that room whenever she was home. “You can have a look,” Christian said.
Josie stepped into the room to see that Shannon and Christian really hadn’t left any stone unturned. The mattress was off center, the drawers of the nightstand hung open, the closet door was ajar, the sheets and towels on shelves inside of it were disheveled.
“Do you need help?” Christian asked.
“No,” Josie said. “Thank you.”
He left her. She spent several minutes studying every corner of the room, trying to think where Trinity would have left a high school diary. Josie took a thorough look around, even testing the edges of the wall to wall carpet to make sure there weren’t any places it peeled back, before deciding that, as an adult, Trinity wouldn’t have hidden any diary in here. In fact, the last time Trinity probably handled the diary was when she was in high school. Working on that assumption, Josie went back to the hall and began to methodically search the boxes as well as the items that Shannon and Christian had already removed from them and left scattered on the floor. She checked the compartment of every jewelry box, cosmetic bag, purse, even inside shoes. Any item that had a compartment, no matter how small, Josie deconstructed.
She found nothing.
Nothing except the realization that she and Trinity, despite being raised hours apart in two very different environments, and despite how different they were as adults, had had very similar tastes as teenagers. Trinity had many of the same CDs, movies, books, and even clothes that Josie had liked as a teen. Josie hadn’t been able to afford nearly as much as Trinity had collected, but she had certainly admired and enjoyed many of the same things.
They’d both worn skinny jeans and listened to an eclectic range of music which included albums by Nelly Furtado, Jennifer Lopez, Matchbox 20, Leanne Womack, and Rascal Flatts. Tears stung the backs of Josie’s eyes as she wondered if Trinity had ever sung along with the same anthems of Josie’s teenage years, felt the same escape in Nelly Furtado’s ‘I’m Like a Bird’ and reassurance in Jennifer Lopez’s ‘I’m Gonna Be Alright’. They’d both also had the same pink and turquoise caboodle—a large plastic cosmetics case that kids their age were crazy over in the early 2000s. Josie had given her own away ages ago. With a stab of nostalgia, she opened Trinity’s to find two dried up tubes of body glitter which made her laugh in spite of the situation. She had liked most of the things that teenagers at that time liked, but she wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing body glitter. She searched the compartments, but they were empty.
She found a silver-plated trinket box and flipped it open to find a Tiffany’s charm bracelet. Josie touched it reverently. It seemed so big and chunky now with its silver chain links and huge heart-shaped charm announcing: Please return to Tiffany & Co. Many of the wealthier girls in Josie’s school had had these. She had coveted them all through high school, but she knew they were expensive, and Lisette was hardly rich. She set it aside and moved on to a new bin of Trinity’s belongings, this one containing the movies Trinity had collected during high school.
Shannon’s voice startled her from her thoughts. “No one even watches VHS tapes anymore,” she said, pointing to a pile of movies from the early 2000s in Josie’s lap. “I’m not even sure you can sell them on eBay as vintage. I’ll have to tell her to just get rid of them when she—”
She broke off and covered her eyes with one hand. Josie pushed the movies aside and stood up. Gently, she pulled Shannon’s hand away from her face. “When she gets back,” Josie finished for her. “She can go through these things when she gets back. Look at these movies—these were my favorites at that age, too: Miss Congeniality, Return to Me, Erin Brockovich, Notting Hill, Shakespeare in Love.”
Shannon smiled. “She loved to watch movies. She’d sit for hours in her bedroom and watch movie after movie. I think it was a good distraction for her.”
Josie held up one of the tapes. “This one was my favorite. Frequency. Do you remember it?”
“I think so,” Shannon said.
“It was about a police detective who is able to communicate with his late father over a HAM radio during the aurora borealis. Somehow, they could talk to one another thirty years apart and change both their futures.