Read Online Dear Daughter by Elizabeth Little - Free Book Online

“history” in their names. Her current research interests include pioneer somethings and American Indian something elses. Ask her about any of this and you will be so crazy bored that you would rather self-lobotomize than ask a follow-up.
    (But I made a few flashcards and wrote a short paper on nineteenth-century settlement patterns just in case you’re not.)
    Then I was released, and all my ifs turned to whens. I sent Noah running around California putting together my new identity and ordering my new wardrobe, and while he was otherwise occupied, I planned my trip to Ardelle, mapping my route and booking a room at the only local inn that had a website. Here I caught a break: When I called to make my reservation, I spoke to the inn’s sweetly enthusiastic proprietress, a woman named Cora Kanty.
    “You can’t come then!” she said when I asked about availability.
    For a moment, I was nonplussed— Other people wanted to visit this place? —but I recovered quickly. “In that case, is there another hotel you can recommend?”
    “Oh, no, that’s not what I meant! It’s just that if you can wait until November, you can join us for Gold Rush Days, our yearly festival! It’s great fun, especially if you’re a history buff like me.”
    I thought through the possibilities. A festival would provide the perfect cover. There would be crowds to hide in, events to attend. If there was anyone named Tessa in Ardelle, I’d be sure to run into her. All I needed was a good reason to be nosy—which was where Rebecca Parker came in.
    “November it is, then,” I said. “Because as it turns out, I’m absolutely fascinated by history.”
    •   •   •
    By the time Kayla’s shitty truck and I got to Ardelle, the sun was setting, and my immediate impression on arrival was that things would probably look a lot better once it was pitch dark.
    I hadn’t been able to find very much information about Ardelle, so I didn’t quite know what to expect. I knew the town was classified as a “census-designated place,” as kindly a euphemism as I can imagine for “one-horse Podunk shit hole.” I also knew its per capita income ($35,835), racial breakdown (White, 98.6 percent, American Indian and Alaska Native, 1.4 percent), median age (47.2), and primary industries (logging, mining, tourism). Even so, I had never imagined I’d find nothing more than a few dozen buildings hashed into twelve blocks by a grid of five streets.
    I found it helpful to think of the town’s layout in terms of the buttons on a telephone, like so:

    (For gas, press 6.)
    (For groceries, press 2.)
    (For city hall, press 5.)
    (To speak to an operator—well, sorry, you’re shit out of luck, because anyone with that kind of vaguely marketable skill probably left town long ago.)
    Most of the businesses I passed as I rattled down Main Street were already closed for the day—if, indeed, they had ever bothered to open at all. I parked the truck in the darkest corner of a lot off Percy, just past the inn. I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror. My eyes were wide and red-rimmed: I wasn’t used to wearing contacts, or that’s what I told myself.
    I stepped out of the truck, walked to the street corner, and turned in a slow circle. According to my map, the town was built into a couloir—the eastern approach to the pass to Adeline, I guessed—with Main Street running the length of its nadir and transitioning from state highway to county road. If I squinted, I could see where Main Street then narrowed into a single lane of jagged asphalt and disappeared abruptly into the trees. The gully was sufficiently flat-bottomed to seat the town comfortably, but the mountain slopes rose so precipitously on three sides that it was impossible not to imagine the forest was about to fold in on you.
    Just one house was set high in the hills. A Romanesque revival. Pretty. Incongruous.
    When I looked down Main Street, I could see a dry cleaner, a hardware store, and a