29 Elena
Elena
Elena opens the email from the casting agency as she walks back to Barbara’s.
Her call time is tomorrow at seven. A small leap of excitement breaks through her grim thoughts about Quinn.
This is it. She may be just background, but she intends to speak to Phillip Granger, or track down a casting director, and send along her demo reel.
She’ll do what it takes to make sure she’s on someone’s radar for future projects.
“Elena?” The deep voice comes from closely behind her. She jumps and spins around. A tall man stands less than a foot away, up on the curb. She wonders how long he’s been there. She didn’t hear him at all. “I thought that was you,” he says.
It takes her a minute to place the shape of his face, the color of his eyes. He has a beard now. “Oh my god,” she says, recognition dawning. “River Hunstad.”
He shoves his hands into his pockets. “Heard you were in town.”
“You still live here?”
“Still in my parents’ house actually. Bought it from them when they moved to Montana to be with my sister and the baby.
” He hesitates. “That’s a lie,” he says, forking a hand through his hair.
“They gave it to me. Technically, I paid out their taxes for the year, but they had no more mortgage to pay down, so zero dollars on the actual house.” He lets an awkward laugh escape.
She feels it too, and this is exactly why Elena hates reunions.
“But hey, if you’re not busy, you should come by for a drink,” he says. “You can meet Walter.”
“Who’s Walter?”
“My grandfather,” says River. “It’s been a few years since he passed, but I’ve been able to preserve the body pretty well.”
Elena’s heart skips.
River’s face breaks, and he lets out a small laugh. “Sorry, that was my terrible attempt at humor. Walter is my dog. Very much alive. So, yes? Time for a drink? I have wine. I have soda. I think I have some tortilla chips.”
“Oh, now? I can’t. I have to go back and then I’m meeting Sophie and Joey.”
River digs his hands into his pockets, though it’s not cold. “Ah, she did say you guys were getting together.” He hesitates. It looks like he wants to say something else but seems to change his mind.
“Nice to see you,” she says, waving and stepping away, realizing now how close she actually was to him. She could smell his shampoo.
“Let’s get together while you’re in town and catch up,” he says and lifts a hand.
He’s walking backward, but his eyes are pinned on her.
He watches her longer than seems necessary, something indecipherable on his face.
A centipede of unease crawls over her skin, but she shakes it off and turns the corner toward Barbara’s.
***
Quinn’s room is almost exactly how Elena remembers it.
She didn’t let herself come in here before, partly because she wasn’t sure Barbara would want her to, but mostly because she didn’t want to.
The same black and blue tie-dye comforter covers a full-sized bed.
Her dresser stands to the left of the door, decorated with a few pictures.
One depicts Quinn as a young kid leaning into both her parents.
Another is of the four of them, faces pressed together so close that it looks like they’re sharing one long continuous smile.
Elena turns away. She opens the closet where Quinn used to shove bags, coats, dresses, and anything else that didn’t fit in her drawers.
It’s no longer bursting but is instead a neat approximation of what it used to be.
A denim jacket, a long flowy skirt, a couple of hippie shirts, and not much else.
She sniffs, imagining she’ll get a whiff of something that will set her memory alight, but instead she only gets traces of cinnamon and vanilla, and it makes her sad because she knows these are the scents of Barbara’s house.
The smell of Quinn, whatever Quinn did smell like—because, truthfully, she can’t remember—is long gone.
There is no sign of the book, so when she’s done looking, she closes the door gently and heads into the guest room across the hall.
“Hey,” says Gael without looking up. He lies on his stomach across the bed with knees bent and feet crossed in the air. His face is inches from the laptop screen, examining some small detail.
“Remind me,” she says, setting her bag down on the floor. “Why did you want to come here so badly? Don’t you wish you were at home with your friends getting into trouble? It’s summer vacation.”
He looks up and blinks at her like he’s not sure she knows him at all. “No way,” he says. “It’s cool here.”
“It’s not,” she says, offhandedly searching for her phone in her bag.
There’s a long pause, and she can feel his eyes on her. She looks up to see him staring at her, serious. “Can you come look at this? I found something weird.”
He waves her over, and she flops down next to him on the bed. “What are we looking at?”
On the screen, it’s a picture of Elena, Joey, and Sophie, at a distance, on Front Street.
They’re standing close together and talking.
Elena has her hands on her hips, Joey’s arms are crossed, and Sophie is reaching out toward them both, possibly for a hug.
They’re cocooned by old brick and peeling-paint buildings on either side and standing in the long imposing shadow of one of the Three Elks peaks.
“It’s a great shot,” she says. He has captured the discomfort of their first meeting in fifteen years so perfectly that she feels herself cringe inwardly at the scene.
“Look,” he says, and he brings a finger to the screen. He points at a person even farther in the distance, standing half-hidden by a parked pickup. It looks like a man, but that’s about all she can tell. Most of his face and body are obscured by the truck. She can’t even see what color hair he has.
“Okay, what’s weird about that? It’s just a person on the street.”
He clicks out of the photo and then scrolls for a second before clicking another thumbnail.
An enlarged image bursts onto the screen.
The first thing that strikes Elena about it is the colors.
It’s bleak and dim—the sickly yellow and black of a night shot.
It’s taken from a second-floor vantage point, from this very room, she realizes with a start.
Gael is partially reflected in the window, perhaps on purpose, his camera raised to his face.
Beneath his reflection, the window is open a few inches, and there’s a view of the light at the end of the street.
The streetlight illuminates the road…and something else.
Elena leans in closer, her stomach flipping.
It’s a man. Standing beneath the streetlight, facing the house.
Again, it’s impossible to see his face—he’s just a dark shadow—but there is clearly someone there.
“I think it’s the same guy,” Gael says, bringing up the two images side-by-side and zooming in until the pixelation obscures anything worth identifying.
“When did you take this one?”
“The other night. You were out, and I thought the reflection was cool. I didn’t see a person there until I looked at this picture today. I swear.”
She remembers the chill that followed her that night.
She’d felt the tingle of someone’s eyes on her when she went out to the car looking for her phone charger, and when she turned toward the streetlight, she saw a figure.
Or, at least she thought she had, but she wasn’t entirely sure.
Now, the certainty is like two strangling hands.
Her instincts were right. Someone is watching her.