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so
enthusiastic
about things. So perky, so exhausting. Although their last visit had turned out surprisingly well, Lacey didn’t want to jinx it. “
We
are not going to do anything.”
    “You’re not coming to Colorado to get to the bottom of this? That doesn’t sound like you. Do you want people to think you dated a maniac?”
    “I have dated maniacs. Tucker wasn’t one of them. Trust me.” Her mother waited. Lacey sighed. “I’m flying to Colorado, but I’m just going to Sagebrush for the arraignment. I’m going there
alone
. To assure myself that he’s innocent. The law is going to handle this one. I’m not getting involved this time. I’m serious, Mom.”
    Her mother was silent for a moment. “But you
are
stopping in Denver first, aren’t you? There are no direct flights into Sagebrush. We can spend some time together. You could borrow the station wagon. I’m sure it will make it over the mountains. Pretty sure.”
    Dad’s old Oldsmobile station wagon? Across the Continental Divide? I’d be better off in a covered wagon.
    “I’ve already rented a car.”
    “We
will
see you, then? Good! What an unexpected pleasure!” Rose purred with satisfaction.
    “Yes, Mother.” Lacey groaned silently. “You’ll see me. Briefly.”
    “You don’t need to drive to that awful place until Sunday anyway, so you can spend the night here. Won’t that be fun?”
    Lacey closed her eyes. “Fun. Of course, I’ll stay one night, Mom.”
    “That’s wonderful. Your room is all ready, and Cherise said she’d come over. It’ll be fun. Just us girls.”
    She already arranged everything before she called. Naturally
. “What about Dad?”
    “Oh, he’s around. Somewhere,” her mother said vaguely. “He’s fine. He said to have a safe flight.”
    Lacey said her good-byes and hung up.
Some things never change. Mom. Dad. My sister. And the station wagon
.
    Lacey always seemed to forget how drab the Colorado landscape was in winter, at least the dusty High Plains side of it. She already missed the green of Virginia, even though the snow-capped Rockies on the horizon were stunning in their drama. Lacey retrieved her little econobox rental car—the rental agent swore it would make it over the mountains—and wondered again whether she’d made the right decision to travel here. She ticked off the miles as she drove over the brown and yellow plains east of Denver, past the steel and glass skyscrapers of downtown, and finally down the Valley Highway and Speer Boulevard to the middle-class neighborhood where she grew up.
    The family manse, a brick midcentury ranch-style house with a “modern” vibe that had been gussied up by some wacky would-be architect, looked the same. Her parents loved that house. They’d been living in it since Lacey was a little girl, even before Cherise, her little sister, was born.
    Lacey never warmed to the house, never liked it. The architecture was chilly, all sharp angles and harsh lines, with a preposterous roof that met at a peak in the middle and swooped over the rest of the house and the carport like black-tiled bird wings. A row of windows under the roofline let in too much light and too much cold. The house was poorly insulated, hot in the summer and cold in the winter. The thrifty environmentalism of her parents prohibited one and all from ever turning up the thermostat. And forget about air conditioning. It simply wasn’t
green
. The Smithsonians had been discussing solar panels on the roof for at least ten years, but had yet to take action.
    As a child, Lacey lived in fear that the house, with itswinged roof, might really be a spaceship, though not the flying saucer kind, which would take off in the middle of the night for another galaxy, never to return.
    When she was five or six years old, Lacey came to hate the glass block windows in the bathroom. In her nightmares a monster with an extraordinarily long neck would crash through the glass blocks with his head. It didn’t matter