Blessing in Disguise Read Online Free PDF

having a field day with this story. Those calls you’ve been getting, that could be exactly the kind of thing this Nola Emory wants to avoid.”
    As if on cue, the phone rang. Grace heard her machine, behind the wall of bookcases that enclosed her office space, pick up. “Nancy Wyman from Associated Press ...” came the tinny response to her own message. Though promising to call back later, Nancy left both her office and home phone numbers.
    Grace looked at Jack, who offered her a grim smile.
    “Looks like you’ve opened a Pandora’s box,” he commented.
    “I just want to set the record straight! Of course I knew there would be questions raised, but once people have read the book ...”
    “You were nine and a half,” he reminded her. “Are you certain of what you saw? Memory sometimes exaggerates. And even if it happened the way you say it did, why did your father tell the police he arrived on the scene after Ned was shot? And why was his good friend Mulhaney put in charge of the investigation? Grace, those are the questions people will be asking. They’ll want to know just what your father was hiding.”
    “He wasn’t hiding anything,” she protested. “He was just protecting himself. His position, his whole career, was at stake. And he was so close to pulling a majority his way on the Civil Rights Act. A thing like this would have ...”
    Grace pulled free of Jack and went over to her desk, snugged in behind a high bookcase crammed with books and magazines. She found what she was looking for atop a pile of pages from a transcribed interview, and brought it over to Jack.
    It was a newspaper photo of her father standing behind Lyndon Johnson as he sat at a table, pen in hand. The caption underneath read: LBJ Signs Civil Rights Act.
    “It was Daddy who made it happen, who pushed it through,” Grace said, her voice rising. “He risked his career, the favor of his constituency, for what he believed in.” She thought of the stories Daddy used to tell, about the years before his family moved to New York, growing up in Tennessee, where blacks were treated like farm animals, sometimes worse. And about when he was stationed in Okinawa during the war, captain of an all-black quartermaster company, how the system that made heroes of white soldiers only served to crush and humiliate men of color. Daddy had sworn he would never stop trying to right those injustices. “Do you know what my father told me once? He said he thought it was luck that he’d ruined his lungs fighting fires. Otherwise he might never have run for office.”
    Jack put his arms around her. “Grace, you don’t have to convince me your father was a great man. But even more than it loves its heroes, the public loves a scandal. Look at Chappaquiddick. Who knows what really happened? All we can be sure of is that it ruined any chance Teddy Kennedy might have had to become president.”
    “That’s why I need Nola to back me up.”
    “But she’s not talking.”
    “She will,” Grace said with more conviction than she actually felt. She couldn’t help remembering the hostile little girl who’d tried to prevent her from going inside Margaret’s house that day.
    “I hope you’re right.” Jack looked thoughtful. “It would certainly strengthen our position from a legal point of view.”
    “Jack, you’re not afraid of some kind of libel suit! Who would—?” She stopped, realizing at once what he was getting at. “Oh, Jack, you can’t think my mother would do such a thing. What would she have to gain from it?” Then Grace remembered Mother’s current crusade, for which she’d been soliciting funds since God knows when: the Eugene Truscott Memorial Library.
    Mother could move mountains if she had to ... or become one.
    Like after Daddy died, transplanting the three of them to Blessing so she could take care of impossible, bedridden Grandma Clayborn, then raising two daughters alone in that big old house.
    One whiff of scandal concerning