"Julia, the van is for company business only. This," Nina said, gesturing up and down at Lance, "is personal."
"Okay," Julia conceded, "then we'll take my car."
"Um," Lance interjected. "Believe me, no one is a bigger fan of finding another vehicle than I am, but your car is in front of the house. I can't go out the front door. And you can't exactly pull around here without making it look like something's up."
Julia thought about her driveway, which was almost a half mile long and full of twists and turns. Normal people could barely see her house from the road, but the vultures that were camped in the ditches weren't exactly normal. "Fine then," Julia said. "We just won't go."
"Jules," Nina said, "we've got to go."
"Why?"
Nina didn't answer. She shifted her gaze between Lance and Julia and bit her lip, weighing some unspecified options.
"Nina ..." Julia said, a threat in her voice.
"Caroline wouldn't say!" Nina blurted. "She just said that I had to get both of you to her house and not to waste a minute about it. So, see, we've got to go!"
Julia turned and started upstairs. "I'm going to go get blankets. Lance can lay down in the backseat. We'll cover him up." She looked at Lance. "Is that okay with you?"
He nodded. "That's fine."
Twenty dirt roads, nine illegal U-turns, and one mad dash in front of a train later, Nina turned into Caroline's seemingly uninhabited development.
My very own bat cave, Julia mused as Nina pulled into the garage space where Steve parked his Camry on the rare occasions when he was actually home. Caroline hit the button and the door started down, blocking out the sunlight, proving it was safe to pull Lance from beneath the pile of blankets. One look at him made Julia wonder who had had the worst of it—Julia, who could see the road, or Lance, whose trip was left up to the imagination.
"Okay, Caroline, I'm here. Spill it," Julia said.
But Caroline obviously didn't share Julia's sense of urgency. Instead, she led her guests into the kitchen and asked, "Can I get anyone a drink? Some fruit? Juice maybe?"
"I don't want juice, Caroline," Julia snapped. "I want to know what the ..." her voice trailed off as she noticed Nina, who had taken off her hat and was slipping out of her trench coat, revealing her brand-new GIVE LANCE A CHANCE T-shirt.
"Nina!" Julia cried.
Nina looked down at her shirt as if she'd forgotten what she was wearing. A broad grin stretched across her face. "I got you one, too."
"Nina, this is so not—"
"Julia, I took the wrong box!" Caroline cried, the words exploding from her lips. Every eye turned toward Caroline, who looked down at her hands, spinning the wedding band on her finger.
Julia looked around and asked, "What box? What are you talking about?"
"Yesterday. The junk we cleaned out of Lance's room." "Lance's room?!" Julia questioned.
"—one of the boxes was old manuscripts. I took it by mistake. I'm sorry."
Julia exhaled. She hadn't known she'd been holding her breath. She eased onto a barstool as the tension slipped away and she realized her sister's "crime" had been minor.
Then, worry was replaced by annoyance. "We had to sneak over here because you wanted to give me my box back?"
"No," Caroline hurried to say. "Steve put it out with the trash this morning."
"Oh," Julia said, surprised. An odd sense of grief came over her as she realized what that meant. "Everything I ever wrote was in that box. Short stories, essays, drafts of my books." The weight of loss settled down on her. "Now they're gone. ..."
Caroline eased onto a stool beside her sister. She pulled Julia's hand into her own and patted it. "That's the problem. They're not exactly gone.''''
Lance said, "Maybe it's vertigo from the car ride talking, but you've lost me."
"We all know that Myrtle's crazy," Caroline said slowly. "She wears a housecoat all day long, and she drinks in the mornings, and . . . she likes to go through the trash. Julia, honey, I saw her take your box."