Out of the Past (Heritage Time Travel Romance Series, Book 1 PG-13 All Iowa Edition) Read online

  As for her looks, Mindy has always looked just like Dyan Cannon and not just to me, everyone always comments on the similarities, more so when we were young, especially during our teenaged years when Mindy had possessed long, pale-blonde hair. She had always flat ironed her hair until it hung perfectly straight to her butt, which had been the very popular bootylicious type derriere that men couldn’t and still can’t help but ogle. She was and still is confident, classy, and always very aware of her sexuality and its effect upon men. When we were young, she had been the perfect wingman, for lack of a better term because although we were both able to attract men’s attentions, it was her vivacious personality that had always kept them buzzing around.

  Even now that she is a soccer mom, complete with a minivan and a basement room full of boys’ athletic equipment, she is still just as vibrant and energetic as ever. She is the team mom for most of the activities that her boys are involved in and always volunteers to run the concession stands and takes charge of the banquets at the end of each sports season—a real force of nature. And although her hair is wavy and shoulder-length these days, and beauty salon highlights have taken the place of nature, she is still the same person that I have known and loved for thirty-plus years.

  “Come on, let’s pick you out a bedroom. I have refurbished all of them and you can have your choice of my great-grandma Alice’s bedroom, the boys’ room, Mahala’s bedroom…” I said enticingly, as we headed upstairs.

  “How do you know which room was whose?” Mindy wondered aloud as she followed along behind me up the flight of stairs, pausing to admire the family portraits that hung in staggered orderliness on the wall as we climbed.

  “Oh, I just had to guess,” I lied.

  ***

  After we got Mindy settled in, we decided to go out and take a tour of the town. I showed her where the old high school had been and downtown Fremont and we made a drive through the cemetery to show her my family, while we talked all the way, laughing and catching up with each other.

  We decided to have dinner at the Finish Line and had just gotten seated at a booth near the front windows when Char, who has become my very favorite waitress, placed a couple of menus before us and after filling our water glasses snapped her gum with expert flair and said that she would give us time to look over the menu and that she would be back in a few minutes.

  “So what looks good to you?” I asked Mindy as I surveyed my own menu, considering. “I think I’ll have a cheeseburger and fries.”

  “Ooh, that looks good to me,” she said kind of breathy.

  Struck by the odd tone of her voice, I looked up to see what she was referring to, and found that she didn’t even have her eyes on the menu.

  “Jesus, Torie, look at him,” she sighed, gazing out the plate-glass window and into the parking lot.

  I followed the line of her stare and saw that Dave Cameron was just climbing out of his black F-150. He was dressed in a simple white tee and blue jeans that hung off his hips just perfectly and showcased his long, lean, sinewy, six-foot plus frame. Without any kind of conceit or vanity, he innocently raked a hand through his unruly hair, which was doing that unintentional but extremely sexy, spilling over his forehead thing that it always does, as he approached the diner.

  I had to laugh at Mindy’s open-mouthed, stunned expression. I think that jaw-dropping most accurately describes the look and I think now that I had likely looked similarly thunderstruck when I’d first laid eyes on him a few short months back. He is one damn handsome man but doesn’t act as though he knows it which makes him just that much more attractive.

  “That’s my home renovator, Dave Cameron. I told you about him, didn’t I?”

  “What!” she sputtered with a look of incredulity. “Um, I think you failed to mention that he was drop-dead gorgeous! I’m sure that I would have remembered that bit of information. Oh my god, Torie, is he single?”

  “Yes, he…”

  “Who does he look like? Someone famous…” she interrupted as she literally lifted up off of her seat so that she could better crane her neck and lean toward the window to watch Dave as he headed for the door.

  I was much more dignified and primly seated on my side of the booth facing the door as he entered. I discretely kicked Mindy under the table so that she was, at least, on her butt if not completely unruffled when he noticed me and walked over to our booth.

  “Hey there, lady, I haven’t seen you for a while. You’ve been keepin’ busy I guess, huh?” he asked in the usual, easygoing way that immediately puts one at ease.

  “I just got back from visiting my sister in Colorado for a few days. I meant to call you soon to go to lunch or something,” I said feeling a little guilty because I had failed miserably at keeping in touch with him after the street dance and it wasn’t due to any awkwardness about the kiss or anything like that, nor was it anything to do with my break up with Derek which was really a non-event. No, the honest truth is that I hadn’t called Dave because; sadly and rather pathetically, if I do say so myself, I have continued to spend more and more of my time living in and thinking about my stupid time warps these days to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

  I had used the time between my return from Colorado until today, adding all of the detail and stories to my family tree program from the notes that I had taken while with Bill the barber, as well as adding the Olive Branch schoolhouse photos to my grandpa Arlan’s biography page.

  Mindy cleared her throat suggestively, looking for an intro.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Dave—this is my best friend Mindy from Des Moines. I think I’ve told you about her before.”

  Mindy smiled warmly at Dave with a sweep of her long-lashed flirty eyes, taking in his entire person appraisingly. Like I said before, she oozes sexiness and just can’t help herself.

  “Sure, good to meet you, Mindy,” he said politely, reaching out to shake her hand before his eyes came back across the booth to me.

  “Well, I don’t want to interrupt your reunion, ladies,” he said looking into my eyes.

  “You aren’t interrupting, Dave. Would you like to join us?” I offered, shifting my position and moving my purse to make room for him to scoot in next to me and I sincerely hoped that he would.

  “Thanks, Torie, but I have a carryout bag with my name on it waiting at the pickup window but it was really great to see you. Maybe next time,” he declined me politely.

  “Okay, if you’re sure,” I said, letting him off the hook but I couldn’t quite hide my disappointment. “Hey, have a good evening then, Dave.”

  “You, too—it was nice to meet you, Mindy.”

  He nodded to us both and then sauntered over to the cook counter and Char was off and running in an animated conversation with him about something that had him grinning. I couldn’t hear the conversation but she was gesturing and they were laughing and after a minute, Tom came out of the kitchen carrying a white plastic bag tied up and ready to go and the three of them continued standing at the cash register after Dave had paid, speaking companionably together.

  “Torie,” Mindy said under her breath as she watched the three across the room. “I can’t believe that he’s real. He’s so freakin’ hot!”

  I had to laugh at her over-the-top reaction. “Yeah, I know.”

  “You mean to tell me that he’s the guy who did all of the work on your house? He’s the one that you took the trips to Omaha with? The same guy who helped you with the injured deer in the spring?”

  “Yep, the same.”

  “Why the hell aren’t you dating him?” she asked dumb-struck.

  “Well when I moved here I was with Derek and I’ve been busy with book stuff,” I shrugged. “Besides we’re just friends, that’s all.”

  “No,” she shook her head and stated quietly but firmly. “No way! Didn’t you see the way that he watched your every move? He’s into you.” She crossed her arms over her chest, clearly disgusted with me for missing what she saw as an opportunity.
r />   Dave walked back past our booth and without stopping, gave me a friendly nod as he left the diner and Mindy paused in her berating me to watch him walk across the parking lot to his truck.

  “Holy hell!” she breathed. “He looks just as good walking away. Torie, you can’t tell me that you don’t think he’s sexy…”

  “Yes, I think he’s amazing and he’s a great person. We did…” I began and stopped, catching myself mid-sentence.

  “What?” Mindy pounced on my words like a cat grabbing hold of a mouse. “You did what?”

  “Nothing,” I insisted but then against my better judgment confessed. “Except that we did have a moment back in June but I was with Derek—”

  “Which is no longer an issue,” she finished my sentence and continued. “A moment? What the hell does that mean? What happened?”

  I frowned at her, lowering my brows.

  “Don’t you dare clam up now, Torie Mills! I have nothing except living vicariously through my friends romantic adventures, now tell me this instant,” she ordered, pointing an index finger at me sternly.

  “It was just that he and I shared a kiss—a few kisses.”

  “And…”

  And so I filled her in briefly on all that Dave and I had shared at the street dance and when I’d finished, she just stared, slightly open-mouthed, waiting for something more.

  I shrugged. “That’s it and that’s all. We both stammered about and apologized to each other and I left, drove home and called Derek to ease my guilty conscience.”

  “Oh, god, Torie, don’t make me puke,” she sneered. She had never agreed on my choice of Derek. “Man, I wish that I could think of who Dave reminds me of. Is it a young George Clooney, during Facts of Life? Or maybe it’s a young Sam Shepard?—Oh—oh, I got it, Dermot Mulroney?” she questioned, her forehead creased in concentration.

  “Mindy, those three look nothing like each other,” I snorted with laughter. “And share absolutely no resemblance with Dave Cameron.”

  “Okay, you’re the expert at deciding what celebrity people look like; so who is it?”

  It has always been a quirk of mine to think of people in terms of which famous person they look most like; like my comparison of Derek with Brad Pitt or Jerry with Josh Holloway. In my younger days, during my college years, you could give me a few beers, and I would soon be swearing that every person in the bar looked just like someone famous.

  I pondered the question seriously now, bringing to mind and discarding faces but I came up with nothing.

  “I have no idea. He just looks like Dave Cameron,” I said with a dismissive shrug.

  “Well, it’s someone,” Mindy said frowning thoughtfully and then letting the subject go as Char approached the table and flipped open her tablet, clicking her ball point pen as she smiled at us both.

  “Ladies,” she said. “If you’re ready to order, what can I get ya?”

  ***

  After we had dinner, we stopped at the Casey’s General Store and bought a six-pack of light beer and a bag of pre-popped popcorn and we came back to the house to watch a couple of chick flicks. While Mindy picked out which movies we would watch, I went to open us a beer and put the rest into the fridge. When I turned around from closing the refrigerator door, I jumped and with my heart in my throat said a very bad word. Mindy had somehow soundlessly entered the kitchen and was standing right behind me, literally right behind me within inches and with a disturbingly maniacal grin on her face.

  “You nearly scared me to death!” I scolded her, placing a hand over my chest as my heart pounded with a fight or flight burst of adrenaline galloping through my veins.

  “Look!” she demanded, holding up a copy of my novel Passion’s Fury right in front of my face. “That’s Dave Cameron! That’s why he looks famous to me.”

  “What are you talking about? That’s Jimmy Thomas and he’s a professional cover model. I paid good money for my rights to that photograph,” I stated matter-of-factly.

  “Torie, you can’t tell me that you don’t see it. They could be brothers. Their identical!” she turned the book to peruse it again and tilted her head to the side as she looked the cover over, double checking her original hypothesis. “Okay, I’ll concede that Dave isn’t quite so muscular and he doesn’t have the brown eyes but look at the hair color, the jawline, the dimples, the lips, even their eyebrows are the same shape for God’s sake!”

  I pursed my lips, considering and took the book from her hand.

  “You know what? You’re right,” I said, studying the image as we took our beers and the bag of popcorn out into the front room. “I wonder why I didn’t see that before?”

  “Thank goodness, now I can forget about it. That has been driving me nuts since dinner!” With a huge sigh of relief, Mindy dropped onto the sofa, grabbing up the remote control. “So are you ready for a little Scarlet and Rhett?” she asked with a grin, shrugging her eyebrows at me suggestively.

  I nodded absently and while the movie queued up to the main menu, I looked back to the book cover and my prized Jimmy Thomas photograph portraying my novel’s romantic hero Beau Gardner. It seemed so odd and so unlike me to have missed, for months, this very obvious Dave Cameron doppelganger that was staring out at me.

  ***

  In the end, other than the freaky revelation about Dave Cameron, Mindy’s overnight visit proved to be completely uneventful and that was huge! She’d slept peacefully through the night in my great-grandaunt Mahala’s bedroom and she’d had absolutely no weird dreams or any dreams, for that matter, because I’d quizzed her relentlessly about that in the morning over breakfast. It was also the one night in Rose’s house that I didn’t warp—the one and only night—in all of the weeks that I’ve lived here which can only lead me to believe that the key to stopping them must be having other people in the house.

  Chapter 18

  “Rose, we gotta hurry! Hurry!”

  I looked over to see a very young Grandaunt Lucy’s excited smiling face, flushed with exertion and her giggling gleefully. She and I were both running along a wooden sidewalk passing a line of storefronts in downtown Fremont. I looked over at her again and quickly calculated her age as about ten-years-old. If I was Rose as she said, then I knew that I must be Lucy’s cousin, Rose Wyman, who was the youngest daughter of my Great-Granduncle John Wyman and a namesake of Grandma Rose. Cousin Rose Wyman had been one of Grandaunt Lucy’s closest playmates and cousins growing up, probably because they had lived on farms that were near each other and were both the same age. I knew that their relationship had been very close from my experience in other time warps when I had either inhabited one of them or simply observed them interacting with each other while I had inhabited some other relative. The two girls were inseparable, much like Mindy and I had always been.

  Continuing to try and get up to speed on what the heck was going on in this warp I looked down and saw that Lucy and I were clutching the metal handle of a heavy old-style butter pot, swinging between us and the pot, being jostled by our movements, was bumping into our legs as we ran, causing us both to stagger ungainly like a couple of newborn calves. I realized at the same time that dangling from my other hand was a large reed basket containing a variety of different-hued-brown chicken eggs and it was swaying precariously until I realized it was about to tip and righted it.

  We were nearing the front door of a general store and ahead of us on the boardwalk coming from the opposite direction were two other pre-teenaged girls in plain white linen summer dresses falling about mid-calf and sturdy leather boots, clomping along the walkway and they were also carrying a churned pot of butter between them. It was apparent that this was sizing up to be some kind of a desperate competition because the other girls stepped up their efforts and I quickly sped up to match Lucy’s pace.

  Lucy and I made it to the door first by just a hair and Lucy yanked the door open and we dashed inside right before the others girls arrived. I let Lucy take the lead as she hurried to the glass-topp
ed counter and we set the butter bucket on the floor and I put the basket of brown eggs up on the glass countertop.

  I realized right away when I saw the large sign that hung over the counter that read Baitsell’s General Store that we were not in Fremont but a township just east of there because The Baitsell’s General Store had been in Wright Township. However all of the Baitsell family members are buried in Fremont and I had found numerous references to the proprietor of this store, John Baitsell, in local history books when I had worked on his families online memorials.

  The other two girls arrived behind us breathing heavily from their efforts and I glanced back at them, receiving a scowl that told me that they were not well-pleased with Lucy and me or with their position in line behind us.

  I suddenly remembered when my dad’s oldest sibling, my aunt Delores, who is eighty-three years old, had related to me a story, passed down from generation to generation, about an occurrence like this; when I had spent an entire day with her gleaning what information I could from her, for my genealogy research. I’d written the story up and had added it to my family tree and hadn’t really thought about it since then but I’m almost positive now that it had involved my grandaunt Lucy. That day with Aunt Delores had been a couple of years ago now and I couldn’t recall all of the details at the moment but I would need to look it up when this current time travel ended and if it had been this experience, then update the story.

  Lucy spoke up at once, looking Mr. Baitsell directly in the eye. “My pa says that we need to get fourteen cents per pound for the butter and not a smidge less than four cents per egg. Ma says that two of the eggs have double yolks,” she added obviously trying to sweeten the pot.

  “I can’t go a penny over eleven cents per pound on the butter and one cent per egg,” Mr. Baitsell parried with a gleam in his eye.

  “Thirteen cents per pound for the butter and three cents per egg,” Lucy countered with a bit of uncertainty tempering her voice.

  “Here’s my final offer Lucy, I’ll give you twelve cents a pound for the butter and two cents per egg. Looks like you got fourteen eggs here,” Mr. Baitsell said as he inspected our bounty and waited for Lucy’s response.