Searching for Selene

by Lael Littke

  Searching for Selene

  Lael Littke

  © 2003 Lael Littke.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Deseret Book Company, P.O. Box 30178, Salt Lake City Utah 30178. This work is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church or of Deseret Book. Deseret Book is a registered trademark of Deseret Book Company.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Visit us at DeseretBook.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Littke, Lael.

  Searching for Selene/Lael Littke.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Sixteen-year-old Selene's world turns upside-down when she learns that she was abducted as a three-year-old child and her birth parents seek to reestablish a relationship with her.

  ISBN 1-59038-179-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  [1. Kidnapping—Fiction. 2. Family life—Idaho—Fiction. 3. Mormons—Fiction. 4. Idaho—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L719Se 2003

  [Fic]—dc21 2003010618

  Printed in the United States of America 72076-7135

  Publishers Printing, Salt Lake City, Utah

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  * * *

  To Heather and Eric, to keep a promise

  With special thanks to

  Walter Hofmann, Clark Coberly,

  and Judith Jefferies

  for their help and advice

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Urgent!

  The word was crayoned in red across the top of the note Mom had left for me on the refrigerator door.

  I backed away from it, my heart thudding. Words like that made me hyperventilate.

  “I don't think I'm thirsty after all, Lex,” I said. “Let's go.”

  Lex didn't seem to hear. “Urgent,” he read aloud. He folded himself down so he could peer nearsightedly at the note. “Selene, please stick around after school. Dad and I have something urgent we need to talk with you about.”

  Lex is snoopy. He feels perfectly at home at my house because he's been there so much ever since we were little kids.

  I took a couple of deep breaths and walked forward to open the refrigerator door, narrowly missing Lex's bent-down head. Poking around old margarine tubs filled with leftover spaghetti and limp broccoli, I fished out a bottle of orange Gatorade. “Want this? Or would you rather have 7-Up?” My heart slowed as I spoke, and I was able to keep my voice steady.

  Lex straightened up. “Aren't you even going to read your note? It says ‘Urgent.’”

  I shrugged. “You already read it to me, Lex. It's not going to say anything different if I strain it through my own eyes. Besides, you know how my mom is. Urgent is her favorite word. It's urgent when she wants me to dust the living room before her Relief Society board meetings. It's urgent for me to pick the heads off the pansies so they'll bloom better.” Cold air flowed from the refrigerator, and the motor switched on. “Gatorade or 7-Up? It's urgent that I shut this door.”

  “Gatorade. Got any yogurt and wheat germ?”

  Lex mixes everything with yogurt and wheat germ, which is enough to gag a goat. He thinks it will help him put on some pounds. He skinnied up to six-foot-three during the past year without gaining an ounce. The guys at school tell him to hide when the utilities men are around or they'll stand him in a hole and string wires from him.

  I found a carton of mixed-berries yogurt and handed it to him along with the plastic bottle of Gatorade and Mom's jar of wheat germ. She uses it in the bread she likes to bake.

  “Hurry up,” I told Lex as he poured everything into the blender and gave it a whirl. “I told Grandpa we'd be over to his house right after school.”

  Lex took an overage banana from the basket of fruit Mom keeps on the table in the midst of the family history charts she works on whenever she has a few minutes. Adding the banana to the thick, gritty mixture in the blender, he spun it a few more seconds, then drank the whole mess right from the container.

  Wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, he said, “Selene, that note says you should stick around. Sounds to me like your mom has something important on her mind.”

  “Believe me, Lex. It can wait.” I took a can of 7-Up from the refrigerator, popped it open, took a couple of sips, and replaced it on the shelf. “Mom was going to take Keith to the dentist in Prentice after school, and Dad had business at the bank. We'll be back before they come home. When Mom gets to town, she likes to stay as long as possible. Keith might even talk her into a movie.”

  Keith was my thirteen-year-old brother.

  “Okay, okay.” Lex finished off his slimy shake, then snuffled along the counter looking for crackers or crusts of bread or anything else edible. He reminded me of Hoover, our dog, who vacuums up stray morsels of food.

  Lifting the top off Mom's cake keeper, Lex stood back in awe. “Hey, take a look at this!”

  Sitting there was one of Mom's Creations, always referred to in capital letters. This time it was her special-occasion-three-story-mahogany-cake-with-cooked-Brownstone-Front-frosting.

  The sight of it started my heart to thudding again. Mom made that particular cake for only two reasons—celebration or consolation. The last time she'd made it was almost exactly a year before, when Grandma died.

  Was there a connection between the cake and the urgent thing Mom and Dad wanted to talk with me about? Why would I need consolation? What was there to celebrate?

  I stared at the cake, and my mind began its usual evasive action. When I was confronted with something I didn't want to face, I recited the Pledge of Allegiance, or the Articles of Faith, or Grandma's recipe for chicken soup, or the books of the Bible. Anything to keep from thinking about what needed to be thought about. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus…

  Maybe the note didn't have anything to do with me after all. Maybe my older brother, Tyler, had received his mission call. Maybe his letter from Salt Lake City had arrived, telling him where he'd be going.

  Of course, that was it. Just Tyler's mission call. He'd sent an e-mail the day before telling us to let him know immediately as soon as it arrived. Like we wouldn't know to do that if he didn't remind us.

  But why would it be urgent that Mom and Dad talk with me about Tyler's mission call?

  Well, maybe we were going to do some kind of family reunion or something that they needed my help to plan. Sure, that was it.

  “The note's about Tyler,” I told Lex. “Let's go to Grandpa's.”

  Lex just stood there. “Tyler's still down in Provo.”

  I nodded. Tyler had just finished his first year at Brigham Young University but was staying there for another couple of weeks to finish a job that paid better than farm work at home. He would need all the money he could raise to pay for his mission. “But,” I said, “if his mission call came, don't you think he'd want to rush right home to open it? So Mom made the cake to celebra
te.” I grabbed Lex's hand. “Let's go. Grandpa's expecting us.”

  We went outside, where Lex's sagging Ford station wagon waited by the barn like a dejected old horse. It had belonged to his family for a long time and had seen better days. But Lex says any wheels are better than no wheels and doesn't complain.

  Hoover was there by the car, sniffing the tires. When Lex opened the door for me, Hoover invited himself in too, fighting me for the window seat.

  “Out,” I said. “Who asked you?”

  Lex got in and started the motor. “Let him stay, Selene. He's lonely. He'll feel bad if we go off and leave him. He can help us search.”

  What we were going to do was help Grandpa search for clues as to what had happened to Selena Marie Atkinson, the woman I was sort of named after. There wasn't much point in searching because Selena Marie had disappeared over fifty years ago, about ten days after she'd promised to marry Grandpa. The relatives she stayed with during the summers there in Stone Creek had told Grandpa that she'd simply gone—away from them, from the Church, from him. All the things that had been part of her life. But Grandpa insisted she had gone off into the mountains to pick huckleberries, the way she'd liked to do, and that something had happened to her. The relatives had moved away soon afterward, and Grandpa had looked for her off and on through the years. Now that Grandma was dead, he'd stepped up his search. It was an obsession with him.

  Lex drove down the long farm road that led to the main highway. “Think Tyler really did get his mission call?”

  Hoover was trying to sit on my lap so he could poke his snout out of the window. I shoved him back to the middle of the seat. “Why else would Mom make a celebration cake?” I didn't mention that it might be a consolation cake.

  Lex was silent for a moment, thinking. “Where's Tyler hoping to be sent?” he asked.

  “Denmark. The blood of the Vikings flows in our veins. In his veins,” I corrected.

  Lex knew what I meant. It's no secret that I'm adopted.

  He grinned. “He'll probably get sent to someplace like Pocatello. It'd be the pits to be sent somewhere that close. When I go on my mission, I hope they send me to New Zealand, or Japan, or Brazil. Far off.”

  “What happened to ‘I'll go where you want me to go’?”

  Lex grinned. “Will you? Go where they want you to go, I mean?”

  “I'm not going anywhere.”

  I didn't ever plan to leave the safety of our Idaho mountains. Just thinking about it opened the door of that dark closet of my mind where the terrors hung.

  I'd been four years old when I had come to Stone Creek from somewhere “out in the world,” which is what we called everything outside our familiar territory. There was no way I was ever going “out there” again, away from Mom and Dad and my married sister, Naomi, her husband, Robert, and their little boy, Jeddy, and my brothers, Tyler and Keith. And all my friends.

  I looked out of the car window as Lex drove along the narrow road. Sagebrush-covered hills rose around us, with Dad's fields crawling far up their shaggy slopes. To the west, the land fell away to the narrow valley Bear River had carved for itself through the ages.

  “No,” I said again. “I'm not going anywhere.”

  “Someday you'll want to.” Lex always knew more than I did. After all, he was almost seventeen and I'd just turned sixteen. “What's to keep you here? You'll want to see what's out there in the world.”

  I knew what was out there in the world. Terror was out there, and the Woman with the Big Black Hat, that fragment of memory that had given me nightmares since I was small.

  “I like it here,” I said. “Everything I want is right here.”

  Hoover scrambled back onto my lap, hanging his head out of the window. I let him stay there, warm and happy, his ears flapping in the wind. Looking past him, I gazed at the land that cradled me in safety.

  Dad's farm lay in a crease in the mountains and was connected to the main part of the village of Stone Creek by a natural pass through the hills. If you looked at Stone Creek from the air, it would resemble a three-fingered right hand, palm down. Each of the three fingers was a narrow valley with a creek flowing down its center. Where we lived was the thumb, and besides my family the only people who lived there were Grandpa, the Nelsens, who included my best friend, Abby, and the Rasmussens, Lex's family.

  Grandpa's house was in a little scooped-out bowl along the rocky road that led down to the river. Chokecherry bushes grew along the small stream that ran past it, and old poplars, like the original ones planted by my great-great-grandfather Swensen, marched like tall soldiers around the big lawn. Grandpa had maintained the place the way it was when he was a kid.

  Lex maneuvered the station wagon across the creaking bridge that led to Grandpa's yard. Grandpa was there splitting wood, each stroke of his ax narrowly missing the stockinged foot with which he held down the skinny log he was working on. The wood was for the old black kitchen stove he refused to replace with a more modern appliance.

  “Old coot,” Grandma used to say. “Determined not to join the world.”

  “Grandpa,” I said as I got out of the car, “you should put on your shoes when you cut wood.”

  “Dang well cut wood stark naked if I want to.” Grandpa swung the ax again, hewing out a chip a fraction of an inch from the unprotected foot.

  Grandpa was a state-of-the-art old coot, obstinate and impossible, but Grandma had loved him anyway. He'd loved her, too, and had shown it in multiple ways. But that hadn't kept him from going off now and then to search for the missing Selena Marie. Actually, it was usually Grandma who would send him off to the mountains “when he got mopey,” as she used to say. She understood him well. “When things get tiresome the way they are, it does him right good to go off and look for what might have been,” she told me once. Then she added, “Old coot.” Understanding Grandpa didn't make her tolerant of Selena Marie. The very mention of the name made her slam pots and pans on the stove and pinch her lips shut in a straight line.

  Grandpa must have felt guilty about his searches; when he returned from the mountains, he always brought Grandma some wild flowers or maybe berries he'd picked up there. He kept a couple of pictures of Selena Marie in the bottom of a drawer, under socks and shoelaces and an old sweater he'd had when he was young. He showed me the pictures a couple of times, black-and-white photos of a pretty girl with wildly curling blonde hair and flirty eyes. Selena Marie, with terrific legs stretching out of a flowered, just-above-the-knee sundress.

  Grandma had been short and dumpy.

  Sometimes I wondered why she'd allowed me to be named Selene. I'd never asked her. Some things it wasn't wise to bring up with Grandma.

  “Grandpa, you could amputate a foot that way.” I reached over to kiss his cheek between ax swings.

  “Ding, ding, ding,” he muttered. “You're just like your grandma.”

  He didn't say if he meant about the kiss or the nagging.

  Lex got out of the car and came over to us. Hoover barked off toward the corral, where several cows lifted their heads to gaze scornfully at him.

  “Where do you want to search today, sir?” Lex asked. “Do you want me to drive us in my car, or should I saddle up some horses?”

  Grandpa stopped chopping and wiped his forearm across his face. “Thought we'd look in them gullies down by the river. Lot of huckleberry bushes there. And rocks. Selena Marie was fixing to plant a rock garden right over there.” He pointed the ax handle toward where Grandma had planted four cedars. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, she'd called them. “She coulda gone down there in the gully and got bit by a rattler. Mountain lions, maybe coyotes, could of et her up.”

  It was a familiar recital. We'd heard all the possibilities many times before.

  Grandpa shook his head. “Never could get anybody to do a proper search after she was gone. They all said she'd run off. But she wouldn't of done that. She would have left the ring I gave her if she'd just up and gone.”

  Grandpa was
sure he'd find a clue someday. Maybe that diamond ring, gleaming in the sunlight. Or the big silver bracelet she wore in Grandpa's hidden pictures.

  “Yup,” he said. “Thought we'd start there in the gullies today. But we ain't agonna do it. Your folks called, Selene. They're home now and they want you to come right back to the house. Got something to show you.”

  “Tyler's mission call? Is that it, Grandpa?”

  “Nope.” His voice was gentle now. “I believe you better just take yourself up there and find out. They want to tell you themselves.”

  So there was nothing for me to do but climb again into the old station wagon with Lex and Hoover and go back to that three-story-special-occasion cake that might be for consolation.

  “Selene,” Mom said when I walked into the house, hanging onto Lex's arm for courage. Her face was all bunched up, as if she were trying to hold it together.

  In her hand was a letter. I had the feeling that once I read it, my life would never again be the same.

  Chapter 2

  Mom held the envelope toward me. “This came today.” She seemed to have a problem finding words. After a pause she said, “It's about you.”

  I reached out to take it, then stopped with my fingers barely touching the heavy, ivory-colored paper. It was like the freeze-frame at the end of a soap opera, with something important about to happen but all action momentarily halted. The cliff-hanger: Will Selene open the envelope that she feels could change her life? Tune in again tomorrow, folks.

  Dad took a step forward. He cleared his throat. “We'd better tell you what it's about.”

  “I know what it's about,” I said.

  Mom looked puzzled. “How could you know what it's about?”

  “What's it about?” Lex asked.