~ Glimpse Of Never Ending Love ~

by

Evanell

"So, who are you?" he asked to humor her. "If you’re not Kacy Rose?

"I was born in England, in Kent, a very long time ago, and my parents christened me Catharine Paice."

"How long ago?" Would she claim she’d been born the same year as Kacy? He didn’t know why he wondered that. The ripe old age of twenty-one, going on twenty-two wasn’t all that long ago.

"Do you truly wish to know?"

"Sure."

"In 1837."

Shock was Tyler’s first reaction. Disbelief came next, then anxiety. She’d flipped, toppled over the brink of sanity. She was nuts, possibly certifiable.

"Kacy--Catharine, I’m Tyler, your friend. Remember? Don’t make up stories. I want the truth."

"But what I just told you is the truth. Two years ago Kacy traveled back to the year eighteen fifty-four with her guardian angel. That’s where I met her. The angel brought me to this century because I didn’t wish to live in the nineteenth any longer, and Jennifer agreed to help me learn how to live in this time so Kacy could go back."

Ty jumped to his feet, rammed his hand through his hair, and started to pace. "This nonsense has gone far enough. Tell me..."

"Pardon me, please, for rudely interrupting." She clasped her hands together, and frowned up at him. "Would you please sit down?"

Ty stopped pacing and searched her eyes. "This is ridiculous."

She shook her head. "Tis not. My real name is Catharine Paice. Not Kacy. Nor Kathryn Cassandra Rose. And I have more to say. About Jennifer."

As an attorney Ty was trained to read people, and he knew she wasn’t faking. This was no joke. She was in dead earnest. He sat down, not as close as earlier. "What about Jennifer?"

"Please brace yourself. What I have to say may come as a bit of a shock."

"I’m ready."

"She isn’t dead."

Ty wasn’t ready. Not to hear that.

"Of course she is. We buried her ten days ago. You attended the funeral. Have you forgotten?"

"No. But I knew she wasn’t Jennifer before the funeral. I didn’t know whether to tell you or leave it be after the automobile accident. Then Jennifer returned, and I left the matter in her hands."

"What?" Ty jumped back up to his feet. "How can somebody return from the dead?"

Catharine, who was beginning to seem more like a stranger with each passing second, shook her head again. "Jennifer didn’t return from the dead. The girl who died, the girl you and your parents buried, was someone else. Her name was Miranda. She assumed Jennifer’s identity after Jennifer went back to live in the same time as Kacy."

"This is crazy," Ty ranted. "How dare you trump up such stories? And why tell them to me? What’s your reason? And if Jennifer’s alive, why did you wait this long to mention it?"

He paused, giving Catharine a chance to answer.

She licked her lips and lowered her head, breaking eye contact. "I can prove what I say is true."

"How?"

She opened the navy backpack she’d plunked on the floor by the couch, and ransacked until she found a VCR tape.

"Jennifer left this. She returned the morning we planned the funeral. I think she considered calling to tell you she’s still alive. But if she had, there would have been no easy way to explain her disappearance if she returned to the past. And then that man came, and she decided to go back with him."

Dumbfounded, Tyler could only stare as Catharine extended the VCR tape.

"Jennifer made this for me, and for you, in the event I decided to share it with you. And now I have made that decision."

Tyler seized the tape, but he didn’t insert it into the VCR. He had too many questions, but didn’t even know where to begin.

Had the only girl he’d ever truly been attracted to gone off her rocker, into some other dimension? Was her mind now incapable of discerning fact from fiction? Is that why she acted so differently? Why she sat there looking innocent, fragile and demure after spinning such unbelievable tales?

He rammed his hand through his hair again and paced the carpet. Kacy and Jennifer had not traveled back in time and decided to live in the mid 1850’s any more than two strangers who looked exactly like them had traveled to the future and taken over their identities as well as their lives.