Wakening the Past: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

they’d gone through more than one storm, her alone in the country, him on the road in his car or at the office in the courthouse in Wichita.
    It would soon be past the season for this kind of weather, she thought resentfully; spring should be close at hand now. But she remembered a blizzard back in early April and right now it wasn’t quite March.
    “I heard you say you told my family I was here.”
    She looked up from her concentration on the soup. “First thing I did. They were frantic.”
    “I left a note. Anyway, they know I can look after myself.”
    “Good Lord,” Hart commented without rancor, “You’re fourteen. When I was fourteen I’d barely been out of my home town.”
    “That would be Mountainside?” Was there mockery in that question ?
    Her hometown had been Medicine Stick, gone now for decades. She could hardly admit that to this girl who seemed to know more than she should. She changed the subject. “How did you get here, Bobbi?”
    “Big airplane, little airplane, cab.”
    That was succinct enough. “I’m surprised you had the money.”
    “Not a problem.” The look the girl gave her was a mixture of resentment and something like amusement, which was surprising since she didn’t think she’d said anything remotely funny.
    “I’ll make up the bed in the guestroom for you.” The sentence was barely out of her mouth when the lights in the kitchen flickered, came up again and then abruptly shut off. She heard the soft purr of the electrical heating stop as well.
    She’d been here before. Right after Christmas they’d gone without power for three days. Now with only the fire for light the house lay silent in near darkness.
    “What’s going on?” Bobbi asked, sitting straight up.
    “Power outage. Wind and ice are a bad combination; we most likely have lines down.”
    “I don’t like being in the dark.”
    “It’ll be all right. May come right back on and if not, we have candles and battery lights. The worst part is that the kitchen range and the heating system are electric. That’s why we keep stocked up on wood for the fireplace.”
    “That’s positively primitive.”
    Hart decided this wasn’t a good time to point out that in her girlhood a pot-bellied wood stove was their source of heat for the entire household of six people and that Mom had cooked on a kerosene stove.
    The power hadn’t come on by ten p.m. and Bobbi complained loudly that she couldn’t go to bed without watching television for a while first, finally departing for the back bedroom, flashlight in hand, with plans to call her friends in California.
    Minutes later when Hart heard a shriek she thought something awful had happened to the girl and dashed down the long dark hall to find Bobbi deep in the mass of quilts heaped on her bed, the flashlight sending a thin stream of light across her lap. “My phone won’t work. I can’t call anybody!”
    This was hardly unexpected. “Means the towers are down. Wind and ice aren’t good for communications either.”
    “When will they be working again?”
    “I really can’t say.”
    “Well, Hart, call somebody and complain.”
    Hart gleefully broke the bad news. “We don’t keep a land line, Bobbi. If the cell phones are down, then we’re on our own.”
    Bobbi’s expression was so appalled that Hart almost felt sorry for her, even though back when she was a kid, the only phones in town had been at places like the school and the store and those hadn’t worked particularly well.
    This, she thought, could be an educational experience for the girl. “Turn off your light and go to sleep. You won’t miss electricity if you’re not awake.”
    She went to bed, feeling a whole lot more sorry for poor Mr. Jeffers than she did for Bobbi Lawrence.
     
    Dawn shone dimly on an ice-coated world turned miraculously overnight into a thing of beauty with winter bare tree branches coated in the glittering substance and roads treacherously slippery. A rash of accidents kept