Free Christmas Ghosts - Fiction River by Fiction River Page A

for almost twenty years reset.
    He turned off the small time machine and headed out into the storage chamber.
    Duster Kindle and Bonnie were waiting for him, smiling. Both were wearing 1870s clothing, clean and ready to go.
    “Headed back again?” Carson asked.
    “We can’t stay in one place too long,” Duster said. “We’ve actually taken about ten more trips back since we met you in Boise.”
    “Spent almost two hundred years total since then,” Bonnie said, smiling. “But we wanted to hold off going back again today until you got here. Just to make sure.”
    Carson laughed. “Yeah, this was the one. Has Sherri gone back into the past again?”
    Bonnie and Duster both laughed. “I doubt she has given it much thought. She’s been sort of busy.”
    “With what?” Carson asked, suddenly worried.
    “You’ll see,” Duster said, slapping Carson on the shoulder as he and Bonnie headed for the crystal room. “Just don’t forget to lock up as you go out. And drive carefully getting off this mountain. Your car is down near the river. You’ll have to go out on snowmobile. But it’s a nice day out there at the moment.”
    “Thanks,” Carson said, trying to not run for the entrance of the mine. Silver City was a long two hours on a snowmobile and four hours of driving from Boise.
    Maybe the longest six hours he was going to ever spend in his life.
     
     
    Seven
     
    Sherri forced herself to take a long, slow bath.
    Carson was arriving just about now in Silver City. For him, only a moment would have passed since their kiss. For her seven very long months had gone by.
    Seven of the hardest-working months she had ever spent.
    Once she got the artificial ghost turned off, and discovered the old basement room and got everything down there removed or hidden, she managed to get some of the top contractors and stone masons and fine wood-crafters from around the Pacific Northwest to come in and work on the Edwards Mansion.
    Three times she had been written up in the newspapers for the groundbreaking work she was doing on an old historical mansion. She didn’t care. She knew what it had looked like in 1898 and she knew what it had to look like now. That was all that mattered.
    She had a deadline and she wanted to meet it. She wanted Carson to walk back into his own home, fully restored and modern.
    The entire time she worked on the mansion, she had known where he lived just north of Boise in a modern apartment in the hills. And she had known he was working on his second masters at the university in history. But she had managed to not get close to him, although she had seen him once from a distance.
    She even knew when Duster had offered him his first trip back in time and how for months after that Carson had spent decades in the past, on every trip first building the mansion that she was remodeling.
    In total he had lived hundreds and hundreds of years. That made her feel very insecure, but she tried not to think about that. Bonnie and Duster had lived far longer and they were still her best friends.
    Duster had warned her that she didn’t dare approach Carson now, because they had to first meet in the past for this present to work out. And that Carson needed to grow and mature and become the man she had fallen for.
    “Even though he has only aged a number of months, he’s lived hundreds of years in the past,” Duster had told her. “That’s the man you fell for, not some college kid.”
    So she had agreed to stay away from him. Instead she focused all her attention on the mansion remodel.
    And now, it was done. And she had decorated in wonderful Christmas decorations and put a big tree in the main entry and another in the television and family room.
    And Carson had returned to this time as the person she had met.
    For the first time, they were together in a dual time, in both their real times.
    She was so nervous, she felt almost sick. Like prom night or something.
    Somehow, she managed to stumble through the next