Page 55 of Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Book
In his mind, he’d always imagined his mother would leave the hospital and he’d take real good care of her. But she died of liver failure a few months after his father. At eighteen years old, Logan inherited a fortune. There was more money in his account than he knew what to do with. But Nathan had a few ideas.
Logan walked over to Jeb, who seemed less than thrilled to see him. “What are you doing?”
“Hey, Logan. My brother left his truck here. The doctor says he shouldn’t drive tonight, so I’m going to take him home.”
“Why didn’t he call me?” Logan felt the wound keenly. “He knew I was waiting for him.”
“I don’t know, Logan,” Jeb answered.
“Don’t y’all hate each other?”
“Yep. Can’t stand the motherfucker. But he’s still my brother.”
“How are you gonna get home if you drive his truck up to my guesthouse?” Logan hated how he sounded. Like a whiny little bitch.
“I think Mitch will be staying with me from here on out. He’s in deep shit already. And as you may have noticed, he’s not that bright. He’ll end up destroying his life if I don’t keep an eye on him.”
Logan couldn’t come up with an argument. Nathan would be livid when he found out Logan had lost custody of their guest. Mitch was their ticket to the mainstream. It was Nathan’s first big test, and he was fixing to fail it.
“Everything okay with you?” Jeb asked.
His hands were tingling. Wave after wave of heat washed over him. “It was that fucking doctor, wasn’t it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He turned Mitch against me.”
Jeb had that look in his eye again. Thethis boy ain’t rightlook. The look Logan had been getting from people his ENTIRE FUCKING LIFE.
Jeb took a step forward. “Logan, listen to me. Nobody turned anyone against you. Mitch is my brother. It’s my job to look after him. You will not go after that doctor. He’s the only thing keeping half of the people in this town alive. Do you understand me?”
“Fuck you,” Logan said. “And fuck your brother, too.”
“Alright, son,” Jeb said. “But if I hear about you messing with the doctor, you’re going to wish you’d never been born.”
Jeb drove off in Mitch’s truck, leaving Logan alone again with Augustus Wainwright. Then he saw them on the far side of the square. That feminist bitch, Beverly Underwood, and the two little thugs who’d ruined the rally. Everything was falling apart thanks to those three. He saw Beverly Underwood turn his way, and Logan stepped into the dark shadow beside the statue. Looking spooked, she hurried the Wright boys toward her car.
“Y’all can run,” Logan said. “But you can’t hide.”
Chapter 23
The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are
“So the Wainwright family won’t end with me?”
“Sweetheart, you are the tip of one stunted little branch on an otherwise thriving tree,” Beverly Underwood told her daughter. She’d been taking a break from cleaning up Jackson Square when Lindsay called.
“Wow.” Beverly couldn’t see Lindsay on the other side of the phone, but she pictured her searching for words to follow that one up. “I don’t know how I should feel about all this,” Lindsay finally said.
Beverly looked up at the statue of Augustus Wainwright. “I’m not sure many people have been where we and the Wrights are right now,” she said. “But I can promise you one thing, there are a lot of folks headed our way.”
The day after her father passed away, Beverly discovered an envelope on his desk. Written on the front was her name. She thought, briefly, he’d left her a letter. But he hadn’t been that kind of father. He’d always loved her—Beverly knew that—but he chose to do so from a distance. Like so many men of his generation, he kept his feelings carefully locked up where they posed no danger to anyone—least of all, him.
Inside the envelope was a single page of monogrammed stationery with eight characters written in her father’s shaky hand.BDW12180—her initialsand birth date. Beverly still kept that slip of paper in her handbag. Wherever she went, it went with her. There was more love in that single gesture than her father could have fit into a fifty-page letter. She knew the moment she saw it that it was the password to his digital family tree.
In the two decades after his wife’s death, the tree had been her father’s passion. For much of that time, Beverly had avoided all talk of it. Aside from Trip and Lindsay, her father was the only family she had left, and she refused to let Augustus Wainwright come between them.
It was only out of a sense of daughterly duty that Beverly had poured herself a large glass of wine, taken a seat in front of the computer, and typed in the password her father had bequeathed to her. She expected to find a tribute to the Wainwright legacy. Instead, she discovered a fascinating world teeming with characters forgotten by time. Her father had researched dozens of their ancestors, rescuing them from oblivion and adding their stories to the family tree. There was the second son of an English nobleman who became a notorious pirate. A gentleman who’d been kicked out of Plymouth Plantation for having “novel ideas,” and a farmer who was likely North America’s first axe murderer of European descent.
