Dolly had always thought she didn’t like whiskey, but she discovered that it wasn’t so bad, after you got used to it. Except for the steady chirping of crickets, all was quiet. The air smelled like the smoke of a faraway bonfire. Getting out of town had been a brilliant idea, she thought. The problems with Byron were sliding to the back of her mind, and she was feeling much better.

She lit a fresh cigarette. “You have to tell me what happened to everyone. Your family.”

So he told her how Elissa had finished her cadet nurse training and then gone to work at a small hospital in South Dakota.

“So she obviously never got back together with Ty.”

“No,” he said. “I guess she was really in love with our uncle.”

A little tipsy from her several nips at the flask, Dolly giggled at that. “So what happened to him? To Nick?”

JJ shrugged. “We never heard from him.”

“Even Elissa never did?”

“No,” JJ said. “At least not that she told me about.”

Dolly sighed. “What about your grandpa? Did he die from that accident?”

“No. He just got knocked out, was all. Once he sobered up, he was fine. Course, his Packard’s hood looked like an accordion, and he was pretty sad about that.”

“Did he ever admit to being Nick’s father?”

“He left him some money in his will, but we didn’t know where to find Nick. I guess my dad tried writing his mother, but she wrote back and said she hadn’t heard from him, either. My dad has the money in a trust for him, in case we ever find him.”

“Do you think you will?”

JJ just shrugged again. He took another drink from his flask and offered it to her. She took a sip, liking the smooth burning of it going down. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, and handed the flask back to JJ.

He laughed. “You’re a lightweight, Dolly.”

“Well, so I don’t drink all day long like some people,” she said.

He ignored her, and said his butt was getting sore from leaning against the car. “I’ve got a blanket in the back, want to sit down?”

She agreed, so he got out the blanket, limping a bit on the uneven ground, and soon they were settled on it, next to the car on the grassy edge of the beach. The lake lapped quietly at the shore. He sat leaning back on his hands with his legs stretched straight out in front of him; she sat cross-legged, with her skirt carefully covering her bare legs.

“I have to ask you one more thing,” she said. “If you’ve been in love with Anne all this time, why haven’t you gone after her?”

“She married my uncle Harry.”