Magnolia Gods (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

grandson of a traitor?”
    “Jesse, you and I both know I haven’t got any choice. If I did, I probably wouldn’t be here. I will say that being the son of a hero has its bad side too. “
    “Why?” asked Jesse.
    “It’s like you always have to be brave,” said Mike.
    Jesse didn’t speak for a while. He poked at the ground with a stick. Then he said. “My mother married Dad right in the middle of all the troubles. She stayed around after my daddy was killed. Nothing was easy in those days. I went to the regular schools and the kids were tough on me. In time I made friends. My mother fought a lot of battles for me. She got worn down. The day of my graduation from high school, she told me she was done here. She said Loretta Lawson wasn’t going to fight her husband’s war anymore.”
    He continued. “A person has a right to have his name cleared if he is innocent. My mother left the Eastern Shore because of the hatred. Marrying into the Lawson family gave her a right to share the Lawson shame, to have the townspeople thinking she was more than a little bit, as they said, “ignorant”, joining up willingly with the Lawsons.
    “She told me that she was still a young enough woman, she had met somebody, and she was going to have a new life. She moved away, runs a garden store over on the Western Shore. “
    “You stayed here,” said Mike.
    Jesse said, “I guess I got that from my grandmother. I don’t like to back down. My father had been working other people’s harvests before he went off to the war. Farmers call it custom harvesting. I took over the business and built it. I was lucky.”
    Jesse laughed. “My grandmother named me Jesse James Lawson. She thought if I was named after a train robber, it would make me strong enough.”
    “Maybe she was right,” said Mike.
    As he drove back to Wilmington, Mike felt he could understand where Jesse was coming from. He realized that he did know something about hate, how children suffer for the deeds of their parents.
    Robin had told him about hate. She had been brought up in Canada. Her father left the United States because of the Vietnam War. When he had been a student at the University of Pennsylvania, he had refused to report to the draft. Instead he had fled to Canada and had stayed there during the war. That’s where he had met and married her mother. She’d taken a lot of criticism trying to defend her father. Some people were still vicious about his choices.
    He looked ahead at the highway in the night. Robin’s father and Jesse’s grandfather had one characteristic different from his own father. Robin and Jesse didn’t seem to want to be like them. On the other hand, he did want to be like his father, or at least, as Robin had often reminded him, he wanted respect from him, the worst kind of respect because it was from a person who was no longer alive to give it to him.

Chapter Three
     
     
    8 AM, June 30
    Wilmington, Delaware
     
    As Mike arrived the next morning at the Museum, Jeremy drove in, sliding to a stop, dust flying. Mike smiled as he saw again the main description of Jeremy’s attitude toward living, that being that everything had to be done at the same speed, full ahead.
    “Wait’ll you hear what I found out,” Jeremy said, rushing up to Mike.
    “Let’s go to my office,” Mike said.
    They entered through the hanger where work was continuing on the Thunderbolt restoration. The Pratt and Whitney Double Wasp radial engine had been hoisted by chain and tall aluminum ladders were set up on each side of it. The white haired mechanic was on one of the ladders, his head and torso hidden behind some of the big cylinders as he tried to disassemble what was left of the fuel system. His left leg hung loosely as he maintained a precarious balance and his once white overalls were stained by dripping ocean water mixed with ancient grease and oil freed from the old cylinders.
    “Find any surprises?” asked Mike.
    “Caught a few fish but they