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By Root 643 0

Jeb was trying to convince him that something was wrong, telling him not to trust anyone. Dad laughed it off. Jeb grabbed the photo album from the end table and started… almost carving the lines into the back cover with a pencil. Dad got mad, said my mom would be angry. Jeb said, ‘Linda’s mom asked you all to come up for a visit, right? Kind of strange, out of the blue? Got a little upset when only Linda would come? Tell you the truth, Trev, I don’t think Linda will be minding anything much when she gets back. Oh, she might act like it, but you’ll be able to tell the difference.’ It didn’t make sense at the time, but what he said really upset my dad. He ordered Uncle Jeb out of the house. Jeb wouldn’t leave at first. Kept warning us not to wait until it was too late. He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into his side. ‘Don’t let ‘em get you, honey,’ he whispered. ‘Follow the lines. Start at the beginning and follow the lines. Uncle Jeb’ll keep a safe place for you.’ That’s when Dad shoved him out the door.”

Jared nods absently, still studying. “The beginning… the beginning… It has to mean something.”

“Does it? They’re just squiggles, Jared. It’s not like a map-they don’t even connect.”

“There’s something about the first one, though. Something familiar. I could swear I’ve seen it somewhere before.”

I sigh. “Maybe he told Aunt Maggie. Maybe she got better directions.”

“Maybe,” he says, and continues to stare at Uncle Jeb’s squiggles.

She dragged me back in time, to a much, much older memory-a memory that had escaped her for a long while. I was surprised to realize that she had only put these memories, the old and the fresh, together recently. After I was here. That was why the lines had slipped through her careful control despite the fact that they were one of the most precious of her secrets-because of the urgency of her discovery.

In this blurry early memory, Melanie sat in her father’s lap with the same album-not so tattered then-open in her hands. Her hands were tiny, her fingers stubby. It was very strange to remember being a child in this body.

They were on the first page.

“Do you remember where this is?” Dad asks, pointing to the old gray picture at the top of the page. The paper looks thinner than the other photographs, as if it has worn down-flatter and flatter and flatter-since some great-great-grandpa took it.

“It’s where we Stryders come from,” I answer, repeating what I’ve been taught.

“Right. That’s the old Stryder ranch. You went there once, but I bet you don’t remember it. I think you were eighteen months old.” Dad laughs. “It’s been Stryder land since the very beginning….”

And then the memory of the picture itself. A picture she’d looked at a thousand times without ever seeing it. It was black and white, faded to grays. A small rustic wooden house, far away on the other side of a desert field; in the foreground, a split-rail fence; a few equine shapes between the fence and the house. And then, behind it all, the sharp, familiar profile…

There were words, a label, scrawled in pencil across the top white border:

Stryder Ranch, 1904, in the morning shadow of…

“Picacho Peak,” I said quietly.

He’ll have figured it out, too, even if they never found Sharon. I know Jared will have put it together. He’s smarter than me, and he has the picture; he probably saw the answer before I did. He could be so close….

The thought had her so filled with yearning and excitement that the blank wall in my head slipped entirely.

I saw the whole journey now, saw her and Jared’s and Jamie’s careful trek across the country, always by night in their inconspicuous stolen vehicle. It took weeks. I saw where she’d left them in a wooded preserve outside the city, so different from the empty desert they were used to. The cold forest where Jared and Jamie would hide and wait had felt safer in some ways-because the branches were thick and concealing, unlike the spindly desert foliage that hid little-but also more dangerous in its unfamiliar smells and sounds.

Then the separation, a memory so painful we skipped through it,