When she turns it around, Barbara reaches out and smiles devilishly. “I think I’d have to agree with you there. And the acting?” asks Barbara.
Elena savors her bite of pancake, then speaks. “My agent has something in the works for the stage, believe it or not. And I’m just going to keep taking my chances with any films that come my way. In the meantime, commercial work can be financially rewarding.”
“You seem calmer about it all.”
Barbara’s right. She is calmer about it. That desperate, would-do-anything-for-a-big-break attitude evaporated the minute Cal’s skull split open on his living room floor.
Elena hears Gael in the next room, zipping up a bag.
“Do you still own this town?” Elena asks quietly.
Barbara laughs, looking at her with curiosity.
“Thought so,” says Elena. “In that case, I need you to do something for me.”
Barbara has grown older, even in the last twenty-four hours. The evidence is under her eyes, in the wrinkles around her mouth. Elena doesn’t see it as age because she knows it’s more than that. Barbara exudes immense strength. What fortitude this woman has, she realizes, to have endured all these years without her daughter, to bear the impossible weight of a lost child.
Elena doesn’t tell Barbara about why she left Whisper Ridge. She doesn’t tell her how Marissa Berglet slipto her mother at Bible study, of all places, that she saw Elena with a pregnancy test in the girls’ bathroom, or how only days after that, her mother wrenched her from this town and locked her in a foreign bedroom all the way in SoCal for long enough that, when she finally escaped, it was too late to have an abortion. Elena didn’t tell her how she’d run away after her twenty-four-week doctor’s appointment, to nothing, just a cheap apartment she found on Craigslist and a waitressing job.
She doesn’t explain any of it. She only says, “Get them to search Mark Collingswood’s computer.”
Barbara says nothing but raises her eyebrows.
“I have a feeling they might find illicit images of underage girls on there. Just a hunch.”
After breakfast, Elena heads out to meet Sophie and Joey. She couldn’t have written a better ending if she tried.Woman thanks her childhood friends for saving her from a psychopath murderer, then makes plans to drink heavily on a beach in a few months’ time. If it wasn’t for the fact that she grew up in a town where there was magic in the woods, this would all seem surreal. But very few things are beyond the realm of possibility, it turns out.
She’s wearing black—not because she’s mourning, but because, inthe mountains, which always seem to carry a chill, it’s the best way to feel the true warmth of the sun.
75Joey
Joey shoots off a text.
While she waits for a reply, she gathers up Elena’s old shoebox, planning to take it to her this morning. She’s almost done sorting through her mother’s things too, the mess she’d strewn all over her living room floor yesterday. There is some junk, to be sure, but she finds her mother’s favorite brown mug—a hideous thing that Joey cleaned and filled with hot coffee for her every morning—and a marble jewelry box that she dusts off and sets next to her bed. There is also a framed photograph of her and her mom hiking together, taken when Joey was ten years old. Joey smiles and tears up at the same time, which is very unlike her. It’s been a long week.
There’s a light knock on the front door.
She stands and brushes invisible debris from her pants. She licks her lips and swallows.
River stands there, looking sheepish, with his hopelessly adorable dog and a question in his eyes. She invites them in and splashes water into Walter’s favorite mixing bowl. “We’ll have to decide whose housewe’re going to live in,” she says over her shoulder. “I’m not going to just automatically move in with you.”
He waits a long painful moment before doing anything at all, and Joey is sure she’s made a mistake. She’s misread where they are now. She broke something that she can’t mend, not with this meager gesture, this playful acceptance of an offer made days ago.
But then, he nods and holds in his eyes a mock seriousness, and she finds herself melting into a smile. Not just on her lips, but deep within her. Then it all comes to the surface. Relief and the hot sting of tears. She wants him, and for once, Joey is going to let herself have what she wants.
“We could let Walter decide,” he says. They look at the dog and the puddle forming underneath his dripping mouth. It’s the warmest Joey has ever felt.
After River leaves, with a promise to come back later, Joey puts what she loves of her mother’s things on a shelf for display and boxes everything else up to donate. She has plans to meet Sophie and Elena. They’re going to the spell circle to lay a ring of wildflowers for Quinn. Her favorite.
As she collects the stray scraps of paper, mail, and old receipts that have fallen to the floor, a folded-up note catches her eye. On the front, written in a familiar hand, is her name. She sits up straight, brushing aside an envelope and picking up the note. It’s rigid between her fingers, and the edges don’t line up, as if it was folded in a rush.
And then she is thrust into a memory. She had such an amazing time with River that night, fifteen years ago, laughing and goofing around. They kissed, and it was like something hummed to life inside her. But the walk home was long, and Joey decided to shower immediately, as if she needed to wash it all off, to erase River’s smell and her shame.
And then her mom came into her room and told her that Quinn had come by after school, that she was looking for her, that she left anote. Joey spent an hour tearing apart her room, whipping blankets around and throwing the contents out of dresser drawers. She desperately wanted to find it because she thought, she hoped, that reading a note Quinn left would somehow absolve her. She concluded, in the end, that her mother was wrong. There was no note. And no absolution.
But now, sitting on her faux wood floors, she knows this is it. Cal’s illusion spell, in all its omniscience, must have included this note, hiding it from Joey fifteen years ago. And now, the illusion spell has worn off. With steady hands, she unfolds it.
Joey,
