Read Online Blessing in Disguise by Eileen Goudge - Free Book Online Page B

Hill would have snatched at the excuse to kill the Civil Rights Act he’d been pushing for. The press, too, would have been on him like jackals. And the public? Come election day, even his staunchest supporters would have thought twice about punching a hole in the ballot beside Gene’s name.
    And where, Cordelia wondered, would this country be today if Gene had allowed that to happen?
    “The truth is,” she went on, struggling to control the quaver she could feel building at the back of her throat, “that Gene was the finest man I’ve ever known.” She fixed Dan with an unwavering gaze as she said it. “And I’m confident that when Grace comes to her senses she’ll set the record straight.”
    “Are you saying that Grace didn’t actually see this killing, like it says here?”
    “I’m saying that Grace always was prone to exaggeration. And in this case ... why, she wasn’t much more than nine years old at the time. I’m choosing to believe her imagination simply became overheated.” By no means was that an excuse for her daughter’s present lack of discretion, but Dan Killian didn’t have to know everything that went on in her family.
    Cordelia squeezed her hands together in her lap, feeling overheated herself and even a bit faint, though no doubt it was a good deal cooler in here than it seemed. Her pulse stepped up its shallow, flighty rhythm.
    She wanted to scream at Dan, force him to end this torturous foot-dragging and say whatever it was he planned on saying. But then, when he finally did speak, she longed to run from the room, slam the door on him.
    “Well, now, Dellie, I wish I could believe all this was going to blow over. But it’s not as simple as all that.” At least he has the decency to look ashamed, she thought. Watching him heave his bulk from his chair, Cordelia felt acutely aware of her own diminutiveness—what others, she knew, often mistakenly perceived as fragility. “I phoned this reporter fellow in Atlanta, and he says he got it from a reliable source. Not only that, but the wire services have picked it up. By tomorrow, people all over the country are going to be talking about this over breakfast. Shoot, Dellie, you know how I felt about Gene. He was a fine man, a great man. But this ...”
    “Why, Dan Killian, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you believed that vicious gossip!” cried Cordelia, no longer able to contain the hot fury rising in her.
    “ ’Course not, ’course I don’t.” Groping in his back pocket for a handkerchief and mopping his shiny forehead, Dan moved around his desk and paced over to a row of shelves where the half-dozen trophies from that silly golf club of his were displayed. Hackers and Slicers, they called themselves. And how fitting. Because that’s how she felt now, as if he were hacking at her, slicing her dream to bits. “It’s these times we’re living in, Dellie. These damn prickly times. Why, at the mill alone I employ more than eight hundred men and women—more than three-quarters of them black or brown or something in between. We’ve had affirmative action groups, the NAACP, you name it, stirring up trouble wherever they can. You know I’m a fair-minded man ... always have been. But just how do you think they-all’d react if Killian Textiles were to donate close to a million dollars toward a memorial for a senator who’d supposedly had a hand, however accidental it might have been, in killing a black man?”
    Cordelia felt like shouting out the truth, asking Dan what he would have done in Gene’s place. But she already knew the answer. Dan was a coward. She wondered now, as she often did, what would have happened if Gene hadn’t gone to Margaret’s rescue that day. Might Margaret, or even her little girl, have gotten hurt or, worse, killed? Ned Emory, she’d learned after his death, had been unstable, even violent. Forever accusing his wife of things she hadn’t done, affairs with other men. Dear, plain, sensible