Read Beyond This Time: A Time-Travel Suspense Novel for Free Online Page B

her comfort since childhood, did little to assuage her fears.
    She’d had her fill of bodiless voices and phantoms. She wanted and needed the company of a real live person with red blood coursing through their veins. A person with warm skin and a beating heart. The question of with whom to share all her fears and mixed up thoughts loomed like a specter in the waning light.
    Logic dictated she select Mitch. After all, he’d been on Park Street; seen the same things. But he’d taken himself out of contention early on. After partnering for five years, she knew better than to expect him to change his mind. He’d made it painstakingly clear he intended to ignore the early morning events. To him, nothing had happened, and because of this stance, he wouldn’t be receptive to hearing about phone calls from a showerhead.
    She loved Mitch, but sometimes he could be a royal pain in the pahooty. And right now she needed an open minded person to listen and acknowledge her theories were possible, if not wholly credible. Unfortunately, her partner failed to meet those qualifications.
    That left one name on a very short list: her father, Reverend Alvin Rayson.
    Kathleen Ruth, was the only child of Alvin and Dolores Rayson. When she was six, her mother, the Switzerland of the family, the neutral ground on which her opinionated husband and equally stubborn daughter met, died of ovarian cancer. Without Dolores, and her peace making skills, the years that followed were often stormy and always dramatic.
    Shortly after high school graduation—in yet another grandiose display of her independence—Kathleen Rayson met, married, and divorced William Templeton all within six months.
    Her short-lived marriage had set off World War III between Kat and the reverend. Pop so intensely disliked the smooth talking, arrogant and sinful William Templeton that he’d isolated himself. His one man cold war lasted as long as her marriage did. With the husband gone, the father and daughter relationship resumed its stormy course.
    After a brief lull, their battles once again escalated. They finally reached epic proportions the day the twenty-two-year-old Kat announced, after three years at Howard University that she intended to switch her major from History to Police Science. And as a footnote added, “After graduation I’m applying to the Maceyville Police Department.” This Sunday dinner proclamation had ignited a series of high voltage debates which resulted in a polite truce between parent and child.
    The Reverend Alvin Paul Rayson, minister of the Demopolis Hope and Glory Baptist Church, maintained the position that, “Violence—or, God forbid, taking a life—was WRONG. Wrong because the Bible said, ‘Thou shalt not kill’. Period.”
    Six years after graduating from the police academy, Kat still fervently worked to convince her father that law enforcement didn’t necessarily equate to violence or killing. But their opinions were so diametrically opposed she doubted common ground would ever be reached. And she did not foresee any great changes in the near future.
    In spite of all their skirmishes, they miraculously maintained a loving relationship. When not on Sunday duty, Kat drove the twenty miles to Demopolis and sang in the Hope and Glory Baptist choir, then cooked dinner for her father. And no matter what, she could always talk to him.

 
     
    =FIVE=
     
     
     
    It had taken a full week before Kat felt capable of sharing what had happened on Park Street with her Pop. On Saturday night she’d fried chicken, made potato salad and baked beans to take to Demopolis. She wanted to talk to Pop, not have to worry about cooking after church.
    She drove over for the church service and then invited him to a backyard picnic. Braced by his rip-roaring sermon, she eased into the subject during the meal.
    Understanding Pop’s misgivings and worries each time she put on the uniform, Kat deliberately omitted a few facts. Facts such as why she and Mitch