You’re blowing this thing out of all—”
She opened the door and turned back to him. “And you can tell Linea that for me. When you and she have your next little chat, that is.”
“Ellie,” he called after her, but she was already gone.
2
IT TOOK ELLIE most of the next day to get to Deadwood, with plane changes, car rentals and having to use a detour through the Black Hills for the better part of an hour. When she finally pulled into her grandmother’s driveway it was dark. Really dark.
It seemed crazy that South Dakota and Los Angeles shared the same sky. Because this one had a vast, starry splatter of lights arching over it against a velvety black, the likes of which was never seen in California. Too many houses. Too many lights. And even if there weren’t, who ever looks up in L.A.?
The cold night air smelled impossibly sweet from the roses that hugged her grandmother’s house and from the distant tang of snow sliding down off the jagged mountains. Winter came early here and lasted forever. Hugging herself from the cold, she surrendered to her need for warmth and went inside.
The house smelled musty when she opened it. Ellie flipped on light switches, grateful she hadn’t turned the electricity off. It had been months since she’d been here last, and whoever was trying to sell it clearly hadn’t been here much, either. There were white cloths covering the furniture and someone had begun gathering things together in the living room, probably for the auctioneer. She triple locked the door and took a deep breath.
With a frown she dragged her suitcase up the stairs toward the bedroom she had always slept in. It was small, with faded striped wallpaper and the twin bed she’d slept on as a girl when they’d come to visit. Made of mahogany with little pinecone finials on top, the bed still bore the signature handmade quilt from their grandmother’s hand.
She sat down on the bed and ran her fingers across the patchwork fabric. It was soft and worn with time and love. It smelled like her grandmother in here. She dropped back and rubbed her cheek against the old cotton, feeling tears prick her eyes. As infrequently as they’d managed to see her, Grandma Lily had been a force in her life and Reese’s. The only person to see past the photo ops, the trust funds and the Hollywood hype of their lives. Here they were just themselves. Just girls no one knew. Here she and Reese would dream of their futures late at night with the lights out and share secrets they would tell no one else. Here they’d felt loved.
SHE AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING, still wearing the clothes from the night before. Light was pouring in through the undraped window and Ellie sat up, disoriented. God, she’d been exhausted. She didn’t even remember falling asleep.
Downstairs she made some coffee in the stove-top antique of a coffeemaker and took a mug with her as she climbed the squeaky stairs to the attic. Swallowing thickly, she opened the door at the top of the stairs and pushed the little button in to turn on the overhead light.
There was a window at the far end, in the eve, and piles of stuff her grandmother had hoarded up here. It was like a yearbook of her life. Little signatures of her friendships and triumphs, and a few of her failures. There was the wide bedstead she’d shared with the grandfather Ellie had never met. He’d died before she was born. There was an old crib and a bassinet, rocking chairs and hat racks. A pair of old wooden crutches and piles of National Geographic her grandmother wouldn’t part with. But draped across all of these, like spiderwebs, was yellow crime-scene tape.
It was this that made the coffee in Ellie’s hands shake as she approached the trunk that sat smack in the middle of the chaos. Morning light struck it with a pinpoint ray, as if it were announcing itself as different from the rest. Dust motes swam in the light above it. Ellie knelt down and set her coffee on the floor.
For six months they’d searched for Reese. No stone went unturned, no parolee unquestioned. But in the end, there were simply no clues. No ransom note. No indication according to the police that she had done anything but vanish into thin air.
“You must go back to the beginning,” that man had said. “To the trunk. That’s how you’ll find her.”
There was no doubt in her mind it was this trunk he meant. This was the last place Reese had been. This was the trunk she’d been exploring when Ellie had run out for coffee, leaving her alone. She’d left the door unlocked behind her. Everyone in Deadwood did. And that was the last time she’d seen her sister alive. She had vanished without a trace.
Ellie opened the lid on the trunk and tilted it back. It appeared to be the same as any of the other dozen weathered trunks piled in the attic. This one, still smudged black with fingerprinting dust, was stamped tin with leather straps and a crinkling wall-papered interior. She began to unload it: there were ribbon-wrapped letter collections and photos and pieces of lace, pressed flowers and hat pins and a velvet crazy quilt that was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Halfway down, she found an antique tintype camera and lifted it out of the trunk.
Sunlight glinted off the large lens as she uncovered it. It was a beauty in mint condition and she couldn’t believe they had missed this before. It must be over a hundred and thirty years old. She turned it upside down, examining it from all angles. The initials E.K. were engraved on the underside of it in beautiful scroll lettering. Who was E.K. and how had his camera ended up in her grandmother’s trunk? She wondered if it would still work and decided to take it with her when she went back to L.A.
She sat down and placed the camera beside her. She then dug into the trunk again. By the time she’d emptied it, her cell rang. She checked the caller ID and answered the call.
“Okay, are you really back in Deadwood?”
Bridget Meeks’s voice made her smile. Bridget, her best friend since high school and unofficial partner in more zany exploits than she could remember, had tracked her down via satellite. Probably in between feedings of her twin baby boys, Lucca and Isaac.
“Yeah,” Ellie said. “Nuts, huh?”
“Dane called me this morning as I was wiping the oatmeal off my face, whining about it.” She sighed. “He said you two had a fight.”
Why Dane felt that he needed to go to her best friend when things were going wrong, she couldn’t guess. “That’s right. News at six…”
“Everything okay with you two? I mean besides the fact that you’re there and he’s here?”
Were things okay? She didn’t think so anymore. “Do you think I made a mistake, Bridge?” Ellie picked up an old book of historical photography and opened it.
“What? Going to Deadwood?”
“No, agreeing to marry him.” That thought hadn’t fully coalesced until just now.
An I-don’t-want-to-say-what-I-really-think hesitation ensued. “It’s how you feel that matters, El.”
Good answer. How did she feel? Right now confusion was the only emotion she could pinpoint. It swirled inside her like the dust in the sunlight spilling across the pages of the old book in her hands. “I don’t know,” she murmured, “maybe I’m expecting too much.”
“Maybe,” Bridget suggested gently, “it’s time you expected something of somebody other than yourself.”
And there
