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."

Out of the Past snippit

Out of the Past...snippet. FREE READ
Paranormal, Sci-fi, Time Travel

AMAZON LINK 

Sitting cross-legged, with my elbows braced upon my knees and hunched over Dave’s supine body as I was; I imagine that I likely resembled a medieval gargoyle perched precariously upon the ledge of some Gothic building. I closely observed his face and marveled at that eerily blank and yet oddly tranquil repose that I’d glimpsed upon my own countenance when I’d recently videotaped my own time travel experience. It was entirely different though, seeing it manifest itself upon someone else’s face.
     I’d been back for nearly an hour now and using the time to note the other physical effects of time travel upon the human body, namely Dave’s body, as he continued to remain unresponsive. Such as the change in his skin temperature going from heated with a sheen of sweat beading upon his forehead, to a coolness that was a little creepy and corpse-like. Both of these were somewhat indicative of him going through non-REM and REM sleep cycles except that there was no movement behind his gently closed eyelids, hinting at any dreaming, even though he definitely appeared to be in a deep enough sleep that he should be dreaming.

     Also, in spite of his wildly fluctuating skin temperature, his breathing and heart rate continued to remain slow and regular. Even his usual nocturnal tumescence, referred to by Dave as his ahem—morning glory had yet to arise this day, if you get my meaning and no I hadn’t molested the man in his sleep, I’d just looked and with a purely scientific interest. http://amzn.com/B009ZZDVJS

Coming soon...

Three very different stories...

 Torn, snippet

    

When I come down the darkened hallway from the living room toward my bedroom, I am a little down and ready to call it a night but I pull my phone out of my pocket and can see the pulsing light signaling I have a message and suddenly I am completely revived.

I flip on my bedroom light and Mark yells from behind me, “Brian, I’m making a frozen pizza. You want some,” he asks coming after me to stand at my door.

 “A…yeah,” I say distracted. “I’ll be there in a minute.

 I glance around to see him nodding, but he doesn’t make a move to leave. He just stands at the threshold watching me.  I use my foot to push my door closed on him, but he sticks out a hand, stopping it.  “You didn’t,” he groans. “Tell me you didn’t.”

 “I did,” I answer shortly.

 “You’re asking for trouble,” he predicts but grins at me and is shaking his head.

 “Totally worth it,” I reply with a smile just before I close the door in his face.

I can hear him hooting with laughter and then he starts belting out some unrecognizable tune, (he’s completely tone deaf), as he heads back toward the kitchen. I can hear our roommate Adam come barreling into the front door of the house and it sounds as though he has brought company. At least one female voice echoes down the hallway.

     I open the new message screen, anticipating and it is, it's from her.

     “U2 Brian…”

     I study the seven characters as if by staring at them they will somehow rearrange themselves to mean something more. They don’t and I can’t blame her, not after everything we’ve been through and then seeing me tonight with, of all people, Laurie.

**********

Claire White of Cedar County Iowa, snippet

June 1861

Cedar County Iowa

    

Nathan LaRue fears that the breakneck pace on the rough road is sorely testing the strength and wind of his chestnut gelding, because it is neither a pace nor a trek that the old plow horse has ever been asked to make before. Nearly dusk now and after half a day of toiling in the fields, old Buck, bless him, was giving him his all. Nate has no choice but to ask it of him, as Lizzie’s very life lay in the balance. He digs his heels into the horse’s sides again and lays the strop of his reins into Buck’s rump.

 “Yah! Get up there!”

 Leaving Lizzie alone in the house for even these few minutes could become her eternity, Nate knows, but if he can’t find help for her, he will lose her for sure. Plain bad luck that Doc Harper happens to be away at West Branch just now helping out with a new group of poor souls, but Doc always tries to be there to give medical care to any of those in need before they continue their escape along the underground railroad, hoping for a chance at freedom up North in Canada. Doc Harper wasn’t expected back for two more days and in the midst of a life and death struggle, Lizzie didn’t have two more days. Her only chance was for him to get to the neighbor's place and Claire White. If any other person could possibly save his young wife and their unborn child, it would be Missus White. He just prays that he will find her at home.

Love's Endurance, the sequel to Love's Vengeance, snippet

Somerset Bermuda 1689

    

       Timothy had his back turned as he tied Sebastian to a hitching post and smiled to himself, hearing the titter of giggles coming from behind him and just inside the house near the front door. It was, no doubt, Lizzie’s constant irritations and little sisters, eleven-year-old Clara, nine-year-old Esther and little five-year-old Ruth, jockeying for a spot to have a better view out of the window.

         “Esther, go tell Lizzie that Tim is here!” Clara ordered.

 “No you go! I want to see Tim!”

He watched the three, positioned at the window that edged the front door and waved at them with an amused smile, causing them to titter with excitement.

The door opened abruptly and all three girls spilled out onto the front porch to meet him and he was immediately hit with a gush of excited questions.

  “Tim, is it true that you are here to speak with father?” Clara exclaimed, hugging his hand to her cheek. “We overheard father talking with Lizzie. You are going to be married? Yes?”

  “Are you going to be our new uncle?” Ruthie piped up, tugging at his coattail with chubby little hands and gazing up at him, all wide-blue eyes and bouncing-brown curls.

   “Not uncle Ruthie, brother in law. He will be our new brother,” Clara corrected her little sister patiently.

   “Should I go find Lizzie?” Esther offered. “She was out in the backyard last I saw her.”

   “No Esther, let's just let Lizzie be, for the time being. Could you announce me to your father though?” he asked, laughing as he disentangled himself from Clara and Ruthie’s grips and then he lifted Ruthie into his arms, “And please girls, let me speak with him alone for a moment, will you? Can you find him and then run along for just a bit? You will be the first I speak with—after Lizzie, of course. Can you do that for me?”

They all entered the house en masse and just within Tim placed Ruth upon her own two feet.  

“Of course Tim,” Clara assured him. “Come along girls, let’s go and call father. Tim you wait in the parlor.” She gestured to the room off the front hall and then with a blur of matching blue gingham and bouncy brown curls, the three scampered off in search of their father.