Somewhere in Time

Chapter One

"She was what a woman ought to be." --Tombstone of one woman of Trenton, late 18th century

Near Philadelphia

Zane Grey Rutledge downshifted into second as he guided the black Porsche up the curving driveway toward Rutledge House. Gravel crunched beneath the tires, sending a fine spray across the lacquered surface of the hood and fenders. He swore softly as a pebble pinged against the windshield, leaving behind a spider-web crack in the glass. A pair of moving vans were angled in the driveway near the massive front door and he eased to a stop behind one of them and let out the clutch.

He didn't want to be there. Rutledge House without his grandmother Sara Jane was nothing more than a haunted collection of faded bricks and stones.

"One day it will all matter to you," Sara Jane had said to him not long before she died. "I have faith that you'll see there's nothing more important than family."

But he didn't have a family. Not anymore. With Sara Jane's death he had moved closer to the edge of the cliff. The lone remaining Rutledge in a long and illustrious series of Rutledges who had made their mark on a country.

Lately he'd had the feeling that his grandmother was watching him from somewhere in the shadows, shaking her head the way she used to when he was a boy and had been caught drinking beer with his friends from the wrong side of town.

He leaned back in his contoured leather seat and watched as the treasures of a lifetime were carried from the house by a parade of moving men. Winterhalter portraits of long-dead Rutledges, books and mementoes that catalogued a nation's history as well as a family's.

His fingers drummed  against the steering wheel. He'd done the right thing, theonly thing he could have done, given the circumstances. Rutledge House would survive long after he was gone.  Wasn't that what his grandmother had wanted?

"Mr. Rutledge? Oh, Mr.Rutledge, it is you. I was so afraid I'd missed you."

He started at the sound of the woman's voice floating through the open window of the car.

"Olivia McRae," she said, smiling coyly as she prompted his memory. "We met last week."

He opened the car door and unfolded himself from the sleek black sports car. "I remember," he said, shaking the woman's bird-like hand. "Eastern Pennsylvania Preservation Society."

She dimpled and Zane was struck by the fact that in her day Olivia McRae had probably been a looker.

"We have much to thank you for. I must tell you we feel as if Christmas has come early this year!"

He shot her a quizzical look. She was thanking him? In the past few days he had come to think of her as his own personal savior for taking Rutledge House and its contents off his hands.

"A pleasure," he said, relying on charm to cover his surprise.

"Oh, it's a fine day for Rutledge House," she said, her tone upbeat. "I know your dear departed grandmother Sara Jane would heartily approve of your decision."

"Approve might be too strong a word," he said with a wry grin. "Accept is more like it." Bloodlines had been everything to Sara Jane Rutledge. No matter that the venerable old house had been tumbling down around her ears, in need of more help than even the family fortune could provide. So long as a Rutledge was in residence, all had been right with her world.

Although she never said it in so many words, he knew that in the end he had disappointed her. No wife, no children, no arrow shot into the future of the Rutledge family