by Cindy Myers
“Actually, the editor gets final approval. But don’t worry. You’ll get to see the manuscript when it’s done.”
She finished her drink and rested her chin in her hand. “We’re not going to have a manuscript if Shelly won’t talk to us. I tried hard to chat her up this afternoon, but she wouldn’t talk at all about our family or growing up or anything.”
“She’s bound to soften up after a few days,” Travis said. He reached into his coat and pulled out a little black box, smaller than a pack of cards. “Here. Take this.”
She picked up the box. “What is it?”
“It’s a voice-activated recorder. Tuck it away somewhere and use it whenever you talk to Shelly. Don’t make it like you’re interviewing her, just, you know, reminisce. Get her to talk about her feelings. Stuff like that will make great quotes for the book.”
“Isn’t it illegal to record people without their permission?” She pressed the button on the side of the recorder and heard a whirring sound.
“A technicality. After all, the government does it all the time.”
She tucked the recorder into her bra. It fit snugly. “Does it show?” she asked.
“Um, no.”
He was actually blushing. She grinned. At least he wasn’t totally immune to her charms. Not that she was interested in him, but still, it was good to know she hadn’t completely lost her touch. “How am I supposed to get her to talk about anything useful?” she asked. “Nothing I’ve tried has worked so far.”
“You have to come at her from an angle, not with a direct attack.” He sat back, legs stretched out in front on him. “For instance, maybe you say you’re afraid of the dark. Ask if she’s afraid of the dark. If she says yes, ask how she managed down in that dark cave, or if she thinks her fear is because of the time she spent there. If she says she’s not afraid, ask how she managed in the dark cave or if she’s not afraid because of what she went through down there. Tell her you remember the good times you all had as children. Ask if she remembers the Christmas when she was seven and you were two. Or the dog you had as kids, or the school play—anything like that. Once you get her talking about general memories, you can dig deeper and eventually work your way back to the cave.”
She had to admit, Travis knew his stuff. “You really think it will work?”
“I know it will. You and I can arrange to meet up every day or so and I’ll empty the recorder’s memory and transcribe anything useful. We’ll put that with whatever I get from interviewing the locals and the interviews I’ve already done with folks back in Texas and before you know it, we’ll have our bestseller.”
She tucked the recorder in a little more securely. “This might be kind of fun. Sort of like being a spy.”
“Exactly.” He held up his half-empty beer in a salute. “Just think of it as an undercover operation. You’ll do great.”
Chapter 3
The smell of cinnamon and sugar was a better stress reliever than any fancy aromatherapy oils, Shelly thought, as she pulled a tray of cinnamon rolls from the oven. She put her face close to the warm rolls and breathed deeply, eyes closed, letting the soothing aroma fill her.
“That bad, huh?”
Charlie ambled into the kitchen and poured a mug of coffee. Charlie rarely moved quickly—he was a big, deliberate man who reminded her of a bear. He made Shelly feel safe and calm. She set the tray of rolls on the stovetop and turned off the oven. “Good morning,” she said.
“How long have you been up?” He kissed her cheek, and pinched a piece off of one of the rolls.
She made a show of slapping his hand. “Since about four. If you’ll wait a minute, I’ll frost these.”
“My offer still stands. If she upsets you that much, I can be the bad guy and ask her to leave.”
Of course, Charlie assumed Shelly’s agitation was due to Mindy’s unexpected arrival. And it was—mostly. But her anxiety had started with that online story about the twenty-fifth anniversary of her rescue. Then Mindy had showed up, and that reporter. It was like emerging from that cave into chaos all over again. She didn’t know what to expect, or whom to trust. She glanced toward the stairs. The guest room was at the back of the house, but still . . .
“She won’t hear us,” Charlie said. “She didn’t come in until almost one. She’ll sleep all morning.”
As a child, Mindy had been a heavy sleeper, seldom rising before noon on weekends, while Shelly could seldom stay in bed past seven, anxious to be up and active.
“Do you want me to tell her to go?” Charlie asked. He pinched off another bite of roll.
“Do you really mind having her here?” She added vanilla to the bowlful of powdered sugar, then drizzled in melted butter.
“It doesn’t matter what I think. She’s your sister. If she upsets you, I’ll tell her she can’t stay.”
Having Mindy here did upset her. She reminded Shelly of too many things she wanted to forget—all those old bad feelings of only being valued for the money and attention she brought to her family, not loved for herself.
But another, accusing voice in the back of her head whispered that she ought to be over that already. She was a grown woman, with children of her own. There was something wrong with a person who couldn’t even speak to her family. She ought to do her part to try to mend the rift between them. Mindy was the only sister she had. Now that they were grown, maybe they could heal the old wounds, and be close again. After all, no other woman could know her the way her sister did. “I think I want her to stay—just for a little while,” she said.
“That’s fine with me. What about this book idea of hers?”
Shelly beat the frosting more vigorously. “I don’t want anything to do with that.”
“I can understand that.” He sipped his coffee and stared out the window at the sun just beginning to break over the mountains. None of the windows had curtains or blinds; Shelly didn’t want anything to block the view, and the house was set back far enough from the road and neighbors that no one could see in. “The two of you are probably going to have to talk some about what happened when you were a kid,” Charlie said after a moment. “You’ll have to clear the air.”
She nodded. “I’ll have to try to make her understand how I feel. And I guess I need to listen to what she has to say about it.” She set aside the bowl of frosting and turned to face him, her back against the kitchen counter. “I know she feels like I got all the attention and she got nothing, but I would have given anything for things to be the other way around.”
“If you tell her that often enough, maybe it will sink in.” He turned to pour more coffee. “Wrap one of those up for me to take with me,” he said. “I’ve got to go in early, work on one of the graders that started acting up yesterday.”
She smeared frosting on the rolls, then cut off one and placed it on a napkin. He pulled her close and gave her a long kiss good-bye that tasted of coffee and sugar. He held her tightly for a moment longer than usual, the hug comforting her more than words.
The boys came downstairs a few minutes after their father left, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, though still barefoot, hair uncombed. “Cinnamon rolls!” Cameron exclaimed, and slid into his chair at the table.
Theo, the quieter of the two, said nothing as he slumped into his chair. Shelly squeezed his shoulder and set a glass of milk in front of him. “Wake up, sleepyhead,” she said.
“I’m awake.” He stifled a yawn and reached for a roll from the plate she set in the center of the table.
“Drew Sommersby fell asleep in Sunday school last week,” Cameron said.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Shelly corrected him.
The boy took a drink of milk. “The teacher woke him up and told him he should go to bed earlier. He told me he’d stayed up late the night before, watching a movie. It was that film about the robots, and this guy who wants to take over the world. . . .”
She listened to his rambling story while she made the boys’ lunches—peanut butter a
nd strawberry jelly for Theo, turkey and cheese for Cameron. Apple slices and homemade cookies and a frozen box of juice that would thaw by lunchtime. She glanced at the clock over the window. “It’s seven-thirty, boys. Time to run upstairs and brush your teeth, comb your hair, and put on your shoes. We don’t want to be late.” Their babysitter, Debbie, lived the opposite direction from the bank, so on the mornings Charlie couldn’t drop them off Shelly had to allow extra time.
Cameron raced up the stairs, Theo shuffling after him. “Good morning, Aunt Mindy!” Cameron called.
Mindy, wearing boxer shorts and an oversize T-shirt, descended the stairs a moment later. Hair uncombed and makeup smeared, she was a far cry from the former beauty queen. “What smells so good?” she asked.
“Homemade cinnamon rolls. Do you want coffee?”
“Please.”
Shelly poured her sister a cup of coffee and set a plate in front of her, then busied herself with loading the dishwasher while Mindy drank coffee and ate a cinnamon roll. The boys thundered down the stairs. “We’ll wait in the car, Mom!” Cameron called. “Bye, Aunt Mindy!” Then the door slammed and they were off down the steps.
“Your boys are certainly, um, active,” Mindy said, staring after them.
“They’re just boys.”
“I’ve never spent much time around little kids. Funny, since half the girls I went to high school with are already married.” She pinched off a piece of roll. “How old were you when you married Charlie?”
“Twenty-one.” Though she’d felt at least a decade older. While Mindy, at twenty-five, seemed much younger.
Mindy shook her head. “I can’t imagine tying myself down so young. And only having sex with one guy for the rest of your life?” She shuddered.
Shelly smiled, imagining how shocked her sister would be if Shelly told her that Charlie was the only man she’d ever had sex with—and that was fine with her. “What did you do last night?” she asked.
“I wanted to see a little of the town, so I went to that bar—the Dirty Sally.” She made a face. “Sounds like it ought to be a place with strippers.”
“It’s named after one of the mines in the area.”
“You mean, like gold mines? Do they really still do that here? Mine gold, I mean.”
“They do. The Dirty Sally Mine shut down during the Depression, but there are a lot of others still around. The town owns a half interest in the Lucky Lady Mine, which reopened a couple of months ago. And there are a few others, mostly smaller one- or two-man operations.”
“That’s wild.” Mindy shook her head and pulled off another bite of roll.
“Did you have a good time last night?” Shelly asked.
“Not really. I mean, it was just a bunch of people sitting around talking and drinking. No dancing or anything. And there’s no movie theater or mall—what do people do around here for fun?”
“Most people around here are into outdoor activities—hiking or Jeeping in the summer, skiing or snowshoeing or snowmobiling in the winter.”
“That’s fine for the daytime, but what do they do at night?”
“I guess they’re worn out from all the daytime activities. Or they stay home and watch TV or you know, read.”
Mindy rolled her eyes. “It’s a wonder you don’t all die of boredom.”
Shelly laughed. “I guess we are pretty boring, but it suits me.”
Mindy pinched off a piece of a second roll. “These are good. Where did you get them?”
“I made them.”
“You mean, like, from a mix or something?”
“I mean, like, from scratch.”
“Where did you learn to cook?”
“I taught myself. I like to cook.” Their mother had believed in spending as little time in the kitchen as possible—if it didn’t come from a can, the freezer, or a takeout menu, they didn’t eat it. Shelly hadn’t realized how good food could taste until she started cooking for herself.
“Of course you did.” Mindy’s expression turned sour. “You probably made that quilt on my bed, too, and knit your own socks.”
Shelly had indeed made the quilt on the guest bed, and while she didn’t knit socks, she had been known to knit a scarf or two. Clearly, Mindy didn’t want to hear that. “What do you like to do for fun?” she asked her sister.
“I like to dance, and listen to music. I like going out to clubs and stuff. And shopping—I love shopping.”
“We don’t have many places to shop around here. And no clubs.” Mindy looked so disappointed at this news that Shelly almost felt sorry for her. But at least this meant the young woman wasn’t likely to stay around that long.
But Mindy rallied. “Maybe you can show me around town today.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t. I have to work.”
“You work at the bank, right?”
“Yes. How did you know?” Had the private detective who had found her filled in that little detail, too? The thought of some stranger spying on her made her skin crawl.
Mindy shrugged. “Last night, people wanted to know how I ended up in Eureka. I told them I was your sister. Someone mentioned you work at the bank. What do you do there?”
“I’m a teller. Nothing exciting, I promise you. What kind of work do you do?”
“Oh, different stuff. My last job, I worked as a hostess in a restaurant. That was before I decided to become a writer.”
Shelly stiffened. But she told herself she should have a more open mind. “What kind of things have you written?”
“Oh, different things.” Mindy waved her hand dismissively. “This book will be my first big project. The publisher thinks it will sell really well.”
“I can’t imagine why anyone would be interested in something that happened twenty-five years ago.”
“It’s all your doing,” Mindy said, her languid attitude vanished. “If you didn’t pull your Greta Garbo act and disappear, people would have probably gotten tired of the whole thing by now. But now you’re a big mystery—people want to know what happened.” She glared at her sister. “Why did you bug out?”
“I don’t owe anyone an explanation for my behavior,” Shelly said.
“I think you owe me one. You owe Mom and Dad one. We’re your family and you just stopped talking to us. You didn’t even let us know where you were living or what your name was. You could have been dead, for all we knew. Didn’t you think we’d worry? That we’d feel awful that we never knew where you were or how you were doing? How do you think Mom’s going to feel when I tell she’s got two grandsons she’s never seen?”
Shelly had spent a lot of years convincing herself she had nothing to feel guilty about. She opened her mouth to deny that her mother would care about her or her children, but she couldn’t. Now that she was a mother herself, she couldn’t really believe that in some small part of her heart, her mother didn’t love her. Shelly didn’t agree with the way Sandy had chosen to express that love, but maybe she did, in fact, care. And how much was she hurting the boys, not allowing them to know their grandmother?
But then the image of a tabloid photo of her boys and the headline BABY SHELLY’S BABIES flashed into her head, effectively trampling the brief sentimentality. She couldn’t believe that, if she did introduce her children to Sandy, the woman wouldn’t be on the phone to the media at the first opportunity. “I don’t have time to talk about this right now,” she said. “I have to take the boys to the sitter and get ready for work.” A glance at the clock told her she was already late.
“Don’t you even care how much you hurt us?” Mindy asked. “How much you hurt Mom?”
“Mom hasn’t thought of me as her little girl in a long time,” Shelly said. “She can’t look at me now without seeing dollar signs.”
“Oh sure, you’re all happy and settled in your big house with your good job. You’ve forgotten what it’s like to not have money. Why should you hold a grudge against her for trying to provide for us the best way she could?”
Shelly heard her mother’s voice in those words; Mindy was parroting something she’d heard so often it was burned into her brain. “Mom and Dad had plenty of money after I was rescued from that cave,” she said. “It’s not my fault they wasted it all.”
“They wasted it all on you—on new dresses and shoes and trips to the beauty parlor. I had to wear your hand-me-downs.”
“I would have gladly traded places with you.”
“It’s easy for you to say that, because you know you never would have had to.”
Shelly sighed. This was an old argument she thought she’d put behind her. “Neither one of us can go back and change what happened in the past,” she said. “I’m sorry you were hurt.”
“You think we took advantage of you and what happened to you, just because we were greedy,” Mindy said. “But you turned your back on us a long time ago. Maybe Mama spent so much time focused on what happened to you because it was the only way she knew to get your attention.” Mindy shoved back her chair and stormed out of the room. Shelly listened to her feet pounding on the stairs, then the door of the guest room slammed.
She grabbed her keys and purse and headed toward the door, but memories of her mother crowded out every other conscious thought. Sandy had been only a year older than Shelly was now, holding court for a group of reporters at Shelly’s twelfth birthday party. “We’re so proud of Shelly,” she’d said. “She’s come so far, overcoming the trauma she experienced. She’s so smart and sweet. We know one day she’s going to make us all proud.”
They were the kind of words any mother would say. Words Shelly herself might say about her boys. But at the time, Shelly had been sure her mother was faking it, saying the words like lines in a play, to try to impress the reporters. Sandy had concocted this fantasy of the perfect, loving family that she liked to present to the rest of the world. Shelly, a withdrawn and mistrustful preteen, hadn’t believed the words were true.
But what if they had been true? What if Sandy really had been proud of her daughter? What if at least part of her desire to show off for the press had grown from that pride, however twisted or misplaced?