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Elise nodded. “Thank you.” She then blinked at the woman, willing her to leave.
“Can I help you find what you’re looking for?” the woman asked.
“I don’t think so. I just want to, um. Dig into it. You know?”
“Okay.” The woman looked momentarily irritated. “Whatever you think is best.”
When Elise had the space to herself, she walked toward the large collage of old photographs and studied each of them separately. Her heart thudded throughout her search. She felt as though she peered down a very long tunnel and into her mother’s past.
Oh, these people on set. The actors, the stagehands, the tech people, the director. They all seemed so vibrant, so beautiful, so particularly late ‘70s with their funny haircuts and their silly styles. Elise was nostalgic for another time, just gazing at them.
How she wished she really could step back into time and see them. How she wished she could meet her mother again.
It took a number of minutes before Elise finally spotted her mother. In the photo, Jane Seymour sat in full costume at the very desk that sat in the library’s exhibition. Her hair was fluffed up beautifully, and her eyes were turned back toward a youthful, gorgeous Allison Darby. They seemed to share a joke together—an acclaimed actress seated with a girl she very much thought would “make it” in the business.
Beneath the photo, these words were written:
Jane Seymour chats with her personal assistant on a particularly long day of shooting.
That was all her mother was given in the photograph.
The title of “personal assistant.”
Gosh.
That hurt worse than Elise’s spill across the pavement earlier that day.
But also, this was the first physical proof that Allison Darby had spent these months on Mackinac Island with Jane Seymour, on set forSomewhere in Time. That was strange in and of itself.
None of the photos on the wall were labeled with the stagehands’ names. This was a serious problem. Elise needed Dean’s last name if she was going to press forward at all. Plus, she remained starved for more signs of her mother in their midst. This led her to the various tomes at the desk. They were her last resort—and they had enough material to last several hours.
Probably, the librarian would forget about her.
Slowly, Elise pieced through the articles, the spare photographs that had been taken by a Mackinac Island historian, and the spare letters and things that had been donated by residents of Mackinac Island throughout the filming. It seemed that the residents adored the fact thatSomewhere in Timehad chosen Mackinac Island for its main set so much that they’d wanted to record almost every portion of that era. As Elise was from Los Angeles, this was a funny thing for her; everywhere she had ever been, she’d seen movie sets, people who worked for Hollywood. She had never treasured it in the way she now felt it had always meant to be treasured.
Movie magic. It was a very beautiful thing.
Sometime after one in the afternoon, she found a photograph labeled “staging company” on the back. This photograph was located in a pile of others that seemed to collect all the stagehand boys together—various snapshots of an attractive twenty-something guy carrying a prop or arranging boxes and grinning the kind of grin that only people had in old photographs. It was the kind of smile that suggested they would never grow older.
One of these photographs struck Elise as particularly odd.
The second she saw it, she was reminded of a photograph she had recently taken of Brad at the Malibu Pier.
In it, the twenty-something guy hung onto the rungs of a ladder. A cigarette dangled between his lips. He looked like he was up to something, as though he had just cracked a joke that might have gotten him in trouble. Elise knew the look well. It was the very one Brad wore all the time.
Could this possibly be him?
With a shaking hand, she turned the photograph around to discover the scrawled words: Dean Swartz. 1979.
Here he was.
Her father.
She dropped the photograph, but it didn’t change a thing. Dean Swartz continued to laugh up at her, as if to say, “Here I am. I’ve been here all along. Where have you been?”
