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

computer screen at his rural home, munching on a turkey and bacon sandwich he’d made himself, and researched the now defunct town of Medicine Stick, Oklahoma.
    Founded in 1901 when Oklahoma was still a territory, it had mostly been established by pioneers from Texas who had come up looking for free or cheap land. Settlement had been thin, even in its heyday the town had never numbered over a thousand residents and by the time it was submerged after the war when the new lake was built on that site, less than two hundred individuals had lived there.
    Prominent among the local residents had been the Hartleys, owners of the largest ranch in the area, also named for the town, or vice versa, Medicine Stick Ranch. He was surprised . He’d known Hart had been left a tidy sum by her mother’s family and her first name had been in their honor, but he hadn’t know that the famed old ranch, no longer intact, had belonged to her family. Hart’s parents had died relatively young and she never talked about them much. He’d always wondered if Tommy had felt left out, his mom had not been a Hartley and so he’d not come in for a share of that family’s largess as had his half-sister.
    He tried goggling the Hartleys but didn’t come up with much. Apparently they’d been a rather private family, at one time settled behind the barbed wire fences of their large ranch, but the property had been sold late in the fifties and Madge Hartley, who must have been Hart’s great grandmother had died in her home in San Francisco, leaving the bulk of her not insubstantial estate to her son, who would have been Hart’s grandfather.
    Grandpapa married a woman named Henrietta Todd from an old New England family, a joining of family fortunes, and that was the money that had come down to Hart.
    He and Hart had never talked about her money. He’d not been particularly interested and she’d seemed somehow a little embarrassed.
    They’d lived in his house and on his salary for those few weeks they’d been together and, being admittedly somewhat old fashioned, he’d been proud of those facts.
    Taking another bite from his sandwich and chewing thoughtfully, Alistair reminded himself that this research wasn’t supposed to be about Hart and her family, but beginning to seek resolution into an old, old murder. That person who had spent years lying under the lake water deserved some answers to her death.
    Or his. He reminded himself that Hart’s insistence that the bones were those of a girl were not proof. And as for evidence, how likely was it that what she’d said about the body being left to be covered over as water filled into the newly built lake was preposterous.
    He looked up information on the forming of the lake. Built by the Corps of Engineers, it was designed for both recreation and water storage and it was true that the water had rushed in fairly abruptly. An old dam up river had been torn down to allow water to pour into the larger lake bed with its newly built dam. Within hours the lake had been nearly full and the little town of Medicine Stick erased from sight.
    That had happened in 1947, only a couple of years after the war ended, long before either he or Hart was born. Maybe that grandmother of hers had made up stories and told them to the little girl so that they lingered in her memory. Perhaps she imagined someone trapped in the little town as the water poured in.
    It was the way a child would think.
    He continued his research without learning anything of significance until long past bedtime, then went finally to bed and dreams of Hart that would linger painfully into his waking hours.

Chapter Seven
    Hart kissed her nieces goodbye, handing them the loaf of banana bread she’d baked earlier as she got into the car, and then waving as she drove away.
    Tommy and Nikki were still in conversation inside, but their voices were no longer raised so loud they scared their small daughters. Hart grinned, thinking that she’d never have