Between Lost and Found

by Shelly Stratton

Genres: General Fiction; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

Janelle Marshall's life is finally going according to plan. Her perfect, upscale career - and her perfect, successful boyfriend - will make her future as secure and predictable as her childhood never was. And with luck, Little Bill, the grandfather who raised her, will someday understand why she'd rather play it safe than be impulsive.

But just when she should be happiest, she gets a distressing call: Little Bill has gone missing. Now Janelle must go to the one place she's long avoided - the tiny mountain town of Mammoth Falls, South Dakota. Tracking down her eccentric grandfather is easier said than done, and Janelle has no choice but to stay as long as it takes. Yet little by little, she's drawn in by the unique town, the helpful locals, and their distinctly straightforward ways. Before long she realizes that those who also care about Little Bill are struggling with their own vulnerabilities - and secrets as deep as the mistakes they try to set right. As Janelle learns to draw on their support and hard-won experience, she'll challenge her past, come to terms with her present - and chart her own surprising course forward.

Vibrant, heartfelt, and uplifting, Between Lost and Found is about gaining the courage to take chances, learning to let go, and rediscovering the family - and the self - you thought you knew.

Release date: July 25, 2017

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Maybe it was a crazy idea. Maybe it was even a dumb idea—but only time would tell.

Little Bill wished he had alcohol to blame for coming up with this one. But all he had to drink tonight was a little whiskey—nothing that his seventy-eight-year-old liver couldn’t handle. It probably had more to do with the gambling. Having a set of cards or a roll of dice in the waxy palms of his hands always made him take wild chances. The last time he and his girlfriend, Connie, had been at one of those casinos in Deadwood, he had lost five hundred dollars at the blackjack table because he kept doubling down, only to go bust. This time as he played blackjack at the Midnight Star, he had decided to double down yet again—in more ways than one.

It’ll work, he had told himself after the nebulous thought floating in the back of his mind finally solidified. He watched the bored-looking dealer turn over the cards, revealing that Little Bill had won, and Bill took it as an auspicious sign. I know it’ll work!

Later, at the bar, he told Connie his plan and she stared at him like he had just declared himself the king of Siam. She asked him to repeat himself. When he did, her expression morphed from amazement to unease.

“I don’t know if I could do that, Bill,” Connie said, her dark brows furrowing as she sipped her rum and Coke through a straw. A basket of beer-battered onion rings sat between them. “Why don’t you just call her yourself? Talk to her and tell her that you don’t—”

“She ain’t gonna listen to me! Not while she’s out there and I’m back here. I need to see her face-to-face, eye-to-eye.”

“But what you want me to do . . .” Connie shook her head as she lowered her drink. “Won’t your granddaughter be mad?”

“She’ll be mad—at first,” he said between chews. He shifted his shot glass aside and rested his elbows on the bar top’s polished wood. “But when she finds out why we did it, she won’t be mad anymore.”

I hope.

“I don’t know,” Connie said again. “It just doesn’t seem right.”

“Trust me. All you’ve got to do is say exactly what I told you.”

He had Connie practice over and over again. When she kept stumbling over the words—saying them in the wrong order or not saying them at all—he finally wrote down the sentences on the back of one of the casino cocktail napkins and handed it to her.

“Hi, is this Janelle Marshall?” Connie read aloud, squinting behind her red reading glasses at his jagged script. “Your grandfather’s gone missing in Mammoth Falls. We need you to come here and help find him. Get here as soon as you can. Good-bye.” She looked up from the napkin to gaze at him. “You . . . you sure that’s all you want me to say?”

“Well, what else can you say?”

“It just seems so . . . so cold. Nobody would talk like that to a girl whose grandpa just disappeared. Shouldn’t I tell her I’m sorry, or . . . or tell her you were—”

“Just keep it short and sweet. I’m tellin’ you, this way is best,” he assured before giving her soft hand an affectionate squeeze. He slid his cell phone across the bar top toward her. His granddaughter Janelle’s phone number waited on the screen. All Connie had to do was press the little green button.

Connie gazed at the phone warily, like it was a temperamental lizard that could snap at her fingers at any moment. While she dithered, Bill could feel the seconds ticking by. He felt it more at his age, but they seemed to be whipping by him faster tonight, faster than his old eyes could register.

He wondered, Has it happened yet? Will we be too late?

Gradually, Connie reached for the phone. Bill released the pent-up breath he didn’t know he had been holding. He watched as she slowly rose from the barstool and walked across the room to seek a quiet place that was far away from the ringing of slot machines, the clinking of glasses, and the roar of conversations and laughter. With her long, dark hair pulled back into a braid at the nape of her neck, he could see her face clearly. She still looked uncertain. Connie gave one last hesitant glance at Little Bill over her shoulder before continuing on her path and disappearing behind old-fashioned saloon doors.

Little Bill motioned to the bartender to pour him his second whiskey. That’s when the finger tapping started. He started playing a six-beat that he could have hand-danced to in the old days. He looked down at his hands and realized for the first time that he was nervous.

He wasn’t worried that Janelle wouldn’t come to Mammoth Falls. He knew his granddaughter. If she heard her Pops had disappeared in the mountains somewhere and needed to be found, his baby girl—his little Miss Fix-It—would come running. But he was starting to have misgivings about what the aftermath would be. When Janelle found out he hadn’t gone missing, she’d certainly be angry, maybe even furious. She might not want to talk to him for a while. But that was a risk he was willing to take.

He couldn’t let Janelle marry that man.

“I want to ask you for Janelle’s hand,” Mark, Janelle’s boyfriend, had said to Little Bill by phone that morning, sounding almost giddy.

“Hand for what?” Bill had asked distractedly as he stood near the gas pump, muttering to himself about the rising price of unleaded.

“Hand in marriage! I plan to ask her to marry me at our housewarming party tonight, but I realized—belatedly—that I should ask you first. You know . . . get your blessing . . . with you being the closest thing she has to a father and everything. It seemed appropriate. Janelle told me you were busy and couldn’t fly here to Virginia for the party, so I wanted to give you a quick call.”

A quick call . . .

Like asking Bill to hand over one of the most precious things in the world to him was a perfunctory chore.

At Mark’s words, Little Bill had fallen silent. He had stared at a U-Haul truck that had pulled up to the pump next to him.

Probably needs a new fan belt, he had thought dazedly as he listened to the truck whine and screech. He had stood silently for so long that Mark had started to wonder if he was still on the phone line.

“Bill? Bill, did I lose you?”

“No, I’m here,” Bill had answered before regaining his bearings. “Look, Janelle don’t need me or anyone else to give her away. She don’t need my permission to get married. She can make up her own mind!”

“Well, I suppose she can,” Mark had replied after a pregnant pause, sounding mystified. “That wasn’t what I was—”

“There’s no supposin’. She can and she will make her own decisions. I just hope she makes the right one.”

“Yes, I expect that she will.”

Mark’s voice had changed. The boyish giddiness had disappeared. He sounded firm, almost taciturn.

“Well, I’ll let you go, Bill. I assume I don’t have to tell you not to tell Jay about this since it’s supposed to be a surprise. I’ll ask her tonight, and we’ll let you know when we settle on the wedding date,” Mark had said before abruptly hanging up.

Bill couldn’t tell Janelle what to do or whom to marry, but it was his humble opinion that she deserved the best—not some pipsqueak mama’s boy with a fancy suit and cuff links. Mark wasn’t right for her, not by a long shot. A man should be willing to travel miles for his lady love, to scale tall buildings and cross oceans. But Janelle’s boyfriend seemed barely willing to walk over a puddle for her.

Little Bill had had similar doubts about his daughter Regina’s beau, Carl, almost forty years ago. When he had first laid eyes on that smooth-talker striding confidently through his front door on platform shoes, wearing a pink polyester shirt with a collar as wide as bat wings, Bill had known instantly that he wasn’t the right man for Reggie. But he had kept quiet.

“She’s a grown woman allowed to make her own decisions, honey. And she’s stubborn. It’s not like she would listen to you anyway. Just leave it alone,” his then wife, Mabel, had said to him as she cleared the dinner table.

She’d handed him a casserole dish filled with half-eaten meatloaf that was already congealing in its ketchup-and-pepper sauce.

“Can you wrap this in aluminum foil and put it in the fridge for me?”

He had done as Mabel asked: wrapped the meatloaf and kept his reservations to himself. Mabel would know best, wouldn’t she? She was Reggie’s mother, and she had always warned Bill that he was too impulsive, that he “never knew when to leave well enough alone.”

Reggie would marry Carl a year later, and with the exception of the birth of Janelle, Reggie’s life would become a soul-crushing, backbreaking march of misery for the next eight years before she finally decided to end the pain, sat all Carl’s things on her front stoop for the last time, and got a divorce. But Carl had left a permanent stain on Reggie that no amount of joy or love seemed capable of washing out. Never again was she the bright-eyed, cheeky girl that Little Bill remembered.

He refused to let that happen again. He wouldn’t keep silent this time around.

He had tried before to talk to Janelle about Mark, about what she really wanted out of life, but she would always deflect and change the subject. And he knew if Mark asked her to marry him, she would say yes. She’d be grateful, maybe even elated, that he asked—like she was winning some big prize on The Price Is Right. But the truth was that she’d be selling herself short.

Little Bill thought maybe, just maybe, if he got her away from Mark, from the hustle and the bustle of the big city—if he got her to the silence of the mountains, she would finally hear her old Pops.

She ain’t gonna like it, but I gotta do it.

Connie returned to the bar a few minutes later. She plopped onto her stool, shoved his cell phone back at him, and glared down at the melting ice in her glass. She jabbed her straw into the glass as if she were stabbing someone.

“Well?” he asked. “What happened?”

“What the hell do you think happened?” Connie mumbled, refusing to meet his eyes. “She sounded scared out her wits, Bill!”

“That’s all right. She’ll be fine when she sees I’m okay,” he said, reaching out for Connie’s hand again. But this time she pulled away from him.

“I shouldn’t’ve done it.”

For the next hour, Little Bill tried to charm Connie back into a good mood, but nothing worked. Finally, he gave up and finished the last of their onion rings while she sat silently beside him. As he wiped the grease from his hands on another cocktail napkin, he asked her if she was ready to go home. She was supposed to ride back with him to Mammoth, but she shook her head and told him she’d rather stay.

“Stay? You mean here? At the Midnight Star?”

“What else would I be talking about? I’ll get a ride back later. Some of these folks have to be headed back to Mammoth.”

He frowned. “What folks?” He glanced around the bar room at the slim crowd that remained: another couple at one of the bistro tables in the corner, a half dozen loud truckers whose off-color banter would make a sailor blush, and one surly-looking cowboy who had been nursing the same beer at the end of the bar, it seemed, for the past two hours.

Besides the old couple, none of them seemed suitable to escort her home.

“Come on. Don’t be that way! Just let me drive you.”

“No,” she answered firmly before grabbing her leather purse, throwing the studded strap over her shoulder, and walking off.

As he watched her leave and finished the last of his whiskey, Bill couldn’t help but worry more about where and in whose bed Connie might sleep tonight than how she would eventually get home.

As he drove alone from Midnight Star in Deadwood back to his cabin in Mammoth Falls, Little Bill restlessly tapped his fingers again—this time on the steering wheel. He was taking one of those side roads that only locals were brave enough to take at night. Even with the help of his high beams, he still had a hard time making out all the details of the winding road in front of him. It was bordered on both sides with melting two-foot-tall piles of snow that had been shoveled by heavy-duty diesel trucks a week ago. On the mountain slopes beyond the snow piles were a seemingly endless army of towering trees—Ponderosa pine, Black Hills spruce, and paper birch. Their pine needles and branches were encased in ice and also sprinkled with snow, making them look like soaring glass figurines that a giant child had left behind. The trees sent up a light dusting in the wake of his passing F-150.

Little Bill squinted out his windshield. The glass was caked with grime though he had given that boy Jesse Eger twenty bucks to wash the damned truck yesterday. Little Bill figured either Jesse had done a shit job (as lazy Jesse Eger was prone to do) or his eyesight was getting worse. Maybe cataracts were finally setting in. But that was part of getting old, wasn’t it? If it wasn’t one piece of you falling apart, it was the other.

He tore his gaze away from the road in front of him for a few seconds to glance down at the cell phone perched in one of his cup holders on a rattling bed of loose change and discarded gum wrappers. From the programmed chime he knew right away who was calling him. It was Janelle. She had called twice already. This time, like the other times, he did not answer her call. Instead, he reached down and adjusted one of the knobs on his radio. Willie Nelson’s voice filled the truck’s cab along with the twang of a country guitar. Little Bill hummed along to the old hit and finally stopped tapping his fingers. He began to relax.

Connie will see, he thought.

Because it would all work out fine in the end. Janelle would arrive in Mammoth Falls soon, and he’d talk to her. Then she’d dump her second-rate boyfriend. He and Connie would make up.

Everything will be A-okay, Little Bill thought.

“Uh-huh,” his deceased wife, Mabel, said in his head, then grunted.

Mabel often spoke to him at moments like this when he was cloaked in solitude. She also spoke to him when he was about to make a true ninny of himself.

“Sounds like you still aren’t too good at making the right bet, Bill,” she argued.

He turned up the volume to drown out Mabel’s voice, then leaned back against his headrest. Only a few other cars passed him as he drove: a blue Chevy truck, an ancient hatchback, and one RV with a garbage bag taped over one of the rear windows. Each time their taillights disappeared in his rearview mirror, Little Bill gave them a brief wave good-bye.

“Better slow down,” Mabel suddenly warned.

He glanced down at his speedometer. He was barely inching above forty. He was fine. Though his vision wasn’t quite what it used to be, he still knew to keep an eye out for a spindly-legged deer crossing the road, elk, or—on one occasion last year—an errant, ornery bison who refused to get out of the damned way. He had lived in the Black Hills long enough to know that.

A minute later, he turned the bend and caught sight of a snow pile in the middle of the road, but the pile was small enough that his truck would have no problem driving over it.

“Is that what you were trying to warn me about?” he asked his dead wife, then chuckled. “You worry too much, Mabel.”

But as Little Bill drew closer, the “snow pile” shifted and turned. When he was only six feet away, he spotted a canine’s startled brown eyes in the truck’s headlights. The dog, whose matted mane was caked with ice and snow, sent up a mist into the frigid night air when it yelped at the sight of the F-150.

Little Bill didn’t particularly like dogs, not since Mabel had brought home a basset hound puppy back in ’72 that she had named Doodlebug. The thing had whined and bayed throughout the night—keeping them both up into the wee hours of morning. It had left little bite marks on the wooden legs of all their end tables and in the leather and plush velvet arms of every sofa and chair, and finally—for its grand finale—it had taken a crap in the middle of their four-poster bed. Mabel had had to give the puppy away to a neighbor who already had four dogs and six cats and wouldn’t mind the added chaos Doodlebug could bring.

After Doodlebug, Little Bill had never worked up enough energy to own, let alone like, a dog. And he would soon find out that dislike was cosmically justified.

Little Bill’s heart leaped from his chest to his throat. He slammed on the brakes and whipped his steering wheel to the right to keep from hitting the dog. His tires squealed as they lost traction on a patch of black ice and the truck started to skid. He whipped the wheel to the left, overcorrected, and the truck began to spin. Around and around it went, and Little Bill saw a flash of trees, road, and mountains . . . trees, road, and mountains . . . trees, road, and mountains. Finally, he let go of the wheel and closed his eyes, praying for the crazy carousel ride to end. It did seconds later when the truck slid off the road, dipped down a steep slope, and slammed into the sturdy trunk of a pine tree. He heard the glass of his windshield shatter. His airbag inflated with a whomp and with enough force that it threw him back against his headrest and knocked the air clean out of his lungs.

Then everything went black.

Janelle Marshall set the Lucite tray of mozzarella and prosciutto near the center of the table, between the wine bottles and the platter of roasted carrots and parsnips drizzled with white balsamic vinegar. She shifted the stainless steel tongs to the left by two inches then back to the right another inch. She took a step back and clutched her hands in front of her.

It was a modernist masterpiece on white tablecloth, and like a gallery visitor, she examined the artwork. She appreciated the symmetry and the clean lines of the eggshell-white stoneware and the way the wineglasses refracted the light from the French crystal chandelier overhead. She noted the vibrant red and yellow of her Mediterranean salad and the understated green and orange of the vegetarian summer rolls she had purchased at the killer banh mi place six blocks from her office but planned to subtly pass off as her own. It all looked so impeccably composed, so . . .

“Perfect,” she whispered with a grin.

Tonight’s housewarming would be seamless. She’d gone over the checklist on her iPad to make it so, reviewing every minute detail—from the lighting to the song selection uploaded to her iPod, even to the dinner napkins she had spent hours folding into fleur-di-lis patterns. Now everything was in its rightful place and she could finally relax.

“The guests are starting to arrive, baby. Are you almost done?” Mark said as he strode through the dining room entryway, carrying a silver-lidded platter.

He was wearing a tan Hugo Boss blazer, dark khakis, and a yellow polka-dot bowtie she had gotten him for his birthday. He looked much like he had the first night she had met him, like a black Tucker Carlson.

Janelle had known even back then that Mark was the type of sturdy guy you could build a life upon. He was the stellar boyfriend who came home with the dry cleaning without being asked to pick it up, who took her car to get the oil changed as soon as the odometer shifted three thousand miles. Mark was as reliable as a Swiss watch—and she loved him for it.

Janelle examined their buffet table one last time, then nodded before turning to him and giving a small adjustment to the knot in his tie. “Yep, all done!”

“Great!” He then shoved the tray of mozzarella and prosciutto aside, cramming the silver platter into the now open space.

Watching him ruin her masterpiece, she almost cried out “No!” but she bit it back before the word passed her lips.

It’s okay. It’s fine. Take a deep breath. It’s just a minor imperfection. Only you’ll notice.

“Breathe in, breathe out,” is what she often told employees at Bryant Consultant Group who came storming into her office, slamming the door behind them, ready to unload some grievance. As HR director, she had to play arbiter and problem solver. She could not, under any circumstances, lose her cool. She would have to do the same tonight.

Trust in the Zen, she reminded herself before giving one last longing glance at the buffet table, resisting the urge to shift around the dishes again to regain the symmetry and balance it once had.

“Mom’s here,” Mark said as he removed his wire-framed glasses, grabbed one of the linen dinner napkins, and began to wipe his lenses.

“Yes, I heard.”

Even over the sound of jazz playing on their surround sound system and the rising murmur of conversation, Janelle could hear Mark’s mom, Brenda Sullivan, with her distinct Southern drawl. Though, truth be told, that drawl was as fake as the curly wig Brenda wore. Janelle wasn’t sure why the aging divorcée spoke like Scarlett O’Hara considering, according to her son, she had grown up in the projects of Detroit and not on a plantation in Savannah.

“She didn’t come empty-handed, either. She brought this,” Mark said as he placed his glasses back on his nose and removed the silver lid. He grinned. “Looks good, huh?”

Janelle stared down at the platter.

The dish was displayed in a carved-out pumpernickel loaf with a nest of gourmet crackers and bread slices radiating around it, with shavings of parsley sprinkled on top like green confetti. It looked like it should have been on the cover of one of those gourmet food magazines—Bon Appétit or Saveur.

“It’s crab dip,” Janelle said flatly.

“Yeah, it’s crap dip. What? What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong? Honey, you know I’m allergic to it, and so does your mom,” she said, dropping her voice down to a whisper.

Allergic—as in breaking into hives, swelling like the Stay Puft marshmallow man, gasping for air, and ultimately dropping dead—unless she got a quick stab of epinephrine.

“So then don’t eat it!” He chuckled in exasperation. “I mean, come on, baby! Mom just meant to be nice. She didn’t mean anything by it.”

Janelle glanced at the crab dip again. Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

“You’re right,” she said, patting his arm. “It’s no big deal.”

She would just have to shrug this off like she had shrugged off the other little digs from Brenda since she and Mark started dating, all of which could be mistaken for (or disguised as) well-meaning though clueless gestures.

Thanks, Brenda! A Weight Watchers subscription is just what I needed for my birthday!

You’re right, Brenda! My curly hair does look awfully big. I should straighten it or just cut it all off!

Brenda’s assistant, Shana, was another annoyance. Shana would sometimes come through the door trailing behind Brenda, nodding eagerly as she carried boxes like a happy pack mule, taking notes and gushing over everything Brenda said and did. She felt like yet another impediment to Janelle and Brenda truly ever bonding.

But we’ll bond—eventually, Janelle told herself. It will happen.

Because with time and with effort, she could make it work—like she made everything else work.

Mark replaced the silver lid, leaned down, and kissed Janelle’s cheek. “That’s my girl! Don’t sweat the small stuff, baby. Let’s just enjoy the night.” He glanced over his shoulder. “We should get out there and mingle with our guests. You ready to jump into the fray?” He extended his hand to her.

She nodded before taking his hand, standing on the balls of her feet and giving him a quick kiss. “Of course, honey.”

He escorted her into the living room, where there were several clusters of partygoers near the fireplace, the bay windows, and nestled on the sofa and armchairs. It was a microcosm of typical NoVa (or “Northern Virginia,” for those recent transplants) types: Beltway political insiders, long-time federal employees who could rattle off where they fell on the government pay scale faster than they could their own Social Security numbers, and pseudo-liberals who donated thousands to the Green Party but would still pull their Michael Kors purse close to their side whenever a hoodie-wearing guy walked nearby.

“Great party, Jay!” someone shouted out to her.

“Your new place looks amazing,” someone else called.

Janelle waved and blew a kiss to them, graciously accepting the compliments she had worked so hard to earn.

Brenda spotted Janelle and Mark as soon as they walked into the room. She sauntered toward them with wineglass in hand. Shana skittered after her across the Brazilian hardwood.

Brenda and Shana were wearing almost identical Albert Nipon suits. Brenda’s was gray and probably purchased at full price; Shana’s was red and likely bought off the sale rack. They looked like mirror images of each other, from their clothes to their petite figures to the plastic smiles on their faces.

“Janelle, there you are! We were wondering where you were hiding.” Brenda kissed Janelle, leaving a smear of blood red lipstick on the younger woman’s cheek that would have to be discreetly wiped off later.

Shana did a perky wave. “Hi, Janelle!”

Janelle nodded and forced her smile to stay in place. “Brenda . . . Shana, thank you so much for coming tonight.”

“And for the crab dip,” Mark added, gently nudging Janelle’s elbow. “Right, Jay?”

“Of course,” Janelle said through clenched teeth, almost tasting the words as they curdled on her tongue. But she was the consummate hostess. She refused to be rattled, even by the likes of Brenda and her deadly appetizers.

“Anything for you, darling,” Brenda drawled before playfully pinching Mark’s cheek. She turned back to Janelle. “Janelle, I was hoping to finally meet your family tonight.” Brenda looked around the living room. “Where is your mother, anyway?”

“Oh, Mom’s on a two-week cruise in the Mediterranean. She’d hope to make the housewarming, but I told her to just go and enjoy herself.” She waved her hand and chuckled. “She’s wanted to do this cruise for years!”

“Is your dad on the cruise with her?” Shana asked with raised brows. “Or is he coming tonight?”

For the first time, Janelle’s casual veneer and deep breathing exercises wavered. Her polite smile teetered on its axis. “My dad’s . . . uh . . . he’s dead.”

Shana looked stricken. Her mouth formed into an “O” as she clapped a hand over lips. “I am so sorry! I didn’t know!”

“No, it’s fine.” Janelle shrugged awkwardly. “He died more than a decade ago, and he was . . . well, out of my life, for the most part. So when he passed away, I barely even noticed. I-I mean I noticed. He was my father! I was sad, of course. But I wasn’t . . . you know, devastated.”

Her voice shook a little as Shana lowered her hand. The two women stared at Janelle with blank faces. Mark squinted at her like she had all of a sudden decided to speak in French.

Oh, God. I’m babbling.

She always did that whenever she spoke about her dad, which is why she preferred not to talk about him, let alone think about him.

“I just meant it wasn’t like I missed out on much because my mom was . . . was really great and—”

“Her grandfather raised her,” Mark interjected, saving her. “He was like her dad. Too bad he couldn’t make it tonight either, huh, baby?” Mark swept his hand around him before throwing an arm around her shoulder and giving her a squeeze. “It would have been nice for him to see how well it all turned out. I bet he wo. . .