Worth the Read

By Diana Cockrell and Rachel Katelyn Cockrell

"Look, let's take it one century at a time. We have enough eighteenth-century problems without adding our twenty-first century problems..." For seventeen-year-old Tori, weird had become the new normal. Reeling from her dad's sudden death and her mom's disappearance, Tori picks up a book-and finds herself with her mom in eighteenth-century Boston

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Apr 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685158132

Diana Cockrell

Diana Cockrell lives with her husband in a Greenville, South Carolina, home overrun by books, cats, and story ideas. When she's not teaching history or writing composition, she's thinking about history and writing. When she's not doing that, she's studying history or writing, usually with a cat in her lap. Her dearest wish is to travel back in time, experiencing the events and meeting the people she loves. You can contact her at justourbook.com.

Book preview

Chapter 1

I

think I should warn you that reading a book is dangerous. A book is a pathway, paved with words, that takes you into another world—a world that is, a world that will be…or a world that used to be.

Those are the worst ones.

They’re even worse than the world at present, into which you have just walked. It should have been a really great world: a comfortable, two-story home in a little city named Greenville, nestled among the scenic foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in South Carolina. But this world, right at the minute, was a doozy—a doozy just a few degrees removed from purgatory.

So now is a good time to reconsider hanging around. It gets worse.

As it was, I was hanging around outside the locked door of my mom's bedroom. Since I was seventeen years old and should have been, according to the usual scenarios, the one in the locked bedroom, this reversal could have been a highly entertaining experience for me. But since my entire life, and that of my mom, had been completely destroyed and Mom had locked herself in her bedroom, this was just plain purgatory.

I thought Mom had weathered the miserable day well enough, but when a box had arrived for her, delivered to our front door, Mom's facial expression informed me that something else had gone wrong. She’d sort of traded down from normal everyday despair to new and acute despair. I think. Like every other teen probably, I’m pretty good at interpreting a parent's facial expression. I mean, there's the I-brought-you-into-this-world-and-I-can-take-you-out look, which sends some of us fleeing for cover. And there's the look-at-me-when-I’m-talking-to-you/don’t-look-at-me-that-way expression, which makes some of us confused about what exactly we should do.

If I’m ever truly stumped about an expression on Mom's face, I’m not left in doubt very long at all, because Mom has no trouble actually saying things to me—at any time ever—except this time, I guess, because she’d just carried the box into her room and shut the door.

I turned away from the locked door, slumped against the wall next to it, and reviewed how much my really nice life had short-circuited in one week.

First problem: I was pretty much trapped with Mom inside the house. Journalists in media vans occasionally drove past, looking for one of us, circling us like sharks drawn to the scent of blood.

Second problem: Mom's phone, in the back pocket of her jeans, was slammed with calls from other hungry reporters, all wanting to know how we were handling the news; from friends, wanting to know if there was anything they could do to help; from people neither of us had heard from in years, offering condolences.

I shoved a mass of glossy, honey-tinted curls over my shoulder and pondered the floor as if it held the answers I sought. I appreciated the support from friends. And I supposed that the journalists, understandably addicted to the ratings tragedy brought, couldn’t resist the sensation of a dead politician, especially a rogue one on the opposite side of the political aisle.

A wan, rusty smile touched the corners of my mouth. Dad was a rogue. He bucked the system and defied the odds. A state representative for District Twenty—that's our neck of the woods in Greenville—he was independent, fierce, strong, and reliable. As far as I was concerned, he was one of the few politicians worth anything. My smile faded.

Third problem, and the biggest one of all: He was. Past tense.

Blinking rapidly, I once again tried to process that fact. They said the first stage of grief was denial, and whoever they were happened to be correct. Dad had always been indomitable, larger than life. There was no way a plane crash could have taken him. The ugly, torn wreckage of the small plane scarring the landscape had burned itself permanently on my memory. Yet somehow, it was just a random image on the television screen, a brief news blurb about someone else.

I could not believe he was just…gone. And the sun kept shining; the world kept turning. Without him.

I heaved a trembling sigh, put that issue in a box marked Deal with Later, and went back to the task at hand. Oh, yeah.

Fourth problem: a parent locked in her bedroom.

Okay, lessee. How had Mom handled me when I had pulled the same stunt in my drama queen tweens? I wasn’t sure. As I remembered, I had always been a model daughter, and this was the thanks I got.

Maybe a soft approach. I faced the door and said gently, Mom, please open the door. An awkward pause. I know life is hard right now. Somewhere someone was handing me the Understatement of the Year award. But let's talk about this. What was in the box you got? Can you tell me?

The door very eloquently said nothing in return.

Well. That went over like a lead balloon. But I was relieved to be able to discard the soft approach. It had never really suited me anyway, and I felt supremely foolish to be crooning comforting words to a stubbornly locked door. I preferred to be direct, almost blunt, just like Da—

The locked door swam before my eyes as tears threatened. Yes, I was like Dad. If I had ever pulled this stunt, he would have laughed his boom of a laugh and simply ordered me to unlock the door. And I’da done it. But I didn’t really feel like laughing, and somehow yelling Anne Elizabeth Bennet, unlock this door this instant at my own mother seemed a little harsh under the circumstances.

Maybe bribery? Mom, remember that Grandmother Bennet is coming over tonight. She could be here any moment. Mom loved Grandmother Bennet, Dad's irascible and diminutive mother, who hobbled about with a cane and wasn’t afraid to use it on unmannered youngsters—for instance, anyone who tried to call her Granny or Grandma. It was entertaining to imagine how Grandmother Bennet's cane would fly if someone tried Granny on her. A wobbly smile restored some of my confidence, and I faced the door again.

My voice sharpened a little bit—well, maybe a big bit. "Come on out, Mom." And I emphasized my displeasure with a forceful rap on the door. To my surprise, the door swung open a few inches, revealing a glimpse of the blue-and-white bedroom within.

A bedroom that was quite empty.

Okaaay. This was weird. Mom? I called timidly, stepping into the dim interior of the room. There was the mysterious box sitting on the bed, but I ignored it, intent on finding Mom. I crept past the tidy bed, peeked into the closet, the bathroom. No Mom anywhere.

Had she—? Gripped by a sudden hideous thought, I flew to the second-story window overlooking the backyard. Behind the heavy drapes, the window was securely locked. A quick glance out revealed only bleak darkness brooding over the yard on a chilly February evening.

I shook myself. I mean, really. If Mom had wanted to end it all, there were more successful venues for it than out of a window one story above soft hydrangea bushes. I turned around, facing the vacant room, uneasiness growing within me. I knew Mom had retreated into this room. I had followed her here. Where was she now?

Just to be sure, I exited the bedroom and sped through the entire house, calling Mom's name repeatedly—again and again, peeking first in this door and then in another, until I jerked open a door marked No Girls Allowed and stuck my head in for a look around. Who knows? Maybe Mom had forgotten her gender.

Is Mom in here? I demanded.

"Does it look like Mom's in here, Dirt Face?"

I might have forgotten to mention that I have a brother. Yeah. I told you it was purgatory.

Brennan Landis Bennet, a pretentious little maggot with an impressive-sounding name, swiveled back around in his chair and plunged into the video game he was playing, promptly forgetting my existence. For the first few years of his life, he had thought I was pretty cool. Then he turned thirteen and apparently learned that sisters were just about the uncoolest thing out there. I had retaliated by nicknaming him The Twerp.

I know. I pulled out all the stops for that one.

I opened my mouth for a suitably sarcastic reply, and then it occurred to me that, in the unpleasant two seconds I had seen his face, The Twerp's eyes had been just a bit red-rimmed. Sighing, I stepped further into the disaster zone he called a bedroom and said softly, I’m sorry, Twer…uh, Brennan. I know this is hard on everyone, especially you. If I can help—

Swivel. "You still here, Dirt Face? Nothing is wrong." Swivel.

Good talk. And nice to know I wasn’t the only one in denial.

Closing his door, I continued my round of the house, calling Mom's name, until I found myself standing once again at her half-open bedroom door amid dreadful silence and gathering darkness.

Fear began to coil tightly inside me. Where was Mom? Putting back a trembling hand, I drew my cell phone out of my pocket, swiped at its brightly lit screen until I reached Mom's contact information, and tapped the green call icon.

There it was—Mom's ringtone—singing out cheerfully into the awful quiet. A surge of relief—Mom was here. I had just missed her. She was in her bedroom just as I knew—

I darted into the bedroom, perhaps not the kindest words poised on the tip of my tongue, and abruptly ground to a dumbfounded halt.

There, on the floor by Mom's side of the bed, was a book I hadn’t noticed before, propped open against the nightstand, as if it had been hastily dropped.

If it had been a rabid skunk, I could not have leaped away faster, tripping over my own feet in the process and crashing to the floor. Not my normal response to a book, sure, although I did warn you that books could be dangerous. Don’t forget that.

I scuttled back from it because spiraling up from its core between two pages was a golden glow that seemed to grow brighter as Mom's ringtone continued. Yeah, you heard me right. A glow. It looked like…well, it looked like something that starts with the letter m, but I’m not about to bring up the m-word this early in the game.

The light swirled around in lazy, golden spirals, arching outward and growing steadily larger the longer Mom's phone rang. But I didn’t see the phone anywhere. It was like the phone was—

In the book? As soon as the ringing ceased, the light died, gold fading into nothing.

From my gracefully chosen place on the floor, I stared. What had I just seen? A mirage? Didn’t those occur only in cartoons in the desert?

Okay. There had to be an explanation, and I thought I knew what it was. I stood up, brushing off my jeans, finger-combing my rumpled curls, and calling out, Very funny. You got me. Come on out with your cameras. Game's over.

But no reality TV crew emerged from the shadows of the room. It was just me and the book.

Would it happen a second time? Watching the book warily, I touched the call icon on my phone again.

And there it was. Mom's ringtone warbled cheerily—yes, it was coming from the book—followed instantly by a radiant light that set shadows dancing over the walls of the dim room. Then the ringing ended, the light gone.

I crept closer to the book. Setting my phone on the bed, I reached down gingerly to scoop up the book with trembling hands. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be anywhere near this book, but I had to get to the bottom of this before I had to break out the m-word and make myself look like an idiot. Marking the open page with a finger, I closed the book to look at the title on the front cover.

Except there wasn’t one.

It was just a very old, dusty, brown book, blank on the front and down the spine. I ran a tentative hand over the worn front cover, and silky dust came off on my fingers. I brushed firmly across the book, sending clouds of dust into the air, but the book remained just as dusty.

What was going on?

I licked dry lips and swallowed hard. This book was giving me the creeps. I looked up, and, scanning the area, I could see a faintly wrinkled depression in the bed covers where Mom must have sat down and began reading this book. When things were normal, she read books all the time.

But life was far from normal now. And evidently so was this book.

I opened the book to the page I had been marking, the page to which it had been open when I found it. The heading seemed ordinary: Chapter 6: Crossing the Rubicon. But the first sentence underneath that chapter title screamed at me:

Anne Bennet—daughter-in-law of Elise Wells Bennet— a woman from the southern colonies, first appeared in Boston when she was spotted near the Green Dragon Tavern clad in Native American garments.

Oh. My first reaction was a well-practiced eye roll. I should have known this would be a history book. A self-proclaimed history buff, Mom slept, talked, ate, talked, drank, and talked history—did I mention talked? It was seriously annoying. But then—

I gasped. My second reaction was more to the point: Why was I looking at Mom's exact name—and Grandmother Bennet's name—in a history book? It was just there, like it had been published that way. Before I could begin to make sense of it, I caught the next sentence:

Bennet's experience in Boston illustrated the increased tensions radiating throughout the town. Dressed strangely and calling the name Tory, she caused a scene that very nearly ended in a tarring and feathering.

A prickly sensation crept down my spine. This went beyond coincidence, beyond random chance. In the text of a book published long ago (and given its evident age, very long ago) were Mom's name, my grandmother's name, and mine—at least, a slightly misspelled version of my nickname Tori, short for Victoria. Victoria Wells Bennet.

As I gazed at the page, a horrible, half-naked suspicion sprinted through my mind like a bad streaker. Was Mom herself, with her phone, in this book?

Immediately I discarded the absurd idea. Then I would have to bring myself to say the m-word. Okay: magic. Are you happy? The simple reality, however, was that I was stressed out from a difficult week, and maybe now I was going crazy.

If I read a little more of this book, it might start to make sense. Maybe the similarity of names was a coincidence. So I began reading the next paragraph, something about the eighteenth century, the British, and ships. Before I reached the end of the page, the page started to blur; the edges of the page blurred, like a peripheral fog creeping inward. Great. Now my sanity and my vision were going.

But it was dim in this room, and Mom had always told me that reading in dim light would ruin my vision. Blinking, I tried to keep reading anyway, but halfway through the next paragraph, the page got fuzzy again. I mean, history isn’t exactly riveting content, so I could scarcely blame my mind for refusing to focus. I looked up quickly from the book and around the room, but that was a mistake. My mind shifted back to the present, and I remembered the terrible truth.

Dad was dead.

Closing my eyes, I let that fact sink in, probably for the first time. Hey, I was progressing—congratulate me. Numb denial vanished in the onslaught of a bitter wave of emotion. Welcome to Stage Two of Grief: Anger.

And now, somehow, Mom was gone too. I was losing people, leaking them worse than my first rattletrap car leaked oil. Sighing, I sat down on Mom's bed, gripping the book with both hands, open to the same chapter. Think, think. Where could Mom be? Listlessly I gazed at the words on the page, beginning absently to read again.

But history had never been my thing, and the page began to blur once more. And it was funny, but it kinda felt like the book began to vibrate. My first overwhelming instinct was to drop it like a hot poker, but I held on, sure I was just imagining it. Stress could cause delusions, I’d heard. The room in which I sat seemed to be fading from my peripheral vision. And was it just me, or was it getting cold in here?

Argh! I wasn’t channeling my inner pirate; I didn’t even think I had an inner pirate. I felt the sudden, sharp sensation of falling, even though I was still seated firmly on the side of the bed, making me feel sick. Well, when it rains, it pours. So far, I’d lost my dad, my mom, my mental health, and my physical health.

But that wasn’t all. Little did I know, I’d also lost my century.

See. I told you it gets worse.

Chapter 2

"T

ori!"

I reacted instantly, clapping a hand over my right ear, hissing, No need to yell, Mom! I’m right here!

Where exactly right here was, I wasn’t sure, but the first thing I noticed was that I was standing next to Mom, who was huddled against the rough brick exterior wall of a building in some kind of alley, clutching her cell phone and yelling my name into it at intervals. I became aware that I was still gripping the book, open to the same page. No glow, no vibration. Spellbound, I peered down at it again.

Tori!

Reeling again, ear ringing, I snapped the book shut and turned to Mom. In her panic, she had not yet noticed that I was standing beside her, and at any rate, yelling my name did not seem to be the smartest thing to do.

Just a few yards from our position, a man stepped into the alley from a slightly askew wooden door and shouted, You there! Stop!

What exactly he wanted us to stop doing wasn’t clear, but whatever it was, I was eager to obey. I froze, noting that obviously this guy was some kind of nutjob from a theater running a really bad performance of Hamilton, and I didn’t want to do anything to upset him at all. He wore a baggy brown shirt tucked into snug capris, or something like capris, cinched in tight bands just below his knees. From there down, he wore white pantyhose and buckled black shoes. Tied at his waist was a soiled white apron.

But hey, I was in no position to be judgy about his fashion choices. You do you, dude.

At the same time, a few other faces poked around the corner of a far building, more men and some young boys in the same unusual clothing, looking curious and a little too hostile for my taste. A lean, black dog wandered out from behind them and growled.

I kept absolutely still, doing a fantastic Tori mannequin impression, complete with a tentative smile.

Mom, however, had missed the memo. She looked up from her cell phone, blinked, and saw me for the first time. She held out both arms to me and cried, Tori!

Our audience was instantly spurred into action. They rushed at us, repeating the absurd command to Stop!

Any logic or reason or thought of diplomacy disintegrated in the great swamping wave of fear that hit me at that moment, and I proceeded to do exactly the opposite of what these men had asked us to do. In the instant fight-or-flight response, I sanely chose flight.

Run, Mom! I cried, thrusting the book into one of her outstretched hands and seizing the other, half dragging her down the alley.

We emerged onto an unpaved, very wet street, trying to pick up speed and outdistance the army of hostile actors escaped from a bad rehearsal. My new, fashionable, slick-bottomed boots were probably not the best choice for the terrain, and I knew the terrain wasn’t the best choice for them.

Shouts rang out behind me, but I didn’t dare glance back. At the moment, my main concern was survival, which meant a place to hide or an option for suicide—whichever came first.

A bitter, knife-cold wind, laced with a mist of rain, pierced through my sweater, bringing with it the briny scent of salt air and the stench of manure. But it hardly mattered. Heart beating frantically, I was gulping down any air available.

Swerving left, we gained a wider road, paved with cobblestones and pockmarked with mud puddles. Mom, staggering dazedly behind me, clinging to the book, was beginning to make strange sounds. Daring a glance behind me, I saw an odd expression on her face; it seemed like terrified recognition as her wide eyes took in the square clapboard buildings lining this street and the oddly dressed people strolling down it, turning now to stare at us as we fled.

She knew where we were.

I hardly had time to process that information when new threats confronted us. The shouting from behind had attracted more unwanted attention, and the number of our pursuers swelled. I charged down the side of the street, perilously close to the doors of passing buildings, evading a heap of decomposing fish heads and leaping over a pile of manure as I went.

Out of the shadows, a man abruptly materialized, with a towering white wig atop his head. Rage contorting his face, he shook his cane at us and bellowed something unintelligible. I swerved, just missing his pointed cane, and plunged off the cobblestones onto another street paved with pure mud. The swift turn left our pursuers out of sight for a fraction of a second.

Ahead, the land gave way to a vast open sea of rolling gray water. We had nowhere to hide—

Until I noticed a tiny shack, tucked beside an enormous two-story brick building lined with windows. On pure adrenaline alone, I barreled toward our safe haven, splashing through puddles and other questionable debris in my path. I wrenched the door to the shack open and pulled on Mom's hand.

Come on, Mom! Inside!

At the same time, she pulled on my hand the opposite way, going toward the enormous building beside my chosen hiding place.

Come on, Tori! Inside!

We bounced back together and then resumed tugging, me toward the shack and she toward the brick building.

Meanwhile, our pursuers, perfectly united and of one mind, tore down the street toward us, shouting all the way.

Get inside! I rasped.

Get inside! she pleaded.

And so we did. Sort of. My grip on her hand slipped as we pulled apart again. Instead of the graceful dive into the shack I had imagined, I tumbled head over heels into it, the door banging shut behind me. Mom scrambled up the steps of the other building and threw herself in.

Twisted like a contortionist on the floor of the shack, I heard the crowd stampede past. In desperation I heaved my tangled limbs over to the wall and put one eye up to a crack in the wall. All the men rushed pell-mell into the building after Mom, while a group of women, looking concerned, gathered outside the door. They talked and whispered furiously among themselves—women who, I noticed, were wearing floor-length, heavy cloaks with old-fashioned dresses peeking out underneath.

In the terrified confusion of the moment, I recanted my decision not to be judgy about the fashion choices of the natives and sized them up: the only thing that could save those Halloween costumes was a bonfire.

Tempted as I was to bang my head on the floor of the shack and release a string of very unladylike language, I pulled myself together. Who knew what that insane crowd was going to do to Mom? I needed to get out of a pretzel shape and out of this—

And then it dawned on me exactly what kind of shack I was in. My sense of smell alone clued me in. I was in an outhouse.

If you are fortunate enough not to know what an outhouse is, congratulations. I had the bad luck to know what one was because Grandmother Bennet kept an ancient one behind her house just in case her toilet stopped working during a zombie apocalypse. Or whatever.

Peeking out again through the crack in the wall, I really thought the zombie apocalypse had already begun.

Where on earth were we? One moment I was in Mom's bedroom at home, the next in a foreign universe running for my life.

Okay. Untangling myself, I stood up warily. I smoothed my fluffy, Christmas-red sweater back down over my mud-splattered jeans and raked trembling fingers through my long, tangled blond curls. I tried not to notice that my new, suede ankle boots were now more of a mucky brown than their previous pristine gray.

If I was going in to be devoured with Mom by bloodthirsty natives, I was going to look my best while doing it. Or…having it done to me.

Taking a deep breath—which was a mistake, since I was still in the outhouse—I opened the door and stepped out onto the street. Even though I sensed every female head swivel in my direction, I kept