Charlie darted across the backyard.
Francine downed a handful of the colorful marshmallow cereal, wincing at the sugar as she watched her nephew race toward the willow tree in the middle of the block, laughing in easy joy as he went. She could remember the feeling well: a buoyant pull that made running more natural than stopping. It was one of the many marvelous sensations that hadn’t quite survived her trip to adulthood.
What did she have instead?
Little anchors. Little anchors called regret, and loss, and almost. They were light when she picked them up one by one, but then came the day she’d picked up so many she couldn’t shake them off, and she was left longing for what she once was: a child in summer, weightless and full of hope.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
At least fifty Precious Moments figurines lined the shelves of a long bookcase in the guest room, a.k.a. Francine’s room for the next two weeks. The porcelain children, which Francine had always found a little creepy, shared shelf space with Pete’s antique clock collection, a hobby so boring even stamp collectors made fun of it. The clocks mercifully didn’t chime on the hour, but their softly ticking second hands gave the room a just-tolerable white noise.
Francine peeled away the blanket she’d collapsed onto the night before, revealing the orange-and-yellow, butterfly-patterned sheets beneath like a pair of embarrassing underwear. Ellie had a penchant for buying wacky bed sheets to show how fun and spontaneous she was. Being married to an antique clock collector did funny things to a person.
Upending her suitcase, Francine spilled her clothes and few material possessions out onto the bed at about the same speed with which they’d been packed. If anyone in Hawthorn Woods needed to know how to flee the West Coast in a hurry, she would be only too happy to enlighten them.
1) Ask the landlord of your shag-carpeted and stucco-ceilinged apartment to hold your mail. Try not to be offended when he asks for your name and unit number, even though you gave him a Christmas card last year.
2) At no point should you cry, as it only serves to slow things down.
3) Strongly demand, reasonably ask, then desperately beg for an immediate two weeks off from your busy job, putting you on thin ice with the boss.
4) Sell your expendable possessions in a beyond-depressing yard sale that quantifies your existence into a specific monetary value. Hint: It’s less than you think.
5) Use your yard sale profits to buy the best San Francisco to Chicago flight money can buy, or at least the best flight you can buy. Turns out three connections make for the cheapest option, so you’re off on an involuntary tour of the contiguous United States.
6) Do not let the fact that you are alone and carrying nearly your entire life in a single suitcase trick you into violating Rule # 2.
7) Board your first flight and immediately violate Rule # 2, drawing the doting concern of the Swahili-only, elderly lady in the window seat next to you.
8) Don’t spend the next three connecting flights calculating how behind you are in the race of life and how you have absolutely no idea how to fix what needs to be fixed, including how to politely wake the Kenyan grandmother snoring on your shoulder.
Francine examined her worldly possessions scattered unceremoniously across Ellie’s butterfly sheets: a worryingly-thin wallet, a tangle of cheap necklaces, half a box of dollar store tampons, half a roll of Lifesavers (mostly pineapple-flavor), an essential army of bobby pins, an issue of Vogue, her favorite scissors and comb from the salon, a bright yellow Nancy Drew hardcover, a VHS tape labeled with a tiny skull and crossbones, and a stack of papers bound by a red rubber band.
Francine picked up the papers. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory: an exhaustively thorough, hundreds-of-questions-long personality test. Ben had given her the pages a few weeks after they split because he was just so damn thoughtful (after they’d split, anyway). Francine refused to fill the papers out, but also refused to throw them out, leaving the neat rows of true and false boxes forever unchecked. She did, however, answer the occasional question in her head, and perused a few for fun.
I like to read newspaper articles on crime.
True.
I believe that women ought to have as much sexual freedom as men.
Oh, you betcha.
People say insulting and vulgar things about me.
Pixie Cut might have a few choice words.
If I could live my life over again, I would not change much.
False, false, a thousand times false.
In Francine’s mind, living without regret was nothing more than the ultimate coping mechanism, one that dictated a person was supposed to learn from mistakes and move in a direction that was exclusively and unrelentingly forward. Because people ended up together if they were meant to, and there were plenty of fish in the sea, and blah, blah, blah.
She wrangled the rubber band back around the papers and chucked them under the bed. The empty scoring page landed face up, showing the abbreviated categories of D, Hy, Pd, Pa, Pt, Sc. A personality type wouldn’t tell her anything. The MMPI was just a Cosmo quiz wearing fancy pants, one she should have left it in California with the rest of her mistakes.
This was bad.
Hawthorn Woods wasn’t supposed to be a place for recursive thought and self-judgment. It was supposed to be Francine’s last-ditch, Hail Mary, damned-if-I-don’t shot at becoming her once-vibrant self again.
She picked up the Nancy Drew hardcover from the bed.
She’d read the fictional teen investigator’s mysteries for as long as she could remember, even walking around as a kid herself with a magnifying glass. Later she’d entertained the girls in the salon by tracking down stolen combs or guessing customers’ professions. A keen ability to read people was one of Francine’s best qualities, something she enjoyed and prided herself on. At least before the skill had become a casualty in Ben’s careless exit.
She studied her beloved heroine on the cover. Nancy was resolute and brave, and in no universe would she come undone just because someone stopped rolling her toothpaste tube, or a nasty neighbor felt like throwing a drink on her.
And right then and there, Francine rewrote her own prescription, from one of relaxation to one of investigation. Out with cucumber slices on eyes and cocktails before five, and in with flashlights and following clues wherever they led.
Francine Haddix and the Airborne Vodka? The title needed some work, but the reason behind Magdalena’s drink throw was definitely a mystery. And even though the offense was a little pedestrian, something in the woman’s eyes, a glint of hate or fear, had spoken to something much deeper than a tipsy misunderstanding.
But to follow the yet-to-be-found clues, Francine would need a lay of the land and a detailed who’s-who. She needed a tour guide. Someone honest, but gossipy, and definitely on her side.
She had just the person in mind.
Chapter 3
I gossip a little at times.
[ x ] TRUE [ ] FALSE
“I am so glad you called,” Laura Jean said, stepping out her front door. “I apologize for not offering a proper welcome tour myself.”
Francine shrugged casually as the two of them started down the driveway. “I figured I should know who lives where, given the surprise at the party.”
“I have been dying to talk to you about that. Should’ve dumped my beer right on Magdalena’s head. Mutually assured destruction and all that.”