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    Elliot’s stories continued on, tumbling freely as each experience called up another faded memory from the trenches of his mind. His face became a cast of characters. His eyes played out each bit player’s part, changing from sad and compassionate to eloquent and debonair, depending on the accompaniment given by his wide, expressive mouth. She watched his hands as they occasionally let go of the wheel and joined the storytelling with graceful, almost feminine swirls. It made no difference whether he controlled the wheel or not, the truck roared straight ahead, chewing up the road in front of them and belching out a storm of gray in their wake.
    Cloudy shapes began to swim in the distance, and she was more than a little disappointed to see town emerging from them. She watched him, desperate to imprint his features on her mind. She traced the outline of his face, her eyes running across his incredible white teeth, feeling their smoothness, pausing to taste the lusciousness of his edible lips. Her fingers strained under their skin as if bound in a tight glove, restricting their urgent desire to reach out unhindered and glide deep inside the careless blond ringlets that caressed his neck. And she knew that, if she could hold on to it, she’d found a memory she could keep forever.

~ Chapter 3 ~
     
    The Eldorado. The name, in keeping with the opulent structure, had been a presumptuous step toward the future. But the future, as it is wont to do, took a vicious little side step and watched without compassion as the lofty building fell into a long downward spiral of decay, its proud namesake reduced to a preposterous illusion. Built with an optimistic eye on the horizon, the hotel, at its conception, had been the epitome of luxury. Its creator had been a man of vision who years before, had envisioned a railroad slicing through the valley with a prosperous city emerging along its spine. Unfortunately for himself, his marriage and several business partners, his vision had been cloudy: the tracks wound through Fort George, two hundred miles to the south instead, bypassing Hinckly altogether.
    Bud and Pearl Bentley acquired the hotel eventually, the bank all but giving it to them, in its desperation to be rid of it after a decade with no takers. Hinckly had never been overburdened with progressive thinkers, but when the hope for a railroad disappeared, the few that did exist vanished along with it. Bud had busied himself right away with dismantling the massive letters of the sign, stripping off their brass overlay and selling it for salvage. If you knew what to look for, you could still make out the hotel’s former name, imprinted like a shadow on the faded wood of the towering facade. Tacked across three of the letters hung Pearl’s hand-lettered sign: P EARLS C AFE — GOOD EATS — CHEEP R OOMS . Bud had hammered it into place, Pearl directing him from the street below. But as neither of them were real sticklers for details, the sign had never hung any too straight, and after the first winter the weather had more or less destroyed it. Over the years, the rooms upstairs had gradually been stripped of their embellishments and filled with rotting men and rancorous mice, each learning to tolerate the presence of the other. Pearl ruled over all of them with a snarly temper and the ever-present threat of eviction. One time, in an uncharacteristic burst of Christmas bravado, Bud had clambered up the ladder and strung blue lights across most of the roof, and every year since, Pearl would plug them in the first of December and leave them on twenty-four hours a day until the month was over. A few of them still worked.
    The cumbersome entrance door had twisted in its frame, and Victoria wrestled with it for some time before she managed to wrench it open. Thick leaded-glass panes decorated the top half of it, and when the door jarred open suddenly they gave an ominous shudder. One of them had been smashed out and was covered with