Then they realized the sheriff was off guard, looking the other way. Dr. Cooper and Mac took full advantage of that and pounced on him.
They passed right through him, landing in the road on the other side. They scrambled to their feet again.
The sheriff spotted them on the other side of him and spun around, startled. He tried to aim his gun but fumbled it. It dropped from his hand.
Mac tried to catch it. His fist closed completely, grabbing nothing, and the gun fell to the ground, sinking until only part of the barrel was exposed.
Dr. Cooper tried a judo move to bring the sheriff down, but his arms passed through the sheriff's body as if the man were made of smoke. The sheriff swung at Dr. Cooper, but his fist and arm passed right through Dr. Cooper's body.
That was enough to make them both pause. They stood there, staring at each other.
“You're a ghost!” the sheriff exclaimed, looking Dr. Cooper up and down.
“So are you,” said Dr. Cooper, observing the transparent man standing before him.
“I can see right through you!”
Dr. Cooper nodded. “Same here.”
After several slippery attempts, Mac finally managed to pull the gun free from the ground. “Jake, check this out.” In a way, Mac was juggling as he brought the gun over: The gun, like the sheriff, was transparent. It sank through Mac's left hand and fell into his right, then sank through his right hand and fell into his left.
“What in the world . . . ?”
“Mass occupying space, but misplaced in the time dimension,” Mac mused. “Neither here nor there, but somewhere in between.”
Suddenly the gun fell into Mac's hand and stopped. It was solid again.
So was the sheriff. He looked around, aghast. “The town! It's gone!”
“And now . . . fully in the present!” Mac looked very closely at the sheriff, then, with a quiet, “May I?” touched him. “Yes. Spatially in the present . . . dimensionally in the past . . .”
“What are you saying, Mac?” Dr. Cooper asked.
Mac hesitated to answer. He asked, “Sheriff, I'm sorry for the confusion we're all experiencing here, but with your cooperation I think we can resolve it.”
The sheriff looked down at his gun in Mac's hand. “I guess I'm listening, professor.”
“Can you show us where you were when . . . when it got dark?”
The sheriff pointed. “Back there in those cliffs. There's a gap in there. I was chasing Annie Murphy.”
“Can you show us, please?”
The sheriff led them through the ruins of Bodine and up to the base of the cliff where he pointed out a narrow opening in the rock.
Dr. Cooper spotted the footprints of his children right away. “Jay and Lila came this way.”
“Who?” asked the sheriff.
“My children, a boy and a girl, fourteen and thirteen.”
The sheriff shook his head. “I haven't seen any kids, just Annie Murphy.”
“The footprints go in,” Dr. Cooper observed, “but they don't come out again.”
Dr. Cooper and Mac clicked on their flashlights. That startled the sheriff. “How do they do that? You have kerosene in there somewhere?”
Mac tried to explain. “It's electricity produced through a chemical reaction in disposable power cells . . .” But he could see the sheriff wasn't following him. “Uh, we'll explain it later.”
“Come on,” said Dr. Cooper. “Let's take a look.”
They ventured into the cliff, flashlight beams searching about, until they came to the narrow room some fifty feet inside.
“This is where I last saw her,” the sheriff explained. “She was standing right there. I tried to grab her, and the next thing I knew, it was dark and she was gone and so was the town, and there you two were.”
“Your footprints lead out, but they didn't lead in,” Mac observed.
Dr. Cooper spotted something in a corner and stooped to pick it up. It was his other camera, the one he'd sent Jay and Lila after. “They were here, all right.” He shined his light all around the room, trying to find any other passage they could have used. There was no other way out. He checked the camera. “Several shots have been taken. If the kids took pictures of what they saw . . .”
“There's a one-hour developing service back in town,” Mac said.
“Mac.” Dr. Cooper looked directly at Richard MacPherson. “Do you know where my kids are?”
Mac turned to the sheriff. “Sheriff, can you tell me today's date?”
“June eighth, 1885,” said the sheriff.
Mac nodded very somberly. “Yeah, I think I know where they are.”
D
eputy Erskine Hatch returned to the Crackerby Boardinghouse without finding the sheriff. “No sign of him. I found his tracks going into that old crack in the west cliff, but they went in there and just . . . well, that's as far as they went. He kind of disappeared after that.”
Mrs. Crackerby gasped. “What if Annie took him, pulled him straight down into hell?”
“Hardly,” Judge Crackerby scoffed.
“But I found two other sets of footprints coming back out of there,” the deputy added. “They were smaller. Maybe some kids were in there.”
Judge Crackerby's face brightened as wheels turned in his head. “Two children, you say?” He picked up a calico skirt from the coffee table and handed it to Hatch. “Two children were here only moments ago, and the girl was wearing this.”
Hatch stared at the skirt. “Uh . . . why isn't she wearing it now?”
Judge Crackerby exchanged a brief, knowing glance with his wife, who was still seated in the big chair looking pale. “She slipped out of it as she made her escape.”
“Escape?”
“They're strangers, Deputy, and clever practical jokers. I want them found and brought back here. The boy is around five-and-a-half feet tall with blond hair; the girl a little shorter and blond as well. They're both just entering adolescence and dressed strangely.”
That rang a bell in Hatch's memory. “Did the boy have a shirt advertising a Chicago livestock company?”
The judge raised an eyebrow. “So you've seen them?”
Hatch nodded. “Out on the street. They said they were new in town.”
The judge laughed derisively. “Well, I think they have an explanation for all this ghost business, and I'm going to get it out of them.”
Hatch examined the skirt. “Hmm. Still has the Bodine Mercantile's tag on it.”
“Stolen, no doubt.”
“I'll get to work on it.”
“Find those kids, Deputy!” The judge's eyes narrowed with menace. “And bring them to me!”
The kids had managed to slip unseen out of town, and now they were sneaking, stooping, and crawling up the hill toward the cemetery, the last place they'd seen their father.
“Ouch!” Lila plucked a cactus thorn from her hand. “I guess we're solid again.”
Jay raised his head just enough to see the town below. “Yeah, the town's solid too. Guess we're all the way into the past like before.”
“So what's happening to us?”
“Well, I think we're fading between the past and the present every time gravity gets wiggly.”
“So why can't we just stay in the present where we belong?”
“That's what we have to find out.”
They kept crouching until they were hidden from the town by the crest of the hill. Then they straightened up, confident they would not be seen. They found the cemetery, in much better shape now, with the headstones new and still standing. There were even flowers on some of the graves.
“Here it is,” said Lila.
She'd found the grave of Cyrus Murphy. It was still fresh, recently dug.
“Oh no . . .” said Jay.
Beside Cyrus's grave was another, more freshly dug: the grave of Annie Murphy.
“So she
is
dead,” said Lila. “Then how could we have seen her?”
Jay shook his head, totally perplexed. “It's this time warpy stuff, I guess. Everything's mixed up. But I wonder . . .” He stared at Annie's grave.
“What?”
“Why is her grave here in the past, but not in the present?”
“Maybe the marker got moved.”
“Maybe.”
They looked toward the cliff to the south. They knew just where to find the image of the weeping woman, but . . .
“Can you see it?” Lila asked.
Jay squinted, closed one eye, and tried to retrace all the landmarks he could recognize, but the image wasn't there. He shook his head. “If it was a natural formation, you'd think it would still be there.”
“So somebody carved it, all right.”
“Which means it hasn't been done yet.”
Lila recalled, “Professor MacPherson said Annie Murphy was a wood and stone carver. She could have done it . . .”
“But it's not there yet, and she's dead.”
Lila's face sank. “Oh yeah . . .”
Jay thought a moment. “But what ifâlet's just try this a minuteâwhat if Annie isn't dead? I mean, Mrs. Crackerby and the gardener both saw her and thought she was a ghost. But like we just found out, when this time thing gets stirred up and we fade between the past and the present,
everything
looks ghostly to us.”
Lila nodded, turning it over in her mind. “And we must look like ghosts to them. We scared Mrs. Crackerby pretty good.”
“So it goes both ways.”
“Well, we know we're not ghosts. If we were really dead, we'd be in heaven with the Lord right now, not stumbling around in the past trying to figure out what happened.”
“So what does that say about Annie Murphy? She looked like a ghost when we saw her, and she must have looked like a ghost to those other people. But she doesn't have to be dead to do that. Maybe she's alive and tangled up in all this time business just like we are.”
Lila's eyes brightened. “And maybe she's the one who got us tangled up in it. It all started when she ran into us.” Then her face fell again. “So why is her grave here?”
“I think there are some missing pieces to this puzzle that we need to find out.” Jay was already laying plans. “What did Mrs. Crackerby say? Something about Annie being up in her old room?”
“Up in her and Cyrus's old room, looking out the window.” She snapped her fingers. “And remember what Professor MacPherson said? He said Annie shot her husband in the bedroom of a boardinghouse!”
“Let's go have a look.”
The Crackerby Boardinghouse had a back door that opened into a rear hallway. The door was unlocked for the benefit of boarders who came and went, and the kids timed it pretty well: They could hear Eloise working in the kitchen and the Crackerbys talking in some closed room somewhere. But nobody was around to see them enter and sneak up the back stairway.
Upstairs they found a long, beautifully woodworked hallway with a thick carpet to muffle their footsteps. The trick now was to find the room Annie and Cyrus had rented. The first door they came to opened on a broom closet. The second was locked and so was the third. The fourth was ajar, and they took a peek inside.
It was a spacious, airy room with a large, four-poster bed and a lacy-curtained window. There was a beautiful, claw-footed dresser in the corner that made Lila breathe a slow gasp of admiration. But it was the object sitting on top of the dresser that drew them farther into the room.
It was a wood carving of an old miner in a droopy hat smoking a pipe while sitting on a keg of blasting powder. The humor of the piece was easy to see and chuckle about. The artistic skill was so impressive that Jay and Lila just stood there a moment admiring it, hesitant to touch it.
Finally, with the utmost care and respect, Jay rotated the carving, then lifted it, looking for the signature of the artist. He finally found a name crudely carved on the bottom: A. Murphy, 4 â¢18â¢85.
There were other carvings in the room, just as beautifully done: a cowboy on a bucking horse, a mother and her daughter all dressed up for church, and a bust of . . .
“Cyrus!” Lila exclaimed, recognizing the face from the old photograph.
“This is it,” Jay said. “This was their room. Mrs. Crackerby must have left everything just the way it was.”
“Maybe because she feels guilty,” Lila theorized. “She wants to appease Annie's ghost.” She carefully studied the carving of Cyrus Murphy, noting the toolwork, the technique. “What do you think, Jay? Recognize the style?”
He nodded. “Annie did that carving in the cliff. It had to be her.” Then he frowned. “But
how
?”
“It must have something to do with being a ghost,” Lila quipped.
Jay felt unsteady on his feet. “Whoa, careful . . .”
“Oh-oh!”
They both knew what was happening. Gravity was having another hiccup.
And they were on the second floor!
“Let's get out of here!” Jay said, and they bolted for the door.
Too late. Their feet sank right through the dissolving floor, and they dropped into the room below, settling slowly like leaves falling from a tree.
Unfortunately, the room below happened to be Judge Crackerby's office, and the Crackerbys happened to be there. They were standing at the window, their backs to the room, having a hushed conversation as Jay floated down from the ceiling. He could see he was heading for a big splash in the middle of Judge Crackerby's desk, something that would be hard to do quietly.
But there was no need to worry. As he put out his arms to break his fall, his hands passed right through the judge's important papers. He belly flopped into the desk and kept right on falling. When he finally came to rest on solidâwhich meant, present-dayâ ground, the terrain had changed a bit. Apparently the rubble of the house's ruins had filled in what used to be the crawl space under the house. Jay couldn't hide under the floor; he found himself only two inches deep in it, barely hidden under Judge Crackerby's desk.