it, then pulled it over to the stairs and started hoisting it up one step at a time.
“Come on,” she grumbled as she strained to keep moving. She made the first curve of the stairs and rounded the second, but the corner of her suitcase hit a spindle, nearly jerking it from her grasp, and the latch gave way. With a curse, Lucky watched in frustration as everything spilled down the stairs.
“That’s it, I give up,” she said, and dropped the suitcase, too. It banged its way along, hitting the wall and the railing several times before finally crashing to the floor.
Sinking onto a step near the top, she glowered at the wreckage. What was another mess? She was already alone in a house with no utilities, stranded by a terrible storm….
I should leave Dundee as soon as the storm lifts. That thought had been drifting in and out of her mind all morning. She’d already put this place behind her once, along with its ghosts and memories. Why had she bothered to come back?
The black journal that had fallen out of her suitcase, along with everything else, served as a quick reminder. Studying what she could see of the fanning yellowed pages, she wondered once again whether reading it had been a mistake.
Would finding her father really make any difference?
She had no idea. Her brothers hadn’t grown up with their father, but they knew his name. According to Red, he’d been a handsome young man named Carter Jones, who’d spent two years in Dundee before breaking her heart and following the rodeo circuit. Except for the money he’d occasionally sent when he was working, they’d never heard from him again.
Her brothers didn’t seem to have a problem with that, but she was different. She’d grown up without knowing so much as a name. Until now. Suddenly, she had three possible candidates. She’d come here with the goal of narrowing it down to one. And why not? What better things did she have to do? She’d been traveling from place to place, volunteering at hospitals and food banks and shelters for six years—ever since she’d graduated from high school. There really wasn’t anywhere left to go, at least anywhere she’d find the peace she’d been seeking in her volunteer work. This small town hated her for being who she was, but it held all the secrets she needed to gain some perspective on her life.
With a sigh, she retrieved the journal. Maybe returning to Dundee wasn’t a mistake, but she should’ve waited for spring. She might have waited, except that she’d wanted to be here for Christmas. The memory of that one holiday, her first in this house, had tempted her back.
She chuckled sadly. God, she was still trying to relive it. How pathetic…
Stepping past the shoes and underwear on the stairs, she went back to her mother’s bedroom to confront the vulgar graffiti on the wall. This room, those words, brought back so much of what she’d experienced when she lived here. Her friends’ parents’ disapproving glances and hushed words: Julie’s brought home that Caldwell girl again. We need to have a talk with her…. Lucky’ll turn out to be just like her mother, you wait and see…. We’re law-abiding, churchgoing folk. We can’t have that kind of influence in this house. The suggestive whispers of the boys in school: Is your hair that red everywhere? Let’s go behind the bleachers and take a look…. With a mother like yours, you ought to know all the tricks.
All the tricks? Growing up, Lucky had known more about sex than she should have, but certainly not from her own experience.
Sliding down the wall to the bare floorboards, she opened the weathered book she’d found when she finally went through the boxes her brothers had sent her after Red’s funeral. The list of male names scrawled in her mother’s hand brought back fragments of memory Lucky had tried for years to suppress. Men, coming in and out of their ramshackle trailer while Lucky was small, ruffling her hair or handing her a shiny quarter. Men moaning behind the closed door of her mother’s bedroom.
Despite the terrible cold, sweat gathered on Lucky’s top lip. She wanted to burn the journal, obliterate the proof. But she couldn’t. Dave Small, Eugene Thompson and Garth Holbrook were all listed as having “visited” her mother twenty-five years ago, right around the time a man would’ve had to visit Red for Lucky to be born. Unless Red was seeing someone she didn’t write down, which seemed unlikely given her scrupulous records, one of these men was probably her father….
Lucky recognized Dave Small’s name, and Garth Holbrook’s, too. Both had been prominent citizens of Dundee, giving her some hope that she could identify with or admire her father at least a little more than she did her mother. They might have visited a prostitute several times, but Lucky knew from watching Red that being faithful wasn’t easy for a lot of people. It was even possible that they hadn’t been married when they’d associated with her mother.
She thumbed forward to the blank pages that represented the year Morris had come into their lives. He’d put a stop to the male parade going through Red’s trailer. For a while, anyway. Until Red forgot what it was like to scratch for a living and grew bored with being an old man’s wife. Then, while Morris was away on his many business trips, everything had started up again. Only now her mother didn’t keep a list, the men didn’t leave any money, and Lucky was old enough to have a clearer understanding of what was really going on when her mother said she needed to speak to Mr. So-and-So alone for a few minutes.
Briefly, Lucky closed her eyes, shaking her head at all the times she’d begged Red not to risk their newfound security. As Lucky grew older, Red had quit pretending that Lucky didn’t know the truth and started threatening her instead. You say anything, Lucky Star Caldwell, and I’ll kick your ass right out of this house.
Her mother’s voice came to her so clearly, so distinctly, that Lucky glanced up, toward the entrance of the room. But she saw nothing—nothing except herself as a young, insecure girl, peeking into the room in response to her mother’s shrill call, “Bring me some damn aspirin.”
When things at home became unbearable, Lucky would sneak over to the Hill brothers’ barn to be with their beautiful horses. There, for an hour or two at a time, she managed to forget the sick feeling that, by her silence, she was betraying Morris as badly as her mother was. Or the knowledge that, even if she’d had her mother’s permission to tell what she knew, which she most certainly did not, she wouldn’t have breathed a word of it because she couldn’t bear the thought of Morris disappearing from her own life.
Snapping the book closed, Lucky climbed to her feet. She’d tried so hard to distance herself from all that. Once she’d graduated from high school, she’d left Dundee and never looked back. Even when Morris had died and her brothers sent word of her inheritance. Even when, two years later, her mother had a stroke and passed away. Even when Mike Hill contested the will, forcing her to hire an attorney. She’d let the attorney go to court for her and when it was all over, she’d simply petitioned Mike, as executor of Morris’s estate, for the check he was supposed to send her each month and left the house to rot.
Until now. Now she realized she could never run far enough from the past and she’d come back do something about the house. But first she had to ask Mike for a favor before she froze to death. She doubted he was going to be very happy about it.
CHAPTER THREE
LUCKY SHIFTED from one foot to the other as she stood at Mike’s door. He might be chief among her rivals, but he was also one of the handsomest men she’d ever known and, without running water in the house, she hadn’t even been able to shower. She was soaked and shivering from wading through snow, and her nose and cheeks felt so raw she was sure they were bright pink.
Pink had never been a good color on her; pink wasn’t
