After that, I decided to go to my office and do some paperwork.
My office was a newly remodeled space and all of my furniture matched. Which sounded better than it was. The desk was a gray steel monster that took up about half of the windowless room’s square footage. The door that the desk faced was oak with a frosted-glass pane and dark lettering that read Maryville Police Department.
I settled in behind my desk with the door open for maximum ventilation. On the narrow gun-metal gray credenza immediately behind me, the low-volume voices on my scanner crackled on and off. I half listened to them as I polished off a sandwich and began cleaning out the accumulation in my IN box. As usual, I was interrupted. But today it wasn’t a series of calls from county dispatch that thwarted my good intentions and made paperwork impossible. It was a persistently ringing phone.
Two out-of-town reporters and half a dozen concerned citizens phoned, all seeking better information than a police scanner and local gossip could provide. I confirmed what they’d already heard—unidentified remains had been discovered in the forest during a successful search for a lost child—and offered nothing more. They hung up disappointed.
Hours later—a stack of paperwork and a dozen more interruptions later—I went home.
That night, the phone on my nightstand rang as I was crawling into bed and the caller ID flashed the number of the Cherokee Rose. The phone rang again as I held my hand suspended inches above the receiver, knowing that the call might be urgent Underground business, but still hesitating. Because chances were, the caller was my sister.
Earlier, when I’d come home from work, the answering machine had been flashing and the voice on the phone had been Katie’s.
“Hi, Brooke. It’s me,” she’d said at the answering machine’s prompt. “Nice work finding the little girl. Call me, okay? I have great news.”
My sister’s voice had been predictably sweet, upbeat and optimistic. Just like her attitude since she’d returned home to the Cherokee Rose months earlier. Not at all like the depressed, acutely disturbed teenager who had left Maryville eight years ago. Therapy, travel, education, growing up. Some of those things—perhaps all of them—seemed to have transformed Katie. And as for the event that had separated Katie from us? Those who knew of it—Gran, Aunt Lucy, Katie and I—never spoke of Missy’s murder. As if not talking about it meant it had never happened.
As I’d hit the button to erase her message, I’d decided that my day had already been emotionally grueling enough. Katie’s good news would have to wait until tomorrow. That decision had little to do with the day’s events. My reluctance to interact with my older sister was, unfortunately, business as usual.
Despite the changes in her personality, ever since her return to Maryville, the relationship between Katie and me had been strained and distant. My fault, not hers. I loved my big sister as I always had, but a minefield of taboo subjects now lay between us. Our childhood. Missy’s murder. The Underground. Chad. I found it difficult to recall a time when the secrets Katie and I shared had united us. Now I feared that there might be a secret that Katie hadn’t shared with me.
The phone beneath my hand rang for the fifth time and, just as I heard the message tape click on, I answered it. Impulse, perhaps. Or concern inspired by the late hour of the call. Or maybe just to prove to myself that I wasn’t going to let coincidence and unfounded suspicion poison my interactions with my sister. So I picked up the phone.
I was surprised and a little relieved to find Aunt Lucy on the line.
“Hey, honey,” she said by way of greeting. “Gran and I are going shopping tomorrow. Across the river in Paducah. We’ll be meeting a friend of a friend. Would you like to come along?”
I had no doubt that Aunt Lucy was talking about an extraction. And that long habit rather than any pressing need for caution had prompted her to discuss Underground business in veiled terms.
“Okay,” I said without hesitation.
Despite the conflict it brought to my life, I’d never questioned my commitment to the Underground and the women it served. Many who traveled along the Underground network were able to walk away from the abusive situation they’d been in. Easy enough, then, for one of our volunteers to help them take the first step toward a new life in a new