page2 (1/1)

CHAPTER ONE

“KATIE,” SAVANNAH O’Neill sang “Come out, come out wherever you are”

She snuck up to the h the wild abundance of pink tea roses for a gliht blue eyes

“Gotcha!” she cried, pushing apart the thorny branches only to find CJ, the orange tabby, sleeping beneath its leaves

No Katie

This is getting ridiculous, she thought

A quick Saturday inning to take all day Savannah pushed through the kudzu vines, ivy and weepingbranches that dominated the back courtyard, but Katie wasn’t in any of her usual spots

She’d upped her game

Savannah tripped over a broken cobblestone, catching herself against a thick blanket of kudzu vines that had eaten up the fountain and obliterated the bird feeder

It was getting very third world back here Soon enough, these games with Katie would require a machete

That would add a whole new dimension to kamikaze hide-and-seek

“I told you,” she called out “You can run but you can’t hide”

The branches of the cypress rustled over her head and Savannah s to the trunk of the old tree

It was only a ht, before Katie worked up the courage to clier than the two-story house in front of it, and its roots were pushing through the cobblestones, breaking up the courtyard like soround monster

As if it had been yesterday, Savannah’s foot found the small lee in the trunk, her hands found the knobs on the lower branches and within seconds she was halfway up into the leaves She was careful to look for snakes, and hoped her daughter had done the same

What, she wondered, would her clients say if they could see their staid researcher now? The kids at the library, who made faces at her behind her back, would fall over their stolen library books if they sawtrees