Paradise Falls Read Online Free

should’ve told me. I’d have given you a hand with that. Looks heavy.” He glanced toward Fiona. “Don’t get many visitors to Paradise Falls.” His words were delivered in clipped tones, with a thick accent Fiona didn’t recognize. He carefully set down his pencil and stepped around the desk.
    Fiona extended her hand. “My name is Fiona Downey.”
    “The schoolmistress?” The man couldn’t hide his surprise as he looked her over. “Didn’t know you’d be coming in today. Neither did the Haydn family, I’ll wager.”.
    Her heart sank. That would mean there was no one here to greet her.
    “Fine people, the Haydns. You won’t find anyone better in Paradise Falls.” The stationmaster looked pointedly at her trunk. “Don’t think you’d care to haul that all the way to the Haydn farm. Just leave it here until someone’s heading that way. I’ll see they deliver it.”
    “Thank you. How will I find the Haydn farm?”
    He stepped to the door and pointed. “Just follow that road up the hill and around a couple of bends. It’ll be the sixth farm you come to. No more’n a half-dozen miles, I figure.”
    Six miles. She saw the conductor step aboard the train, and gave serious consideration to following him. Then her sanity returned and she managed to smile at the station manager. “Thank you. I don’t know your name.”
    “Gerhardt Shultz.”
    “Mr. Shultz, do you think I might leave my valise here with my trunk?”
    “Yes, indeed.” He took it from her hand.
    “Thank you.” She turned away and walked out of the little shed into blinding sunlight.
    Squaring her shoulders, she started up the dirt path, wondering what had happened to the old man and little boy who had shared her train ride. In the excitement of retrieving her trunk and getting directions to her destination, she had lost track of them. Seeing no one on the trail ahead of her, she decided they must have been picked up by family.
    Family.
    The very word brought a heaviness to her heart, and she had to fight the tears that threatened. She’d once been part of a family. Now she felt like the loneliest person in the world.
    “Oh, Da.” Her words came tumbling out in a cry of anguish. “How I wish you could be here with me.”
    She shivered as a breeze whispered across her cheek, tugging at the ribbons of her bonnet, just the way, her father often had.
    Though her doubts remained, a little of her fears seemed to subside.
    As she passed the first squalid farm, and studied the leaning outbuildings and meager crops in the fields, the thought of her grand adventure mocked her. Grand indeed. This seemed to be the sort of grinding poverty her parents had endured, before coming to America. It would seem that she’d traded one set of problems for another. Perhaps she should have gone to Chicago with her mother. Even if the only work she found would be cleaning other people’s homes, at least she and her mother could be together.
    Here she was, nothing more than a fool, trapped in a web of her own making. Now there was nothing to do but endure it as best she could, and hope that by year’s end she had enough money saved to leave this dreary place and make a home with her mother any place but Paradise Falls.
    “Was this what drove you from Ireland, Da?”
    The sound of her own voice startled her and she walked faster. The sun was now high overhead, sending little rivers of sweat down her back. Her boots were stiff and she thought about sitting on a boulder and removing them. But what would her hosts think if the schoolteacher should arrive barefoot?
    Her hair beneath the bonnet grew damp. After half an hour she’d tossed her hat back from her head, leaving it bouncing against her back, secured by the ribbons at her throat. She was so grateful for the breeze she gave not a thought to the havoc it might be playing with her hair, which tended to curl into little corkscrews in the heat.
    The second farm she passed was no better than the first,