In the recently released The Starlite Drive-in by Marjorie Reynolds, available online or from new bookstores in denver, human bones have been discovered on the grounds of the old Starlite Drive-in, and only Callie Anne Benton knows the victim’s identity. The Starlite Drive-In , Callie’s workplace 36 years in the past, is being torn down by developers. They discover a body and some objects during their dig, and Callie Anne stops by this monument of girlhood to identify the remains.
This triggers her somatic memory and she’s drawn back to the sweltering summer of 1956 when she hit puberty and a handsome drifter named Charlie Memphis swung into the Starlite to help Callie Anne’s injured father show the movies. Callie and her mother, Teal, both fall for the smooth rugged stranger, but Callie Anne’s father—embittered caretaker for the hick drive-in and a shut-in wife—dislikes Memphis’s unconcealed interest in Teal. Lovesick and newly pubescent, Callie Anne realizes that Memphis is packing a rod for her mother, which at first feels distressing, then becomes still more confusing as relations with her father languish and grow fallow. Claude Dicksen is habitually cruel to his wife Teal while Charlie Memphis comes on smooth and suave. In the long summer evenings while Claude works at the Drive-in, an affair develops while Callie Anne eavesdrops from behind the metaphorical hedge. Teal undergoes a dynamic transformation once released from emotional confinement.
The Starlite Drive-in also features several subplots inlaid. One involves a mooch of a veteran named Billy who keeps coming around for food and pstering young Callie to dance. The other involves her blossoming romance with Virgil, a boy nearer her age who runs the ticket booth. An unexpected disaster changes everyone’s lives forever, and it’s up to the grown-up Callie Anne to unlock the secret of the decades-old mystery. Is his the dead body, you may ask? Is he the killer? Well, you won’t get the answer from me.
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