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

drank some tea, willing his heart to be stone-cold unresponsive, reminding himself of what she’d done and said. “Thought you had too.”
    “And we lived together here in this apartment?”
    He shook his head. “At my house, the one my folks gave me out in the country. You said you loved it there.”
    “What happened?”
    What kind of game was she playing? Maybe she just wanted to see him wriggle like a worm on a hook. Well, he wouldn’t.
    He kept his voice cold and without emotion though he seethed inside. “You came home one day and said you were very sorry but you loved another man, that he was first in your life and always would be.”
    “After I married you?”
    “We’d been living out at the farm in a fool’s paradise for nearly two months. As you can imagine, it came as quite a shock to me.”
    She nodded slightly. “It isn’t how I think of myself,” she said and might have been talking about a friend whose behavior had proved disappointing.
    Delicious as the mouthful of her freshly baked bread had tasted a moment before, it now was sawdust and ashes. He washed it down with iced tea and got to his feet.
    “I’d better be going. I parked your car outside.” He reached into his pocket and brought out her keys, handing them to her.
    “But wait,” she said and for an instant his heart jolted almost as though she would say something that explained everything and would make it all right again.
    Instead she said, “What about the dead girl?”
    “We don’t know the skeleton was of a girl, though it was small for a man, more like that of a young woman or even an older child. Anyway we’ve called in the OSBI .  . .
    She frowned.
    “Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. They’ll send out a forensic specialist and hopefully we’ll get some explanations.”
    She seemed to move away, almost as though she were entranced. “They killed her and left her, so that when the water was released it poured over and covered her body.”
    This was so wild he couldn’t help staring. “Hart, that lake was built in the forties. The skeleton would have surely dissolved in the water over the years. It has to be more recent.”
    She shook her head. “She was waiting there for me. She wanted me to find her.”
    Now he was getting scared. This wasn’t the level-headed rather serious young woman he knew. “Hart!” he said firmly.
    She looked up, the blue eyes bewildered. Obviously she had no idea what she’d just said.
    “Hart, I believe I should take you to your brother’s house. You shouldn’t be alone right now.”
    She opened her mouth to argue, th an closed it again. She wrapped the bread in aluminum foil to take with her, put the pitcher of tea in the refrigerator and went with him, locking the door after they stepped outside. She drove her own car, but he followed her to Tommy’s house, watched while she went inside, then drove slowly back out to the lake.
    Crime scene tape marked the point on the shore where they’d gone out to the now exposed ruins of the town and a deputy sat as watchman in a county car. Alistair only nodded at him, than sat in watchful silence, trying hard to make sense of something that didn’t seem to have any sense at all.
     
    This had started out to be such a good day, Hart thought as she stepped into her brother’s home, and it had turned into a blur of awfulness. She’d heard herself back at the apartment saying those things to Sheriff Redhawk, but she didn’t know where those words or the thoughts behind them had come from.
    The minute she walked in she knew she was in the middle of a noisy argument between Tommy and Nikki.
    “I’m not her mother,” Nikki yelled. “I have two daughters of my own and I’m not looking for a job seeing after your crazy sister!”
    The sound came from back in the kitchen, but her two little nieces were huddled in the entry hall. Christy had her hands over her ears while older sister Mandy stood listening, frightened tears sliding