The Secret Gift Read Online Free PDF Page A

traffic lights, no lights of any kind, only the occasional lamp glow that she could just make out coming from some remote cottage window. Even the moon seemed to have gone into seclusion.
    At one point, some distance back, she’d passed a red phone box and for the next several miles had seriously considered backtracking to it, to call someone—anyone—to come and rescue her. She would have, except that she had no earthly idea how she would ever tell them where to find her.
    And she’d never been so tired in her life.
    The fatigue of the past days and the stress of the past weeks had been steadily winning the fight to overtake her. She could sense herself starting to slip in her efforts to fend it off and had even felt her eyes begin to close as she drove. She had opened the car windows to the bitter chill of the outside air and blared the only station she could get on the car radio, a static mixture of Celtic folk and accordion-ridden country dancing music.
    She hadn’t slept a wink during the flight from Boston, had been restless the entire flight, out of balance, with no clue what she was going to find on the other end of her journey.
    Had her mother felt the same when she’d made her trip all those years before? Had she been excited? Frightened? Matilde had come to Boston, she’d told Libby, to marry Charles Hutchinson, an American who had apparently swept her off her feet, for she’d had Libby almost immediately after. What a rare thing their love for one another must have been, to have brought her mother so far from everything she had ever known. Matilde had always told Libby she didn’t regret having gone to America, and she’d never once returned to Scotland, not even to visit. In fact, throughout her childhood, Libby could remember no letters, no phone calls ever having come from that corner of the world.
    Then why? Why the peculiar crystal stone and the photograph of a man Matilde had never mentioned? And why would her mother have waited until after she was gone to reveal it to Libby?
    There was an answer, Libby knew it. And there was only one way—and one place—to find it.
    Wrath Village.
    If she ever got there.
    Just a few more miles, she told herself. She punched the gas as she started to climb a steep rise. Surely she had to be almost there.
    Just as she reached the top of the hill, a scattering of cottages appeared in the distance, and a modest black-and-white sign came into view.
     
    WRATH VILLAGE—3 MILES.
     
    She had made it. Somehow, remarkably, unbelievably, she had found it.
    As she rolled along the sleeping street, past a post office with its red-and-yellow ROYAL MAIL sign, Libby began to look ahead, envisioning the soft bed she would collapse into, imagining the warmth of the toasty fire that awaited at the quaint B and B she’d found when she’d begun researching the village on the Internet.
    She nearly shouted out loud a “hallelujah” when a short while later she saw the second, smaller sign, which directed her off the main road and onto what amounted to little more than a pathway, so obscure that it didn’t merit an A, a B, or, for that matter, even a Z.
    Just a few minutes more, she told herself, and she would be at her mother’s childhood home.
    But twenty minutes and two dead-end turns later, Libby was still driving.
    It took everything she had just to keep from falling over the steering wheel and weeping.
    “This ... is ... ridiculous,” she grumbled aloud to the windshield wipers that were intermittently sweeping away the faint drizzle that had begun to fall. She backtracked yet again and yanked the steering wheel to the right, encouraged when the isolated road passed a stone cottage, its windows as dark as the moonless sky. It was the first dwelling she’d seen since the post office earlier. No one seemed to be at home, but a cottage was still a good sign. Surely the village must be just ahead.
    Libby pressed on, slowing the car slightly when the road entered a thicket.