A Husband in Time Read Free

should follow him and turned back toward the living room, then headed up the stairs. “Come on, I want to show you something.”
    Jane knew she was grinning like a loon, but she couldn’t help herself. “Isn’t this great, Codester? A house complete with a ghost and a historical past?”
    â€œMom, you’re too into history. Get with the nineties, willya?”
    â€œYeah, yeah. Hurry up, I want to hear the rest of this.” She followed her son, noticing the way he paused just outside the door of the room at the top of the stairs. He stood still for a moment, staring at that door. Then shivered and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand.
    â€œYou okay, pal?”
    â€œYeah. Sure, fine. C’mon.”
    Sheriff O’Donnell headed into a bedroom farther down the hall, snapped on a light and waved his arm with a flourish when they entered.
    Jane caught her breath. “My God,” she whispered, blinking at the portrait on the far wall. “It looks like a Rockwell!” She moved closer, ran her fingertips lovingly over the ornate frame, then touched the work itself. “But it can’t be. This has to be at least a hundred years old.”
    â€œYou have a fine eye, Jane.”
    â€œI know antiques,” she said with a shrug. “It’s my business. This is unsigned. Do you know who did it?”
    â€œAyuh, unsigned, and no, I don’t know who theartist was,” O’Donnell said. “But it’s yours, along with everything else in the house. Including the old safe in the attic, still locked up. Might even be some of Zachariah Bolton’s old notes and such tucked away in there. Yours to do with as you please, just as your grandmother’s will specified.”
    Jane couldn’t take her eyes from the portrait on the wall. A very Rockwellian painting of a dark-haired man, eyes passionate and intense, hair rumpled, white shirt unbuttoned at the neck. In one hand he held a small contraption with springs and wires sprouting in all directions, and in the other a tiny screwdriver. Gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, and those piercing, deep brown eyes stared through them at his work. And beside him, right beside him, dressed in identical clothes—though in a much smaller size—sat a little boy who couldn’t be more than five or six. He had carrot-colored curls and bright green eyes, and he was tinkering with a tiny screwdriver of his own. The two sat so close they had to be touching. And the connection between them was so strong it was palpable, though they weren’t even looking at one another. At the bottom of the painting was a single word: Inventor.
    â€œThat there is Zachariah Bolton, ma’am,” Sheriff O’Donnell told her. “And the boy is his son, Benjamin.”
    â€œBenjamin,” she whispered. “That was my grandfather’s name and this child looks enough like Cody to be his…” Jane’s voice trailed off.
    â€œLittle brother,” Cody finished, stepping farther into the room.
    â€œBolton was a friend and colleague to WilhelmBausch and Eli Waterson. In fact, they both said publicly that they considered him one of the greatest scientific minds of their time. One of the few things they agreed on, it was. Well, sir, when little Benjamin died of quinaria fever—”
    Jane gasped, her eyes snapping back to the mischievous green ones in the painting. “Oh, no. That sweet little boy?”
    â€œYes, ma’am. And the day the boy passed, Zachariah Bolton went plumb out of his mind. The grief was too much for him, they say. Locked himself in the boy’s bedroom and refused to let anyone in. When they finally forced the door, he was long gone. And he’d taken the poor little fellow’s body right along with him. Bolton was never heard from again. Now, Bausch and Waterson were distraught enough over it that they vowed to find a cure for the disease that took little