The Summer We Lost Her Page 27

  * * *

  THE DREAM WAS one he never wanted to wake from. He was walking along Whiteface Inn Lane, just north of 86. Gunner trotted by his side. They passed cabins that pressed tight to the road and curving driveways flanked with massive stone walls and elaborate landscaping that hinted of large houses just out of sight. It was late September. The summer foliage was tinged with scarlet sugar maples and sumac, purple-red smoke bush, and pinkish-yellow katsura trees—heavily fragrant with hints of brown sugar. Gunner heard it first—the yipping of puppies up a long, rutted driveway lined with trees cracked and craggy from brutal winter storms. The happy barking led them to a tumbledown kennel made of particleboard, two-by-fours, and peeling black paint. A corrugated metal roof had rusted gashes. Must have leaked something terrible.

  Gunner rushed forward to push the busted door open. As Matt approached, he heard Gunner’s tail thwacking the walls. The dog yelped excitedly. Matt burst inside to the sweetest sight possible: Gracie grinning on the concrete floor, her freckled nose scrunched up in delight as Gunner licked her face.

  Matt scooped her up. With Gunner dancing around his feet, Matt held his daughter so tight they almost became one. Her soft cheek against his. Hair scented with Johnson’s baby shampoo in his eyes, his mouth, nearly weightless arms around his head. Finally, Gracie pulled away to look at him. She held up a finger in mock admonishment. “What took you so long, Daddy? I waited forever. . . .”

  * * *

  IT WAS JUST past sunup and Cass was grinning at him, snapping photos as he rolled over in bed. “Someone was out like a light.”

  “I didn’t mean to sleep.” He rubbed the hollows above his eyes, checked the clock. 5:12. “I dreamed I found her. God, she was so perfect. The way when she smiles big and can’t keep her eyes open. Sweet freckled nose and cheeks.”

  “It’s a sign.”

  Yes. It had to be. Please let it be.

  “It’s going to happen.” She took his bearded chin between thumb and forefinger. “Matty, we’re going to find her, you hear me? I’m witchy about these things.”

  “When I find her . . . I’ve been thinking I should just stay. Why leave? Gracie loves it here. And I need to start from scratch. Re-create my life. I can run my own practice. I’ve already seen a place I can work out of. Gracie can go to school in town.” He paused. He’d need a nanny at home for the baby, but he could work from home more while the child was young. “I can do this. Get a puppy. A German shepherd.”

  “Is Elise just going to walk away?”

  “I’ll wind up with custody, without a doubt. I’m Gracie’s primary caregiver. Elise can make her own choices. This is where we will be.”

  Cass turned onto her stomach and rested her chin on one fist. Gazed at him with those honey-colored eyes. She was truly striking—a watery spray of caramel freckles across her nose, thick copper lashes—even in the tragic light of the Swiss Miss Motel.

  “Did we, uh . . . ?” he asked, wincing. “Last night?”

  She slid a hand up his chest. “We did not. Believe me, if we did . . .” She played with the hairs on his chest. “You’d remember.”

  He held her fingers. “I really think I could do this. Live here.”

  “I could handle that.” Cass moved on top of him in lacy tank top and thong, all pillowy breasts and wild hair and soft lips. Kissed his bearded jawline to his earlobe. “Right now, I could handle a lot of things.”

  So could he. Matt tugged off her panties, slipped her top over her head, and let his fingers explore the wonder that was Cass Urquhart’s body. Then, for the first time in thirty-three years, he lost himself in the woman he’d never gotten out of his thoughts.

  — CHAPTER 33 —

  Elise woke up just after eight in the morning, toy frog still in her hand, to the high-pitched crystal ping of her cell phone. Bleary, she sat up in Gracie’s bed to fish around in the covers, eventually finding her phone between mattress and headboard—no doubt nudged there by her daughter’s tiny dejected animals. An e-mail had come in.

  It was from her father.

  Lisey,

  I haven’t felt right about intruding, given what hell you’re facing. But the police spoke to me yesterday, so I’m guessing you’ve heard that I’m here . . . staying at some god-awful fishing lodge up the lake, have been all week. Imagine moldy walls, zero water pressure, and a stowaway beetle in my suitcase hoping to wind up anywhere but this place.

  Asbestos be damned, I came here to see you. Unless you reply, I’ll be at your dock—eastern shoreline with the black boathouse, big S over the door?—around 11:30.

  Dad

  She immediately tapped out “No. Please don’t.” But didn’t press send. She got up, restless, and paced the upstairs bedrooms. Her mind was awhirl. She hadn’t expected this reaction, after all, it had been twenty years—but part of her wanted to see Warren.

  She went downstairs and stared at her handbag on the kitchen table. Matt had always believed her sensitivity about anyone touching the purse was driven by possessiveness. But it wasn’t that at all. She reached inside, dug beneath the stiff leather bottom piece to pull out stacks of unopened envelopes. The first few were addressed to Lisey Bleeker, but later he’d started addressing them to Lisey Sorenson. She spread them out and examined them, reorganizing them by date posted.

  Was it time to finally open them . . . hear what her father had to say for himself?

  * * *

  IN HER MIND’S eye, that day had been unusually hot and muggy for September. Elise had just started eleventh grade and had stayed late after school to sort out some confusion—she and another girl had both been assigned the same locker. The other girl was a senior, so she had priority. Elise was assigned another locker down in an airless hallway by the gym and had spent the better part of an hour setting it up. Aware her mother might be starting to worry, Elise jogged the whole way home and arrived sweaty and parched.

  As she drew near, Elise could see that Rosamunde had put on the sprinkler and forgotten about it. The water was still spraying over the lawn and deep puddles had bloomed on the sidewalk, the porch steps, even the driveway. She followed the hose to the faucet on the side of the house and turned off the water. Strange. There was a hum coming from inside the garage. She stood in front of the big door and tugged hard on the metal handle.

  The door wasn’t halfway up when Elise smelled the exhaust.

  The Tercel was running. Strapped into the passenger seat, where she used to sit when she was married and her husband did most of the driving, was Rosamunde, her face calm and expressionless. Her skin translucent and—for the first time—free of makeup. She’d had her hair cut to the chin and smoothed straight. She wore a white blouse Elise had never seen and the navy skirt Warren had deemed to be “business casual.” This Roxborough Rosamunde was so very compact. Smiling and composed. Sure of herself, finally, in death.

  * * *

  NOW, ELISE STARED down at the envelopes from her father. Never, in all the years since Rosamunde died, had her profound grief, the agony that could bring her to her knees if she stayed still long enough, been anything less than resolute. It had been the flag she had planted in the ground that day in the garage, certain it was immovable.

  Until now.

  For the first time in her life, the image of her mother sitting in that car with the motor running brought her anger. Not even anger—that was too tame. Fury.

  How could she? Rosamunde was a parent. So god-damned-what that her husband walked out? She had a daughter who needed her. Who—she had to have known—would be the one who would pull up that garage door and find her. Whom she was leaving so alone in the world that Elise would spend the rest of her life on the run, so filled with sorrow for all that befell her mother that she would grow fierce with resolve and ambition and drive. Who Rosamunde would have had to realize would misdirect her resentment and aim it squarely at her only remaining parent, a man she would have no choice but to hate.

  Rosamunde didn’t take away
one parent from her only child, she took away both.

  Elise thought back to those nights in her airless room in North Carolina. How she’d pondered all the possible reasons other aspiring Olympians might have to make such profound sacrifices in their lives. Of course, you could throw in Academy Award and Nobel Prize winners. Those who climbed Everest. Any pinnacle strived for that almost no one reaches. If you examined the childhoods of those who worked hardest, those who forfeited so much in their lives to win whatever prize they sought, would you find any who felt whole from the start? Or, like Elise, did they find themselves so broken one day that they would spend the rest of their lives trying to prove they had worth?

  Had Elise done anything remotely as despicable with Gracie?

  She’d cut her thumb. She’d run to the shed. And someone out there had capitalized on those moments she was absent. Someone out there—for whatever reason—had gone and done the unconscionable.

  Elise ran a fingertip across her name on one of Warren’s letters. It occurred to her, like the light of dawn peeling back the night sky, that all these years she’d been running from the wrong person.

  – CHAPTER 34 –

  The Sunday morning crowd at the Bookworm was full of tourists, mostly baby boomers—Matt was fairly certain everyone in attendance had grown up pondering the identity of the Woodstock Girl. Cass couldn’t have looked more the part. Natural and summery in faded jeans with frayed cuffs, leather flip-flops, and a creamy, loose-knit sweater.

  She was terrific in front of her audience. Held the mic to her lower lip as she told them that day at Woodstock was the day her life really began. The photographer had been a redheaded guy, college age, with a bag of camera equipment. She had followed him around and he taught her how to find the beauty shot within every frame. He taught her how to use his scratched Polaroid camera, then gifted it to her. Cass reached into her bag and pulled it out to excited oohs and aahs. “When they stopped making these a few years back, I bought out every package of film left. ’Course now they sell them everywhere.” She looked through the lens at the audience, snapped a one-handed photo. Pulled it out and fanned herself with it. Her laugh was throaty. “I’ve always said, people look their best in Polaroids.”

  Matt leaned against a table in the Travel section, baseball cap pulled low to avoid being recognized. With his beard, he was fairly certain no one beyond staff had so much as glanced his way. Also, he could best observe the street from this vantage point. Ridiculous, of course. No one would be parading his daughter past the bookstore.

  He’d sent Barrans his resignation. Caught up with Dorsey on communications—the latest was a psychic certain Gracie had been taken to the Netherlands. She’d seen a vision of her squatting in a wooden child carrier on a bicycle ridden by a blond man. There were windmills. Tulips.

  A woman in a long flowered dress and drapey bead necklaces put up a hand to get Cass’s attention. “Which day was the photo taken? It looks like it wasn’t as crowded as I’ve always imagined Woodstock to be.”

  “Good eye,” Cass said. “This was Monday morning—because of the rain, they’d extended the schedule. The crowd had shrunk way, way down from half a million on the weekend. The day was dismal, mud in every direction you looked, and the field was splotched with lumps of soaking-wet sleeping bags and backpacks. I remember thinking it looked like a field of dead dogs. Everywhere was a sort of sad aftermath. But still, it was an intimate vibe. It was, ‘Look at us, the lucky ones, still here.’ ”

  The crowd was rapt. The only movement came from the store’s owner, soundlessly checking on the coffee, the tidiness of the books; she’d been careful to avoid Matt and his aura of tragedy. She moved past him now with a hushed “Pardon me.” Her name tag caught his attention: VAL REISER. Wait, this was the source of the Annie Leibovitz comparison—the bookstore owner?

  “I was goofing around until Hendrix launched into that insane rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ I mean, his amps were so freaking loud, and at first he played it sort of as is, then—I’m sure some of you guys remember it—he went mad crazy with the feedback from his amp. Used it to mimic bombs dropping, jets racing, people wailing . . . holy shit, was it something. That was the moment the picture was taken. This photographer, he went nuts snapping people’s reactions. I mean, people were dropping to their knees, pulling out their hair. Some weren’t even breathing, it was so intense.

  “So everyone was strung out and way inside their own heads with what they’d just heard. Then Hendrix went into ‘Purple Haze’ and everybody started dancing like it was their last moment on earth. I’ll never, ever forget it—or that nameless soul who snapped the photo and sparked in me a forever love of the lens.” She held a hand up. “Thank you for coming, folks.”

  A thunder of applause. Val took the mic to thank Cass, thank the crowd for coming, invited all in attendance to help themselves to refreshments and be sure to bring their books to the table where Cass would soon be signing.

  Her cheeks flushed, Cass sauntered over to Matt and stood, flipping her hair off her face. “I survived.”

  “You were so natural. Like you’d been doing this all your life.” He glanced at his watch. “Listen, I’ve got to head—”

  “Wait.” She reached up to touch his jaw. “I was thinking before I went on . . . I love today. Waking up with you. Looking across the room just now to see you there waiting. Feels . . . like the way things should be.”

  Maybe it was time for them to rewrite history, he thought. River and Gracie adored each other. Cass could sell her place, he’d sell his, and they’d start fresh. He’d always wanted a son. And there’d be no more perfect little girl for Cass than Gracie.

  Then there was the baby. Cass would be wonderful with an infant.

  It would be an idyllic life—probably the one he was meant to lead.

  So why was his heart thumping?

  Cass laughed and looked toward the back of the store, shaking her head. “Okay. Heard your silence loud and clear.”

  “Don’t say that. It’s just so soon.”

  “I wasn’t proposing. We shared a very romantic morning. Passionate.”

  “I know. It’s just . . . I don’t even have my daughter back yet. I’m not ready to think about romance or passion, if that makes sense.”

  Val waved to Cass from across the room. There was a lineup of people clutching books at the signing table, excited to chat with the Woodstock Girl in person.

  Before Cass walked away, she said, “That’s the thing about romance and passion, Matty. The last thing it should do is make sense.”

  – CHAPTER 35 –

  Her arms had stopped aching from burying and unburying the dead animals, but the cramping in her belly had steadily grown worse. Now, Elise was hit with enough heavy nausea that she put away Warren’s letters and made her way back to the medical clinic on Highway 86 around ten o’clock. This time, a receptionist was there—a huge-eyed girl with a pointed face all but hidden by two sheets of glossy hair. A mouse in the curtains. When Elise asked for Dr. Jennifer Upton, the mouse shook her tiny nose. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Sorenson. Dr. Upton’s not working today.”

  No. Elise needed Jennifer Upton, with her gentle authority and her cool hands and her life-giving advice. “Is she on call? Can she drop in?”

  “I’m afraid she’s incommunicado on Sundays. Family time.”

  The girl’s face had morphed into a rat’s now. How dare she say “family time” to Elise, when she clearly knew who she was? And how dare this Dr. Upton make Elise need her and love her, tell her to return with any problem and then, when there was a problem, have taken off to mother someone else?

  “But she did leave a note, if you did come back, to send you straight to Oliver.”

  Elise forced calmness into her voice. “That would be good.”

  In minutes, she was paper-gowned and lying on her back, bare abdomen slathered in cold gel, the lights overhead permanently singeing her retinas, and Oliver once again jam
med into the tight place between exam table and wall.

  “Not to worry,” he said, digging the Doppler down around her left ovaries. “Whatever’s going on, we can deal with it. Sometimes a bit of remaining tissue gets infected. The important thing is, you knew to come in.”

  He probed harder, toward the center now, pressing so deep he’d almost be better off coming from her lower back.

  “See anything?”

  “I do.” He squinted at the screen, his expression dour. Pushed hair behind his ears and, wiggling the Doppler, moved closer. The screech of his wheeled stool. “Can you excuse me a moment?”

  What choice did she have?

  The wait was short. Almost immediately, Oliver was back at his post and armed with his magic wand. “I’m an ultrasound tech. I’m not usually authorized to give patients any sort of diagnosis. But I got the okay just now.” He turned the screen around so Elise could see, and worked the Doppler down around her lower abdomen again. He turned up the volume and the wavering, vaguely underwater swish of her bodily systems filled the room.

  “You see that there?” He pointed to a black hole in the mottled gray clouds, then a ghostly keyhole shape. “That’s what we’re focused on.” He slid the wand to the right. “Almost got what I want. There.” He looked at Elise and grinned as the room filled with a speedy, rhythmic swoosh, swoosh, swoosh.

  Elise looked up at Oliver, stunned. Could it be?

  Oliver’s smile spread across the entire room. “That’s your baby’s heartbeat, Mrs. Sorenson. You’re eight weeks pregnant.”

  – CHAPTER 36 –

  With the crowd around Cass thinning out, Matt stood at the food table, trying to spread cream cheese on an everything bagel and sending seeds skittering across the tablecloth and onto the floor. The more he tried to clean it up, the more cream cheese dotted his hands, his forearms, and his jeans.

  “Cass is going to kill me for being so late. Listed a condo over at Whiteface, took forever.” Garth had appeared beside him to fill a paper cup with coffee. “So, Wolfe’s offer is in, if you have a minute to sit down and go over the high points.”