What the Moon Saw Read online

  Despite his restlessness, she enjoyed listening to him talk, like always. His voice was smooth and deep, like James Earl Jones, yet his words always settled over her softly, like snow touching down. Furthermore, the way he looked at her with those chocolate-colored eyes—such adoration and appreciation. All of him, his whole package, struck her again as familiar, as though she had known him for years. Wasn’t that a sign of a poetic gravitation, a promising match, perhaps even destiny?

  Sometime between the appetizer and the soup, he checked his watch again. Libby was about to question him on it when he reached across the table seeking her hand. His hands were strong and uncalloused, and she anticipated him squeezing and letting go, but instead he gripped securely. Their gazes locked. He swallowed. “Libby, you are so beautiful. You must know that I’ve fallen in love with you...”

  The tone in his voice suggested something elemental was forthcoming. With a start, she drew in a nervous breath and straightened her shoulders. Her senses blocked out the mingled smells and the murmur of conversations that lingered around them.

  He swallowed again. “...but, I’m not who you think I am.”

  And there it was. A whisper of dread unfurled in her stomach. Her mouth opened, posing the retort, “I knew this was too good to be true.” But she remained quiet, remembering her agent training: Don’t assume. Don’t jump to conclusions.

  Still, her mind raced as she studied him, trying to gauge his sincerity and the direction of the conversation. Nothing in his carriage or disposition appeared false or untoward.

  No, he hadn’t toyed with her this past month. His pleasure in their time together was too genuine. Then again, he was an agent. Like her. He could hide his true self when necessary. She assessed his face, hoping to read signs of teasing.

  None.

  With dismay, she slumped in her chair, and parked the soup spoon in her free hand onto the saucer. She was on a runaway train with no perceptible way to get off. She had to follow this rocky ride of a conversation to its inevitable, probably hurtful, collision.

  She started to pull her hand from his clasp, but he clutched tighter.

  “What? You’re not Andrew Grey? Not a computer forensics expert? What is it?” The clipped questions hurled from her like flying bullets.

  He cringed. “No, I am all that. I—”

  Frustration got the better of her and she rushed ahead, seeking the damaging facts. “Married? Bisexual? Transvestite? Which is it?”

  Andrew’s head jolted back like he had been struck. “No, none of that. Let me explain.” He leaned forward again, a dark curl falling carelessly over his forehead. He spoke slowly, as though choosing his words with care. “I told you I was forty. That’s true. I have lived forty years, but ...” He hesitated and his gaze intensified. “I wasn’t born forty years ago.”

  “So...when?”

  He shrugged a stalky shoulder. “Add a century...or two.”

  Libby blinked as a warning bell tolled in the deep recesses of her mind. Insanity? A fountain of youth? Perhaps he’d been unknowingly hypnotized on assignment? Yes, that was it. Should she extract herself from this madman, bolt, and run while she still could? She dismissed the questions as absurd.

  “Go on,” she whispered, dread blossoming into extreme foreboding in the pit of her stomach.

  He thrust a frustrated hand through his curls. “I’m not explaining myself well. I’ve rehearsed this for months but—”

  “Months? We just met four weeks ago. What are you talking about?” This time she did jerk her hand free. Who was this crazed man and what kind of a ruse was he pulling?

  “Okay, I’ll say this quickly. Hear me through, Libby, I beg you. Then I can answer your questions.”

  The back of her neck prickled, but she bit back a rebuke and swept an impatient hand for him to proceed.

  “I am Andrew Grey and I was born...well, a long time ago. When doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I began to feel ill several years ago. In another time. At first it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle, but I kept deteriorating. At times I could barely walk. The pain was unbearable. I tried doctor after doctor. Nothing helped—”

  He broke off as a waiter arrived to top off their water glasses, unknowingly adding to the stiltedness that already lay between them.

  Andrew watched him leave before gazing back at her. “Finally, I sought the medicinal benefits of mineral water.”

  “Water?”

  “At a place called Bedford Springs. Previously, I’d only vacationed there, but for the first time, I paid heed to the medicinal reputation of the water.”

  “Water?” she repeated, this time with a mixture of irritation and sarcasm in her voice.

  Andrew continued nonplussed. “After taking the water a few times, I showed improvement, but each time, in quick manner, my symptoms returned—”

  He’d hit her limit. “This is crazy. Do you expect me to—”

  “Libby, please.” His tone grew hard. “Listen. It’s important.”

  She studied him, before bobbing her head in defeat.

  “One night, summer solstice, I was in severe pain. Half out of my mind. I decided death would be more welcome. But first I wanted to give the water one last effort. I waited until dark. Around midnight, I hurried to one of the springs. The Crystal Spring. In desperation I immersed myself in the water. It was frigid cold but I decided I was going to either die there that night, or leave a restored man.”

  Despite her internal BS meter pinging loudly, Libby found herself leaning in and asking, “What happened?”

  “I left the next morning. Cured. But I walked into the year 2022.”

  He stopped and studied her, giving her time to adjust to this latest bombshell.

  She tried to flat-line her voice, but failed. “You’re saying you time-traveled into 2022, a year that, by the way, hasn’t even happened yet.” By the time she was done with her retort, she was practically hissing the final word. She exhaled a shaky breath, “You do realize how absurd this sounds? How old are you anyway? And how—”

  “I’ll answer your questions later.” He looked at his watch and his dark brows came together in a grim line, alarm etching his face. “Right now I have to tell you certain things before 9:26, and it’s 9:12 right now.” His voice rang with a maddening resolve that startled her.

  “Andrew, you’re scaring me.” She thumped both hands flat on the table. “What...” she lowered her voice, “...is going to happen at 9:26?”

  He leaned forward again. “There’s going to be a car accident. Directly outside this door. Senator Woodbine. His driver will lose his right leg. The senator will be hospitalized in intensive care overnight. Tomorrow, at 7:21 a.m., he will die.”

  Libby’s face locked in a stare. Her lips parted but she could not find words. After a moment, she lifted a shaky hand to cover her mouth, an unconscious reminder that she had control of something, or to cover the scream within. Perhaps both.

  He continued, speaking hurriedly. “I know this because in 2022, I downloaded databanks of key events. International. Domestic. Even developments about agents within the bureau. I have them for each year for a couple dozen years. Back to when computers were first refined. I was determined to return. To go back in time...back closer to my own time, and I thought I might need proof along the way. At the next equinox—”

  “I thought you said solstice.”

  “I did. Solstice, equinox, both seem to work. They’re both astronomical events and tied to the seasons of the year.”

  “So you’re saying, four times per year this can be done?”

  “Solstices are the longest and shortest days of the year, and on equinox, night and day are about the same length.” He looked at his pocket watch again. “Some cultures believe it’s when mystical things occur. When the visible and invisible worlds overlap. Indian lure says this is when the past and present collide.” He swiped an agitated hand across his chin. “It’s pure nonsense, of course. But Libby, the influence of
the water is not. I experienced all the power of nature pouring forth into the spring at that time.”

  She recalled her aunt Isabel being preoccupied with the changes of the seasons and the rhythms of the universe. Libby had never paid it much attention. Impatience brewing, she said, “So what about the next equinox? What happened?”

  “I tried, but it only took me back to 2020. However, I learned several things. One is that anything tangible from the future can’t be carried into the past. But, anything stored in cyberspace can still be accessed because it’s not real. Do you understand? It’s digital. I had figured out how to store and retrieve information from the future. Eventually, I tried again and I ended up here, in 2016. I accessed that databank from the future, and from it I know that there’s going to be a crash any moment.”

  “If that’s true then we’ve got to stop it.” Libby stood, tossing her napkin on the table. With that chivalric reflex of his, Andrew leaped to his feet also, cringing, and she wondered if his look of annoyance was at her or that right ‘trick knee’ he complained about from time to time. He grabbed her arm and pulled her eye to eye.

  “No, Libby. You can’t. You mustn’t interfere.”

  She yanked her head back in defiance. “That’s ridiculous. A man is going to die and you’re going to sit there? Why wouldn’t we stop a tragedy if we can?”

  His gaze darted around them. “Please lower your voice.” He pulled her down, back into her seat. “We can’t do anything because we can’t use our knowledge to change history.”

  “But—”

  “We can’t play master of the universe. Besides, if you save Senator Woodbine, then you’ll prevent his successor from taking the position. A position, I might add, that lands him on a senate select committee that leads to his work with the Food and Drug Administration in the Department of Health and Human Services. That effort, in turn, ushers in a new drug that saves the lives of tens of thousands of women suffering from a rare form of uterine cancer.”

  Libby looked at him, flabbergasted. A taut silence fell as she wrapped her arms in an embrace against a sudden chill and turned her head to eye the front door. She imagined herself running through it, across the sidewalk, and into the street. She’d beg someone in a car to block the road. Or, she would create a commotion that would cause the vehicles to slow down to avoid hitting her. But, the faces of tens of thousands of women saved from cancer came to mind and turned on her, shaking their heads as though they knew she could have done something to help them.

  “Why...” Her voice was hoarse, so she took a hurried sip of water and tried again. “Why are you telling me this? Why now?”

  Andrew reached for her hand. “Because you need to understand that I know what is going to happen.” His words came out harsh, urgent, and he inched closer. “Libby, babe, you are going to die in a couple weeks. It’s in the databank. An inoperable brain tumor. And there’s nothing I nor any doctor can do to stop it. Not in this medical age or even into the foreseeable future.”

  Stunned, Libby stared at him, a chill roaring through her. No words would come.

  He fidgeted in his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and began fumbling through it. “I have that card somewhere,” he muttered sotto voce. “Yes. Here it is. Dr. Kuzmich.” He tucked it into the clutch purse she’d left lying on the table. “He’s helped the bureau on several cases. Has security clearance. He’ll see you on short notice. Or, use your own doctor. Just have it verified. Please.”

  Libby whimpered and sucked in her breath, but he continued, rushing his words and grabbing both her hands again as if in a vice grip. “Summer solstice is Monday. It will be our last chance to save you. You can take medical treatments and hope for the best for the next couple weeks or you can journey in a few days to a new beginning with the help of the water. Libby, I want to give you a new life. But I promise, I won’t give up until I travel in time to be with you.”

  An unmistakable hint of foreboding and certainty had crawled into his voice, a sense of someone who had seen life unfold in a crystal ball. He struck Libby as desperate, unhinged. She was shocked into momentary silence.

  Before she could respond or even think about an exit strategy to get away from this madman, the sound of tires screeching on pavement drowned out the classic tunes on the restaurant’s sound system, followed by a stomach-churning crunch of metal on metal. Andrew released her hand.

  Around them, patrons screamed and hurried to the front window, many spilling into the street, but all Libby could do was sit frozen in her seat, stunned. It would be several minutes before she realized she had grabbed Andrew’s forearm in a white-knuckle grip. The commotion continued around them. Sirens wailed, EMTs arrived, and people screamed “Woodbine” into their cell phones, but Andrew and Libby sat still, their gazes locked, as though in an ulterior dimension.

  Then, the revulsion and the horror and the food in her stomach mixed and swirled at such a rate that she grabbed her purse and dashed to the ladies room.

  Chapter Three

  September 1769

  The thicket where Nathan McKenzie crouched was damp from dew and pocked with brambles. His muscles twitched for movement. But, he followed the orders: Be still. Wait for the signal. It was imperative if they wanted to work united to seize the garrison and free their compatriots.

  Others waited too—farmers, homesteaders, restless explorers like him—spread out in a long line west of the Juniata River in the Western Territory of Pennsylvania, in a strategic gap in the mountains called “the narrows.” Each sported a long rifle, shirts swathed around the locks to prevent mist from dampening the priming.

  To the east, the dawning September sun cast stretched shadows along the ridge and, a quarter mile in the distance, on their target: Fort Bedford.

  From behind the copse of trees and piles of underbrush, Nathan listened. The slightest of breezes wafted through the Alleghany Mountains causing the tops of the timbers to moan with the voices of ghosts who dwelled there, urging him to avenge their deaths.

  He shook his head to dismiss the thought, and lifted one hand off his long rifle to brush it over his face and hair, scrubbing a new focus into place. The effort loosened a few tendrils of his shoulder-length hair from the leather strap that held it out of his way. Like the Indians and the other colonists, he had no patience for the ridiculous powdered wigs the British sported.

  When he pulled his hand back, he noticed several things in the dim light. First, were the callouses that had made Anabelle, his ex-fiancé, grimace. Rough, hardened skin from a lengthy familiarity with wooden plow handles, hewing axes, and the coarse iron grips of hoes that were necessary on a backwoods farm. But it was what he saw between the creases of toughened skin that captured his thoughts anew—smudges of the black grease and red paint that covered his face.

  Anabelle had scowled when she’d seen him. He thought now, with dismay, of the conversation they exchanged the evening before. She’d walked to the log cabin he shared with his family, several hours after supper, bringing apples her father harvested from their small orchard. She would exchange them with Nathan’s mother for one of the quail his brother shot that afternoon or perhaps some of the hominy his sister pounded in the stump mortar.

  She shouldn’t visit like that. She had to know it was awkward now. He had courted her. Even proposed. In the end, she agreed to wed a British officer. A safer, more reliable option. One that would provide a future and stability unlike Nathan could provide. Once she’d heard that arrogant British soldier, Richard Wallace, talk about the opulence of London—gowns the ladies wore, china for dining, carriages that sported them about town—she’d decided she wouldn’t settle for anything less refined than one of the more civilized tidewater villages of Baltimore or Philadelphia. She certainly didn’t want a life here in the hard-scrapple western frontier.

  No, truth is, she hadn’t used any of those words. She’d been kinder when she’d told him she accepted Wallace’s proposal. But, that’s what Nathan had inferred, and in
the end, it amounted to the same thing.

  “Nathan, no!” she had scolded him mere hours ago when he opened his family’s cabin door and she saw him dressed in scant Indian buckskin clothes and moccasin boots, his face and arms blackened with soot. “Not again with this foolishness.”

  He hadn’t known she was outside. He would have exited out the back to avoid her seeing him like that.

  Nathan shut the hand-hewn door behind him, hurried across the splintered porch and stepped over the grain sacks they’d placed there in case of rain, then jumped to the ground to stand beside her. She was a half-foot shorter than him and smelled of flour and butter. He imagined her humming as she baked an apple pie, and the pleasant thought annoyed him.

  “Anabelle, you shouldn’t be out alone. Do you have a weapon?”

  “Of course not. Why would—”

  “I can’t talk now.” He draped the leather strap of his rifle over his head and shoulders, then bent to retrieve the knife he had tucked into his knee-high wrapped moccasins. He handed it to her. “Carry it at the ready. Now, go home. Forget you saw me.” He brushed past her.

  She reached out and touched his arm to stop him. A wave of longing rolled over him at the sensation of her touch. He turned to her.

  Taking his hand, she turned it over, and returned the knife to his palm. “I don’t need it.”

  “Anabelle—”

  “You’re determined to get those boys out, aren’t you? Why can’t you let it alone before someone else gets killed?”

  His stomach clenched and he returned the knife to his moccasin boot. By “someone” did she mean the British? In particular, her betrothed? Or, her own kinsmen, the colonists? Two of her cousins were being held. Like him, they were part of the settler movement known as the Black Boys, so-called because they blackened their faces when they took action, rebelling against British policy regarding Indians. The settlers wanted to live in peace with the natives, but the British were intent on allowing tradesmen to sell arms and ammunitions to the Indians and inciting them to kill. It was nothing more than licensed murder.