Forevermore
(Heritage Time Travel Romance Series, Book 3)
A small excerpt...
As I signed in on the spiral tablet
at the front entrance of the Keomah Genealogical Society, I braced for my
performance with Margaret. I knew that she would be her cheerful, inquisitive
self. I was not in the mood.
“Welcome, Torie, so happy to see
you!” she said, rising from the front desk to greet me. “John is at the Wyman house
in Fremont. He has a group of sixth-graders coming for a tour."
“Margaret, it’s nice to see you. I
was just thinking of spending some time in your microfilm library. I am
pondering a new story idea. You know me, always looking for new inspiration,”
I smiled and tried to make it sincere.
“Well, you go right ahead and you
let me know if you need anything at all. I will be right here if you have
questions. I have received a lot of requests for information lately from people wanting to know about the towns of Agency and Craton. It continues
to amaze me, the amount of folks who always reference Where Evil Lived. Even after more than two years it is still drawing folks
from all over the country to get a look at the places you talked about in the
story.”
“I hope that isn’t a bad thing,” I
stated and wasn’t really sure if she considered it as such.
“Heavens no, Torie! The number of
new members for the newsletter alone has made the goals for the society
for the entire year and it's only April. It’s a blessing. Don’t you ever think otherwise,”
she said, giving me a hug.
“Thank you, Margaret. I’ll let you
get back at it.”
I walked into the microfilm room
which was lined with heavy fireproof cabinets containing a century and a half
of newspaper reels along one wall. The other walls were floor to ceiling full
of census record books and obituary clippings that filled shelf upon shelf.
There were family history books provided by different researchers and many
books written by the Keomah members as well. Four beige rectangle Formica
tables were combined and formed a large work table at the center of the room. I
dropped my purse on the floor and set my laptop on one corner and pulled out my cord and plugged it in,
on a power strip along the center of the work tables.
I took a seat at a table and opened
my laptop, logging on to my family tree program. Even though I was in a library
full of every kind of genealogy and history book you could imagine, I felt as
if I was totally without any resources. None of the books or centuries worth of
microfilms around me would hold the answers to make sense of my life. None
would help me figure out how to bring my shattered family back together and
make us whole.
My plan started out to spend the afternoon
going through the oldest reels of microfilm and albums of documents for both
Oskaloosa and the Fremont area, just skimming randomly. I didn’t have an agenda
and wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I was just hoping that something
would present itself which would relate to the experience I had lived as a
woman named Mary back in old Fremont. I really didn’t have much faith that it
would even be possible.
The time of the warp had seemed to be early, maybe as
early as 1840 and there were no local newspapers back then. Still I gave it
a good effort, until my eyes started to cross. The combination of tiny print
and poor quality of the early documents were just impossible to read for any
length of time. After an hour or so I had to give up on that quest and turned
my attention to something less tedious. In the last newsletter,
it had mentioned that they had received in another of the missing years of the
Fremont Gazette, for the decade of the 1890’s. The entire year of 1898.
It turned out that one of the new
owners of an old building in the historic downtown district of Oskaloosa had
come across a forgotten stash of the newspapers, carefully preserved in bindery
albums in an attic room. Of course it just seemed an obvious decision to give
them to the local genealogical experts just down the road at Keomah. With the
windfall of the Wyman house and other funding coming their way from many sources, the expensive process of converting the newspapers to microfilm had been completed in record time and were added to the library for
all to enjoy.
I was scanning through a reel of microfilm,
slowly cranking the pages through the reader, letting my eyes catch on the main
headlines and stories. The headline for Thursday, June 9, 1898 didn’t interest
me but a small story about halfway down the page caught my eye and caused me to
suck in my breath and said out loud softly "Holy shit!"
Search Called off for the
Missing Smith Girls
The search for eight-year-old
Coyle and little six-year-old Lindy Smith, daughters of John and Margaret Smith,
sadly, came to an end on Monday. Both girls have been missing for more than two
weeks and the many searchers and hunting dogs who combed miles of fields and
creek-beds, failed to locate any trace of the sisters. The parents are continuing
the search, however it is feared that the girls may have met with foul-play at
the hands of a vagrant drifter, some accident or possibly made their way to the
swollen and fast moving south Skunk River just northeast of town. It is not
believed the girls would have run away from home.
That was it. Just one paragraph
about the girls I had dreamed about the night before we had left for our wedding
celebration in Las Vegas nearly four years ago. It had been
a time warp! I searched the previous two weeks and the following week and
several weeks after but found no other mention of the girls.
