At least then he could walk away knowing he’d tried.
Chapter 9
Brooke
Brooke stared out over the coffee shop. The lunch rush seemed to be over, leaving a brief lull. It wouldn’t last long, only until the afternoon crowd started trickling in.
“I’m going to tidy things up in the back,” she told Becky, her full-time weekday employee.
Becky tilted her head. “You sure? I’m happy to clean up.”
That was their usual division of labor. Becky handled things in the back while Brooke took care of the front, straightening tables and making everything look as good as it could.
“I could use a change. You mind?” Brooke gestured to the tables. Things looked okay, but not the way she liked them.
Becky furrowed her brow. “Is everything okay? You seem distracted today.”
Distracted. That was one word for it. Brooke hadn’t told Becky about yesterday. She wanted to, but somehow the words wouldn’t come.
She’d expected one of the customers to say something, but so far, no one had mentioned how she’d found a body in the Beartooth Mountains. “Lots on my mind,” she said, which was the absolute truth. “I thought the change in duties might do me good.”
“Sure, no problem. Let me know if you decide to switch. I’m off at two thirty.”
The implication was clear. Brooke may be the owner, but doing dishes was not her forte. Becky was right to be concerned. It was highly possible that Brooke would still be working in the kitchen by the time her shift ended. “It’s fine. I’ll get it done. Who’s on this afternoon?”
Becky named the two high school girls on for the evening, both confident, if not go-getters. Brooke liked giving the youth a chance to work, but it wasn’t always easy. So many times, they’d rather be on their phones than doing the side work necessary in food service. She tried to remind them that if they had time to lean, they had time to clean, but it did little good.
As she started rinsing dishes, her mind drifted to yesterday. Finding the body had been awful. Traumatic, even. She slept little last night, caught between replaying the scene in her mind and waking from strange dreams. Not exactly scary dreams, but definitely odd. Tyler was in them, and so was Deputy Boverman.
She hadn’t even made it all the way home, only as far as a stable internet connection, before pulling over and searching for Tyler’s name. As she read the first article, she vaguely remembered hearing about the tragedy.
She’d been away at college when the fire happened. Phil had mentioned it during one of her calls home. A house fire. A young wife and a toddler dead. Tyler Gillis—Phil’s friend from high school—came home to find his life destroyed.
At the time, Brooke had struggled to place Tyler. Phil kept insisting she knew him, that he was in Phil’s graduating class and had even come over to the house, but she couldn’t picture his face. She was much younger, focused on her own friends and activities. The older kidshad been background noise, faces she passed without really seeing.
Yesterday, after reading the article and seeing an old photograph of Tyler with his wife and child, she realized he did look familiar from that time in her life, and she could even remember Tyler at her house a time or two, exactly as Phil said.
The pictures in the article were very different from how he looked now. It was no surprise she hadn’t recognized him on the trail. He’d aged well. In fact, if she was being honest, he looked better now than he did when he was younger.
His eyes were different. The green was the same, of course, but while they had danced with laughter in the family photo, yesterday they were solemn, almost haunted.
Once she realized Tyler was her brother’s friend, she’d been tempted to drive straight to her father’s house, where Phil still lived in a basement apartment. But if she did, she’d have to tell them about finding the remains, or if Sue was right, one body in two separate piles. The thought alone turned her stomach.
Instead, she spent several minutes searching archived files. A local tragedy. Questions raised. The investigation closed.
Tyler’s wife, Jen, had a bump on her head, but it was consistent with a fall after being overcome by smoke. The fire started in the kitchen, and she might have tried to put it out before being overcome by the smoke and fumes.
The official cause of death for both Jen and their little boy was smoke inhalation, but the pictures of the house and the damage still made Brooke’s heart ache. She was grateful the smoke had been the culprit and not the flames.
No charges had ever been filed. The fire was blamed on a faulty gas line on the stove. But reading between the lines, Brooke could still see the suspicion that had lingered. The insurance payout was mentioned multiple times, and Tyler had left town shortly afterward. The timeline invited questions without providing answers.
After she got home last night, she called Phil, wanting to hear his perspective.
“Tyler Gillis?” Phil had said immediately. “Why are you asking about him?”
“Just curious. I was reading about the fire.”
“After all these years?”
