“Shep, it’s time.”
Eleanor turned, blinking into the dimmer light of the tent—and recognized Megan. Her heart lifted.
The same young woman who’d picked her up at the hotel in California. The one with the too-fast van and the floaty tank top. Eleanor remembered gripping the dashboard while Megan raced through traffic like a game of chicken. At one point she’d taken a turn so hard, the dice had come right off the rearview mirror and hit the drummer in the forehead.
“Any chance,” Eleanor said, squinting with mock suspicion, “you drove us from California all the way here to Denver?”
The girl laughed and wagged a finger. “You’re funny, Ellie. You know I did.”
Eleanor chuckled, smiling wide—covering the flicker of anxiety in her chest. She didn’t know. Not really. But she remembered how the van fishtailed onto gravel and how Roxy had whined the whole drive like she’d been on a roller coaster.
Maybe it wasn’t that she’d forgotten.
Maybe she’d just blocked it out.
No wonder the memory had gone missing—self-preservation, plain and simple.
“You’re a menace behind the wheel, you know that?” Eleanor said, lifting her soda bottle in salute.
The girl grinned and gave a proud shrug. “Only when I’m awake.”
Chapter Fourteen
The sunset stretched endlessly across the horizon, a molten ribbon melting into the road ahead. The radio fizzed in and out of focus as they moved close to the edge of the station’s reach, but the Beatles still played through the speakers. “Here Comes the Sun,” played and its gentle optimism was at odds with Leanne’s growing unease.
They’d left California empty-handed that morning.
No Eleanor. No confirmation. Just rumors of an old woman who’d climbed aboard Shep Moon’s tour bus after a surprise performance that had left the crowd buzzing. Leanne had dismissed the idea that the woman could be her mother—until she heard someone mention the hairless dog.
“A pip-squeak pooch with a beehive tuft of hair and a bark like bad feedback on an amp” had been the exact description.
There was only one dog like that. And only one woman bold enough to bring her onto a rock-and-roll stage.
Eleanor Bell Strickland. There’d been a sharp sense of relief that her mother was alive and well, and hopefully safe, along with the plummet of her stomach when Leanne realized the chase wasn’t over andthat they’d now have to figure out where Shep Moon and his band were headed with her in tow.
Leanne and Nora had stayed at the festival until every last tent had been taken down, searching for Eleanor with no success. At least a dozen people told her Shep’s next stop was in Colorado. With no reason not to trust that, Leanne and Nora, after waiting until checkout to make sure Eleanor was one of the people leaving the motel the following day, had climbed back into the Lincoln Continental—its new tire humming over the asphalt, a full tank of gas beneath them, and miles to go. They’d pointed the car toward Colorado, where the Denver Pop Festival would start in five days.
Leanne was hoping that—as everyone said—the festival would be smaller and easier to navigate than the one they’d just left. That she’d have a chance of actually spotting her mother.
Six hours after leaving California, they started to pass signs for Las Vegas. In the distance, the lights of the Strip shimmered like a carnival dream against the deepening purple of the desert sky.
Beside her, Nora was pressed against the window, her face aglow in the reflected lights. No doubt upset to be missing even more of the summer with her friends than she thought.
Leanne stole a glance. So wistful. So young.
And then, without thinking, without planning it out, Leanne asked, “Should we stop in Vegas?”
The words hung in the air like smoke. She hadn’t meant to say them. She didn’t do spontaneous. Her life was a sequence of lists and quiet compromises. Where Eleanor had been whimsy and wonder, Leanne had been structure, predictability. Pressed pleats and presliced sandwiches.
Nora turned slowly, eyes wide. Looking at Leanne as if she’d rolled a joint and lit it with a match made of reckless spark.
“Are you serious?” Nora asked, cautiously thrilled.
A thrill rushed through Leanne in response—real and ridiculous. She smiled. Leanne had always been the kind of person who waited for life to happen.
There was a sequence, a proper order of things, that she’d been following since girlhood. Probably even before. Everyone grew up, went to school, found a respectable job, married well, kept the house clean, raised the child, wore the pearls, and paid the bills. No detour. No deviation. No dreaming beyond the edges of the script.
But everything was shifting now.
