Gambling On A Secret. Sara Walter Ellwood

Чтение книги онлайн.

      If Charli didn’t soon take a break from cleaning the inside of the house to make the place livable, she feared she’d set a match to it. Why the hell hadn’t she given Tracy a time for Dylan to show up?

      As she headed off the back porch to the potting shed, she looked up at the fluffy clouds dappling the mid-morning sky. On such a warm day, she itched to be in the garden again.

      Mrs. Pratt had spent two whole evenings telling her all about the Blackwell clan after she had mentioned she’d bid on the ranch last month. Did every small town have a crazy mixed-up history? Who would have thought the Blackwells, Fergusons and Cartwrights were all distantly related? From what she could tell, the clans despised each other.

      But according to Mrs. Pratt, the county was founded when Cole Cartwright and his two younger cousins–Dylan Ferguson and Elijah Blackwell–won the tract of land making up the county in a poker game just after the Civil War.

      Whether she wanted to know or not didn’t matter to the landlady as she rambled on about the ending of the fifty-year oil partnership between the Blackwells and the Fergusons, spurring a feud between Jock Blackwell and Jason Ferguson.

      However, what had interested her the most were Aida’s stories about Penelope Blackwell. Jock’s eccentric mother loved gardening and spent hours in the garden healing from her bouts with mental illness. An illness most people in town agreed had been passed down to Jock.

      After Charli retrieved the tools from the shed, she placed them by the bed near the wraparound porch. She ambled around the six massive beds in the front yard and the weedy border along the tattered picket fence until she made her way to the small lake in the front. Maybe once she got rid of the neglect, the garden would be beautiful.

      Wasn’t that the story of her life?

      Horsetails, cattails, water cannas and sweet flags edged the lake created by damming the creek running in the front of her property. A wooden dock, rotted and covered with green slime, jutted into the water. Someday she’d replace it. She could imagine the girls who came to her home to heal from life’s hard knocks paddling around in small boats on the calm water, or fishing along the edge.

      An old concrete bench sat on a stone patio near the water’s edge. With the ivy and weeds, she wasn’t certain the stone path wove through all of the large beds to the house, but here and there part of a path would materialize out of the overgrowth. For a half second, she considered sitting on the bench, until something slithered in the ivy and over the edge of the mossy rocks into the water by the lip of the lake.

       Snake!

      She shrieked and ran through the weeds and high grass to the porch steps, several yards away, clutching her heaving chest. Maybe a match wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Hiring a bulldozer to level the place completely after the fire was an even better one.

      She held her chest and waited for her breathing to return to normal. How many more snakes were in the garden? “Don’t think about it.” She gingerly made her way down the porch steps. “It was just a water snake.”

      What if it was poisonous?

      Don’t think about it!

      She picked up the hoe and used it to poke in the weeds and ivy in a bed close to the house where she’d left her tools. Once she was sure there were no snakes hiding in the overgrowth to bite her legs off, she got busy pruning the shrubs.

      With one eye on the lookout for another snake.

      As she worked, a pang of grief sneaked up on her. She stopped for a moment and looked at the rosebush she was pruning. She missed her grandfather, not the man he’d been when she’d met him, not the man who worshiped his art and wealth, but the man he’d become after she’d run away. Pink roses would be a perfect reminder of him. She paused and stared at the new leaves unfurling on the stems. The day she’d ventured out into the garden at the Long Arrow for the first time soon replaced the vision of new growth.

      When she had first gone to live with Hank, there hadn’t been even a flowerpot at the ranch house. But sometime between when she’d left with the rodeo cowboy who’d taken her to Las Vegas and the day she’d come home after being released from the correction center in Nevada four years later, he’d taken up gardening.

      She had wandered around the mansion for three days after coming home from the rehab in which she’d been treated for alcohol poisoning. Bored and needing to get out, she’d ventured outside. She’d been surprised to find Hank bending over a purple daisy-like flower meticulously snipping off dead buds.

      “What kind of flower is that? It looks like something that СКАЧАТЬ