Elsa was waiting outside the coffee shop where we had agreed to meet. She had one foot against the wall and was reading a book. I was mildly freaked out again by her height. She was taller than any girl my age I’d ever met.
“Hey,” I said.
“Oh, hey,” she replied, dropping the book to her side.
“What are you reading?” She held the cover toward me. It read That Summer. “Is it good?”
“I don’t know yet. I just started it. My sister gave it to me because I’m tall.” I must have looked at her strangely. “It’s about a tall girl.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. Then, again because I am super suave, “You are tall.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
“Does it bother you?” She raised an eyebrow at me. “I mean, not that it should or anything, but…”
“No, because I’m supermodel-tall, right?”
“Really?”
“Really what?”
“What is supermodel-tall?”
“It was a joke. Because supermodels are usually tall,” she said.
Man, am I smooth, I thought. “Oh, yeah. For sure,” I said. “You want to go inside?”
She looked through the window of the coffee shop. “Not really.”
“Oh, okay. What do you want to do?” I said, already feeling off balance. I’d had a whole plan for how to sit, what to order, how to go about paying for Elsa without it seeming weird.
“You want to go for a drive in the hills?”
“You have a car?”
“I have something to drive. Just my mother’s crappy minivan though.”
“Hey, wheels are wheels, right?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“The hills” were the ski hills that sat to the west of Resurrection Falls. They weren’t huge or anything. In fact, you could drive to the top of all of them. And, I imagine, you could drive a Jeep down any number of them as well. But they were good enough for some snowboarding or, from what I’d heard, skateboarding down the steep main road.
“I never do this,” I said as we turned onto Beacon Hill Road.
“Drive around?”
“Well, I guess sometimes. But never up here.”
“I do,” Elsa said.
“Why?”
“You’ll see,” she said.
We talked about soccer and school and what had happened to Romano the night before, and how strange it had all been.
“How is he doing?” she asked.
“I guess all right. He was going for another X-ray today.”
“Do they have any idea who did it to him?”
“Not really. Riley said he saw this car that he thought belonged to this guy from—”
“Wait. Okay, here it is.” Elsa turned down a lane that I hadn’t even seen.
“Where are we going?” I said.
She reached over and patted my knee. “You’ll see.”
We drove along the rutted path, tree branches slapping at the windshield, until we came to a parking lot of sorts.
“What’s this for?” I said.
“Cross-country skiing. The road is actually way better maintained in the winter.” We got out, and I followed Elsa to a path through the trees.
“Now where are we going?”
“You’ll see,” she said again. “Patience, patience.”
“This is starting to feel like a bad horror movie. Only reversed,” I said as I dodged a swinging branch.
“What do you mean by reversed?”
“Well, normally it’s some creepy guy luring a beautiful girl into the woods.”
“You’re not creepy,” she said. Then she turned and punched me on the arm. “Though you got the rest right.” She grabbed my hand and dragged me through an opening in the trees. We were just above the top of a ski lift. The chairs were all rocking slightly in the breeze.
“Don’t they take these down in the summer?” I said.
“This lift hasn’t run in years. So I guess they just leave the chairs where they are.” She jammed her foot against the side of the lift cabin and jumped up into the chair.
“There we go,” she said. “Come on up.” She shifted on the chair so that I could hop up beside her.
“And this is why I brought you all the way up here.”
The view was amazing. Resurrection Falls lay beneath us. The sky was a pure blue, dotted by a few lazy clouds.
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s called perspective,” Elsa said. “It’s why I come up here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I get pretty caught up in things. Like school and soccer and everything. And it’s hard to just breathe and let it go down there. So I end up feeling as if I’m getting angry all the time for no reason. That’s when I come up here and look at this.”
“You get angry?”
“Yeah, Del, everyone gets angry. But think about it.” She reached up and brought the safety bar down, then leaned on it. “This is one little town in a country of little towns and giant cities. And our country is just one country out of a whole bunch of other countries.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a big world.” Which sounded totally lame.
She fell silent for a moment. “What I’m saying is that when I’m up here, all the things that piss me off down there seem pretty small.”
“Do you come up here a lot?”
“No, I’m only a little dysfunctional.” I stared at her and she laughed. “Everyone is though, right?”
“Absolutely,” I said. I could see Angelo’s restaurant and the soccer field beside it. “You know, maybe whoever took Romano out should come up here sometime.”
“Right, we were talking about that before. Do the police have any idea who did it?”
“Maybe. Riley saw a car tear off, and he thinks it belongs to this guy Doug Richards.”
“Doug Richards who goes to Roland Hills?”
“Yeah. Do you know him?”
Elsa looked dead at me. “Yeah, I know him. He’s my brother’s best friend.”