74 Elena
Elena
“Acapulco,” Elena says, pouring two cups of coffee. Gael is in the other room, packing.
Barbara accepts her cup with a contented sigh. “Lovely.”
She’s talking about the upcoming girls’ trip. “I’d kill for a margarita on the beach,” says Elena now, just like she said to Joey and Sophie. She pulls up a picture of the coastline on her phone.
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 Berg let slip to 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, in the mountains, which always seem to carry a chill, it’s the best way to feel the true warmth of the sun.