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“What’s good, Ghost?” Sasquatch grinned at me from the adjacent chair, his dog Roscoe curled at his feet. “We ready?”
“You tell me. You have some moderately adventurous adventures teed up for our writers?”
“Yep. CeeCee’s got five or six short hikes around the resort lined up, and we’ve got some rock climbing planned if the weather holds. We’ll see what these folks are up for.” Sasquatch—whose real name was Travis—and CeeCee ran the adventure shop on the first level of the resort. The shop was a newer addition to Kasper Ridge’s offerings, but when the couple had won a national contest that gave CeeCee’s original shop in town all kinds of exposure, they expanded. Now there were two locations, and Sasquatch spent most of his time running this location.
“Planning any hikes to the backcountry cabins?” Monroe asked, giggling as she reached for the hand of the man at her side.
“Definitely not,” Sasquatch shot back. Monroe—whose real name was Annalee—had gotten caught in a snowstorm in those cabins with Mateo, whom she was engaged to now.
“The romance writers in the group might be up for it,” Mateo laughed now.
“What would you know about romance writers?” Monroe shot back. “You been reading steamy stories when I’m not around?”
Mateo chuckled, his love for her clear in the gaze he rested on Monroe’s pretty face. “Just saying, if anyone’s looking for romance...getting snowed in isn’t a bad way to go.”
“I don’t know how romantic it was. No heat, no indoor plumbing...” Monroe said.
“Getting snowed in back there is unlikely to have the same outcome for most people as it did for you,” Brainiac pointed out.
“Always looking at the bright side of things,” Monroe said, rolling her eyes.
“I’m an optimist,” Brainiac said, managing to look offended beneath his distinguished salt and pepper scruff. He was older than the rest of us, and most of us had had to call him “Sir” back in our navy days. Now, the man whose real name was Harrison was married to Penny, and he answered more often to “Daddy,” since their daughter Maggie had begun talking.
“If you’re an optimist, I’m Tom Cruise,” Fake Tom shot back. Will was Fake Tom’s real name.
“In your dreams,” Monroe laughed.
“Not anymore,” he answered. “I found my dreams up here.” He wrapped his arms more tightly around the woman in his lap—Lucy Dale. The couple had been some of the first people up here with Aubrey and me, bringing in the combined construction know-how needed to rebuild this place.
It seemed like everyone had found a reason to stay here at Kasper Ridge. They’d all found the person to complete them, discovered the real treasure at the end of their own personal hunts. It was part of the reason I knew this wasn’t where I ultimately belonged, no matter what my crazy Uncle Marvinmight have intended for me. The resort had always been more Aubrey’s than mine, and once she and Wiley were settled, I intended to give it to her officially.
“Hey, what’s the verdict on the hunt now, Ghost? The lawsuit?” Lucy asked.
Ugh. The lawsuit. “I don’t know.” I leaned forward and rubbed the back of my neck as I gazed into the dancing flames before me. “On one hand, I feel like it’s what Uncle Marvin wanted us to do—get him credit for all those movies he wrote that were basically stolen from him...”
“But?” Antonio prompted from my side.
“But something about it doesn’t feel right. Does it make sense to ask a family to pay for the sins of someone who’s not even alive anymore?” Rudy Fusterburg had been my uncle’s partner when they’d worked in Hollywood, and then he became his enemy, after Uncle Marvin had stolen Rudy’s fiancée, my Aunt Lola. In retaliation, Rudy had erased any history of their work together writing dozens of movies in Hollywood, potentially cheating my uncle out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties. My uncle had hated the man, and the treasure hunt he’d set up for us to follow as we took over the resort had led us to this knowledge. But now Uncle Marvin and Rudy were both gone. Did it make sense for us to try to exact some kind of vengeance in Uncle Marvin’s name?
“It just doesn’t seem like something Uncle Marvin would do, to be honest.” I said, giving voice to my concerns. “It’s just so hard to imagine him hating anyone, let alone hating them enough to go through this kind of effort to get revenge at any cost, you know?”
“You think we missed something?” Since Fake Tom had been one of the first to arrive in Kasper Ridge, he’d been roped into the treasure hunt from the beginning.
I shrugged. We’d been through tunnels and hidden doors, found literal “booty” and dead ends. The hunt had been so crazy it was hard to know what my uncle’s actual intention had been. “It’s totally possible. We made a lot of assumptions based on an old pile of movie scripts.”
“He definitely wrote those,” Monroe pointed out.
“Yeah, but did he want us to prove it?” I asked.
She shook her head slowly, the firelight catching golden strands in her hair. “No idea.”
“I guess I feel like it makes more sense to let the past be the past. We’ve all made mistakes. We all have things we’d change if we could. Should we punish the living for wrongs against the dead?” The words, as they slipped off my tongue, made my guts twist inside me and I realized I’d just spoken more about my own past than my uncle’s.
Everyone around the fire seemed to realize it too, and the group fell into silence, only the occasional crackle of a log in the fire or the howl of a distant coyote breaking the heavy mantel of the night. My own mind wandered away, exploring ideas I’d been having about starting fresh somewhere new, somewhere no one knew about the single event that seemed to define me even if I didn’t want it to. The problem was, I wasn’t sure where to go or what I’d do once I got there.
“You’re doing okay though, right?” Sasquatch asked quietly, leaning close. He’d been pretty clear when he’d come up here that he was worried about me. All my old squadron mates were. I wanted to tell them everything was fine, that I didn’t spend my nights fixated on the awful events of my past. But I wasn’t going to lie to my friends—we’d been through too much together and they’d see through it anyway. Instead, I just didn’t bring up details.
“Yeah, of course. I’m okay.” And I was. I had a successful resort to run—had basically resurrected the legacy that had beenso important to Aubrey and me as kids, even though it had looked impossible at the beginning. I was busy for now. I was surrounded by friends—a found family of my own making.
