Johnston - I Promise Read Online Free PDF Page B

matter. The local pool hall had video games, if the current owner wasn’t bankrupt, and the Forum Four on Highway 90 had replaced the old El Lasso theater on Getty.
    In the fall, everyone in town attended the high school football game on Friday nights. On Saturdays they enjoyed the Texas two-step and the cotton-eyed Joe at the Hermann Son’s Hall in Knippa, while the Dallas Cowboys and Houston Oilers kept everyone glued to the TV on Sunday afternoons.
    Marsh could two-step with the best of them, but he wasn’t about to brave the stares—or a refusal—if he asked some local lady to dance. While he loved the Dallas Cowboys, he hadn’t seen much of them in the places he had been. It might be nice to start watching again, once he got a living room chair to replace the one his dad had sat in.
    There was dove, quail, and deer hunting in season. Every pickup in town boasted a rifle rack in the back window, sort of like fans in the big city who put a team sticker on their bumper to remind them of their favorite sport year-round. Marsh had done his share of hunting as a kid, but he had seen enough of death and dying—animal and human—over the past twenty years to last him a lifetime.
    Parties in private homes took up the slack. Marsh had been invited to a score of them since he had arrived back in Uvalde. He had refused all invitations, citing the need to spend time with his daughter. But it really had more to do with disliking hypocrisy.
    The grown-ups who were inviting him to their homes as the prodigal son were the very same teenagers who had been the first to believe him guilty. He supposed the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting washed away a lot of sins.
    Marsh pulled into the Memorial Hospital parking lot and keyed off the ignition. The pickup ran another few seconds before it died. It needed a tune-up. He took a deep breath and let it out while he worked up the courage to go inside.
    Marsh hated hospitals. In his experience, nothing good ever happened in them—the one exception being the birth of his daughter. His nose curled. He was smelling blood and the stench of gangrene in a filthy field hospital. Hearing the shrieks of pain, the moans of agony as doctors treated patients without anesthesia. It could have been in Africa, or Asia, or South America, or Eastern Europe. Mankind had a way of repeating its mistakes.
    This hospital would likely be antiseptically clean, the pain and suffering eased by medicines. It didn’t matter. His stomach clenched, anyway. But he had to go in there.
    He had called early this morning and learned that Hattie Carson was scheduled for heart bypass surgery at 10:00 A.M. Delia Carson would be there and maybe Rachel, too. He didn’t know how he could face them.
    He had nearly killed Hattie Carson yesterday.
    Or, rather, he was responsible for the heart attack that had nearly killed her. He had known she was going to be upset when he confronted her. He just hadn’t realized how frail she was. She had acted as tough as ever.
    He had come unannounced, afraid she wouldn’t see him if he called ahead of time. It was a reporter’s trick that often worked. He saw the surprise on her face when she opened the door. He had stuck his foot inside to keep her from slamming it in his face.
    Coming to the front door instead of the back had signaled he wasn’t there as a friend. Her scowl made it clear she had gotten the message.
    “Hello, Mrs. Carson,” he said. “I’d like to talk to you.”
    “There’s nothing we have to say to each other.”
    When Hattie tried to close the door, he put his palm against it. There was no contest. He was six-foot-four and weighed 212 pounds. She was five-foot-two, her blond curls bleached white with age, and had the kind of wiry strength common to sixty-year-old ranch women used to hard physical labor. But her 103 pounds wasn’t going to keep him out.
    She realized it at once and stepped back with a quiet dignity that surprised and humbled him. “Come