“You know, writing a feature story forAdventure Escape Magazine. That’s big doings for Sparkledove.”
Goldie wrinkled her brow and looked at him.
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
“You’re Miss Maraschino, right? Like the cherry?”
“Yeah?”
“So, you’re the writer withAdventure Escape Magazine.” He glanced at her. “I mean, thatisright, isn’t it?”
Goldie tossed her hands up slightly. “Why not?”
They were quiet for another few moments until they pulled up to the paved sidewalk in front of the hotel and came to a stop. The officer put the car in park and turned to her.
“Look, you seem to have other things on your mind. Maybe it’s none of my business, but if you want to talk about it, I’m a pretty good listener.” He extended his hand. “Name’s Eli Johnson. I’m the sheriff here, but don’t be too impressed. I’m the entire police force, and I don’t think anyone else in town wanted the job.”
Goldie took his hand and shook it half-heartedly, but she was really paying attention to something else. Down a side street off the main thoroughfare, she saw a bus from the Rocky Mountain Bus Company idling on the side of the road.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Bus to Denver,” Sheriff Johnson replied. “Comes in twice a day and sits there for twenty minutes waiting to take on passengers. Once in the morning and once in the late afternoon.”
“Denver? How far is Denver?”
“About thirty-five miles.” He looked at her, puzzled. “D-didn’t you come in from Denver on yesterday afternoon’s bus? I mean, that’s what Maddie told me.”
Making a decision, Goldie opened the passenger side door. “Thanks for the lift,” she said, getting out.
She shut the car door and hurried into the hotel, leaving an intrigued and slightly confused Sheriff Johnson sitting in his car.
“Okay then…” he said acceptingly to no one. He put two fingers on the side of his forehead and saluted in Goldie’s direction. “See ya.”
Three
DENVER
Although she couldn’t explain what was going on, Goldie wasn’t accepting it, either. At this early hour in the day, she would’ve preferred to have awakened in a hospital room, pumped up on drugs and incapacitated. At least that was logical. Expected. What was happening now was too strange. Too weird. She got it in her head that if she could just get out of this small town called Sparkledove, everything would somehow be rectified. She was still clinging to the belief that the community had to be a living history town like Colonial Williamsburg. If that were the case, the sooner she got out of town, the sooner a more reasonable explanation would be revealed.
“Everything alright, Miss Maraschino?” Maddie called out as Goldie hurried through the lobby. “I hope you’re not upset that I phoned Sheriff Johnson. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Goldie ignored the explanation and hurried up the stairs, remembering that when she left her room, she hadn’t even thought to look for a room key or lock her door. But she needn’t have worried. When she tried her door, she discovered it was unlocked, and everything inside was just as she had left it. Apparently, Sparkledove was a place of low crime.
Seeing the purse sitting on the overcoat that had been placed on the seat of the chair by the desk, she shut her door, went over to it, and opened it. Inside, she found her room key, plane tickets, sixty dollars and twenty-two cents in cash, and several business cards that read: Karen Maraschino, Senior Writer,Adventure Escape Magazinewith a Columbus, Ohio address.
“Columbus?” she said to herself, looking at the cards. “I don’t know anyone in Columbus. I’ve never been to Ohio. I’ve never even liked that song by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. And why a writer?”
Goldie never had any aspirations to be a journalist, although she enjoyed writing in her diaries. She started when she was twelve, and it was a leftover habit from her pre-teen days. Digging deeper into the purse, she found an operator’s license for a car that required no picture, a compact, lipstick, hairbrush, bobby pins, several folded-up Kleenex, and a small notebook with two sharpened pencils.
She looked at the plastic case sitting on top of her narrow table that was serving as a desk. Opening it, she found a Remington Envoy portable typewriter with fifteen pieces of carbon-backed typing paper inside.
“This just makes no damn sense,” she sighed.
Leaving her suitcase and typewriter behind, she put on her overcoat, grabbed her purse, then left her room, locking the door with her room key. Going back downstairs and through the lobby, she saw that Maddie was behind the counter talking to another customer, so she hurried out the front door, hoping her departure wouldn’t be noticed.
The bus was still idling, waiting to take on any passengers. It was dark red with white mountains painted on the side, and like everything else in town, it was vintage. Goldie paid the driver one dollar for her fare. The bus left promptly at 9:10 a.m., and there were only four other passengers on board. She breathed a sigh of relief when the vehicle turned onto Highway 70 heading east, but if she hoped to literally drive out of November 1942 and back into the present, it wasn’t happening. The highway was a two-lane, and she saw one old car after another drive past, going in the opposite direction. It was too many vehicles to be part of some theme town. Then there were the houses, stores, and occasional billboards she passed. Everything was consistent. Everything was from the 1940s or earlier. Goldie’s arms bristled with another wave of goose bumps, and she fought back tears as she realized that somehow, through some unexplained phenomenon, she’d been transported back in time. Even when the Denver skyline came into view, there were no sprawling traffic cloverleafs, cell phone towers, and the skyscrapers weren’t much taller than ten stories. It was a totally dated world filled with painted signs on the side of barns for Nehi Soda Pop and Barbasol Shaving Cream.
The interior of the Denver bus terminal was a flurry of activity. When Goldie came through the arrival door, people were coming and going for the holiday. Men wore suits and ties, women wore dresses, and soldiers on leave were in dress uniforms. Everyone wore or carried a winter coat. The place was large and spacious. It had a twenty-foot-high ceiling with big circular light fixtures hanging down on metal poles, and there were several sets of wooden benches where six people could sit facing one direction, while six more seated behind them could sit facing another. The place was upscale and cosmopolitan, and strikingly different from the seedier bus stations of the current day. It was also smoky. Cigarette smoke drifted high in the air throughout the place as people puffed away on Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields. Over by the double front doors, she saw a wooden scaffolding where two painters were starting to paint with five-gallon buckets of light-orange paint.
