Wrong Face in the Mirror: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series) by Barbara Bartholomew

Redhawk. She stirred all his protective instincts behaving as she did like a confused little chick who couldn’t find its mother.
    She did act differently than she had when they first met. Then she’d been lively, confidently sexual, meeting his own over-sized personality as an equal. But the idea that this Hart wasn’t his Hart was ridiculous. Something had happened to her that had left her temporarily frightened and mixed up. Most likely a head injury, he thought. She would get better and she would remember their love. He had only to give her time.
    A radio call of an accident on one of the country roads left him no time to consider his personal worries. Turning on his lights, he set the siren to shrieking as he rushed out of town to where a local teen whom he’d known since he was an infant was trapped inside an overturned pickup truck.
     
    Hart avoided looking at herself in the mirror as she brushed her teeth and got into her night shirt even as the early dark and cold air began to penetrate her apartment. She would settle down by the gas heat of the fireplace and watch her television or read and relax until she couldn’t stay awake.
    Winter was coming, it seemed as though they’d skipped autumn, and much as she’d disliked the extreme heat, she dreaded the closed-in season with its gloomy haze of long nights and more time spent indoors. When she was a child, this would have been cotton pulling season and school would have let out for six weeks or so while everybody got in the crop.
    It was hard work, but a joyful time too, the one season of the year when everybody had a bit of money and the smell of cotton burrs burning at the local gin lay heavy in the air and Saturday afternoons were the time when all the country people came to town. When she was older, she’d worked at the store with its seasonal buzz as everybody did their shopping for the year, buying clothes and household supplies.
    Everybody had seemed light-hearted and friendly, they’d shared each other’s happiness. And in a bad year, when it had failed to rain or hail had knocked out a crop, they had shared worries and sorrow and the Millers had extended what credit they could for necessities.
    She missed that sense of community, something that didn’t seem to exist today. Only a few farmers grew cotton now and their farms were huge. Their failures might affect the rest of the community but the average resident remained unaware of that significance.
    People were no longer interconnected in the way they had been in the late ‘40s. So many things had changed.
    She felt lost and alone in this  world where she didn’t belong and with sudden harshness wished she could go back and be the Stacia who had lived in Medicine Stick before it was flooded.
    She went to bed late only after she’d drowsed off several times on her sofa, hoping that she’d be able to go to sleep without that early morning wakening that left her sweating with fears, her brain tumbling with negative scenarios.
    Caught in a nightmare where a shadowy monster threatened her little sister and she was so frozen in place with fear so she  couldn’t reach out to help the small Helen, who looked to be  only three or four and kept screaming, ‘Stacia! Stacia!,’ she awakened to a loud sound of tumbling furniture from downstairs.
    No mouse makes that much noise . The clashing, clattering noise continued as though one item sent another falling until a whole set had dominoed on the hardwood floor. Still half-asleep Hart stumbled from her bed, through the living room and to the door that led to the stairs.
    Operating on automatic, her rational mind still not enough awake to urge caution, she went to the top of the stairs and started down.
    But when she was halfway down something clicked on and she realized she was being extremely foolish. Turning around quietly in her bare feet, the nightshirt floating around her, she heard a voice whisper from below. “Stacia? Is that you?”
    Her heart