Secrets Collide (Bluegrass Brothers)

few seemed to be from the police department or other government offices. Gemma flipped through each one as her frustration grew. She didn’t know a single person in these pictures.
    She fought off a feeling of despair as she dug deeper into the box. Her fingers paused as they came to an old, worn photograph. Gemma stood smiling at the camera with her left front tooth missing. She had a side ponytail sticking out the left side of her head while Gia smiled with a missing right front tooth and a side ponytail on the right side of her head. On the back, Gia had written the word Twins and decorated it with hearts. Her feeling of despair fled as she looked under the picture and found a stack of notes they wrote to each other in their twin language.
    “That’s it,” Gemma said to herself as she hurriedly looked through the pile for the one note she knew had to be in there. She remembered writing it and what it said. From there she could start remembering their translation.
    She found it stuck in the middle of a bunch of notes. Gemma had written it to Gia, telling her she had missed a math question because Graham Bullock had asked her to the middle school dance and she’d been so excited, she’d forgotten to answer the question on her quiz.
    Gemma picked up the notebook marked with the symbol for One and started to read as much as she could.
     
    “Hello, dear. You’ve been at it for hours and I thought you might like something to drink and a snack before dinner.” Miss Lily set down a tray with a brownie and a glass of lemonade on it.
    “Thank you. I am hungry.” Gemma put down the notebook, took a bite of the rich brownie, and moaned. She could get used to the cooking out here.
    “What is this you’re working on?” Miss Lily asked as she looked at the notebook.
    “I need to decipher it for the investigation. My sister took all these notes, but I’m having a real hard time remembering our twin language.” Gemma paused as she took another bite of the brownie. “Strange, huh?”
    “To have a secret language with your twin? Not at all. Daisy Mae, Violet Fae, and I had one growing up, too. It was great to be able to talk about all the important stuff without our parents knowing what we were saying,” Miss Lily winked. “Take, for instance, talking about a hunk of a man with hazel eyes and abs I could wash clothes on.”
    Gemma blinked and paused with the last bite of brownie halfway to her mouth. “Excuse me?”
    “Oh, don’t tell me for one second you haven’t noticed Cy. You’d have to be dead not to and even then it would be hard.”
    “Even if I noticed him, it doesn’t mean anything. He dates actresses and models. I enjoy food too much to be like them,” Gemma popped the last bite of brownie into her mouth as if to emphasize that fact.
    “Mmm, hmm. Do you see him married to any of those women? I don’t. Men like women who look like women, not ten-year-old boys with inflatable toys on their chests. Trust me, he’s noticed. You better make a move before the rest of the town descends upon him.” Miss Lily gave her a wink and headed back inside.
    Right. Like she had a chance with Cy. But, she did have a chance with some of the notes. Enough that she was able to translate a couple of the photographs. She went through the pile and pulled out the ones she could translate and started writing the translations onto notes and sticking them to the back of the photos. Her trouble lay in the notebooks, though.
    Word by word, she slowly made her way through the first ten pages of the notebook. The longer she worked on it, the more it came back, but it was still hard to remember every detail of a language they had developed as children. Determination filled her as she bent her head and went back to work.
     
    Cy parked the truck at Miss Lily’s and walked up the pathway to her front porch. Gemma was curled up on the porch swing with two notebooks in her lap. She didn’t hear him as he approached so he took a moment to observe her. A lock of her hair had escaped from behind her ear. Unlike so many people he knew in Hollywood, Gemma wore no makeup and didn’t seem self-conscious about it. In fact, all he wanted to do was run a finger down her cheek to feel its softness. His brothers’ talks of marriage and relationships were messing with him.
    “How’s it going?” he asked as he stopped in front of her. He saw her jump in surprise as her wide eyes looked up at him.
    “You scared me.” Gemma took a