Free Amber House by Kelly Moore

call Jecie, but it was dead. And, of course, I’d forgotten my charger.
    I snuck into Sam’s room and took his flashlight out of his backpack, then went back down to the library. I thought I remembered seeing a phone in that room.
    It was there, on the table between two chairs. It had a dial, like one of those things from a Bogart movie. It took me a second to figure out how to make it work.
    “Jecie. It’s Sarah. Remember me?” I cringed. I always sounded stupid on the phone.
    We talked for a little bit. She told me she’d gotten a tattoo — Hebrew letters from the Talmud: “If I’m not for myself, then who will be for me? But if I’m only for myself, then what am I?”
    “Way to rep the Hebrew people,” I told her. “I’m pretty sure tats aren’t kosher. Does the rabbi know? Never mind that, does your mom know?”
    She just laughed. I told her about the party, but she couldn’t come. Even if she could have afforded the plane ticket, she had dress rehearsals for The Secret Garden . I told her about the senator’s delicious son.
    “Model status?” she asked.
    “Model status,” I confirmed. I promised I would e-mail some photos as soon as I could get to a place with Internet. I missed my computer.
    Still an hour and a half to go. I explored the library. It was enormous — floor-to-ceiling shelves built around the doors and windows on all four walls. As far as I could see, the books were all hardbound, most of them leather covered. Small brass plates identified different subject matters. There was a section of French authors and a section of German. A heavy Oxford unabridged dictionary lay open on a stand near an ancient globe.
    I sat in one of the tufted leather chairs and examined the stack of books my grandmother had left on the table, unshelved. Conan Doyle and Christie, Lovecraft and Poe. Her taste, evidently, had run to the macabre. On the far side of the table, a large book layopen to a picture of a house on a bluff glimpsed between the trees. I stood and examined it right-side up — it was Amber House. I checked the cover. A Place in Time by Fiona Campbell Warren.
    This was the book Richard had told me about. Of course my grandmother had a copy. I closed it and tucked it under my arm. Maybe it would help me kill some time.
    I sat at the kitchen table. The window in the outside door stared at me like a great black eye. I thought about switching chairs so I didn’t have to see it, but I didn’t quite want it at my back either. I opened the heavy book flat on the table.
    The page after the title was filled with a photo of the author, my great-grandmother. She was pretty striking. Finely carved features, great figure, and a mass of thick hair piled on top of her head. She looked a little like my mother. The next page was the editor’s explanatory preface:
    Fiona Campbell Warren is an extraordinary woman with an extraordinary vision. In the pages that follow, she has woven together historical fact, family lore, and fictional re-creation so skillfully, you will believe she traveled the places, lived the times, and met the people she describes. Then, as if thinking better of her own invention, she will start with the same facts and characters, and alter them slightly, taking you to another place, another outcome — in Fiona’s own words, an “otherwhen.”
     
    He went on in a scholarly vein, but not with me. I flipped past. After the preface came a poem, entitled “Otherwhen.” I wasn’t much for poetry, but I was curious. I read it:
    We chase the turnings of a maze confused,
Drawn on by hope, pursued by history.
By fortune we are soothed, by sorrows bruised,
We stumble on, purblind, toward mystery.
Yet Time hies round thee, hushed, on unshod feet,
Lest hearing, thou should wake to Her, and rise
To seek the point where past and future meet.
Though choice seems chance, though happenstance belies
Intent, learn thou that fate is in thy hands.
Discern the joint that shatters Time, that bends
Her