Read Online Maggy's Child by Karen Robards - Free Book Online Page A

though, she was very perceptive. Maggy had thought she was doing an admirable job of hiding her injury.
    “I—twisted my wrist.”
    Maggy’s gaze met Virginia’s, and she saw quick, pained comprehension flare in the older woman’s eyes. Virginia probably knew her only son as well as anyone in the world. Though she might deplore many of his attitudes and actions, she loved him devotedly nevertheless. As Lucy had once said, with a small smile but entirely without humor, if Lyle committed a murder, Virginia would bury the body and take the secret with her to her grave. Maggy had suspected even then that hers was the body Lucy had in mind.
    “You want me to get out the Epsom salts?” Louella asked with concern, pausing on her way back into the kitchen.
    “No, I’ll take care of it. It’s not that bad, really.” Maggy had a genuine smile for the white-uniformed black woman. Louella was thin and small, with graying hair that she wore secured in a severe bun at her nape. Though she was nearing sixty, she had lost none of her deft quickness or her way with a cooking pot. She and her husband Herd had been with the Forrests for forty years, and as Maggy had learned from association with her neighbors’ help, they could rightly be expected to be more exclusively clannish than members of the family. But even when Maggy had come to Windermere as a bride, knowing nothing of how to conduct herself in a household such as this and as much out of place as a monkey in a tearoom, Louella and Herd had been kind to her. Maggy possessed a soft spot for the couple as a result.
    “There’s coffee and doughnuts in the kitchen,” Louella told her before disappearing through the French doors.
    With a wave for the others, Maggy followed Louella inside, again turned down an offer of a basin of Epsom salts in which to soak her wrist, and escaped from the kitchen. Breakfast could wait until she came down again. At the moment, she feared that anything she swallowed would promptly come back up.
    David was not in his room, and she wondered if Tipton had already driven him to his lesson. She had wanted to talk to him before he played in the tournament, but supposed it would have to wait until later. Anyway, there was nothing she could say that would erase the intensity of David’s need to please Lyle, or the pain he would feel if he didn’t succeed. No matter what David did, or how well he did it, Lyle always wanted more from him. If the boy brought home an “A” on a test, Lyle would demand to know why it wasn’t an “A-plus.”
    If there had been any way to do it, Maggy would have packed up her child and run away right then and there. But it was impossible, of course, quite apart from the fact that at the moment David was nowhere to be found. Her son would fight her every step of the way if she tried to take him from the father he idolized—and Lyle would find them, sooner or later. Maggy had no doubt at all about that. And then, one way or another, she might lose David for good.
    Defeated, she went to her room and shut and locked the door behind her. In her bathroom she swallowed two aspirin, then soaked a towel in cold water and wrapped it around her swollen wrist. After several such applications, it felt a little better. The first-aid kit in her linen closet contained an elastic bandage. She bound her wrist tightly with it, secured the little clips, and determinedly ignored the heated throbbing. She was heading toward her dressing room to choose an outfit for the day—anything but the yellow linen—when she saw the clumsily wrapped package on her bed.
    It was from David. She knew it even before she saw the card on which he had scrawled “Happy Birthday” and his name. As she pulled the last of the gaily decorated paper away, and the gift itself was revealed to her view, her hands stilled of their own accord. During that first moment of recognition, even her breathing suspended.
    It was a small, framed watercolor of herself and