CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

 

 

July 15th, 2016

Above the ghost town of Silver City, Idaho

 

KELLI AND JESSE and Bonnie and Dawn were all sitting in Bonnie’s big kitchen in Boise waiting. Madison and Duster had left yesterday for Silver City to pull the plug on this trip into the past.

April and Ryan were in their home waiting in their kitchen.

For the past hour, she and Jesse had their saddlebags on their laps with her notebooks, his research stuff on past crimes, and the hidden Season Medals.

Not a person had asked what they had done with them.

And they had told no one about Bushnell being a traveler or that they had met a traveler from a far distant future.

Bonnie and Duster knew the plan for the medals being under Janice and Steven’s general store. That was fine for now.

No one else needed to know the rest of the details.

One thing for certain, there was nothing about the Season Medals that had been boring.

And because of them, she had met the love of her life.

Bonnie and Duster’s big mansion around them was dark and closed up. Horses were all sold off and a caretaker had been hired to watch the house and clean a few times a week.

Dawn and Madison were planning on coming back to this point in time in this timeline in a month, so their house was closed up, but not as tightly as this house. Kelli wasn’t sure how that would work, but Bonnie assured her it would.

Dawn and Madison wanted to spend more of a lifetime in the lodge. Then they would return and join the others for lunch in the mine.

Kelli was once again having trouble understanding that she and Jesse had spent all this time, these years, in the past and only just over two minutes had really elapsed. And Dawn and Madison could come back and spend another forty or fifty years and for them only another two minutes would pass.

The idea of it all just made her mind go numb.

She wasn’t sure if she would ever get used to the idea. But she certainly planned on taking advantage of it many, many times.

Bonnie glanced at her gold pocket watch and tucked it back in her pocket. “It’s nine a.m. They should be in the mine by now. Everyone get ready.”

Kelli put her saddlebag over her shoulder at the same time as Jesse did.

Bonnie and Dawn also put saddlebags over their shoulders, holding onto them with one hand.

A moment later they were all standing with one hand on the wooden box in the crystal cavern.

Eight of them were crowded around the wooden box on the table. Bonnie and Duster and Ryan and April and Madison had left years earlier, but they had all come back together.

“Well, that was an interesting two minutes,” Duster said, stepping back out of the crowd as Madison put on a glove and only unhooked one wire from the machine, leaving the wires connected to the same crystal.

“I got the men’s shower first,” Duster said. He turned with a saddlebag over his shoulder and headed for the open door to the supply cavern.

Kelli had stepped back and just stared at the huge place. The beauty of the billions of crystals was almost too much for her mind to grasp.

“You all mind if I take the women’s shower?” Madison said after kissing Dawn. “Long dusty ride.”

“Be our guest,” Bonnie said.

Kelli just kept staring at the intense beauty of the crystal cavern towering over them.

Jesse was standing beside her and he reached over and took her hand.

“It’s real,” he said.

She nodded, just staring around at the billions of crystals and how the cavern seemed to disappear off into the distance.

“And only just over two minutes passed in all that time we spent back there,” Kelli said.

Jesse laughed. “I don’t think we spent it. As far as I’m concerned, we enjoyed it.”

She looked up into his handsome smiling face and squeezed his hand. “I agree and stand corrected.”

With that, they turned for the supply cavern following Dawn and Bonnie and April and Ryan.

At the door, Jesse pointed to the few hundred crystals stacked and glowing beside the door where the door had been cut into the cavern.

Kelli nodded. “It seems we have work to do right here in this timeline, don’t we?”

“That we do,” Jesse said.

They went to one of the big tables and worked at changing clothes into the modern clothes it seemed like they hadn’t worn in a very long time. To Kelli, the jeans and blouse felt normal, but the tennis shoes just felt strange after years of women’s shoes in the past and cowboy boots.

They were the last ones in the cavern when they moved all the medals to one saddlebag.

Kelli nodded to him and he smiled.

She was so thankful they were doing this.

“I want you with me when I hide these,” Jesse said.

Kelli glanced up at him. “What are you worried about?”

“Because if anything ever happened to me, these medals are far, far too valuable to be lost again.

She kissed him and he put the bag on the ground under one table.

Then the two of them headed for the kitchen area, arm-in-arm.