Chapter 12

After things settled down, Jim and Blair headed up into the hills to meet Miss Jeanne Wallace. She was the only one who might have the answers they were looking for.

Coming out of The Whirl was easier than they'd feared. Once their initial panic had subsided--and wasn't it more frightening when you knew what was going to happen beforehand--the ride quickly smoothed out.

Jim had kissed Blair, who had grinned back at his lover. A few, easy strokes with the oars had them exiting the original entrance and they were back where they'd started--at the Roaring River State Park.

The crowd of visitors was mostly the same size. Head Ranger, Mark Davis, had still been standing to one side and was more than a little surprised to see them.

"That was fast," Davis said with a frown.

"Fast?" Jim glanced around. "How long were we gone?" he queried.

He raised up his wrist and tilted his watch to get the glare of the sun off the dial. "A little over 30 minutes."

"Thirty..." Jim ground to a halt. How were they going to explain things? Had they just imagined it all?


"Where'd you get the raft?" Davis asked, a frown puckering his forehead.

“Come on in boys,” a voice called out from inside the dilapidated cabin. A white-haired old woman’s face appeared in the doorway. She narrowed her vivid green eyes at them and then smiled. “It certainly took you long enough to come see me,” she castigated them.

Her voice, unlike her appearance was young and strong sounding. To look at Jeanne you would think that a strong, no, make that, light puff of wind would knock her over. That is, until you looked into her eyes. In her eyes, you could see the virile spirit still residing there.

“On second thought, have a seat, young’uns,” she stepped out of the cabin and gestured to the bench beside the old oak tree in her front yard. The old woman sat down in the ancient rocking chair directly in front of the bench and waited, none-too-patiently, for them to join her. There was really no doubt that they would sit by her, no one ever had.

“So, what can I do for you boys?”

Jim hesitated. Even after all they had seen and been through, the by-the-book ex-ranger hesitated to make himself look foolish. And talking about alternate worlds where people lived virtually forever was the ultimate in foolishness.

“We wanted to know about the strange place we visited.” Blair didn’t have as many hang ups as Jim did. He’d been ridiculed about his search for a Sentinel since Blair was a pre-teenager, so this new inquiry held no worries for him.

“Uhmmm,” she agreed with a hum. “And where would that be?” Her eyes twinkled with suppressed mirth.

Blair smiled back. “On the other side of the whirlpool.”

“What about it?” It seemed to make her happy, asking questions instead of giving answers.

“Was it real or did we hallucinate it all? I mean, wow, I remember all of the friends we made. There were so many people who looked like friends here, but they were completely different,” Blair gushed enthusiastically. “It was really cool and when we appeared back here we had on different clothes and our raft was brand new, but we’d only been gone 30 minutes, so there’s no way it could have happened any other way. Right?”

The old woman gave the two men in front of her a long, hard stare. Blair looked so optimistically hopeful and Jim so resigned to disappointment.

“You were hurt when you came here, weren’t you?” Blair nodded, unthinkingly touching his elbow. She nodded at the gesture. “And you aren’t hurt now, well, not much anyways.” She chuckled. “It’d be kinda hard to get all fixed up in half an hour…wouldn’t it?”

Neither man seemed to think it odd that she knew all about Blair’s injuries. It felt natural that she would be omniscient.

“Cool,” Blair said with a bounce. “But what about the monster we saw, Tin Lizzie?”

She gave them an enigmatic smile, but refused to elaborate any more. The two of them, mostly Blair, peppered her with more questions, but only got more of that almost-wicked smile. When Jim and Blair left they were…more hopeful.

Jeanne waited until they were long out of sight and she was entirely certain that she was alone, before getting up. Walking slowly around to the back of her cabin, the elderly lady came upon a small stream. She took a ribbon out of her pocket, shook it vigorously to straighten it out, and pulled her hair back into a ponytail.

She didn’t look quite as old now.

Kicking her shoes off, she minced along on the rocks and stepped into the cool water. With a sigh, Jeanne went out into the middle of the creek bed…and stepped into a large hole.

She promptly disappeared.

A few minutes later, a wet, sleek head popped up inside the cave at the park. Although everyone knew that Miss Wallace lived on the edge of the Roaring River Park, no one else realized that there was a fissure that connected the little creek behind her house and the large cavern. It was all part of the intricate system of caves that ran underneath that area.

Jeanne smiled and in the faint, flickering light coming in from fissures overhead, she didn’t look old at all. In fact, she looked like a young woman. She was Illiahanna, the red-headed young woman who had “found” Jim and Blair after they’d been raft wrecked.

Taking a deep breath, she dove back under the water and began to swim around. For several, long minutes there was silence in the cavern. The young/old woman was gone for so long that the surface of the water calmed down to where there were only slight ripples, indicating that someone was moving underneath.

Suddenly, another head burst through the water. A very large head—one that might be said to resemble the pictures of the Loch Ness monster. The eyes opened and they were vivid green.

"Tin Lizzie…” The head tilted to one side as Jeanne pondered. “You know, I don't particularly care for that nickname," she said with a toothy smile.


The End