Palaver: Apollonia (ePub)

A year, a number, a piece of time,

A distance in living, a state of mind,

Begins as a woman awaiting her lover . . .

Torn apart by his recent divorce, guitar-strumming everyman Jonathan Chase abandons his life in Denver to return to Saginaw, Michigan, and start anew in his place of birth. But much more than childhood memories await. While managing a used bookstore, with no one but his cat Pluto by his side, he discovers an old photograph album, bound in dark leather and brittle and faded. It is filled with sepia-toned images of somebody's relatives.

Although not the usual inventory The Red Raven sells to the bibliophiles of Saginaw, Jonathan can't seem to part with the family album. All once vital, thinking, loving, hating, hoping, dreaming - living - beings, there is now probably little more than these slabs of fading paper to testify to their lives. It saddens him to think what an awesome, terrible power time reveals itself to be.

Until he turns the page and sees her for the first time.

It was and would always remain impossible to say how it all happened.

In the gloaming of a wild October night, his fall into the past began. And as the Michigan autumn transmuted with the first snows of winter, Jonathan Chase awoke to the chime of a bell, distant but clear, in a wide field - and in the midst of the Civil War - in 1864.

Although his journey of romance, war, intrigue, mystery, and a touch of the supernatural would lengthen and deepen far beyond what he ever would have imagined or even thought possible, the why was the easiest question of all.

Apollonia was the why.