The Bad Luck Wedding Dress by Geralyn Dawson Read Free Book Online

after the three of them decided they wanted Jenny Fortune to be their mother, they’d launched an all-out effort to convince the dressmaker that their father would be a perfect husband for her. “Something we said must have made a difference.”
    “I bet it was the part about Papa sewing up the rip in my dolly’s arm,” Katrina observed solemnly. “She must really like people who sew.”
    “Maybe, Kat. You never know,” Emma replied. She turned to Maribeth. “I’m ever so sorry about whatever happened to make Miss Fortune cry, but it turned out splendidly for us. You know how Papa gets about tears. Did you see his face when he was talking to her? I think he finally realized how pretty Miss Fortune is. This is wonderful.”
    “Wonderful? I wouldn’t go that far.” Maribeth snorted in disgust and glared at Katrina. “We ended up in major trouble because of it. You got back way too soon, Kat. You could have hollered or something and warned us that Papa was here. You could have ruined everything.”
    “That’s not my fault!” the youngest sister protested before popping her thumb in her mouth.
    “You did fine,” Emma, the peacemaker, said.
    “No, she didn’t; she got us in trouble! I didn’t think Papa would ever end that lecture.” Maribeth folded her arms in a huff. “It will take us two days to wash all the baseboards in the house. Oh, Kat, how come you didn’t slow him down? Emma and me didn’t beat y’all home by more than five minutes.” Glancing at her older sister, she added, “I told you we shouldn’t have waited for her to get inside the End of the Line before we left.”
    Emma shook her head. “Absolutely not! We couldn’t leave Kat alone in the Acre.”
    “We’re getting punished for doing just that.”
    Katrina’s voice sounded mushy as she spoke around her thumb. “Mari McBride, you’re a mean sister.”
    The squabbling continued for a number of minutes while Emma bent her mind to the task of how next to proceed. “We must work on Papa,” she announced during a lull in the action. “We’ve primed the pump with Miss Fortune. Now it’s time to prove to Papa how badly he needs a wife.”
    Katrina stuck out her tongue at Maribeth one last time then asked, “How we gonna do that, Emmie?”
    “That’s what I want to know,” Maribeth chimed in. “We can’t talk to him about it. Anytime one of us brings up the idea of getting a new mother, he gets that look on his face. I don’t like that look, Em. Don’t forget we need to be sneaky about this.”
    The eleven-year-old’s eyes gleamed with mischief. “First, I think we’ll give Katrina that reward we promised her for crying to Papa about Miss Fortune.”
    Clapping her hands together, Katrina beamed at her sister. “You’re still gonna buy me my dill pickle at the mercantile?”
    Maribeth frowned and opened her mouth to voice an obvious protest, but Emma forestalled her by saying, “No, I’m not.”
    Maribeth gave a cat-and-cream smile while her younger sister wailed, “Why? I did what you told me to!”
    Emma nodded. “That’s right, you did. And I do plan to get you your pickle, only we’re not going to buy it. We are going to steal it.”
    “What?” Maribeth and Katrina gasped in unison.
    “It’s the next part of my plan. It’s how we’ll go to work on Papa. We’ll steal pickles from the mercantile, and we’ll make sure we get caught doing it.”
    “Oh, Emma, you’re naughty.” Katrina’s eyes grew as round as a barn owl’s.
    “Yeah,” Maribeth agreed, her eyes shining with delight. “And smart, too. Nothing needles Papa more than an appearance by the McBride Menaces.” Her grin faded as she added glumly, “He’ll have us scrubbing the ceilings for sure.”
    Emma pointed toward the floor and the woman who worked in the street-level shop. “But won’t it be worth it?” They all nodded.

    ONE WEEK later when Marshal T.I. Courtright arrived for what was becoming a daily visit to the End of the