Getting Lucky Read Online Free

woman isn't still in the house, is she?" Lizzy bounced around in the backseat, only the seat belt keeping her from barreling out of the truck and running toward the ramshackle house that Edna Lassiter had lived in for more than fifty years.
       So the woman had actually bought property in Saint Jo. He'd heard that it sold to a schoolteacher. Folks didn't buy property unless they were planning on sticking around because it would be years before they could unload it. Griffin gritted his teeth, slapped the steering wheel, and swore under his breath, then imme diately looked in the rearview mirror to see if Lizzy had heard him. She was too busy looking at the house to hear anything. Of all the kids in the classroom, why did she have to befriend those two?
       The Lucky Clover Ranch property started a mile out of Saint Jo and covered most of the ground on the east side of the road from there to Capps Corner. Then he owned a fair-sized chunk of land on up toward Illinois Bend, a small community on the border of the Red River. It had a church and a few scattered houses. Capps Corner was only slightly bigger. Saint Jo had less than a thousand people, and Alvera Clancy said that was counting the dogs and depending on several girls to get pregnant and keep up the population. Why would any single mother come to Saint Jo?
       He made a right-hand turn down the paved lane, through a brick and wooden arch with a swinging sign at the top. The ranch brand, a four leaf clover, was burned into the wood on either side of the words, Welcome to the Lucky Clover Ranch . It was the truth: everyone was welcome at the ranch.
       Everyone except Edna Lassiter, who had kept a hundred-year-old feud alive with the Luckadeau family. She had gone to the courthouse once a year to file a restraining order on anyone with the last name of Luckadeau or anyone who might be kin to those heathens, as she called the whole family. As if he or any of his family preceding him would have any business on that ramshackle property of hers. There was an old rumor that it went back farther than her generation— something about a Lassiter being jilted by a Luckadeau a hundred years before.
       Edna had been a recluse except for Sunday morning services, so not many people even knew she existed. However, there was that day that she called Lizzy the spawn of the devil when Lizzy bumped into her cane in the church parking lot. Lizzy would spit out a cuss word as slick as scum on a farm pond, but she whispered the word spawn anytime she used it, and had been terrified of the elderly gray-haired woman after that.
       Griffin wondered why in the world a schoolteacher would buy that property. The house was probably haunted and if the inside looked like the outside, no one would want to live there.
       Lizzy opened the truck door and bailed out, taking off in a dead run toward the two-story ranch house with a porch around three sides on both the bottom and upper floors. Painted white, it sat in a grove of pecan trees and had a white picket yard fence all around it. Lizzy left the gate hanging with a yell for her father to close it and went tearing into the house hollering for Nana Rita.
       "Right here, child. What is the matter?" A thin Mexican lady emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on the tail of her apron. Her black hair was pulled up into a bun on top of her head. Her jeans bagged slightly on her slim frame, and a red T-shirt peeked out from under a bibbed apron made of red gingham checks.
       "There's another me. She's in my room, Nana Rita, and her name is Annie. She's got a streak in her hair just like mine and blue eyes just like mine and even a dent in her chin. Her momma is my teacher, Miss Julie, and she's got curly red hair but she don't have a lucky streak in her hair. Is Annie my sister? Why didn't Daddy tell me I have a sister just like me?"
       "Because you don't," Griffin said from the doorway.
       Marita tucked her chin and