“No problem,” Caitlin said. It was not quite an hour drive to Jerome, and sort of out of their way, but they hadn’t wanted to take two cars down to the condo they were renting in Tucson. Or rather, the condo that Danica’s parents were renting for them.
“Oh, you girls just worry about your food and gas, and we’ll take care of the condo,” Danica’s mother had said, and although Caitlin had thought she should protest such over-generosity, she couldn’t really think of a good reason why, so she’d let it go. In a way, she supposed she should be glad Danica’s parents had relaxed enough about the whole McAllister/Wilcox thing that they hadn’t batted an eyelash about their daughter going off for a debauched four days in Tucson with a couple of McAllister girls. Funny how having your daughter married to someone from a different clan — Mason and Adam had gotten married last fall — could mellow a person.
They put their suitcases in the back of the Land Rover and headed down I-17, driving in companionable silence while Danica’s favorite retro metal played on the satellite radio. Caitlin tuned it out as best she could; if the worst that could be said about Danica was her terrible taste in music, then Caitlin figured she really didn’t have that much to complain about.
Not according to Roslyn, though. After they pulled up in front of the big Victorian house on Paradise Lane where she still lived with her parents, she tossed her luggage in the cargo compartment, got into the Land Rover, and wrinkled her nose. “Seriously? Am I going to have to listen to this noise all the way down to Tucson?”
“Yeah,” Danica replied. “Because I’m sure as hell not listening to that Taylor Swift crap you like for three straight hours.”
Roslyn shot a beseeching look in Caitlin’s direction, and she shrugged as she fastened her seatbelt. “Sorry, Ros. I think I’d rather listen to Black Sabbath than Taylor Swift, too.”
“You know, there’s good retro and bad retro,” Roslyn said darkly. But her expression was resigned. Danica’s car, Danica’s rules.
Caitlin smothered a smile as they headed down the hill and back toward the freeway. Even the impulse to smile faded soon enough, though, as that sensation began to creep over her once more, the way thunderheads would pile up above the Mogollon Rim to the east of the Verde Valley, presaging a wild summer storm.
Maybe she should have begged off and stayed up in Flagstaff, or come home to Jerome to spend a few days with her family, the way her mother had wanted her to. At the time, though, the trip to Tucson had seemed like a good idea. The plans had been made long before she began to get these vague feelings of unease. And, once those plans were made, she didn’t want to be the one to back out, since she was sort of the glue that held the other two together. Roslyn and Danica got along, but they were friends because they’d each been friends with Caitlin first.
“The little sister brigade,” Adam had called them once, and it was true. All three of them were the youngest child in their families. It was something else they had in common, something that helped them to bond. Roslyn probably had it worst, since she was the youngest of three, but even so, they all knew what it felt like to not be taken all that seriously half the time.
“Especially since Mason is such an overachiever,” Danica had complained once. “She can call fire out of the air and could make a river reverse its course if she wanted to, but of course that’s not enough — she has to get married and be working on her master’s degree at the same time. So I figure I’ll have to hang on and get a Ph.D. in physics or something before my parents take me seriously.”
At the time, Caitlin had just grinned at her friend’s exasperated expression, but she understood. Her own brother had always possessed an innate sense as to which flavors worked well together, a subtle magic, but one that had gotten him a chef position at one of the hottest new restaurants down in Cottonwood. He’d always known exactly what he wanted to do, whereas she….
Well, she’d been lying to everyone, including herself, for the past six years.
By the time they reached the outskirts of Phoenix, Danica relented and switched the station to one that played the sort of Top 40 pop Roslyn preferred. Caitlin wasn’t overly thrilled with the switch, since she preferred more alternative stuff, but she decided not to protest. They only had an hour to go, and if it really started to drive her crazy, she could dig the earbuds out of her purse and listen to Pandora on her phone.
The readout on the dash said it was eighty-one degrees outside. She shook her head, always surprised by the difference in the weather between Flagstaff and Phoenix, or even Jerome and Phoenix. This time of year, Jerome was still lucky to reach the mid-sixties, and sometimes you got hard frosts even into May. But Phoenix? It never seemed to cool down. Not really.