Forevermore Book #3 of the Time Travel Trilogy

Forevermore

Forevermore

 Heritage Time Travel Romance Series Book #3

 Amazon LinkForevermore

Snippet

     “Okay, so who is gonna hold the rope?” Jeff asked.

     “Wait a minute! Who says you’re going down there?” Dave argued. “I think I should be the one.”

     “Why’s that? I’m the one with climbing experience,” Jeff said.

     “Yeah, climbing around on rooftops,” Dave barked back.

     “Well, I have the safety harness and line and pulley in my truck bed right now so I guess I win,” Jeff countered, trumping any argument Dave might have had in the wings. The testosterone was heavy in the air. I decided I needed to put the kibosh on the direction this conversation was heading.

     “No one is going down there,” I insisted raising my voice loudly. “We are simply going to turn on the camera and lower it.”

     The four of us stood on the precipice of the black void of the abandoned well, with a pile of old wood and a large concrete disk tossed to the wayside. We had found it about two hundred feet back from the road after I had led the way as we had climbed between the strands of barbed wire and up the barely discernible gravel drive. 

     The old homestead was completely gone, but as we walked I was replaying the time warp in my head and mentally recalling when I had looked back toward the drive. I could recall standing before the original house, as I described to them the journey Lindy and Coyle had taken, as the others followed along behind me.

     Just beyond where the house would have once been and walking in the direction the barn had once stood, we found the well fairly quickly. It was covered by a large concrete slab and it took all four of us and two shovels as levers to get it to slide off the cavernous hole.

     The guys were not willing to simply take finding an old well as evidence unless I could find some other traces that would make it indisputable. After an hour of scouring the sites that I felt for sure once held the house and barn, I'd had to give it up. Besides, Allen’s buildings from his 1904 homestead had been razed again at some point after 1981 when I had visited this old farm with my dad. 

      There was absolutely no sign of any structures. So here we stood, as Dave and Jeff had now decided that the best evidence would be to go down the well and see if they could find any of the girls’ physical remains.

     “Risk the camera? Nope! Not happening. We don’t even know how deep it is,” Jeff snapped.

     “Hey, it’s my camera and I don’t care if we risk it. You think it’s better to risk one of your lives rather than a three-hundred dollar camera?” I snapped back. “We don’t even need to do that. Let’s just keep looking for remnants of the barn or the house. The house was back that way about a hundred feet.”

     “Torie, we’ve been looking for an hour and have found nothing substantial. The only way to know if this is the place is to try and get to the bottom of this well and see if we can find anything. If the girls really are here, we’ll find bones; at least a skull,” Dave said firmly.

     “Carrie, help me out here,” I whined. I gave her a wide-eyed silent plea to help me rein in these idiots before it got any more out of hand.

     “Let’s grab one of those large rocks over there and drop it down the well,” she said as she pulled out her smart phone. “We can time it and then I can find,” she paused and turned her phone to show us. “Got it—a calculator. I love technology! It states that it’s accurate to within twenty or thirty feet allowing for the variables of the weight of the item being dropped, gravitational pull…yada, yada.”

     “Carrie! I wasn’t kidding! No one is going down there,” I said again but as I spoke, Jeff went to grab the rock and Dave fell to his knees beside the hole.

     “It’s our best option for being sure we have the right place and proving that your dream really was a warp,” Dave said, and by the tone of his voice I could tell I was going to have an uphill battle to win against the three of them.

     “No, I vote to just dangle the camera down there and pull it back up and see if it catches anything,” I said firmly. “None of you are going to put yourselves at risk.”

     “Hardly a risk if we are lowered in a harness,” Dave argued. “We can back my truck up and hook the line to the trailer hitch and just lower one of us…”

     “No!” I said. “That’s crazy! We have no idea how deep it is. It could be full of water. There could be dangerous gasses. The walls could collapse.”

     “Doubtful,” Jeff called as he came back across the scruffy weed-filled farmyard with several rocks in his hands; he was juggling them as he approached. “Okay, let’s do this, and I’m going to be the one to go down,” he corrected Dave. “It’s my harness.”

     Carrie sat on the ground near the lip of the well and flexed her index finger at me. “Come on, we need your ears, Torie. We all need to listen for it to hit bottom.”

     I resigned myself to accepting the plan and joined the others at the well’s edge and I got goose bumps as I looked down into the pitch blackness. The chill air that wafted out of the depths  smelled eerily familiar. I could recall the cool earthy odor as Lindy Smith crashed through the wooden cover. I could even remember the feeling tightening in her middle as she tumbled. That feeling like when you go down the first big hill of a roller coaster and your stomach seems to be dropping out.

     “First a smaller one just to see if we hear water because if it’s full of water, then any remains of the girls will be history,” I said with a heavy sigh of resignation.

     “I agree,” Dave nodded.

     Jeff crouched beside us and took the smallest of the rocks, about the size of a peach, and dropped it down into the inky blackness. We all listened carefully and heard a flinty dry sound as it landed in just seconds.

     “No water,” Dave confirmed. “So now a large one and I’ll time it.”

     Jeff chose a rock about the size of a brick.

     Dave studied his watch for a few moments and then ordered     “Now.”

     Jeff let it go and the depths returned a loud echoed reverb as it struck bottom.

     “About three seconds,” Dave announced and looked at Carrie.

     She quickly typed the information into her phone. “Okay, with variance for gravity, weight of the rock, and the time it took for the noise to bounce back it’s roughly two-hundred plus feet.”

     “Whoa,” Jeff chuckled and jumped to his feet, slapping his hands together to remove the dust. “Okay, show time."

Insight into 'Into the Future'

The 2nd book in the time travel adventure of Dave and Torie Mills Cameron is my personal favorite of the series. I've gotten some feed back about the fact there is nothing about the future in the novel. At the time it was written in 2013, most of the story did take place in the future, 2015, 2016, 2017. However, now real life has caught up with the story. The blurb which is on the back of the paperback, isn't on the e-book version and might also cause the confusion. Maybe. Maybe the fault is with me for choosing a wrong title but I stand by my reasons for naming this 2nd book of the series Into the Future.

To me, Into the Future is really Dave's story and the lengths he will go to in order to give Torie and their baby Rose Lynn some sense of normalcy in a world gone absolutely insane all around them while their own life together has been torn to shreds by the fallout from one terrible night. Dave and Torie are both holding on to their sanity by sheer dint of will and when Dave keeps to himself a secret that would surely be the last straw and the end of their marriage and life together.

I think it shows the depth of Dave's strength to live trapped in a personal hell he cannot leave, a hell that will cost him dearly in mental torment as nightly he goes to battle and heroically lives through and witnesses the unimaginable. While at the same time he is putting on the face of a man who has it all together, for the world's and more importantly, for Torie's benefit.  This part two of the story also shows the depth of Dave's humanity, his gentle and caring spirit and his courage. I feel it makes the reader love him even more and he proves he is worthy of adoration. 

As one reviewer put it: "Dave is stunning. With all the travels and the emotions they raise in him, it is impossible to describe just how touching they are."

Back Cover Blurb:

When author Torie Mills moved to tiny Fremont, Iowa, she found the love of her life and the place where she finally felt she belonged. Five generations of Dave Cameron’s family had inhabited the large idyllic Victorian house he and Torie now called home. They settled in, started a family and seemed to be living the perfect fairy-tale ending.

Fast forward two years INTO THE FUTURE. The Cameron family, including little one-year-old Rose, have been chased from their home by the time travels they believed they had left behind. Quiet Mahaska County has become a Mecca for fans of the psychological thriller Where Evil Lived, which Torie wrote concerning the 1959 mass murder of her Mills cousins. It was just meant to be a way to help Dave heal and put it behind him for good. Now it had taken on a life of its

While Torie searches desperately for the  answers that will fix her fractured family and allow them the happily ever after they desire, Dave struggles to hold onto his sanity and keep a secret from her that will test him to the limits of his endurance as he comes to terms with the time travel gift that neither he, Torie nor their child will be able to resist or control.

 The ebook is $2.99
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If I Die Young by The Band Perry and Out of the Past

Out of the Past is FREE for Kindle. http://amzn.com/B009ZZDVJS

 Another great song from the play list of Out of the Past. If I Die Young by The Band Perry. https://youtu.be/7NJqUN9TClM

Excerpt --

Once the family members were seated, a recording of a song began to play over the speakers from some unknown source. It was The Band Perry and their song “If I Die Young” which was perfect but such a heartbreaking choice, and I couldn’t help but think that Claire or maybe one of her close friends had chosen this song for her—someone else who’d known how she’d longed to find her true love.

The crowd all stood as if in one single motion, in a show of respect as we watched the light honey-maple stained casket draped with a large spray of pink roses making its way toward the front of the sanctuary while the words of the song brought tears to the eyes of most of those in attendance.

Out of the Past

Out of the Past snippet

History, family and a contemporary suspense filled time travel adventure

 

Amazon link 

50 five star ratings

   

  I glanced down at my free left hand and noted the thin gold wedding band and the young unmarred skin before surveying the delicate white silk of the long-sleeved blouse and floor length skirt I was wearing which was all hand-beaded with sparkling clear glass brilliants woven around the wrists of the blouse and I knew that I’d seen the outfit before in a photograph. It all came together in a flash and I knew with certainty that I must be my grandaunt Jennie Andersen Mills, and this must surely be her and Wyatt’s wedding day.

     “I wish you nothing but happiness,” a voice was saying close at hand and I became aware of the hum of conversation in the room.

     I looked at the young woman who’d approached me with her curly-brown hair pulled up into a lovely bun at the crown of her head and I lost all my nervousness at once as I accepted her hand in greeting. She was my frequent and most beloved of time travel buddies, my grandaunt Lucy Mills, Wyatt’s sister.

                                                                 “Oh Lucy, thank you so very much,” I said.

                                                                “We are sisters now, you and I,” she said excitedly.

                                                                “Yes, what fun we shall have together,” I agreed with a light squeeze of her fingers before releasing her. She moved to stand before her brother at my side, looking up at him with an impish grin.

     “Wyatt, my wish for you as well, dear brother,” she said sweetly and I glanced up at Wyatt and saw a wide grin on his happy face as he leaned down to accept a light kiss upon his cheek from Lucy.

     “Thank you, kiddo,” he replied with affection, straightening back up tall.

     Oh my, he’s a good-looking man, I marveled silently admiring him. It came to me all at once that with his hair combed back, glossy smooth and chocolaty-dark brown and with his piercing dark eyes, high cheekbones and firm jawline, that he looked exactly like Christian Slater, but a really young Christian Slater like in that movie Heathers or maybe Untamed Heart.

     I have a couple of wonderful photographs of granduncle Wyatt Mills in my genealogy file at this age including he and Jennie’s official wedding tintype that would have been taken at some point on this day with him looking very dapper in this dark-gray serge suit and waistcoat, with a stiff white collared dress shirt and a gray-and-white-striped bow tie. Just gorgeous, I thought as I smiled up at him, his face flushed with happiness and hopes for the future. Sadly, I already knew what the future held for dear granduncle Wyatt; that he will die at the age of thirty-four from a bout of influenza only about fifteen years from this day, that he and Jennie will never have children and that Jennie will go on to marry again and have a forty year marriage and two sons with her second husband.

     Turning my mind from these sad truths, I continued my detective work regarding this current time travel experience. I knew that Wyatt and Jennie were born, one year apart but shared the same birth date, and that they’d chosen to marry on that same date as well, making the occasion triply special. With this knowledge I knew, without doubt, that today must be June 9, 1912.

Out of the Past-Johnnie Baitsell

     I noticed at that moment the young pre-teen boy sitting off to the side behind the counter with his arms folded across his chest, trying not to show his amusement at the situation playing out before him as a smile warred for control of his expressive, homely face. He was the store owner’s son, Johnnie Baitsell and I recognized him easily and had a lump in my throat as I goggled at him in amazement.

    Johnnie Baitsell is buried in the Cedar Township cemetery in Fremont and I’d had the single most exasperating time trying to locate his grave. I knew that he had to be buried there because I’d found his name on the list from the WPA grave registration survey. That survey was conducted in the 1930’s when the government, in an effort to create jobs for citizens during the Great Depression, had hired people to, among other things, walk the cemeteries and record the headstone information for every person buried in Iowa. That information, by the way, has become an invaluable resource for genealogy buffs like me. 

     I had doggedly kept searching the cemetery for Johnnie every time I came to work on my research but always to no avail. Then one day on impulse I squeezed around behind his parents headstone which is on the furthest east edge of the cemetery in the very last row of graves and up against the barbed wire fencing that butts up right against the woods, and low and behold there on the backside of his parent’s headstone was Johnnie’s information, along with that of his half-brother and baby sister who had also been on my list of graves that were MIA.

     Johnnie died when he was fifteen years old, from consumption which is the name for the end stage of tuberculosis, far away from his home in Iowa, down in Texas, where his mother had taken him for the warmer climate in hopes of restoring his health. I have his obituary which describes how he and his mother had decided to come home to Iowa but his doctor had advised and persuaded them to remain in Texas for just one more week. They’d agreed and only four days later Johnnie had died, cradled in his mothers’ arms and he never got to lay his eyes on his home or his family again. His last words as his mother held him close were, “Praise God.” His mother had returned by train a few days later bringing his coffined body home to his eternal rest at Cedar Township Cemetery. His story has always stayed with me because it was so very sad but also because of another strange twist and an amazing story in itself.

     I know that the boy I am looking at right now is Johnnie Baitsell because I have his portrait and it came about in a very peculiar way. There’s a man who lives out in California and at almost the exact same time that I was finally discovering Johnnie’s grave in Iowa, this man had been browsing for collectables at a flea market. At a booth selling old original tintypes, the image of a well-dressed homely boy with slightly too big ears had caught his eye and totally piqued his interest when he’d turned the tintype over and found scrawled across the back the words “Johnnie Baitsell, Mahaska County.” Thinking that he could perhaps do some investigating and discover the story behind it, he’d purchased the tintype and in a short amount of time he’d come upon the online memorial for him and added the portrait.

     The coincidences of me finding Johnnie’s grave and the man finding his photograph in California almost simultaneously more than a century after he’d passed away and now this, seeing him here alive before my very eyes; gave me a rush of goose flesh up my arms and the hair prickled at the nape of my neck. This is a meeting that I will forever treasure and an amazing alignment of the fates.

Johnnie’s father motioned to him now, and he jumped nimbly down from the stool he’d been perched upon and came around the counter.

Amazon link. A sexy, history filled FREE READ and a stand alone novel with a HEA

PG-13 version with limited sexual content. Also a FREE READ