Hot On His Trail. Kristin Eckhardt

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СКАЧАТЬ illness. House after house was hit by death, and all the townspeople could do was pray for salvation.

      None came. By the end of the year, over one hundred souls had perished. The influenza virus took those in the prime of life, leaving behind an unprece-dented number of orphans. And the virus knew no boundaries. By the time the threat had passed, more than thirty-seven million people had succumbed worldwide.

      But in one house, there was still hope.

      Isabella Trueblood had come to Carmelita in the late 1800s with her father, blacksmith Saul Trueblood, and her mother, Teresa Collier Trueblood. The family had traveled from Indiana, leaving their Quaker roots behind.

      Young Isabella grew up to be an intelligent woman who had a gift for healing and storytelling. Her dreams centered on the boy next door, Foster Carter, the son of Chester and Grace.

      Just before the bad times came in 1918, Foster asked Isabella to be his wife, and the future of the Carter spread was secured. It was a happy union, and the future looked bright for the young couple.

      Two years later, not one of their relatives was alive. How the young couple had survived was a miracle. And during the epidemic, Isabella and Foster had taken in more than twenty-two orphaned children from all over the county. They fed them, clothed them, taught them as if they were blood kin.

      Then Isabella became pregnant, but there were complications. Love for her handsome son, Josiah, born in 1920, wasn’t enough to stop her from grow-ing weaker by the day. Knowing she couldn’t leave her husband to tend to all the children if she died, she set out to find families for each one of her orphaned charges.

      And so the Trueblood Foundation was born. Named in memory of Isabella’s parents, it would become famous all over Texas. Some of the orphaned children went to strangers, but many were reunited with their

      families. After reading notices in newspapers and church bulletins, aunts, uncles, cousins and grand-parents rushed to Carmelita to find the young ones they’d given up for dead.

      Toward the end of Isabella’s life, she’d brought together more than thirty families, and not just her orphans. Many others, old and young, made their way to her doorstep, and Isabella turned no one away.

      At her death, the town’s name was changed to Trueblood, in her honor. For years to come, her simple grave was adorned with flowers on the anniversary of her death, grateful tokens of appreciation from the families she had brought together.

      Isabella’s son, Josiah, grew into a fine rancher and married Rebecca Montgomery in 1938. They had a daughter, Elizabeth Trueblood Carter, in 1940. Elizabeth married her neighbor William Garrett in 1965, and gave birth to twins Lily and Dylan in 1971, and daughter Ashley a few years later. Home was the Double G ranch, about ten miles from Trueblood proper, and the Garrett children grew up listening to stories of their famous great-grandmother, Isabella. Because they were Truebloods, they knew that they, too, had a sacred duty to carry on the tradition passed down to them: finding lost souls and reuniting loved ones.

      Special thanks and acknowledgment to Kristin Eckhardt for her contribution to the TRUEBLOOD, TEXAS series.

      For my wonderful mother, Charol Pleiss

      Special thanks to Dr. Lisa Bladt for her medical expertise

      Contents

       Prologue

       Chapter One

       Chapter Two

       Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

       Chapter Eighteen

       Chapter Nineteen

       Chapter Twenty

       Chapter Twenty-One

       Chapter Twenty-Two

       Chapter Twenty-Three

       Excerpt

       PROLOGUE

      Texas Children’s Hospital

      Houston, Texas, 1992

      DR. PAULA BENNING, one of Houston’s busiest pediatric cardiologists, stood outside the door of the consultation room, her stomach twisting in dread. She loved every part of her profession—except this one.

      A headache throbbed in her left temple, a signal that her blood sugar was low. She knew she should eat something before she broke the news, or at least find a carton of orange juice. But she’d learned early on in her career that delaying unpleasant tasks only made them harder. СКАЧАТЬ