True Romance Nine Romantic Stories to Remember by BroadLit

Author:BroadLit [BroadLit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780989020060
Publisher: BroadLit

THE DARK PATH IN THE WOODS

I knew something was wrong that morning when Kathy came to the little clothing and gift shop I ran out on the highway. Kathy was my husband Randy’s sister and we’d lived across the road from each other for years. I never had a sister, but if I did, I couldn’t have had one any better than Kathy. She was seven years older than Randy, who was just a few months older than I was.

Kathy had been like a mother to all the kids in her family after their mother died. She’d worked in the fields along with all her other responsibilities. Then, when Randy was twelve and the youngest was about school age, their father died. Kathy had the whole burden of taking care of the farm and raising her siblings. Somehow she and her young husband, Peter, had kept the kids together and got them raised. They were very poor but it didn’t seem to matter.

Kathy wasn’t very well now . . . no wonder, hard as she’d worked all those years. She’d held down a job at the shirt factory and cooked and worked on the farm and in the garden even when her own two boys were little. We all had it better now. All our kids were nearly grown and we had nice houses and good lives that we sometimes forgot to appreciate.

“What’s wrong, Kathy?” I asked.

Her eyes met mine and she shook her head. “Donna, I hate to tell you this, but I can’t not tell you either,” she said.

We were alone in the store.

“What’s wrong, Kathy?” I repeated.

“I was uptown at the supermarket and I ran into Kathryn on her way out. We talked for a while and then she left. Then I heard some boys about her age talking. Oh, Donna, I hate this.” She stopped.

I got a cold feeling around my heart. Kathryn, our oldest daughter, slim and tall and lovely, had been married two years now. We hadn’t wanted her to marry that young . . . just eighteen, but there’d been no stopping her. Her husband, Jason, was a good boy, from a prominent local family.

I searched Kathy’s tired, sad face and told her to go on.

“The boys were talking about seeing her parked out in the woods with Jason’s father,” Kathy blurted. “They’d been working for him planting the week before, and then one of them told the others that Kathryn had met him every day and they’d go off into the woods.”

“Clint?” I asked. Kathy nodded and I felt sick.

Clint Henderson owned and farmed the whole bottom for miles, one of the few farmers making any money. Mostly he raised cotton and soybeans in those rich, dark fields between strips of thick woods left as windbreaks and to hold the soil against erosion. Clint also owned, or at least controlled, the feed mill. Actually, his wife had inherited it, along with her brothers, from her father. They’d bought out her brothers or made some arrangement and Mary Ann had run it for years.

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