Synopsis
Logan Swift has spent her life at her father’s side learning the family business—Swift Funeral Home. She’s seen how the death of a loved one affects the people left behind and has promised herself she’ll never experience that kind of pain. But being alone isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Brooke Collier believes she’s responsible for her relationship failures. After a particularly bad breakup, she moves in with her aged grandparents in order to care for them. The last thing she expects—or wants—is the attraction she has to her new next-door neighbor, Logan Swift.
As Logan and Brooke find themselves growing closer with each passing day, Logan realizes that trusting in tomorrow isn’t always easy when you deal with death for a living…
Trusting Tomorrow
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Trusting Tomorrow
© 2013 By PJ Trebelhorn. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-930-5
This Electronic Book is published by
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 249
Valley Falls, New York 12185
First Edition: August 2013
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editors: Victoria Oldham and Cindy Cresap
Production Design: Susan Ramundo
Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])
By the Author
From This Moment On
True Confessions
Missing
Trusting Tomorrow
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I want to thank Len Barot and everyone at Bold Strokes Books for continuing to have faith in me. I’m so very proud to be a part of this wonderful family.
To my editor, Victoria Oldham, thank you for all you’ve done. A simple thank you doesn’t seem to be enough for everything you’ve taught me, but it’s all I have.
Hugh and Betty James, I want to thank you—for everything. You have no idea how much I appreciate your generosity and hospitality.
Susan and Harvey Campbell—I love you guys. Your friendship means more to me than I could ever put into words. And I love how supportive you are of my writing. Susan, you’re the best canasta partner I could ever hope to have. And now the world knows Harvey and Cheryl cheat at cards.
Steven Cunningham, your information on the funeral director occupation was incredibly helpful, and I thank you for agreeing to sit down and answer all my questions.
And last, but certainly not least, I want to thank you, the reader. Without all of you there would be no reason for any of us to keep writing.
Dedication
For Cheryl, always
Chapter One
The keys in her pocket were a weight Logan Swift wasn’t sure she could bear. She sat in her car outside the house, her forehead resting on the steering wheel. Her grip was so tight her knuckles were turning white. She refused to cry. Not only because it signified weakness, but it wouldn’t do for someone in her profession. It was her job to help people through their grief, not give in to it herself.
She glanced up at the sky, thinking how appropriate it was for it to be so gray on this of all days. They were calling for snow later in the day. Her father had passed on his love of snow to Logan, but today the snow clouds did little to lift her mood.
Her anxiety level spiked when her cell phone vibrated on her hip. After taking a moment to steady her breathing, she answered the call.
“Yeah,” she said almost inaudibly. She cleared her throat and decided to make another attempt. “Hello.”
“Hey, Logan,” said her younger brother Jack, his voice much more solemn than she was used to. “I just arrived at the funeral home. Where are you?”
“At the house.” She glanced at the front steps of the double they had both grown up in. Even through the tears blurring her vision she could see the curtains were closed and the porch light had been left on, a testament to the fact her father hadn’t planned on being home before dark the day before. She took in the white paint job, absently thinking it needed to be redone sometime soon. The frigid winters and hot, humid summers in northwestern Pennsylvania had caused the paint to begin peeling. Maybe she’d get vinyl siding put on rather than repainting. Regardless, it would have to wait until spring now, since winter was well on its way.
The house had originally been built as a huge single family home, but sometime in the fifties had been converted into a twin. A common wall separated the two houses in which the layout of one side mirrored the other. Her father had owned both halves and rented the other side out to the Colliers.
“How is it?”
“Still standing.”
Jack chuckled. Logan cursed the fact he knew her so well. Knew she’d be sitting outside trying to talk herself into walking up those steps and going inside. Logan was surprised he’d managed to get home so quickly. She figured there’d be miles of red tape involved with the Cleveland Browns letting him come home for the funeral, but she was grateful he’d managed to get away because she really didn’t think she’d be able to get through it on her own.
A curtain moved in a window on the other half of the double, and it caught Logan’s eye, temporarily making her forget why she was there. Someone was spying on her. She knew it couldn’t be Mr. or Mrs. Collier, because Henry, confined to a wheelchair, was most likely parked right in front of the television and not giving a hoot what was going on outside. His wife, Peggy, wasn’t the type to be covert. If she wanted to know what was going on in the neighborhood, she’d damn well come out on the front porch and let you know you were being watched. And she’d likely have a shotgun at her side if she didn’t know who you were.
Logan smiled in spite of the pain in her chest, because she loved those people like they were her own grandparents. They’d lived in the other half of the double since before she was born, and they’d been as involved in her upbringing as her own parents had been.
Her parents.
The thought brought her firmly back to the reason she was there. She sighed and closed her eyes again, her forehead back on the steering wheel, the phone still held to her ear by a hand she had a sudden urge to use to punch something.
“Let me guess,” Jack said, his tone a strange mixture of teasing and grief of his own. “You’re sitting out in the car staring at the house.”
“Fuck, Jack, I can’t do this,” she said, choking back a sob. She was thirty-three years old for God’s sake, and Jack was three years younger. They weren’t supposed to be orphans, were they? Could you even be an orphan at her age? She sure as hell felt like she was. It was at times like these she was convinced there was no God. She never really believed in a higher power anyway, but damn it, she still needed her father. He was too young to be dead at the age of fifty-five. Her mother was only forty when she’d given in to the cancer which had ravaged her body almost fifteen years earlier. Logan had been convinced she’d never recover from her mother’s death, but somehow she had. And now the pain of losing her was right there on the surface again with the loss of her father.
“Why don’t you call Ernie in Riverside and have his people take over on this one?” Jack sounded as weary as she f
elt. His usual way was to try to make her laugh, and she would have given anything for him to be able to do it now, but she knew he could be serious when the situation called for it, and this one definitely did. “Nobody would blame you if you passed it off to someone else.”
“Pass it off? Jesus, Jack, you make it sound so impersonal. No, I just need to get myself together and I’ll be fine,” she said, trying to reassure him as much as herself. She rubbed a hand over her face and sat back in the seat.
“You’re probably lucky nobody’s called the cops on you yet,” Jack said in one of his attempts to lighten the mood.
“Everybody here knows me,” she said with a sigh. “Who’s going to call the cops?”
As if on cue, there was a loud knocking on the driver’s side window. She looked up to see who was disturbing her and was met with the smiling face of Ray Best, the lone police officer of the incredibly small town of Oakville, Pennsylvania.
“Logan, are you still there?” Jack asked.
“You called the damn cops, didn’t you?” she asked him, rolling down the window and forcing herself to smile at Ray. She heard Jack laughing as she placed the phone on the passenger seat and gave all her attention to the officer.
“Good morning, Logan,” he said quietly as he removed his hat and took a look around the tranquil neighborhood. “Missy got a call about a suspicious looking person hanging around the place sitting in their car.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me, Ray,” she said. As much of a pain in the ass as Jack was, she knew he wouldn’t have called the cops. Not now. Not while they were both going through one of the worst times of their lives. “I grew up in this town. Who here doesn’t know me?”
“From what I understand, the Colliers’ granddaughter arrived last night. She’s moving in so she can give Peggy a hand with Henry’s care,” he said with a shrug and a slight nod toward the house. “Might’ve been her.”
“Wonderful.” Logan quickly brushed a hand over her face to wipe away any wetness. She pulled the key out of the ignition and began walking up the steps with Ray right behind her.
“Is there anything I can help you with?” he asked as she was unlocking the front door. She didn’t answer right away, and he obviously took it as an invitation to keep talking. “I’m real sorry about your dad, Logan. If there’s anything Missy and I can do to help you out, you just let us know, all right?”
“Thanks, Ray.” Feeling like a heel wasn’t something she anticipated, given the situation, but she knew Ray and his wife had been friends with both of her parents, and they were probably feeling a little lost after her father’s sudden death too. She reminded herself the whole town had lost him, not just her and Jack. With the door unlocked, she turned and hugged the man who had always been like an uncle to her. “Tell Missy I’ll call if I need anything.”
“I heard on the news this morning Jack’s coming home. It’ll be good to see him again.”
“Yeah, it will,” she said, remembering she’d left her cell phone in the car and hadn’t even hung up with Jack properly. She walked back down the steps with Ray and they both stopped short when a sports car came barreling around the corner. She chuckled in spite of her melancholy mood. “Speak of the devil.”
“Ray, you old dog,” Jack said as he got out of the car and lifted the much smaller Ray off the ground in a bear hug.
The contrast between them was laughable, and Logan found herself smiling at them. Jack was a huge man at six-foot-four and two hundred eighty pounds. He had their mother’s blond hair and ocean blue eyes. Ray, on the other hand, was about six inches shorter, and close to a hundred pounds lighter. Ray laughed when Jack put him back on his own two feet and reached up to slap him on the shoulder.
“How are things, Undertaker?” Ray asked. The nickname caused an unexpected hitch in Logan’s breathing, and she left the two of them to catch up. She grabbed her phone from the car and headed back into the house. She looked over at the house attached to her father’s when the curtains moved again, but she didn’t stop walking.
Great, she thought before entering the house. Just what I need—a nosy neighbor.
Things would go a lot smoother if she didn’t allow herself the luxury of thinking about what she was doing, so she went directly up the stairs to her father’s bedroom and headed for the closet. Maybe after she picked out the suit for him to be buried in, she’d allow herself some time to grieve properly.
*
“Logan!”
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, smiling ruefully at the fact her brother was the same now as he’d been before she left for college. He’d never been able to simply enter a room. He always had to make sure everyone knew he was there.
“I’m in the kitchen.” A moment later, he walked in and sat at the table with her. He looked tired. She wondered if it had more to do with their father’s death, or with the injuries he’d suffered in the current season. She’d followed his career closely, as had the rest of the town, and she knew he was more worried about his future in the NFL than he was letting on to the media.
“How are you?” he asked quietly.
“Just peachy, thanks for asking,” she answered sarcastically. She immediately felt bad for the flippant tone. Her fingers traced the letters carved into the wooden kitchen table. J.S.+ S.M. 4ever. She felt tears welling up again but refused to let them fall. She remembered her father giving the table to her mother for her thirtieth birthday. The diner in town was remodeling and getting rid of all the tables and chairs. This particular table was the one her parents, John Swift and Susan Martin, had been sitting at the night he’d proposed to her. “I’m sorry, Jack. I’m just having a really hard time dealing with this.”
“I understand, trust me,” he said, his voice choked. He took in a deep breath as he looked around the kitchen, a slight smile tugging at his lips. After a moment he met Logan’s eyes again. “You remember the time we tried to make cookies for Dad’s birthday?”
“Jesus, Jack, don’t remind me.” She chuckled, and the realization dawned on her it was going to be good to have him around, for however long he was able to stay. Even though they were three years apart in age, they’d been inseparable until Jack started high school and decided it wasn’t cool to hang out with his big sister anymore.
The birthday in question had been when Logan was twelve and Jack nine. As a surprise for their father, they’d decided to make his favorite sugar cookies. She remembered thinking the shortening looked and smelled a little bit funny, but at the time didn’t worry too much about it. They found out later it hadn’t really been shortening at all.
“Who the hell keeps old bacon grease in a Crisco can, and in the same cupboard where they actually keep the Crisco, no less?”
“He ate them though, didn’t he?” Jack laughed.
“Every last one of them.” Picturing him with a big smile on his face as the first bite went into his mouth was a memory worth cherishing. “You know, I haven’t cooked since then, so if you’re expecting home cooked meals while you’re in town, you’ll have to look elsewhere.”
“I thought you’d have found a woman to do those things for you by now,” Jack said.
“Please.” She snorted. “In this town? I’m lucky the people here accept the fact I’m a lesbian. If I actually had a lover, some of them might not be so compliant. It’s one thing to acknowledge it in the abstract, but if it’s something you have to actually see every day, it can be a little too much for some people to deal with.”
“Are you serious, Logan?” Jack went to the refrigerator where he found beers for them both. Logan took the one he held out to her even though it was only a little after noon. Who would blame her for indulging a little given the circumstances? She twisted the cap off and tossed it into the trash can behind her, listening when he continued. “The people in this town love you. I seem to remember Logan Swift could do no wrong.”
“Then maybe I’m just uncomfortable with the thought I might be shoving it in p
eople’s collective faces,” she said, irritated.
“I’m not trying to start a fight with you, all right?” Jack said with a shrug. “That’s the last thing I want to do right now.”
Logan felt like a heel—again. She stood and motioned for Jack to stand too. She put her arms around his neck, and his went around her waist. They stood like that for the longest time, just holding each other. Logan felt hot tears run down her cheeks and she buried her face in his shoulder. She realized it was the first time since she’d gotten the call about her father’s fatal heart attack just over twenty-four hours earlier she’d allowed herself the luxury of breaking down.
Chapter Two
“There’s no need to spy on them, dear.”
Brooke Collier turned away from the window and faced her grandmother, Peggy. Not for the first time, she cursed her father for keeping these amazing people away from her for the first eighteen years of her life. She couldn’t help feeling robbed of what probably would have been a wonderful childhood with her grandparents in her life. She considered herself lucky that since she’d turned eighteen, her father couldn’t do a thing about denying her the right to see them. Now at the age of thirty-four, she had an incredible relationship with them, and was even closer to them than she was her father, which really wasn’t too hard to accomplish since he’d rather spend time with a bottle than with her.
“I’m not spying, Gram.” Brooke lied to her. “But I really think I should go and apologize to her.”
“Whatever for?” her grandfather asked from his place in front of the television. He’d never missed an episode of The Price is Right since he’d retired from his job as an auto mechanic ten years earlier. Brooke smiled at the fact he never even glanced away from the television while they were talking.
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