Page 41 of Frankly, My Dear

Flicking through more pages, he stopped again. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing at another advertisement.

She exhaled loudly. “Birth control pills.”

“Huh?”

“Women take one pill every day to prevent conception.”

He raised his eyebrows dubiously.

She smiled at his incredulous expression.

“And they work?”

She nodded.

He seemed to ponder the concept for a long time, then commented, “Those wonder pills must have a liberating effect on women’s sexual activity…and men, as well, of course.”

“You could say that.”

Suddenly he slapped the magazine shut and gazed at her with horror. “Sacre bleu! You truly do come from the future, don’t you?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I’m here by means of time-travel.”

“Time-travel! Time-travel! How? How could it be possible?”

“I don’t know,” she confessed forlornly. “One minute I was dancing in the ballroom, and the year was 1996. The next moment, I was standing in the same ballroom, but the year was 1845. Maybe it was Lilith’s voodoo doll. Maybe it’s reincarnation. Maybe I’m dead and this is the afterlife. Who knows?” She threw out her hands in puzzlement.

“Well, you can’t tell anyone about this. And for a certainty, you must not show the magazine to anyone else.” He rolled up the publication and tucked it in his back pocket. “Can you imagine what Victor would do with this information? They don’t burn witches anymore, but there are laws against the open practice of voodoo. And, believe me, the black arts would be the only explanation any logical-thinking person could come up with for your outrageous claims.”

“But you believe me, don’t you?”

“Oui,” he admitted reluctantly, “but then I haven’t had a logical thought since you entered my life.”

“What are you going to do…now that you know?” she asked nervously.

Whatever answer he was about to give was forestalled by the arrival of Mrs. Gastoneau, who insisted on being called Amelie.

“The dinner, she is ready, chers,” she told them in a rich Acadian dialect, a local combination of French, Indian, and English. “You will like the Cajun food, yes. It is good-good.”

Reba and Fergus came to sit beside them on the bench, along with Pierre Gastoneau, a bearded, long-haired man of indeterminate years, wearing a ragged palmetto hat.

“Everyone, quiet!” Pierre yelled at the squealing children. They silenced immediately.

Without apology, Pierre spat tobacco juice from a huge plug in his cheek onto the dirt at his feet. The crude back-woodsman stared at her with open curiosity, and then grinned at James. “That one, she is your mistress, yes?”

“No, I’m not,” Selene denied.

Unconvinced, Pierre winked with manly camaraderie at James.

“How’s the trapping been this year?” James asked Pierre, changing the subject.

“Good, good, my friend,” Pierre said in a thick Cajun accent, waving his hands dramatically as he spoke. “Le bon Dieu shines his blessing on the bayou this year. Yes, he does.” He pointed to the hundreds of dried skins that were stretched on racks and every conceivable surface around the house—muskrats, beavers, even alligators.

Pierre turned toward Fergus, who engaged him in a heated discussion on deflated prices being offered in the city for bayou products. Throughout the conversation, James glanced continually toward Selene. And she could see that he was trying to understand all that she had told him about coming from the future.

Amelie Gastoneau spoke little as she handed them wooden platters with crude metal utensils. The woman was probably plumb tuckered out; thirteen of the children scooting about the clearing were hers, and she wasn’t even thirty-five years old.

“Poor man’s opera,” James whispered to her when he saw her observing the large number of children.