always said she had too much imagination for her own good, but the thoughts that kept popping in her head were stranger than anything she’d experienced before.
    In fact she got up to peer into the mirror over the little dressing table to examine her own appearance, half expecting to see a woman with a delicate face, huge blue eyes with long dark lashes and black hair instead of her own flaming red.
    She drew in a breath of relief as she saw her own face and her own hair.
    “I declare, Stacia, you are so vain,” her sister’s voice drawled from the other bed in the room. “Quit admiring yourself and turn out the light.”
    Her sister was only eighteen, years younger, but she could be so bossy that sometimes Stacia felt Helen thought she was the older sister.
    “I’ll turn out the light when I’m ready,” she said, but then went ahead and pulled the string to turn off the naked light bulb that hung from their ceiling. The Larkin home was modest and full of family, but most every other house in town was similar so neither Stacia or Helen was particularly discontented. You didn’t feel poor when everybody else around you was poor too.
    Well, almost everybody. Jon Redhawk was what her mom would call ‘comfortable’ with his nice little house and a good living from the ranch he owned not far from Medicine Stick. He was good looking, too, in his own way, though she thought sometimes he looked like an old Indian chief.
    But she felt nothing special for him, nor for any man she’d met thus far, and she was determined to hang on until she met a man she loved so much she didn’t have any choice but to wed. If it didn’t happen, then she was content enough with her life as it was. Although most of her friends were long married, Stacia hung on to life as the oldest daughter of the Larkin home, longing for something she didn’t quite understand.
    “I’m not vain,” she remembered to tell Helen.
    “Then why were you staring into the mirror?”
    For once she was honest about her inner feelings. “I was trying to figure out if I’m me,” she said with all the dignity she could master.
    Helen responded with a hoot of laughter and loudly snuggled into her bed, making the springs creak.
    But Stacia lay asleep for a long time, thinking about her memories of another woman in another time and when she woke up, she opened her eyes to that other woman’s bedroom.  Getting up, she went to a different mirror to look into the face of a dark-haired woman with a high cheekbones and large eyes.
    “I am Hart Benson,” she whispered the words softly. “They told me that’s my name and surely they know.”
     
    A break -in at a house on the edge of Wichita required priority attention from the sheriff on Tuesday morning and Alistair preferred to personally meet with the elderly couple who had been invaded during the previous evening.
    Sibyl and Raymond Forrester had been friends of his grandfather, though they were a good many years younger, and his folks had continued to be friendly toward them after Granddad died. He owed them at least a personal visit after what must have been a frightening evening.
    They were both