Secrets Gone South (Crimson Romance) Read Online Free Page A

home.
    He’d grown up in town in a cramped house, on a sad street in Mill Town, to parents who had no energy for anything except misery. Mill Town was not an official place, but what everyone called the blocks of houses where most of the cotton mill workers lived—which was where Will’s father had worked when he wasn’t drunk. In his alcoholism, Royce Garrett had been more self-deprecating than abusive, but the situation itself was abusive enough. His mother was just a shadow. After his father drank himself to death when Will was sixteen, they lived on a small pension from the mill, the ironing his mother took in, and what Will made at his various part time jobs. By the time she died when he was nineteen, he’d graduated from Merritt High and was working full time stocking and sacking groceries at Big Starr Market, and part time mowing grass at the country club and cleaning up graves at the Merritt cemetery.
    That his mother had owned fifty acres of land in the woods adjoining the Avery’s farm came as more of a shock to Will than her death. She had inherited the land from a distant aunt ten years before. Why she had never mentioned it, he could only speculate. Maybe she was afraid that if she told, her husband would have made her sell it and poured the profits down his throat. Maybe she’d just been too tired to fool with it. Or maybe the money that Senator Avery had paid her for the hunting rights to a ten-acre strip was the only security she had.
    Will had never regretted selling that ten acres with the pond to Arabelle’s father, even after his view on killing animals for food changed. It was, after all, only a personal conviction.
    The senator had waited a decent amount of time after the funeral before approaching Will. It seemed he’d offered to buy the land from Will’s mother more than once, but she had liked the idea of the yearly income. The senator liked to invite friends and political types to hunt, but he didn’t like for his wife and children’s home to be invaded. He wanted to build a hunting lodge on the property and he couldn’t do that unless he owned it.
    The offer had been fair—more than fair, but not so generous that Will felt insulted because of his poverty. Years later, after he had learned his craft and made some money, Will had asked Arabelle’s father why he had been so generous.
    “You could have easily gotten it for a song,” Will had said. “I didn’t know any better.”
    The man had nodded. “If you’d been an adult on an even playing field, I would have gotten it for what I could. That’s just business. But it was worth it to me for my purposes. And I think there is a special place in hell for people who swindle kids in desperate circumstances. Nothing’s worth that.”
    Will had always liked the man and he respected that answer. The money had allowed him to get out of Mill Town where almost all of his money went to rent.
    Now that he had land, he promised himself he would never pay another cent of rent on anything. People had thought he was crazy when he bought a used travel trailer and a generator and cleared enough land to set himself up a little home.
    It was the best thing he’d ever done. He found peace in the woods—serenity. It was as if he had always belonged there. He didn’t respect the woods yet; that would come later. He’d always been able to draw and had done well in art class, though he’d never thought much about it. Poor people didn’t have time for artistic endeavors. But one summer night, after cutting grass and cleaning out flower beds at the Merritt Country Club all day, he’d gone home, built a campfire, and picked up a piece of wood. With his pocketknife, he’d coaxed a little duck out of it. It was crude, but it gave him satisfaction. So he did another and it was better. Then he moved on to other birds and animals. By the time the Merritt Bobcat Booster Fair rolled around the next spring, he had a whole box full of stuff, some of it not