Over the next few weeks Jackson tried to return to his normal life. He spent a lot of his time catching up with his computer software work, but he also put aside an hour or two every day to continue searching for the missing pendant. He had to find it. He felt that somehow the crystal heart pendant was the key to the whole Isabella mystery. He finished the inside of the house and then moved to the gardens. Maybe it had been dropped and trodden into the ground. He tried gently digging into the ground in all the open areas, but finally after two weeks he gave up. The pendant was nowhere to be found.

  The next day he drove to London for a meeting with his employer who asked him if he was still planning to sell the house and return to the city.

  Jackson hesitated. Logic told him he should put the house on the market and use the money from the sale to buy a place in London and go back to working in the office. But then the image of Isabella appeared in his mind, and he knew he couldn’t leave the house in case she returned.

  “No,” he told his boss, “Not for a while yet. I enjoy living in the country.”

  He stayed in London overnight and drove back the following day. It was a bright sunny afternoon as he pulled up in front of Oakhaven. As he walked up the steps to the front door of his house something on the edge of his vision caught his attention. He stopped and turned to look at the nearby hill surrounded by pastures and sheep. There it was, right at the top of the hill, something bright was glinting or flashing in the sunlight, but what could it be?

  Then realization hit him like a sledgehammer. Of course! He should of thought of this sooner! He rushed into the house, picked up a small spade, and then literally ran though the gate and across the pasture sending startled sheep scattering.

  He was out of breath by the time he had made it to the top of the hill. He looked around at the green grass. It must be here, the pendant. Isabella was probably wearing it on the day of the storm, and when the lightning struck the chain broke causing it to fall to the ground. The searchers probably never saw it in the long grass.

  Jackson walked carefully around the highest point on the hill until he found a small depression in the ground. Maybe this was where the lightning bolt struck. He kneeled down and parted the grass in the centre of the depression. Nothing. He repeated the procedure over and over in and around the depression.

  Finally after twenty minutes he saw something metallic. He carefully dug around it with the spade. It was a tiny chain, tarnished and old, but the sort of chain which a woman would wear around her neck to hold a locket or a pendant. With trembling hands he very carefully dug around the chain, loosening the soil. Then he gently pulled the chain free of the ground. Along with it came a dirt covered object, about two centimetres by one and a half centimetres.

  Jackson had no doubt what it was. Carefully he managed to brush some of the soil away from it with his fingers to reveal a white heart shaped crystal beneath. After all these weeks he had finally found it.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon carefully cleaning the pendant. The chain was too badly corroded so he threw it out. Tomorrow he would go to a jeweller and buy a new gold chain.

  He finished cleaning the crystal. Now after eighty nine years there was not a speck of dirt on it. He lay it on his desk. It sparkled under the light of his desk lamp. It was indeed a beautiful crystal waiting to be returned to its owner, if that was actually possible.

  The next day Jackson went into town to the local jewellery store where he purchased the most expensive gold chain the store had to offer. The crystal deserved only the best. He was about to leave when a thought occurred to him. He showed the crystal heart to the jeweller.

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  “Would you be able to appraise this for me?” he asked.

  The man carefully examined the crystal under a magnifer and bright light turning it over and over several times.

  He looked up at Jackson. “I’m not an expert on crystals, but I know enough to tell you this is a rare type of crystal. I’ve never seen anything like it, and it’s been beautifully cut into the shape of a heart. It’s probably worth a lot of money. If you’d like to leave it with me I could get it more accurately appraised. I have a client coming in in a few days who is an expert on this type of thing. I’m sure he’d be happy to have a look at it for you.”

  Jackson declined the offer. He didn’t want to let the pendant out of his sight in case Isabella returned, but he bought a gift box for it, thanked the jeweller and left the store to head home.

  The jeweller watch him go, then picked up his phone and made a call.

  At home Jackson carefully threaded the gold chain through the tiny hole at the top of the crystal and then carefully arranged it in the gift box. It looked almost brand new. As he gazed at the pendant it seemed to sparkle under the light of the sun streaming in through the window. Don Robinson said it had spiritual or mystic powers for the wearer. This was something precious to be highly valued until Isabella returned, if she ever returned.

  He didn’t have a safe, but he remembered a loose floorboard in the living room which he had come across in his original search for the pendant. He wrapped the box carefully in plastic, then placed it in the gap under the floorboard. Then he placed a mat over it. No one would find it there. It was safe.

  That night Jackson dreamed Isabella returned. He had opened the front door to find her there smiling at him. They embraced, then he retrieved the pendant from under the floor and handed it to her. She beamed at him with happiness and pulled him in for a long tight hug. He carefully attached the pendant around her neck and it sparkled just like her eyes.

  But then her eyes turned sad as she told him now that she had the pendant again it would allow her to return to her own time in the past. She gave him one last kiss, then ran out the door, down through the back yard through the gate in the fence and into the pasture.

  “No, don’t go!” Jackson had run after her, but he wasn’t fast enough. He saw her standing at the top of the hill waving to him calling, “Goodbye Jackson, I love you, I will never forget you.”

  A grey cloud quickly moved across the hill, there was a bright flash, and Isabella was gone.

  He woke, sitting up in bed shouting “No!”

  But it had just been a dream.

  Jackson worked most of the following day on his I.T. job, then in the late afternoon he drove into the town to buy groceries.

  It was starting to get dark as he arrived back at Oakhaven. He unlocked the front door with bags of groceries under each arm, then stopped in shock at the sight in front of him.

  The living room and the kitchen beyond it were a mess. Cushions from the couches were lying on the floor, photographs from the mantlepiece were also on the floor, the dining table was lying on its side, and in the kitchen all the drawers had been emptied and cupboards open with the contents all over the floor. It was the same in his bedroom, it was trashed also. He had been burgled!

  The pendant! Had they found the pendant? He ran back to the living room. The mat over the hiding place was skewed out of its normal position.

  With a sinking heart Jackson pushed the mat aside and pried the floorboard open.