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 and that 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.
Nora was leaving soon. Off to Yale. Off to begin the rest of her life. And Leanne… She wasn’t sure what came next. Her marriage? A question mark. Her mother? A mystery. The only thing she did know was that she was afraid of the empty spaces ahead.
So maybe it was time to do something wild. Or at least uncharacteristic.
Maybe it was time to embrace the now—just once.
She turned on her blinker and eased the Lincoln off the highway, merging onto the glittering stretch that was Las Vegas Boulevard.
“Dead serious,” Leanne said, her voice firmer than expected. “We have five days until the next festival, and it will only take a couple days to get there. We know my mom is with the band and not lost alone somewhere. Why not?” She smiled again as her daughter’s eyes widened.
They cruised down the Strip, neon blooming around them, lighting up the dusk in electric pinks, golds, and icy blues. Signs pulsed like heartbeats: The Sands. The Dunes. Stardust. Caesars Palace.
The street was a mix of contrasts—men in slick suits and women in cocktail dresses brushing shoulders with barefoot hippie girls in fringe vests and bell-bottoms. A saxophone player on one corner crooned something jazzy.
The lights from the nickel slot machines spilled from open doors.
Someone, somewhere, laughed too loudly. Somewhere else, someone cried.
This was the city of in-betweens.
“Frank, Dean, Sammy…they made it all look so glamorous,” Leanne murmured, half to herself.
“There’s a rumor Elvis is going to start performing here in July,” Nora said, craning her neck to catch the glittering sign of the International Hotel slated to open in a week. “Too bad we’re not coming back.”
Leanne smiled faintly. Too bad.
Nora traced her finger over the gold lettering of The Godfather on the seat between them. “The Mafia’s huge in Vegas, right?” Her voice was half serious, half amazed. “Do you think we’ll see someone like Don Corleone?”
The city flickered outside their windows like it was alive—buzzing and hungry and full of secrets. And for the first time in a long time, Leanne wasn’t just driving through it. She was in it.
“Well, I hope no one offers us a deal we can’t refuse,” Leanne said, putting on her best mobster growl, her fingers tented like a tiny don.
Nora burst out laughing. “If they do, you’re handling the negotiations.”
They cruised the Strip a few more times, taking in the wonder of the city, letting the neon blur past them like the frames of a dream.
Showgirls in feather boas strutted down the sidewalk in a formation that was both tight and fluid at the same time, disappearing through the spinning doors of a casino.
A man in a white tux leaned against a red Cabriolet out of the 1940s, smoking and watching the world go by with the confidence of someone who owned it.
Sonny Corleone before the job had gotten to him?
Leanne couldn’t remember the last time she’d simply looked at life happening around her.
They chose the Sands for the night, drawn in by a glowing sign out front that read “Join us tonight in the Copa Room for a Legendary Show.”
Inside the hotel, the casino floor buzzed like an elegant hive.
Red velvet carpet softened their steps; shimmering chandeliers cast golden light over a crowd of men in tuxedos and women in sleek dresses, sequins glimmering like stars.
Cigarette smoke curled through the air, mingling with an artificial floral scent, sweet and acrid.
They stood at the center of it all—mother and daughter, soaking it in.
“Is he famous?” Nora whispered, nodding toward a man in a silk ascot holding court at a blackjack table.
“He looks like someone who once dated someone famous,” Leanne murmured back.
“Half the men in here look like mobsters.”
“They might be.”
They approached the man at the front desk in his tailored navy suit. He had a smile lacquered onto his face and a gold name tag gleaming on his lapel.
“Is there a pool?” Leanne asked, her voice breezy but hopeful, as the man slid a room key across the polished desk.
“Indeed, madam. A tropically styled pool deck just out back—with cabanas, cocktail waitresses, and palm trees,” he said with a little flourish as if describing a personal oasis.
“Palm trees?” Nora echoed.
The man stared at her as if she’d asked if the rooms came with ceilings. “Of course. Imported from Palm Springs.”
Leanne felt wonderfully, oddly giddy. Like she might just go for a swim tomorrow. Or order a cocktail before five o’clock.
Then, she sobered. “Where can I find a telephone?” It’d been nearly a week since she’d spoken to her husband, and if she didn’t get through to Dean… Well, she wasn’t sure what would happen. She’d had no success, but he certainly hadn’t made any Herculean attempts to find her.
The man nodded toward a gold-framed hallway just off the lobby. “There’s a row of booths just behind the elevator bank, madam. The operators will be happy to assist with long-distance.”
She nodded her thanks.
After nearly a week had gone by, Dean was probably half worried, half irritated. Maybe she was underestimating him and he’d left a dozen messages at the hotels her itinerary had listed. If she’d called him earlier in the week, he might’ve told her to come home.
And she would have. But now? Now she wasn’t sure she’d listen.
Once they were settled in their room and with Nora in the shower—singing something Beatles-adjacent behind the door—Leanne slipped out, her purse slung over her shoulder, her heels clicking faintly against the marble. The air downstairs was heavy with perfume and panic.
She found the row of pay phones, and several of them were empty. Slipping into one, Leanne picked up the receiver and pressed zero.
“I’d like to place a call to New York, please,” she told the operator.
“Yes, ma’am. Number?”
Leanne recited her home telephone slowly. The operator quoted the charge of eight quarters. She dug cool, if slightly sticky from a melted peppermint, coins from the bottom of her bag and fed them one by one into the slot. Click. Click. Click.
She glanced at the delicate gold watch on her wrist, listening to the ringing on the line.
“No one appears to be answering your call, ma’am,” the operator said after an eternity of trilling. “Would you like me to redirect to another number?”
Leanne hesitated. She didn’t want to call the office. Not really. But if he wasn’t at home, he was there. Always there.
“Yes, please,” she said and gave the number for the firm.
The connection clicked.
Rang once. Then—
“Miller, Abrams and Associates,” came a voice. Smooth. Sultry. Practiced.
Leanne stiffened.
Charlotte. Dean’s secretary.
It wasn’t just the voice. But the lilt, the overfamiliar way she always said “Mrs. Miller” like it was both a compliment and a warning.
“This is Leanne.” Her tone was even, measured, and more controlled than casual conversation required.
“Mrs. Miller! So good to hear from you.” The voice brightened too much, too quickly. “How’s the travel going?”
“Quite well. And thank you again for putting together the itinerary,” Leanne said, her voice clipped but polite.
“Of course,” the secretary replied, voice syrupy. “My pleasure. I’m always happy to help. Dean—I mean, Mr. Miller—has been quite worried. He hasn’t heard from you.”
Leanne heard the slip. But she didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. The flicker of nausea that hit her gut said enough. She didn’t believe that Dean had crossed any lines…but the suspicion always lingered. She steadied her voice.
“May I speak with him, please?”
“I’m really sorry; he’s already left for the evening,” came the smooth reply.
Leanne’s jaw tightened. “Then why are you still there?” The question was genuine—at first. But as the question left her lips, the edge intensified.
“Just finishing up some last bits of correspondence. Makes the morning easier.”
The secretary’s voice was easy, almost conspiratorial. As if she expected Leanne to bond with her over the weight of office work. To relate.
But all Leanne felt was the slow, cold curl of unease wrapping around her ribs.
“Well,” she said, steel in her tone, “if you could let him know that Nora and I decided to stop in Vegas for the night, I’d appreciate it. I tried the house first—couldn’t reach him.”
“I certainly will, Mrs. Miller.”
Leanne hung up.
She stared at the pay phone, fingers curled tightly around the receiver even after the line went dead.
Her stomach churned with a queasy mix of regret and suspicion.
She’d finally found a phone that was usable and called to reassure her husband she and Nora were okay. And what had she gotten for her effort?
She walked briskly back through the lobby.
As she moved past the lobby bar, a man with long hair, gold rings on every finger, and a purple velvet jacket raised his glass toward her. He resembled the groupie dressed like a wizard she’d seen in California.
“You look like you need a cocktail,” he said, smiling.
Leanne stopped.
The last time a man said something like that to her, she was twenty-three and single. Something in his voice—teasing, yes, but kind—cut through the fog of her frustration. So instead of getting ruffled or indignant she said, “Maybe I do.”
He signaled the bartender, and a moment later a bright pink drink was set in front of her. It was cold, far too strong, and precisely what she needed.
By the time she stepped off the elevator and returned to her hotel room, the last of her cocktail in hand, she was seething.
Not drunk.
Not dramatic.
Just done being the only one putting effort into her marriage. Though in truth, how much had she really tried lately?
“Ready for dinner and a show at the Copa Room?” Leanne asked, smoothing her dress and checking her earrings in the hotel mirror.
“Did you find out who’s playing?” Nora turned from the vanity, applying a fresh swipe of rose-petal lipstick, then blotting her lips with a tissue she tossed on the bed. She eyed the half-empty cocktail in Leanne’s hands but said nothing.
“Not yet,” Leanne said. “But it’s sure to be swinging—whoever it is.”
“Swinging,” Nora repeated with a mischievous grin, drawing out the word like it was their own private language now.
Her daughter’s smile full of amusement but something quieter as well—affection.
For a second, Leanne forgot all the eye rolls, the slammed doors, the distance over the last year.
The grumpy argument they’d had that morning getting back into the car.
She was simply grateful. Grateful to be here with her daughter.
On an adventure they hadn’t planned in a city that shimmered like a mirage.
“Maybe it’ll be Grandma,” Nora deadpanned.
They both laughed. Sharp, spontaneous peals that surprised even them.
But then they caught each other’s gaze.
And stopped.
A beat passed.
“What if it is?” Nora asked softly now.
“What if it is,” Leanne echoed, barely more than a whisper.
Neon lights flickered like heartbeats outside the hotel window, and the Strip buzzed with the promise of strange, unforgettable things.