Too Close To Home - By Maureen Tan Page 0,48

off. It warned me that I wasn’t going to like whatever she said next. And I was right. Her announcement stiffened my back, brought me upright from the pillows.

“Gran and I think he’s right. We talked it over and decided there’s no reason she shouldn’t be spending more time playing hostess. Especially during special events like the big wedding that’s coming up. She wants to do it, Brooke. She’s earned the right. And it’s not as if she’d be moving back into the hotel again.”

Instead of moving back into the bedroom we’d once shared in our family’s apartment on the hotel’s first floor, Katie now lived in the brick coach house behind the Cherokee Rose. Used for decades as a honeymoon cottage, the tiny building was separated from the expansive flower gardens behind the Cherokee Rose by a six-foot-tall wrought-iron fence overgrown with jasmine vines. Her walk to work took minutes along a narrow, brick-paved alley. Katie had seemed content with her little home and her position as the Cherokee Rose’s first formally trained chef. Until now.

I was upset enough that I broke with convention, specifically mentioning the Underground.

“But we agreed before Katie came home,” I said, urgency tightening my voice, “that it was too stressful—too risky—for her to be involved with the Underground ever again. And because the layout of the Cherokee Rose makes it impossible to separate regular guests from activities involving our other guests, we came up with our compromise. A place to live away from the hotel and a job that limited Katie’s contact with all of the guests. Remember?”

My question was met with silence, a silence in which I easily recalled an alternative that I had offered a little more than six months earlier. When Katie had called and asked to come home. To stay. That’s when I’d proposed to Gran and Aunt Lucy that we stop rescuing and sheltering abused women, that we shift that responsibility to other, equally competent members of the Underground. But Gran had been adamant.

“Absolutely not,” Gran had said. “Your grandfather and I founded the Underground. I don’t care how many volunteers and how many other safe houses we now have. The Tyler family is the Underground. And until I’m in my grave, the Cherokee Rose will remain at the center of the Underground network.”

I took a breath, tried to reason with Aunt Lucy, although I knew that, ultimately, Gran would make the final decision. As she did with any issue that affected the Underground.

“It was a wise precaution then and it still is,” I said. “We can’t risk anything like Missy ever—”

Aunt Lucy cut me off.

“Gran and I both agree that Katie’s long past that. If you spent more time with her, you’d know that she’s a different person now. Stable. Responsible. Mature. She’s worked through her problems. Maybe it’s time you worked through yours. You can’t go on not trusting people, pushing away anyone who gets too close to you.”

After that, my own thoughts took up enough space that I pretty much stopped listening to whatever else Aunt Lucy had to say. Certainly, I stopped speaking. Except to say goodbye and see you tomorrow.

Chapter 10

There’s nothing worse than a headachy, cranky cop.

That’s what I was the next morning, and I knew it. Anxious thoughts had chewed at the edges of my mind all night, triggering nightmares, disrupting sleep and offering little in the way of resolution.

I must have sounded as bad as I felt. At least to the practiced ear of someone who knew me well. When Chad called that morning, he immediately asked me what was wrong.

Reciting my list of woes wasn’t an option. Especially because desperately missing Chad’s comforting presence in bed when nightmares wrenched me awake would have topped the list.

The lie took only a moment.

“Nothing,” I said. “Except this heat’s beginning to get to me. Sure wish it’d rain.”

“You and most of Hardin County,” Chad said, laughing. Then his tone turned serious. “Did you listen to this morning’s weather report?”

I said I hadn’t.

“Well, it looks like your wish just might come true. There’s a front moving in from the northwest. They’re predicting cooler air, possibly severe thunderstorms reaching our area within the next couple of days. Which is why I’m calling. I think we should search the ravine below the crime scene before the weather gets nasty.”

He paused as if he was waiting for me to object.

I merely pointed out the obvious.

“There’s been a lot of nasty weather around these parts over the last