Once Again by Catherine Wallace Hope

Author:Catherine Wallace Hope
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

Chapter Twenty-Six

2:31 PM

Sunday, June 20, 2021 | Boulder Mountain Park

Erin saw nothing remarkable in either direction, just the wind moving through the fading grass of midsummer, typical mountain brush and rock. She’d stopped at twenty paces down the slope of the trail. To her right stood the half-circle of ponderosa pines. Young trees in pale new plumage, as yet unaffected by beetle kill. She checked her phone. 2:31. She braced herself for the cold, snowy afternoon ahead as she waited through the hot, dry, buzzing seconds until the time shift came.

The world slipped into a winter’s twilight. All of a sudden, the day was nearly gone. Erin’s mind took a second to catch up. Silvery-gray flakes surrounded her, and the ground was soft beneath the soles of her boots, where she stood in the cushion of a two-foot snowfall. It was dusk. Her heart geared higher.

She’d skipped hours.

The young trees stood in the unbroken stretch of white before her. Somewhere here was the spot where he had left her, would leave her before morning. She looked at the white hollow beneath the ponderosas. A confused rage rose inside her. How could he do that to her? Do what he did and then leave her out here? And how can this place look so ordinary? It should have looked like a shrine, but it was as plain as any other patch of snow in these hills.

She pushed her questions aside because now it was up to her to make sure none of that was going to happen. She focused on what she had to do next and scanned the terrain around her. The wind had let up, and the snowfall was diminishing. There were no signs that anyone else had been here, nothing unusual. Except that she’d been thrown back into the past again, but further forward in that past day, somehow.

She looked deep into the woods in the fading light. When she woke her phone, a red warning flashed that the battery was low. Between flashes, the time blinked white on the background image of Korrie’s face. 5:32. Moments ago, it had been mid-afternoon. Now suddenly, it was past sundown. How had she jumped so much in time?

The coroner’s voice dropped into her mind. At one point in the anarchy of those days after Korrie’s death, Rebecca Kincaid had said, “We think he had her ingest them three to four hours prior.” Now suddenly it was the window of time when Clype would give Korrie the pills.

Erin refused to let panic take over. She stomped through the drifts of snow to the roadway and stood at the edge. The wide tracks of a truck ran down the middle. Him? Her mind grappled with the thought. Were they from him? Was she in the right place? Maybe, but now she faced a deeper problem with time. The pills.

She turned toward the east because Tom Drake had hypothesized that Korrie’s body was placed near the trail as Clype left the abandoned road and headed back toward the major arteries into town.

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