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“Petunia,” she called in a soft voice. “Here kitty, kitty.” Her throat closed and her voice cracked on the last syllable. Tomorrow would be the last day of the search, she decided. Then, she had to start picking up the pieces of her life. That included figuring out how to survive on savings that were, she’d discovered after a quick login to her online bank accounts, shockingly low.
“Petunia, please come home. I miss you.” Alanna waited.
A minute.
Two minutes.
She hoped. A small, secret part of her might have even prayed.
No cat.
With a sigh, Alanna turned to the house and opened the front door. She paused on the threshold, utterly confused by the sight in front of her. A blanket fort sat in the middle of the living room.
“Enter the Cave of Secrets,” intoned a solemn voice from within the blankets. The voice sounded suspiciously like Layla's.
“If you dare,” added a second voice that was most definitely her mother’s.
One of them snickered.
Oh, dear God.
This was seriously the last thing Alanna needed right now. All she wanted to do was curl up in bed with a bottle of wine and watch a gruesome crime series on Netflix to make herself feel better about her life. Instead, she kicked off her sneakers, got down on hands and knees, and crawled under the blankets.
Two grinning faces peered at her.
“You are seriously too old for this, both of you,” Alanna muttered as she shifted her legs around into a sitting position. “Also, shouldn’t you be cleaning out about a hundred litter boxes?” she eyed her sister.
Layla smiled mischievously. “Val found a volunteer to cover my shift.” She handed Alanna a glass of red wine. Alanna took a sniff, and her nose detected crisp, light notes of a Zinfandel, Layla’s favorite wine.
“Don’t forget the sacred rules of The Cave of Secrets,” her mother said. Dede sat farther back in the fort, a glass of wine in her hand as well. “All who enter must offer up a secret.”
“Hmmmmm.” Alanna took a contemplative sip of the wine, then smiled wickedly. “So, Layla, remember that time you took my car to one of your cheerleading gigs, and when you brought it back, there was a long scratch on the hood?”
Layla’s cheeks started glowing. “I fessed up right away. Like I said, Chase Rigby tried to slide across the hood like in the cop movies. He picked the oldest, most beat-up car in the lot, which was yours.”
“Mm-hmmm, and you didn’t stop him.” Alanna didn’t break her sister’s gaze.
“It was Chase Rigby,” Layla implored, as if the varsity quarterback was some kind of god.
“Well, I’m the one who took the dead frog from the biology lab and hid it in his back seat.”
“That was YOU???” Layla’s eyes bugged. “His car smelled like formaldehyde for days until his dad paid for a professional cleaning. He blamed Hector Lopez for it. They beat the crap out of each other at a house party the next week. Hector dislocated Chase’s shoulder. He was out the rest of the season.”
“Poor baby,” Alanna said without an ounce of sincerity. Chase Rigby earned his fame on the football field for his throwing arm and his glory in school for smashing the lunches of anyone who even looked like they might be a member of the chess team.
“…And I dunked your toothbrush in the toilet,” Alanna mumbled, quickly taking another gulp of her wine.
“THE TOILET!” Layla dove through the blankets and dragged her behemoth purse into their small space. She dug furiously through the giant bag before resurfacing with three sticks of peppermint gum, which she immediately jammed into her mouth.
“I can’t believe you did that,” she accused, her words slurred around the huge wad of gum.
Alanna shrugged. “I was very protective of that car.” Sure, it’d been a certified POS with a bumper held on by duct tape and prayers, but it’d been hers. She’d painstakingly saved $3,500 for the car over a summer of picking grapes at The Rose and Thorn vineyards during the day and waitressing at Valentina’s Cantina by night.
“Do you remember that velour pink jacket you loved?” Layla wore an unsettling smile.
Alanna’s eyes narrowed into slits. “You mean the Juicy Couture hoodie I bought with my own, extremely hard-earned money that mysteriously disappeared?”
“Soooooo,” Layla grabbed the end of her braid. “I might have somehow gotten confused and accidentally worn it to cheerleading practice. And, maybe while we were trying a pyramid during warmup, Melissa Trigolli may have farted really loud, and we all might have started laughing and the pyramid could have collapsed and…”
