Tuesday Night Miracles Read Online Free PDF Page A

late summer, depending on your personal attitude toward wind, rain, and snow. This is Chicago territory, and as much as Kit hates to be where she is right this moment, to her there is nothing like the smell of oncoming winter, bus fumes, and onions gurgling in butter from the thousands of open kitchen windows all over this lovely city.
    As she dodges a series of holes in the sidewalk that look as if they were created when someone dropped a truck out of the sky, she catches a glimpse of a woman walking into the same building where she’s headed. What really catches her eye are the jet-black high heels, which look like a set of steak knives she once bought for her parents when she was in high school.
    Great news. A hooker is probably going to the same class she has been ordered to attend. Kit pauses at the entrance and has to stop herself from kicking the door with her own shoe, a simple and very practical short-heeled brown leather ankle boot she’s had for at least five years.
    Upstairs and already in the meeting room, Grace Collins is early. No big shocker there. She’s been pacing in the small room for a good twenty minutes.
    Peering out the filthy window, wondering if she’s in the correct location, she sees a woman come parading up the sidewalk in heels she will not let her daughter touch, let alone wear. Then, not far behind her, another woman walking so purposefully with her hands tucked into the pockets of her leather jacket that for a minute Grace thinks she might be a man.
    For some reason, that totally panics her; the woman she called down at the courthouse assured her there would be no men here tonight. That was one small consolation for everything else that had already happened and was about to happen. Grace has struggled with the notion of any kind of relationship with a man, even a casual encounter at something like this, since her divorce. “Please,” she prays, “let that person not be a man.” Then the two people on the sidewalk move out of sight, and now Grace isn’t even sure if they are coming into the building.
    For God’s sake, what if she’s in the wrong building? What if this is some kind of trap? The nasty ways of the world have changed everything. Grace has even gone so far as to imagine her daughter’s evil boyfriend waiting in the lobby to laugh at her as she walks through the door.
    What if the papers she received were fake? Anyone could have intercepted them. She’s even heard of people posing as police officers and holding unsuspecting individuals for ransom. She’s been in a continually escalating panic since the incident , as she has taken to calling it, happened to her.
    Just as a bead of perspiration unblocks the latest menopausal dam that has been building directly below each of Grace’s temples, the door pushes open and in comes the first woman from the sidewalk. And she really is wearing those heels—gaudy needlelike stilettos that caused tons of emergency-room problems years ago, when women were falling, ripping out their thigh muscles, and in some cases beating the living hell out of one another at dance clubs and bars all across America.
    It takes Grace a few moments to realize that she is staring at this woman’s shoes. They look like real stilettos, the kind with heels—if you can call something like that a heel—made of solid steel or alloy. Holy Mother of God. Weapons.
    “Hello,” the woman says, totally distracting Grace from the shoes.
    “Hi,” she responds, wishing she had a towel to wipe off her face.
    It takes each of them only a few seconds to seize her first impressions and run with them. Jane sees a sweaty middle-aged woman who could get lost in a crowd in about two seconds. The woman standing by the window is ordinary. She has wisps of blond in her chin-length hair, and she’s in need of a touch-up because her roots aren’t blonde—they are as gray as the painted concrete floor the women are standing on. Her black glasses look as if they’ve been