Johnston - I Promise Read Online Free PDF

course.”
    “But you’re suspended for three days.”
    “It’s an internal suspension.”
    “What the hell is that?”
    “You go to school, but you stay in a room separated from the other kids. If you don’t let me leave soon, I’m going to miss the bus.”
    Marsh pursed his own lips, unsure whether to believe her. She had shown she was capable of deceit by signing all the warnings and the suspension. But what she suggested made sense. He took the suspension notice and leaned it against the refrigerator, got a pen from the collection in the Yellowstone Park coffee mug by the phone, signed his own signature above her forgery, and held the paper out to her.
    “Daddy! Oh, no! Look what you’ve done!”
    “I’ve signed my name, like I was supposed to.”
    “Now they’ll know I signed the other notices myself,” Billie Jo wailed.
    “Tough.”
    “How can you—”
    Marsh held a thumb over his shoulder aimed at the door. “Get going before you miss the bus.”
    She scurried for the door, snatching the suspension notice from him as she went.
    He caught the screen door on the mud porch before it could slam behind her. “Billie Jo,” he called after her. “Don’t bother throwing away that notice. I’ll be calling the school to let them know I’m aware of the situation.”
    She gave him an outraged look over her shoulder, mumbled something he was glad he couldn’t hear, and ran for the iron gate, where the school bus had screeched to a halt and was honking for her. She tiptoed over the wide-spaced bars of the cattle guard, then stomped her way up the stairs onto the bus, and headed down the aisle. He caught a glimpse of her staring back at him forlornly from a window near the back of the bus.
    He was a failure as a father. Just as his own father had been.
    Marsh let the screen door go and crossed back to the clutter of dishes in the kitchen as it slammed behind him. He wasn’t doing too well as a substitute mother, either.
    There wasn’t time to clean up the mess. He had somewhere he had to be. He grabbed his Stetson from the deer antler rack by the refrigerator and tugged it down before shoving his way out the door. It felt good to be wearing a hat again. He had given up wearing one on assignment, because the damned things kept getting lost, stolen, or left behind when he had to get out in a hurry.
    He left the kitchen door unlocked. There wasn’t much to steal, and no burglars around this far from town to steal it. Besides, people still left their doors unlocked in the West as an age-old gesture of range hospitality.
    Marsh stepped into his pickup—the same rusted-out ’57 Chevy he had driven as a teenager—and headed down the dirt road leading to the highway. The truck rattled over the cattle guard, and he turned right onto U.S. 83 headed north to Uvalde.
    The town seventy miles southwest of San Antonio where Marsh had grown up had few claims to fame. Former Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe had declared it home and might be seen during his term as governor emerging from the local 7-Eleven on a Saturday night and stepping into his pickup with a six-pack—of Coke. The governor was a teetotaler.
    More importantly, one of Roosevelt’s vice presidents, John Nance Garner, had been born there. His home on Park Street was a carefully tended Historic Landmark. The nineteenth-century opera house on the square had been donated to the town by the Garner family.
    Uvalde was the kind of town most Americans yearned to live in, with tidy pecan and live oak-lined streets. Getty Street featured stores that had been owned by the same families for generations. But Uvalde had a modern high school, a junior college with strong programs in shop and auto mechanics and cosmetology, not to mention one of the best rodeo teams around. Very little serious crime occurred, and the few existing pockets of poverty were hard to find.
    On the downside, there wasn’t much entertainment available for teenagers, or adults either, for that