The apartments Clara lived in weren’t anything special. Inexpensive, boxy, and scattered across town like checkers on a forgotten board. But they were home. Growing up, there were always kids running around the complex..riding bikes, chasing ice cream trucks, playing barefoot in sprinkler runoff. We didn’t care about money or whose parents had what. Economic status wasn’t a thing you thought about when you were eight. We were just kids.

The summer before third grade, I met my best friend, Olivia. She was chubby, with hair down to her knees. Her bangs were cut by her momma, straight, and absolutely didn’t frame her face appropriately.

She lived around the corner from Clara, in a two-bedroom unit packed with people..her mom, her grandmother, her uncle, and his daughter, her cousin Nina. Nina had cerebral palsy, and stayed in a wheelchair, sitting in the living room holding her Barney doll. I didn’t know how hard things were for Olivia, or anyone in that home. I only knew that she had the coolest Barbie dream house bed, shaped like the actual dream house, with matching linens and that her mom let us watch Stephen King movies (IT) and eat McDonald’s like it was a food group. She felt like freedom.

Clara didn’t let me stay the night at Olivia’s, though. Ever. Supervised overnight visits only and only at Clara’s. At the time, I thought she was just being unfair. Now I understand she was trying to protect me from things I couldn’t see yet.

Although, it wasn’t too bad, spending our time in Clara’s castle. Under the cushions of her couch, or the pallet under the kitchen table either the blanket closing us in. Our imaginations running wild. We would giggle with our flashlights, usually because I was concocting a scary story because she was such a baby. I knew exactly how to get her to react, and usually it ended with her screaming. On other nights, I was a detective, she was my cohort, and we spent hours digging through Clara’s bedroom closet and her cedar hope chest – one of the few things she brought with her across the ocean from Norway. It smelled of lavender and old paper. That chest was a treasure box to us, filled with articles, dictionaries, and buttons. She never minded us digging through it. Not really. But there were things we never asked about, things she never offered.

Clara lived simply. There were no pictures on her walls…just one antique rotary phone that hung crooked in the kitchen. She had a brown 1970s loveseat, a box television that only picked up channel 8, and a small wicker basket with the same five or six fairy tale books she read over and over again. She was magic in the quietest way, and Olivia and I always suspected she had secrets.

And then one day, we found the locket.

It was tucked in a corner of her closet, resting on a shelf behind a shoebox filled with dried rose petals and a single yellowed handkerchief. Inside the locket were two photos…one of a man, one of a girl, and two dates etched in delicate script.

Her son, Roald, had died later in life. But the girl…she died at 24, the date 1966.

I remember staring at her face. Dark hair. Soft eyes. She looked like she belonged in a painting. I couldn’t understand why Clara never mentioned her. Why she had this locket hidden away. Why she’d never told me about the daughter who died so young. She looked like a movie star.

I closed it and put it back.

Olivia and I spun theories for weeks. A car accident. A bee sting. Maybe she drowned. We were kids raised on urban legends and Stephen King books – half of what we knew about death came from Carrie and Pet Sematary.

Then came the newspaper clipping.

It was folded deep in the pages of an old cookbook in Clara’s side table. The headline was torn out, the body of the story gone. All that remained was the picture: a sprawling ranch called T-Lazy-7 Ranch in Aspen, Colorado. Below it, a name: Jim Griffin, and a circled date—September 1, 1966.

Something about the photo didn’t sit right with me. I stared at it for days, trying to guess what had been cut away.

It felt like a breadcrumb. A piece of something bigger. I didn’t know where to look, didn’t know how to ask. But I knew, even then, Clara was hiding something.