Free Wakening the Past: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series Book 2) by Barbara Bartholomew Page B

the road.”
    Bobbi nodded. She looked up and grateful to see Granny’s rental car coming back down the highway, she began to wave.
    It wasn’t until they were in the other car and headed toward the lodge again that Hart realized. Having just protested her independence from her husband, he had been the first person she contacted when she needed help.
     
    The report of a sighting of Nolan Jeffers turned into a young mother’s identifying of an elderly, rather reclusive neighbor as the man she’d seen. A short, rather plump gentleman he bore little resemblance to Jeffers other than being in his early seventies.
    Having apologized to the ‘suspect,’ a man he’d known all his life who probably had never gotten as much as a traffic ticket and hardly ventured from his house these days because of ill health, he thanked the young woman for her vigilance in calling the sheriff’s office. “We’ve anxious to find Mr. Jeffers,” he said, “both for the sake of the public and his own.”
    She wrapped her arms around her little son, while another clung to her leg. “I’m afraid to let the boys play outside,” she said. “Mountainside isn’t used to having a criminal loose right here in town.”
    Tired and his patience stretched, Alistair almost told her that several such lived in her midst, but of course they were drug dealers, wife beaters, and drunken drivers, not known murderers. He owed it to the community under his care to bring in the escaped prisoner. Only he didn’t know how.
    He would have guessed nobody could hide out long in Wichita, or for that matter, in nearby Mountainside. With most prisoners, he would have supposed they’d gone to ground with friends out in the county.
    But Jeffers had no friends. He’d been locked away for too much of his life.
    Not until after he’d gone by his office and made sure everything was being worked, including the continuing search for Nolan Jeffers, he decided it was time to take a few hours off. The last thing he wanted was to have to face some major problem, the kind that could come up anytime in a sheriff’s day, when he was mentally and physically exhausted.
    Barely casting a glancing thought to going home for a nap, he headed northeast. He needed to pay a visit to Rainy Mountain and his own long buried past.

Chapter Eleven
    Even though for the first time she had been able to control which time frame she would exist in, at least after a few frightening moments, the tug from her own past was almost irresistible.
    She’d insisted on taking the back seat in Serena’s plush rental car, leaving Bobbi seated up front with her grandmother. Closing her eyes, she could feel the world of old Medicine Stick and the little house where she’d grown up, building around her, beckoning.
    But when she opened them, she was right here, Hart Benson Redhawk, in a car with Serena Hudson and Bobbi Lawrence, headed for the lodge where she hoped to get a room.
    In a way, she thought with bemusement, she felt like a woman in bad need of a bathroom and afraid she would wet herself embarrassingly at any minute, but determined to hang on a few more minutes.
    She had to hang on. She couldn’t pass out here in the car with Serena. Her niece, Helen’s daughter, would no doubt call for an ambulance as soon as she realized Hart couldn’t be awakened. She would not understand as had Bobbi, but would think she was dealing with a medical emergency.
    And Alistair would be called. He would be convinced more than ever that something was wrong with her and would rush her back to the doctors and confinement in Oklahoma City.
    She couldn’t really blame him. All the symptoms were there. She kept blanking out, she’d confessed to hearing voices and being convinced she was another person, not Hart. He simply wanted her to be treated and get well, which was impossible since she wasn’t sick in the first place.
    No, she couldn’t allow that world that kept peering over her shoulder to take over until