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Elise walked back toward the Pontiac Trail Head with a headache brewing in the back of her skull. As a kind of insurance, she’d packed the diary and the photograph of Dean Swartz—proof that she was who she said she was.
Again, she appeared before her father’s house. She closed her eyes to picture them: the three Swartz siblings, running in and out during their youth, hollering and laughing.
If Alex was a tiny bit older than she was, and Tracey was even older than that...
It meant that they’d been alive, boisterous toddlers, while Dean and Allison Darby had fallen in love.
Elise had to guess that they hadn’t yet owned this house, not when Dean had operated as a stagehand.
The money had come later.
And now, the Swartz family did anything to protect it.
Elise walked in a kind of daydream toward the front door. Seconds after her knock, a maid appeared: dressed in dark jeans, a dark t-shirt, her hair pulled back. Her eyes were bright, her skin tanned, probably from many days spent out by the lake. She was maybe thirty or thirty-five.
“Good evening,” she said. “I assume you’re Elise?”
“Yes, thank you,” Elise said.
The maid opened the door wider to allow Elise to enter. The foyer itself was grand, ornate, with many old-world photographs and paintings of Mackinac Island. Another painting hung toward the back wall of the foyer, with what seemed to be Dean Swartz, and his wife beside him.
His wife.
The wife he’d cheated on with Allison Darby.
Elise walked behind the maid, all the way down the hallway and then to the left, to a large room with large windows, glistening wooden floors, and a grand piano in the far corner. Dean Swartz himself sat at a long dining room table, with his hands stretched out across the wood and his eyes studying the fancy china set across the table.
“Mr. Swartz? Elise is here.”
Dean stood as quickly as he could, an act that seemed to make his bones creak. His smile was every bit as bright as it was in the photograph Elise had tucked away in her mother’s diary. He was Brad as an old man; his eyes seemed to exude love and confidence.
“Good evening, Elise. I was so worried you’d already left the island and wouldn’t come,” Dean said.
Elise stepped toward him and shook his hand.
Handshaking hadn’t been on her list of “Top Things To Do With Dad.”
But here they were like they’d just finished a business deal.
“I have to apologize again for the mishap with the Willow Grove,” he said, dropping her hand. “For some reason, nobody informed me of the issue. When I learned that one of our guests had just been abandoned, I was heartsick. I’m glad you accepted this dinner with me today. I know it can’t possibly make up for all you’ve gone through, but...”
Elise realized she hadn’t spoken yet. She swallowed and tried to think of words. Any words. She was a writer, wasn’t she? Writers were meant to be articulate.
“It’s really okay,” she said.
Wow. How original.
“I’m glad to hear that,” Dean said. “Why don’t you have a seat?”
Elise walked delicately toward the only other china setting at the table. As she sat, Dean sat along with her. They paused for a long time.
It was increasingly clear that Alex hadn’t reported to Dean what Elise was “up to.”
He didn’t know about the long-lost daughter thing.
“You have a beautiful house,” she said.
Really brilliant dialogue, Elise. Absolutely inspired.
“Thank you. We moved in when my youngest child was around ten or eleven, so we were allowed many good family years here,” Dean affirmed. “You can imagine what it was like. Constant chaos. Kids were screaming from all corners of the house. I had three—which I sometimes said was three too many.”
He laughed. Elise joined him, feeling like a complete alien.
Hello! I’m number four!
“But now that my wife has died, and the kids are all off living their own lives, I must admit, the silence becomes deafening,” Dean said.
“I can understand that,” Elise said. “I was recently divorced, and my kids went off to college. I was once so proud of my house, proud to have guests over for dinner, proud of all I’d worked for to buy it. And now, I get lost in the sheer number of rooms.”
Dean studied her. His face reflected feelings of both confusion and intrigue.
“Where are you from, Elise? You don’t seem to be a Michigander.”
“I’m not. I’m from Los Angeles.”
Dean’s face twitched strangely.
Had he just had a flashback to Allison Darby?
“You’re a long way from home, then,” he told her. “I didn’t think most people outside of the Midwest even knew about Mackinac.”
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t. Not until recently,” Elise said.
“I see.” His eyes dropped toward the plate again. He looked on the verge of asking her another question.
But at that moment, the maid appeared with a big tray of eggplant parmesan, a whole baguette that had been re-baked with garlic, butter, and cheese, along with a salad. She returned moments later with a bottle of red wine, which Dean told Elise was made at a winery just outside of Cheboygen.
“That’s a funny name for a place,” Elise said.
“We’ve got a lot of funny names. Mackinac is a funny name, in and of itself.”
“Sure. But if you look at anything too hard, it’s funny, right? Like, Calabasas? It’s just a ton of syllables thrown together.”
Again, Dean’s face twitched. Probably, he remembered that Allison was from Calabasas, also.
“I’ve never made it out to LA,” he said. “I always wanted to go, but my career took off so quickly over here on the island.”
“And then, there’s always kids to pay attention to, and friends to see, and all that stuff,” Elise said. “I’m forty-two, and I feel kind of like my life just fluttered away from me, outside of my control.”
“It doesn’t get any easier. I can tell you that,” Dean returned.
Now, this was the kind of conversation I’ve always wanted to have with my father.
They dug into their food after that. Elise ate slowly, falling into banter with her father, who was much funnier than she would have suspected. Their senses of humor were pretty similar, and she found herself pausing several times to press her napkin across her lips and cackle.
“What is it you do, Elise?” Dean asked, chewing at the end of his garlic bread.
“I’m a screenwriter.” Elise was grateful that she was able to say it without hemming and hawing around the idea. “I’ve sold a few scripts and worked on several TV shows over the years.”
Dean leaned back, his eyes big. “Wow. So you’re actually a Hollywood girl.”
“Something like that.”
“I’m amazed,” he said. “When you’re out here, you don’t think anything like that is possible. We do normal things, like own bed and breakfasts, become teachers, work as doctors—that kind of thing. But you? You went out into the world, and you made something of yourself.”
“I wouldn’t call any of those other things, not making something of yourself,” Elise said with a laugh. “I wouldn’t know the first thing about being a doctor, for example. I would go so far as to say that there should be a law against me becoming a surgeon.”
Dean laughed. “Still, I’d love to see something you worked on. I had a flair for the dramatic back in the day, you know. I’m actually from Chicago, and I used to work as a stagehand.”
Oh, boy. Here we go.
“I didn’t know you were a Chicago guy,” Elise said, treading around the topic at hand as best as she could.
“Sure am. Born and bred. I didn’t move out to Mackinac till the late seventies.”
“Do you ever miss Chicago? I just went there for one night for the very first time. I have to say; there’s something about that place. It’s nothing like LA. That’s for sure.”
“I can only imagine,” he said. “And to answer your question, I do miss it. Sometimes. I miss the guy I was back then, the young man with a ton of energy who didn’t really know anything. I have to say, although it worked out, I married much too young, started having kids way too early... I didn’t know who I was, and already I was bouncing little Cindy on my knee. Then, there was Tracey, then Alex...”
Elise nodded. “I was such a kid when I had my kids, too. My mother told me I was crazy.”
“Oh, but there’s no way she didn’t love having grandkids around,” Dean said. His eyes shone with laughter. “Everyone always wants to tell everyone else what to do. But when you get right down to brass tax, more love is never a bad thing.”
“I’ve always felt this way, too,” Elise affirmed. “My mother was more of a rebel, and maybe less of a romantic. She always said we didn’t need men.”
“I would say, after knowing all the women I’ve known in my life, that’s much truer than we men would like to admit,” he said.
Elise was blown over by what a good guy her dad was.
She could see it: why her mother had loved him so much.
But why had she left him?
Why hadn’t they tried to work it out?
Did it really come down to this marriage, which he’d just said he hadn’t been ready for?
“By the way,” Elise said, stretching her finger toward the grand piano as their stomachs settled. “I was curious. Do you play?”
Dean arched his thick grey eyebrow. “I do.”
Elise hadn’t uncovered this fact yet in the diaries.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to perform something?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Would that bore you? My kids always tell me I like to show off a little too much.”
“No. My daughter, Penny, she always used to play. It drove my husband nuts because he felt like he couldn’t concentrate, but I fell in love with every single song,” Elise said. “It would make me so happy to hear something.”
Dean heaved a sigh, reached for the bottle of red wine, then poured them each another glass.
Slowly, Dean walked toward the piano. With his eyes away from her, Elise struggled to keep the tears at-bay.
This man was a genius. He was kind and considerate.
He was nothing at all like his son, Alex.
Dean sat at the piano bench and placed his fingers over the keys. He looked meditative, as though his mind was a million miles away.
Then, he began to play.
Elise recognized it.
It took her a long minute to recognize it, but it finally came to her.
It was the song that played in many scenes in the film this very man and her mother had worked on together.
Rachmaninoff.
It was beautiful: the kind of song that made your heart and your stomach ache; the kind of thing that made you swim in nostalgia. It went on for several minutes. Dean’s fingers didn’t miss a beat.
When he finished, he allowed his hands to fall to his thighs.
The silence stretched between them.
“I know that song,” Elise finally said.
Dean turned his eyes toward hers. “You do?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not well known outside of the classical music world,” he told her. “But, I love it.”
“It was in a movie, wasn’t it?” Elise asked.
Dean’s eyes grew hard. Slowly, he stood up again from the piano bench and slipped his hands across his pants. “I suppose it was. A long time after it was written.”
Ah. So he wanted to evade the topic of the film.
“But what was that movie called?” Elise asked.
Maybe it was the red wine, giving her a jolt of confidence.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“You know it. You must,” Elise said.
Dean stood in the center of the room, between the table and the piano. His eyes were shadowed, ominous.
“It’s just that everyone on this island knows about that film,” Elise affirmed. “Somewhere in Time. It must have been filmed around the time you moved here? If you said you moved here in the late seventies.”
Dean reached out to grip the edge of the dining chair. He looked on the verge of collapsing.
“Especially given the fact that you said you used to be a stagehand,” Elise said.
Dean’s lips parted.
Silence hung between them.
That moment, there were footsteps in the hallway.
An ominous voice rang out and echoed from window to window.
“Dad? What the heck.”
Elise turned to find Alex standing in the doorway. His dark eyes bore into her.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Elise’s nostrils flared. “Your dad invited me.”
“She lost her room at the Willow Grove,” Dean said softly. “I thought it was the polite thing to do.”
“This is just what you wanted, isn’t it?” Alex said under his breath, speaking only to Elise.
“What was that, Alex?” Dean asked. He pressed his hand against his chest and coughed once.
The man was aging. There was no telling what this kind of interaction might do to him.
Elise’s shoulders felt heavy with sadness. She’d wanted to explain it all to him. She’d wanted him to say her mother’s name.
“It’s been a lovely evening,” Elise said, mostly toward Alex. “I was just leaving.”
Alex stared at her strangely as she gathered her purse. She turned back toward Dean and said, “Thank you again.”
“Yes. Of course,” Dean offered. His voice sounded far away.
Elise rushed toward the hallway. As she tore down it, she heard Alex’s words sizzling behind her.
“Don’t you realize? There’s an open investigation about the fire. There’s a possibility she did it.”
“Why would a girl like that want to burn down the Willow Grove?” Dean asked. His voice faded slightly as he spoke. “She seems perfectly lovely.”
“You should stay away from her until the investigation is complete, Dad,” Alex returned. “You remember the others who tried to take advantage of us. I won’t let it happen again.”
“Oh, Alex... you’ve had a hard time, but that doesn’t mean that you should blame just anyone...”
Elise didn’t catch the last of what her father said. She rushed out into the chilly night, whipped out the gate, and then rushed to the edge of the Pontiac Trail Head. She blinked out across the wild waters, her heart flipping.
There was so much of this that didn’t add up.
So many unanswered questions.
Elise breathed slowly, trying to steady herself as she returned to Wayne’s house. When she entered, she found Wayne standing at the counter with a beer in-hand. He beamed at her and lifted his other hand, which was swaddled in bandages.
“What did you do!” Elise cried.
Wayne laughed. “Just man stuff, Elise.”
“Oh, you mean, just being an idiot while doing hard labor stuff?” Elise teased him.
Wayne chuckled, then glanced down at his hand again. “I had this weird feeling that you weren’t coming back tonight.”
“I wasn’t supposed to,” Elise said. “Dean Swartz arranged for me to have another room in a bed and breakfast. He forgot to give me the key.”
Wayne tilted his head. He gave Elise a sneaky smile, then said, “You were going to keep that from me, weren’t you?”
“It’s not like it went anywhere,” Elise said. Her voice cracked a little, proof of the drama of the day.
Wayne opened the fridge, grabbed a beer, and passed it over to her. She cracked the top off and then collapsed in a heap on the couch.
“What do you mean?” Wayne asked.
“We spent all night talking about everything else, except for the stuff I wanted to talk to him about,” Elise said. “And then, right at the perfect time to ask him, Alex stormed in and demanded that I leave.”
“Shoot. That guy knows how to track you down, doesn’t he?” Wayne said, joining Elise on the couch.
When he sat, Elise was again reminded of these potential “playboy” ways, which he’d spoken of. She scooched a bit away from him. She had to guard her heart, even if she did plan to go back to California.
“I guess so. He told his father I’m under investigation for the fire, which is insane,” Elise said.
“You’ll get out of that easy,” Wayne said. “The strange thing is—didn’t you just kind of get what you came to Mackinac for?”
Elise thought for a moment. “It’s almost perfect. It just isn’t quite there yet.”
“You want him to accept you.”
“I just want to understand more about it. And I want to hear his stories about my mom. I want to know what 1979 was like for him. But his wife, his children... all of that was going on at the same time. It’s obvious that it wasn’t a very happy time for him. Decisions were made that impacted all of our lives and continue to impact our lives,” Elise continued.
Wayne nodded. “I always knew Mandy.”
“Mandy?”
“His wife,” Wayne said.
“Oh.”
“She was kind. Genuine. Considerate. I don’t know. Maybe they weren’t perfectly compatible, but is anyone?” Wayne said.
Elise continued to stare down at her beer. “What happened to her?”
“She died from a stroke about two years ago,” Wayne said. “I remember it because Anna and I had just ended whatever it was we had, and I saw her at the funeral, and she wouldn’t talk to me. Her son, Alex, did the eulogy, and she was buried in the Mackinac cemetery. Dean invited me to their house afterward. I remember watching him, seated at his piano, staring out the window. When I went up to say goodbye, because I wanted to go, he said, ‘You’re probably the only person I know who understands this right now. This feeling like a part of your body has been ripped out of you, and there’s no way you can take it back.’”
Wayne bit hard on his lower lip.
Was Wayne a widower?
Was this why Wayne had become such a playboy for those years?
Because he was grieving, and he didn’t know how to handle his own emotions?
“We met a few times after that,” Wayne continued, without explaining further. “He wanted that kind of support. We went hiking, played with his dog, went sailing. Alex was a little bit jealous of it all, but I think he was also just grateful that somebody else managed to handle his father’s mental health while he continued to manage the properties.”
Elise pressed hard on her forehead. “That was kind of you. I’m sure he really needed a friend.”
Wayne shrugged. “I needed one, too.”
Elise turned to face him. The tension between them was insane.
Kiss him.
Right after he half-confessed, he’s a widower?
Who cares! Kiss him!
But she couldn’t. The night had gotten too heavy.
“Thank you again for letting me stay here,” Elise said. “I’m sure I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow, once I get that key for the other bed and breakfast.”
Wayne lost a bit of the light from his eyes. “It’s been a pleasure to host you. Even if you eat rabbit food almost exclusively.”
Elise chuckled and sipped her beer. Silence fell over them. Wayne reached for the remote and flicked through the channels until he found an old movie Elise hadn’t seen in over twenty years. Princess Bride.
“My ex-husband loved this movie,” Elise said. “We used to watch it when we were in college, in that stupid rickety bunk bed.”
Wayne turned back to face her. His eyes were difficult to read.
“I don’t know what he did to you, but whatever it was, you definitely didn’t deserve it,” he said.
The words were so heavy.
Elise was completely awestruck.
But before she could answer, Wayne lifted his bandaged hand and said, “Shoot. I need to change this out.” He hustled toward the bathroom, placing his beer on the coffee table as he went.
Elise sat in stunned silence, while Wayne puttered around in the bathroom, looking for more bandages.
“Do you need any help?” Elise asked.
“No way. Although it’s pretty funny that the two of us continue to get injured, isn’t it?” he called.
“Funny is a word for it,” Elise said.
As Wayne returned to the couch, he furrowed his brow, took another sip of his beer, and said, “Have you looked at the diary any more for clues about why it didn’t work out between your mom and Dean?”
“I’ve thought of it.”
Truthfully, the end of the diary frightened Elise.
She wanted to know the truth, but she also didn’t want the hunt to end.
She didn’t want to come to the part where her mother had to face the sadness of her reality.
She loved living in the fuzzy in-between, watching as a twenty-four-year-old Allison Darby fell head-over-heels with the handsome Dean Swartz.