Another, more likely idea suggested itself to her as she looked again at the medals and ribbons on Cole's jacket. When they reached the firehouse a short time later, she made up her mind what she was going to do. She didn't think that her father would have minded in the least.
The photographer was already there, unloading equipment from the backseat of a Ford Model A. He set up his bulky camera and its black silk drape on a tripod, then took several large, heavy photographic plates from the car. Captain Driscoll was fussily lining up the members of the company. Annabel saw that several of the firemen had brought their wives and families to watch the photograph being made. All of them looked dashing and handsome in their dress uniforms and black caps, she thought, even Patsy, who as the shortest member of the company stood in the center of the group next to the horse-drawn steam pumper around which they posed. Cole, one of the taller men, was placed on the end of the line.
Annabel slipped up to him while the photographer was still preparing for the shot She took his hand in one of hers and used the other to press something into his palm. "Here," she murmured. "I want you to wear this."
"What is it?" he asked, then looked down at his hand to see the San Francisco Fire Department's eagle-on-a-gold-shield emblem—or at least what would be the emblem of the department someday in the future.
"It belonged to my father," Annabel said, her voice trembling a little. "Captain Mike Lowell. It's his fire department pin. I. . . I want you to have it." She closed Cole's fingers over the pin and squeezed gently.
"But. . . but if it belongs to your father. . ." Cole looked flustered.
Annabel shook her head. "I inherited it."
Comprehension dawned in his eyes.
"He was killed . . . fighting a fire," she was able to go on after a moment.
Cole leaned closer to her. "Annabel," he said softly, "I can't take this. This must be so special to you."
"It is." She managed to smile as she blinked back tears. "But so are you, Cole. Please . . . wear it for me."
He swallowed hard and didn't say anything for a few seconds. Then he asked, "Will you pin it on for me?"
Her smile widened as she took the pin from him and lifted it to his lapel. "I'd be honored to."
She fastened the pin on his jacket and then quickly kissed him, not caring who might see, as Lieutenant Driscoll called, "All right, men, we seem to be ready. Everyone stand at attention now."
Annabel backed off so that she would be out of range of the camera's lens. A small part of her still wished that she could stand among the men as one of the members of the engine company, but she knew now that this could wait possibly forever. She kept smiling at Cole, who stood there with the other firemen looking solemn and dignified.
"Oh, no!" Annabel said. "It can't be—!"
Luckily, she said the words under her breath as the reaction hit her and the world careened crazily around her. Recognition flooded in on her, and only the self-control she exercised over her muscles kept her from staggering. An annoying feeling of deja vu had suddenly exploded into a crystal-clear memory. She could see herself standing in the San Francisco Fire Museum with Earl and Vickie, looking at an old-fashioned sepia-toned photograph of an engine company from 1906.
It was this engine company that had been in the old photograph, and today's date had been inked in the corner—April 17, 1906. Earl had said something about it, but Annabel couldn't remember what it was. She recalled the handsome fireman at the end of the line, the man Vickie had pointed out to her . . .
Cole.
Annabel remembered. He'd had some sort of pin attached to his lapel, and she had leaned forward, there in the museum, to see what it was, only to be distracted before she could identify it.
She knew now that it had been her father's fire department pin, the pin she had just given Cole.
But that meant . . . oh, Lord . . . that meant that even while she was there in the fire museum, in her own era, she had already somehow traveled back in time to give the pin to Cole. But that was impossible, because it had been later that night that she'd answered die call from Captain McPhee to go to the Diablos’ and fight the forest fire there. How could she have been here in San Francisco before she had crawled into that cave to escape the flames?
The unanswerable questions started spinning faster and faster in Annabel's head, echoing so loudly that she barely heard the whoosh of the photographer's flash powder going off, only vaguely noticed him calling to the firemen to stay where they-were so he could get another exposure.
Annabel felt her knees buckling. How could it be? How could it be?
Unless . . . she really was crazy. Unless she had really been born in this era and everything that she had thought was her life in the future was only a vivid hallucination, a fever dream from a diseased mind . . .
But there was her father's pin on Cole's lapel, shining in the sun, a relic from a time that had not yet come to be.
Annabel let out a loud moan, and for the second time since she had come to 1906, she did something utterly embarrassing.
She fainted dead away.
Chapter 18