Stroke of Fortune by Christine Rimmer

entered.
    â€œHello, Josie. So nice to see you.” Grace’s tone was warm. Her eyes were not. She crossed the room and took the application from the housekeeper. “Thank you, Anita.”
    The housekeeper nodded and backed out, pulling the double doors shut in front of her.
    â€œWell,” said Grace when they were alone. “Would you like anything? Coffee?”
    â€œNo, thanks.”
    â€œHave a seat.” Grace gestured at a fiddle-back chair. Josie perched on the edge of it. Grace went around the coffee table and sat on the sofa.
    The room had plum-colored walls trimmed in white. The furniture was big and fine and comfortable, the floors of dark, lustrous hardwood covered with beautiful Oriental rugs. It was just as Josie remembered it—and she remembered all too well.
    Once, in a rage, a very pregnant Monica had grabbed a crystal vase from the marble-topped table in the corner and hurled it at Flynt. “I’m fat as one of your prize cows.” She had called Flynt an ugly name. “It’s your fault, and I hate you, Flynt Carson.” And she’d let the vase fly. She hadn’t even cared that the housekeeper happened to be in the room at the time.
    Then, after Monica died, Flynt would sometimes drink himself to sleep in there. Not very often. He preferred his study for serious, all-night drinking. But now and then he would end up in the sitting room. More than once, Josie had come in to check on him and found him passed out on the sofa where Grace was sitting now. Josie would gently settle a blanket over him, her heart aching for him, loving him though she knew it was hopeless, calling herself a fool—and loving him anyway.
    â€œSo,” said Grace, a little too brusquely for comfort, “I see you’ve been working at a day-care center.”
    â€œYes. For nine months I was at Kid’s Place Child Care up in Hurst. That’s in the Fort—”
    â€œI know where Hurst is, Josie.”
    Josie shut her mouth and looked down at her folded hands, feeling all of a sudden like a badly behavedyoung child. Grace Carson knew how to put you in your place with a gentle word and a reproving glance.
    Grace said, “This is a glowing recommendation. They seem to have been very impressed with you.”
    Josie pulled herself up straight. “I loved working with the children. I had four months doing baby care, and then the rest of the time I had the toddlers.” She had also worked nights as a waitress. With the two jobs, she’d been able to support herself in a modest way, to pay Flynt back the money she owed him, to buy her computer—and to send a little home to Alva, as well.
    Grace sighed. “Josie.” The papers in her hands rustled as she tightened her grip on them. “I think we’d better just get to the point here, don’t you?”
    Josie’s stomach clenched all the harder. She kept her spine very straight. “Yes. Good idea.”
    â€œYou…took off last year out of nowhere. One day you were here and we knew we could depend on you, and then you were gone. We never heard another word from you, until right now.” Grace lifted one shoulder in a sad little shrug. “Oh, yes, Flynt did mention something about family difficulties. But that hardly made sense. We heard you had left town, left your mother behind.” Grace hesitated, as if she couldn’t decide how to go on.
    Then she continued, “I’ll admit, we were quite concerned for you at first. We thought that maybeyour father…well, that he’d been released and you were frightened he might come after you.”
    Josie’s father had died in Huntsville Prison, ten months ago. Everyone in town knew that Josie had been the one to put him there.
    Grace went on, “But then we heard about what happened to him.” Rutger Lavender had finally run into someone meaner than he was. He’d been stabbed in the prison yard by another