The Renegade

Chapter 3

3

“It’s a truth universally acknowledged that when a grown woman goes home and stays in her old bedroom, she might as well give up and become a child again.” Isabelle surveyed her room, which was filled with the detritus of the past, as if the outgoing tide had left it behind.

Old lip glosses, movie tickets, textbooks, a shaggy purple beanbag chair, Harry Potter books, a ukulele, the yearly Rocky Peak Lodge brochures, her favorite Raggedy Ann doll that Mom had made for her. A closetful of ski pants and hoodies and boho skirts from her faux-hippie phase. Twinkle lights in the shape of skulls from her goth phase. A holographic image of a snake-haired goddess from her “spiritual” phase.

She’d gone through a lot of phases.

“Are you talking to yourself or being haunted by Jane Austen?” Her younger sister Gracie poked her head around the door, her blond hair a flash of platinum.

“A little of both.”

Damn it, she had to stop doing that. Goodbye, Jane.

“Can I come in?”

“Why would you stop now? Haven’t you been raiding my closet for the past fifteen years?” Isabelle slung an arm around her sister’s shoulder and hugged her tight as she stepped in.

Gracie was wearing sparkly tights under a black velvet dress, with her hair gathered into a puff ball on top of her head, and looked adorable as always. She and Isabelle were opposites in so many ways—artist versus doctor—but they rarely fought. Isabelle saved that for Jake.

“Of course I have.” Gracie tucked a stray wisp of hair behind her ear. “That’s the good thing about being the only one left at home. I get to borrow all the clothes.”

Even though she said it in a bright tone of voice, there was something wistful about that comment. “Gracie, you don’t have to stay here, you know. You can go anywhere you want.”

Her younger sister shrugged. “I like it here. I don’t know why everyone wanted to leave. Rocky Peak has everything. Beautiful mountains, beautiful snow…”

“Beautiful boys?”

“Lots of beautiful boys. Homegrown and imported by the tourism industry.”

Gracie always made light of her love life. She made light of everything, actually. Sometimes Isabelle wished that she’d take her life more seriously. Did she really want to spend the rest of her years at a secluded lodge ruled by the impossible Mad Max?

“Can we be serious just for a second?”

“Excuse me. I’m a Rockwell. You know we’re all about sarcastic humor. Laugh so you don’t cry, remember?”

“I know. But I swear, this won’t hurt a bit.”

“Doctors always say that,” Gracie grumbled. She walked to Isabelle’s closet and shoved hangers aside, clearly looking for something in particular.

“You’re what, twenty-two now?”

“Twenty-three. I had a birthday.”

“Oh my god, did I forget your birthday?” Isabelle clapped her hands onto her head. “I blame time-zone brain.”

“It’s okay. I’ll take this as my birthday present.” With an incandescent smile, Gracie held one of Isabelle’s favorite dresses against her body. It was slinky, black with a subtle glitter woven into the fabric. Isabelle had worn it to prom and never felt more beautiful.

“It’s all yours. You know what? You should wear it somewhere amazing. Like Paris. Or San Francisco. Somewhere not Rocky Peak.”

Gracie sighed heavily and draped the dress over her shoulder. “You know, I do go places. I’m not some kind of freakish hermit crab. I went to Yosemite with Kai.”

“Yes, if it weren’t for Kai flying you places, you would never have set foot out of the Cascades.”

“Yeah, well…so what’s the problem? I like to be home.” Gracie skipped toward the door—more like, fled toward the door. “You should try it more often. Don’t you get tired of always traveling?”

Yes, she actually did, but she’d never admit that to any of her family members. “Look, just tell me you’re happy here. That’s all I want to know.”

Gracie’s gaze flitted to meet hers, but only briefly. “That’s funny, because I was going to ask you the same thing. You look tired.”

“Thank you.”

“Gorgeous, but tired.”

“Too late.” Isabelle smiled, but even she knew it was a tired smile. “I haven’t been sleeping well,” she admitted.

“Is it because of Lyle?”

“What? No.” She scowled at her sister. “What kind of question is that?”

“A shamelessly nosey one, obvs.”

“It has nothing to do with Lyle. I’ve … well, I’ve been …” She hesitated, unsure about bringing Gracie into her current dilemma. Her sister looked at her alertly, and she realized, with a shock, that her little sister truly was all grown up. Why not trust her with this? “Actually, maybe you can help me.”

“With what?”

“I’ve been having this recurring dream over the past few months. It’s actually why I came back. It’s a dream about Mom.”

Gracie’s whimsical face tightened. “About the accident?”

“No, not that.”

Their mother, Amanda Rockwell, had died in a car accident about seventeen years ago, when Isabelle was eleven. Their oldest brother, Kai, had been in the car too, and nearly died himself. The aftermath of that crash had echoed through their family in so many ways. Max had spiraled into grief and blamed Kai. After a huge blowout fight, Kai had left, leaving the rest of the siblings on their own. Griffin had stepped in as a kind of surrogate parent. Jake and Izzy had each other, so it was easier on them.

But Gracie…what had it been like for her, a little girl watching her entire world shatter around her?

“The dream is exactly the same every time. I’m a little girl and—” Isabelle broke off as Griffin poked his dark head into the room. She noticed a mark on his neck. Griffin, the second oldest, all smoldering good looks and pro athlete physique, had recently fallen in love with an artist named Serena. They weren’t shy about it.

“Don’t either of you have your phones on? Family meeting. Everyone’s trying to reach you.”

“You know I don’t believe in those newfangled contraptions,” said Gracie.

Isabelle startled and checked hers. She’d missed a few calls while she’d been skiing. “Sorry, ringer got turned off. What’s the meeting about?”

With the lodge closed for renovations—paid for by Lyle Guero’s cash infusion—there seemed to be a family meeting every other day on some issue or another.

“Finalizing interior design options for the guesthouses and the lounge. We need Gracie for that. Serena has some ideas but she wants Gracie to weigh in too.”

“Not me?” Isabelle asked, a bit wounded.

Griffin glanced around her room, which could double as the set for a disaster movie. “Seriously?”

Isabelle couldn’t help laughing. “Fine. Point taken. I’ll be there, but feel free to start without me.”

Griffin left, Gracie heading after him. Isabelle snagged her sister’s arm on the way out the door. “Wait one second. I never finished the part about you helping me. Remember how Mom was always writing in her journal?”

Gracie screwed up her face. “I guess so.” Since she’d been only seven at the time of the accident, her memories of Mom were the most vague.

“Can you think of where she would have left it? It was probably more than one notebook, but they all looked the same. She liked those Mead composition books.”

Gracie thought for a moment, then shook her head. “Let me ponder on that. It could be anywhere, I suppose. The lodge has so many nooks and crannies.”

“And no one knows them better than you. You’ve lived here the longest, even though you’re the youngest.”

“Well, I don’t remember seeing anything like that. You could ask John Derrick. He’s in charge of the construction crew. Maybe one of the carpenters noticed something.”

Isabelle nodded, disappointed. “Thanks, I’ll talk to him.”

“So that’s why you haven’t been sleeping? You’re worried about those journals?”

“That dream keeps waking me up and then I can’t get back to sleep. I feel like Mom’s trying to tell me something. But I have no idea what. I thought maybe if I could read her journals…”

Gracie burst out laughing. “Aren’t you supposed to be the skeptical scientist of the family? You sound like me right now.”

Isabelle laughed ruefully and let go of Gracie’s arm. “I kind of do, don’t I? I guess that’s what sleep deprivation does to me.”

“Oh, snap.”

“Go on, they’re waiting for you. See you down there.”

Gracie vanished like a wisp in the wind, and Isabelle clicked on her phone to check the calls and texts she’d missed. Several from various family members—no doubt about the family meeting. One from the staff at Doctors Without Border, confirming her mailing address—maybe a check was on its way. And one from Diane, one of her friends from high school.

Really hoping to catch up soon. Want to pick your doctor brain about some stuff.

Oh great. That was an unexpected consequence of getting her medical degree. Everyone wanted a diagnosis of something, and didn’t seem to understand that it took a real exam to properly accomplish that. Still, she always did her best to point people in the right direction. First, do no harm, after all.

Next time I head down the mountain I’ll text you, she wrote back. Hopefully that was neutral enough.

Then she yawned and headed downstairs to see what the more artistically inclined members of her family had decided. Isabelle’s specialties were going fast on skis and operating on trauma patients in rough conditions. Picking paint colors—not so much.