Road to Nowhere Read Online Free PDF Page A

Gold Valley. Not just weekenders.
    She didn’t answer. There was a photo album on the table and he picked it up. “What’d you get this out for?”
    “I was just thinking about it.”
    He opened the first page and for a minute forgot about everything else. There they were, the two of them, ten minutes married. Cornelia was fresh and glowing in her white dress, twenty-five years old, twenty-four years ago.
    “Hey, look at you here.” He looked at her, the real Corny, the middle-aged mother of two grown-up girls, standing beside him, and then back at the beauty in the picture. “You know, I didn’t remember. You were almost as gorgeous back then as you are now.”
    “Oh, Wade.” But she smiled.
    “Yeah, and tell you what. This summer. We should go on a trip. Maybe France, but this time just for us, not on business.”
    “We don’t need to.”
    “I think we should. For our anniversary, this fall. It’ll be twenty-five, right? Okay, I got to go. What’s for supper?”
    “Lasagna.”
    “That’s right. Hey, I’ll be there.”
    “Good morning, Patsy. Thought I’d stop by and see if there’d been any mail come in.”
    Randy was really just needing a breath or two after his meeting with Everett, and the courthouse was only around the corner from his office.
    “You can have this one that came in certified.”
    Randy glanced at the return address, a law firm in Texas, and that was all he needed. “Trinkle farm.”
    “There’ve been a lot of those in the last few months,” Patsy said.
    “There’s a lot of Trinkles. Where do we even send the tax bill to?”
    “Every address I can get. Texas, Michigan, California, Georgia. Every cousin. I even send one to those lawyers.”
    “When was the last time they ever paid?”
    “I’ve never seen a payment in the five years I’ve been working here.”
    “We’ll have to get a lawyer and foreclose eventually.” He opened the letter and there it was, a whole long five pages of legal gobbledygook. “I guess we’ll need a lawyer just to make this out.” He tucked the letter into his pocket. “I’ll put this with the others, and sometime we’ll have to see what they’re all about. It’s usually just copies we get whenever one of them sues another over who owns the deed, and not anything we ever have to worry about. And there’s enough I do have to worry about.”
    Patsy nodded and sighed. “I saw the newspaper this morning.”
    “That’s exactly what I mean. For goodness’ sake, that Luke Goddard is one to make trouble.”
    January 11, Wednesday
    Louise opened the big appointment book. It was always fun to see who’d be coming in.
    She had just started looking down the columns when Rebecca and Stephanie came through the front door together. Rebecca was in a pout and that meant she’d been arguing with her mother already this morning, but Stephanie was happy.
    “Good morning, girls,” Louise said, and went back to the appointment book. Rebecca had a perm to do first thing. “Becky, dear, you’ve got Grace Gallaudet in ten minutes.”
    Louise had her own morning mostly open, and that would be fine to catch up on the bookkeeping. She walked back past the four chairs and the big mirrors to her desk in the back corner, where she could keep an eye on the shop and the girls, and started opening the mail.
    It was still as cold as it could be, and it had been all week. Not a bit of the snow from the weekend had melted. She turned up the thermostat. She didn’t want the ladies shivering when they came in.
    Grace was there just at nine and Louise chatted with her a minute to make up for Rebecca not wanting to. And that was where she was standing when the door opened and everybody—Rebecca and Stephanie, Grace Gallaudet, and Louise herself—turned to just gawk.
    “Eliza! You came!”
    She stood there for just a moment, looking at the salon and the salon looking at her. She was a sight to behold. She was tall, or it was more that she was thin, or not thin but