Oh, well. What’s a girl to do?
Other than hang up on her brother—which is what I do after saying a quick “Good-bye.”
A minute has barely passed before the phone rings again. I quickly glance at the screen, accept the call, and turn off Main Street. “Hi, Tiffany.” My best friend.
“Please tell me it’s not true?” Her tone drips with feigned horror.
“What’s not true?”
“That you’re in a hick town somewhere in Montana, packing up your crazy great-aunt’s house.”
“Yep, that pretty much sums it up—except my great-aunt wasn’t crazy.” Charlotte is mydeceasedgreat-aunt from my mother’s side of the family. “She just didn’t share our families’ sentiments about living in Beverly Hills.”
Story has it that she moved here in her twenties because she craved adventure.
That, and because she wasn’t interested in marrying the man her parents had picked out for her.
Have I met her?
Once, when I was nine years old. She visited us but hadn’t been back since. And Copper Creek isn’t exactly on the family-approved list of vacation spots.
Not even close.
“But why doyouhave to do it?” Tiffany asks. “Couldn’t you just hire someone?”
That’s a definite no. My family can’t afford to risk a stranger stumbling across some buried family secret that we’d rather remain buried.
And who knows what I’ll find in Charlotte’s house.
But I’m not admitting this to Tiffany.
A man’s voice can be heard in the background on Tiffany’s end. At the familiar low rumble of his voice, the equally familiar sensation of porcupine quills prickles deep in my chest and my gut.
Tiffany replies to whatever he asked her, but this time her voice is muffled.
She’s your best friend. She couldn’t help who she fell in love with.The words keep repeating themselves in my head, with the enthusiasm of a cheerleader hyped up on too much sugar and caffeine.
Granted, it would have been better if Mathew had at least been honest with me and ended our relationship first…and if Tiffany had waited untilafterhe and I broke up before having sex with him.
You know what else would have been a fantastic idea? If I had listened to his housekeeper when she warned me he was too busy to talk to me. Instead, I raced upstairs, eager to share my good news with him, found him in bed with Tiffany, and then fled like a criminal caught at a candy-store crime scene.
And while we’re adding to the list of great ideas, grief-stricken me shouldn’t have hightailed it out of Beverly Hills in my cute Mustang convertible, so I could lick my wounds in private. Then I wouldn’t have been in the wrong place at the wrong time when the delivery truck lost control on the highway. It wouldn’t have totaled my poor baby, and my leg wouldn’t be badly damaged.
Yes, in retrospect, I should have listened to my great-aunt Margie that morning when she warned me that, according to my horoscope, my luck was about to change.
She might have had a point there.
“Darling,” Tiffany says, her voice like maple syrup on grilled salmon. “I have to go now. Mathew and I have one of those horribly boring charity events tonight. We promised his mother that we would attend. She’s going to introduce me to some important people in the art world.” Tiffany fake air-kisses me through the phone and hangs up.
The charity event she’s talking about? It’s the Reach for the Stars Fundraiser to help kids in low-income families achieve their full potential. I was involved with the planning, but since it was a romantic couples-only event and I had no one to go with, I opted for an early departure to Copper Creek.
“Hey, don’t look at me that way,” I say to Charlie. “She and I have been friends forever. She made a mistake, which is why I chose to take the high road and forgive her.”
Twenty minutes later, I travel along the neglected driveway leading to my great-aunt’s house. It’s not so much the road that’s neglected as the grass. It’s at least thigh-high.
My gaze moves from the overgrown grass to the house that appears just as ill-kept—and my stomach free-falls. “It looks haunted.”
Charlie barks in agreement.
