The Artifacts: A Flint Hills Story
Kayla Ramsey buys property in the Flint Hills town of Sycamore Falls, Kansas: an 1890 Victorian house and an 1870 farmhouse behind it. In the farmhouse’s library, she finds shelves of frayed books: Next Door Neighbors by Josephine Lawrence, The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster. Each has dog-eared pages with sentences underlined: “not one to make a stranger feel at home”; “attempt to connect a by-gone time with the very present”; “the only girl in college who wasn’t brought up on Little Women.”
When Kayla reads an underlined phrase from Agatha Christie’s Destination Unknown, the scene around her changes: from a warm sunny day to a cool cloudy one, an empty gravel driveway now underlies a 1950s car, a strange male’s voice projects from the next room. When she closes and replaces the book, the voice, car, and clouds disappear. She has time-shifted.
Kayla experiments with time-shifting until she’s comfortable traveling back and forth from present day to the 1960s and ‘50s and even back to 1885. In her trips she witnesses a cleverly executed murder masquerading as an accident and finds and returns teen twins who themselves time-shifted and were trapped in the past.
While the premise is interesting, The Artifacts provides little in the way of explanation: why these books or these underlined words. Kayla does interview some of the people she encounters in other time periods, but the exchanges tend to be superficial. There’s no real sense of time and place.
The effect is like a museum exhibit with artifacts from an archeological dig resting in a glass case. The objects pique the imagination, but by themselves they don’t fully tell the story.
