enough to let it go, although he didn’t, really.
He’s been carrying it all these years, and all these years later he’s found the hidden keys to Lucy’s life before Burt. She kept them in her jewel box, like notes that she wrote to him, but was afraid to send. Now that she’s safe from whatever she was afraid of, Dan is free to track down the answers to questions he promised not to ask. He’s in Fort Jude.
It was a gut decision: no questions, no regrets. It made itself. He didn’t quit his job, exactly, but he did call the office. His boss didn’t say yes or no because it wasn’t a question. He said, ‘Remember, your mother can only die once.’
There are so many ways to parse this that he can’t bear to start.
Dan Carteret doesn’t want to kill his mother all over again; he just wants to put this thing to rest. He’s here to strip mine her past and pull his father out.
With its flashy neon and artificial palms flanking fancy wrought iron benches, Fort Jude is nothing like New London – or Los Angeles, for that matter. It’s more like downtown Oz – real palm trees and plastic flowers in cement tubs line Central Avenue, with flowers in pots hanging from the ornamental lamp-posts, and mosaic obelisks marking the major cross streets. There’s so much cosmetic architecture here that it’s hard to tell the difference between what is and what used to be. Brash new buildings compete with old hotels tarted up with false fronts like gaudy party masks. Dan skims the facades like a speed reader, looking for places Lucy would have gone. He wants to walk into her past and figure out what went wrong and why she tried so hard to obliterate Fort Jude.
This is not the time for a Holiday Inn, Marriott, Sheraton, any of your anonymous, clean places. It’s not like he expects to run into his mother in the lobby, he just wants to stay somewhere that she might have come. He’s looking for a hotel with a history, where the homefolks meet for drinks in late afternoon – people his mother might have hung out with, the ones who were born here and stayed here, so that they segued from backstory into now without feeling a thing. He’d like to slide down the bar, all, Hi, I’m new here. Smile and make them like him, which he’s good at, even though he grew up pretty much alone. If he can make friends, maybe one of them will point him to Lucy’s old neighborhood. They might even know the house. Otherwise, he’ll have to go through Fort Jude street by street, block by block in his rented car, matching tree lines and front porches to the ones in his mother’s snapshot until he finds the place.
It takes him two passes to find it, but the Flordana is perfect. Never mind the wrought iron fence surrounding the overgrown courtyard and the gingerbread trim bolted to the long front porch. Behind its Victorian facade, the Flordana is straight out of the 1920s, blunt and flat-footed and sweet. At odds with the false front is the Art Deco sign, blue neon winking at him from behind faded plastic ivy: FLORDANA HOTEL. Set back from the street, the hotel crouches between hulking office blocks like a nice old lady forgotten on the sofa at a high school party, wedged between two jocks too stoned to notice.
It’s all cool until he parks and gets out of the car. It’s hotter out here than he thought. It’s . . . He doesn’t know. In the courtyard he gets an attack of the dry swallows: gulp. The tiled porches are green with moss. The cement courtyard has a tired, dingy look. As if this is too little, and he got here too late. Get over it! he tells himself. Don’t get weird and don’t pin any hopes on this. What does he think, that he can flash a snapshot of his mother and real Lucy will fall into his hands, buried secrets and all? That somebody will say, ‘Why, that’s Lucy Carteret, do you want to see her house?’ Not really. He’s a little crazy right now but he is, after all, a reporter. Was. Gulp.
Check in. Scope the place on the web before you start. This is no big deal. It’s just the beginning.
But what if she and his real father actually came to the Flordana,