Echoes of Tomorrow Read Free

is on all the papers, including the deed.  I own everything on Oak Vista, lock, stock and barrel."
    "I said my name is Reed, not Jerk, and if this is another practical joke instituted by the McNeely brothers, then you have all carried it to a very tiresome extreme.   I would be more than pleased to pay you to go away.  Name your price."
    The strange woman stood there, anger and indecision warring on her face, the only sound in the room the metallic ching of keys dangling in her shaking hand.
    "Get up," she ordered after several seconds.  "You can explain it to the police." She waved the leather case toward the bedchamber door.
    Reed slowly got to his feet, deciding to play along.  Arguing might get him another dose of that liquid fire in his face.  Besides, all he need do was catch her off guard and disarm her.
    He glanced around the room, looking for something with which to bind her hands, if need be, when he realized with a start that some were very different.  How had she changed the heavy draperies on all the windows?  And the bed hangings and counterpane?  Even some of the furniture had been rearranged.  Where was his mother’s hope chest?
    Before he could look closer at the bedroom, his eyes fell on the open door to his dressing room.  He stopped dead in his tracks. 
    What, in the name of all that was holy, had happened?  There, off in his dressing room, sat a strange, beige, porcelain-looking seat, with a rounded bottom on a pedestal. Along one wall sat a huge, oblong tub, big enough for two people to sit in, with a stopper at the bottom and gold knobs on one end.  If he didn't know better he'd think it was a bathing tub, but that monstrosity could never be taken out and emptied.  Indeed, the thing looked to be a permanent fixture.  A shelf made of marble ran along another wall.  A bowl had been formed into it with the same kind of hole in the bottom and the same gold knobs on top.  Around the mirror above the shelf were small, round globes, glowing like lanterns, but no flame lit them. 
    As he stared, rooted to the spot, the woman made a wide berth around him, reached past the door and hit a small knob on the wall.  Every one of the glowing globes went out at exactly the same time.
    Reed's gaze left the now dark globes and slid to the woman.  He clenched his fists while his heart banged in his chest.  Little hairs at the back of his neck rose to rasp against his shirt collar.  He swallowed in a vain attempt to moisten his throat.
    "What has happened to my home?"
    The woman stared at him, a bewildered look mingling with the wariness in her eyes.  Through his baffling haze of disbelief he thought for a moment her guard had slipped, but then she spoke.
    "We're going downstairs, and we'll talk it over while we wait for the police.  If you try anything I'll give you another face full of tear gas." 
    Was her threat tinged with confusion?
    Reed fought jolts of alarm at all the changes as he and the woman walked the corridors of the home they both claimed.  Most of his furniture remained there, but in different places.  New paintings hung on the walls, and every now and then he passed an unidentifiable contraption.
    The first was a small white panel on a wall with colored blinking lights and numbered buttons.  The woman stopped and punched a few of the buttons.  Reed only had time to make out one of the words on the panel:  Alarm .  She motioned for him to move on ahead of her and he walked past more of those glowing globes and buttons on the walls.
    He almost caressed the familiar staircase with relief until his eyes fell on yet another contraption sitting on a small table at the bottom of the stairs.  This one was a small, black box with red, glowing numbers on the front that read 9:15.  As he watched, the numbers changed to 9:16.  While he wondered at the workings of this amazing clock, his gaze drifted across the table and he again stopped dead in his tracks.  For the first time in his