The Last Secret Read Online Free Page A

their help good.” She swallows hard; he imagines her snuffling food off the soiled plates coming into the kitchen to be washed.
    “’Fraid I'm overqualified.”
    “So's everybody, but it's a stepping-stone. That's what we're doing here. Inch by inch.”
    “The rubber tree plant,” he chuckles. But, of course, she doesn't get it. “Tell you what. Give me the address. I'm heading east soon. A business opportunity.” He stands up when she hands him the address she's just written on the shelter letterhead. “This'll be my grubstake,” he says, folding the paper into his pocket.
    “Yeah, you'll like their steak. I've eaten there before. And the Delmonico potatoes, they're to die for.”
    “You know what a grubstake is?”
    “No. My favorite's the porterhouse. Oooh, and prime rib.”
    “You like to travel?”
    “Nah. Airplane seats.” Shaking her head, she spreads her hands to indicate girth. As if he hasn't noticed.
    “What about by car? You can get places that way, right?”
    “I guess.”
    “Best way to travel. Take your time. Stop when you want. I used to do that, drive for a living.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. One time I drove this old couple, LA. to Boston. Took our time.” He shrugs. “Stop when you feel like it. Grand Canyon. Vegas. Eat your way across.”
    “Sounds like fun.”
    “Yeah. Go where you want, see what you want to see.”

en minutes late . When she turns the corner, the car skids. She slows down. This storm isn't supposed to intensify until later, but the dark roads are already slick. Hard to see with the snow falling so fast, sheets of big wet flakes across her headlights. She was supposed to meet Ken in his office at five. Something's wrong, she can feel it. Of the two of them, Ken's always been the more upbeat, but lately he seems depressed, almost remote at times, like a man besieged, hounded, but by what? Work? His family?
    A couple of nights ago, Chloe and Drew had been teasing each other all through dinner. She could sense Ken's edginess, but she was enjoying their good-natured banter. The pleasure they found in each other's company, even their occasional annoyance with one another, seemed a joyful contrast to her own teenage years, the sameness of such silent, weary meals that the scrape of a fork against her mother's teeth could set her heart beating faster. “Geeky” Chloe had called her brother's plaid shirt. Drew glared at her a moment, then caught himself as he so often must lately. He laughed and said her tight, low-rise jeans were “slutty.”
    “That's it, you're done! Leave the table, goddamnit!” Ken roared.
    “He was just kidding,” Nora said, shocked as Drew stomped upstairs, then slammed his door.
    “He didn't mean anything,” Chloe snapped at her father, and with that, Ken threw down his napkin and stormed into his study, holing up there for the rest of the evening.
    So unlike Ken. He is a chronic optimist, according to gloomy Oliver, which is precisely why the brothers work so well together. Oliver loves the newspaper, but has little patience and less affection for most people. Ken finds tedious the details of running the paper, but he loves people, making him the perfect spokesman for the
Chronicle.
It is Ken who sits on the boards of banks and charities, Ken who cuts ribbons and, from years of groundbreaking ceremonies, has his own display of silver shovels hanging on their garage wall. “Our poster boy,” Oliver sniped recently after Ken's picture ran in the paper three days in a row. Uncharacteristically, Ken called him on it, and Oliver's response was a shrug and a snide look. Ken was deeply offended. That alone is cause for alarm. For years the brothers have played off one another's foibles, with Ken rarely letting Oliver cloud his sunny aura. But in these last few days they're barely speaking to one another. At yesterday's editorial staff meeting each sat stonily at opposite ends of the table. It fell to their cousin Stephen to initiate discussion