Wish You Well by David Baldacci Read Free Book Online Page A

concerning their mother.
    Lou stared out the window, arms across her chest.
    “Hell No,” said Diamond, “just plop me off over to the bridge. Catch me anythin’ good, I bring it fer supper. Tell Miss Louisa?”
    Lou watched as Hell No edged his blunt chin forward, apparently signaling a big, happy “Okay, Diamond!”
    The boy popped up over the seat again. “Hey, y’all fancy good lard-fried fish fer supper?” His expression was hopeful, his intentions no doubt honorable; however, Lou was unwilling just now to make friends.
    “We all shore would, Diamond. Then maybe we can find us a pitcher show in this one-horse town.”
    As soon as Lou said this, she regretted it. It wasn’t just the disappointed look on Diamond’s face; it was also the fact that she had just blasphemed the place where her father had grown up. She caught herself looking to heaven, watching for grim lightning bolts, or maybe sudden rains, like tears falling.
    “From some big city, ain’tcha?” Diamond said.
    Lou drew her gaze from the sky. “The biggest. New York,” she said.
    “Huh, well, y’all don’t be telling folks round here that.”
    Oz gaped at his ex–blood brother. “Why not?”
    “Right chere’s good, Hell No. Come on now, Jeb.”
    Hell No stopped the car. Directly in front of them was the bridge, although it was the puniest such one Lou had ever seen. It was a mere twenty feet of warped wooden planks laid over six-by-six tarred railroad ties, with an arch of rusted metal on either side to prevent one from plummeting all of five feet into what looked to be a creek full of more flat rock than water. Suicide by bridge jumping did not appear to be a realistic option here. And, judging from the shallow water, Lou did not hold out much hope for a lard-fried fish dinner, not that such a meal sounded particularly appealing to her anyway.
    As Diamond pulled his gear from the back of the Hudson, Lou, who was a little sorry for what she had said, but more curious than sorry, leaned over the seat and whispered to him through the open rear window.
    “Why do you call him Hell No?”
    Her unexpected attention brought Diamond back to good spirits and he smiled at her. “ ’Cause that be his name,” he said in an inoffensive manner. “He live with Miss Louisa.”
    “Where did he get that kind of a name?”
    Diamond glanced toward the front seat and pretended to fiddle with something in his tackle box. In a low voice he said, “His daddy pass through these parts when Hell No ain’t no more’n a baby. Plunked him right on the dirt. Well, a body say to him, ‘You gonna come back, take that child?’ And he say, ‘Hell no.’ Now, Hell No, he never done nobody wrong his whole life. Ain’t many folk say that. And no rich ones.”
    Diamond grabbed his tackle box and swung the pole to his shoulder. He walked to the bridge, whistling a tune, and Hell No drove the Hudson across, the structure groaning and complaining with each turn of the car wheels. Diamond waved and Oz returned it with his stained hand, hope welling back for maybe a friendship of enduring degree with Jimmy “Diamond” Skinner, crimson-crowned fisherboy of the mountain.
    Lou simply stared at the front seat. At a man named Hell No.

 
     
    CHAPTER SEVEN
    The drop was a good three thousand feet if it was an inch. The Appalachians might pale in size if leveled against the upstart Rockies, but to the Cardinal children they seemed abundantly tall enough.
    After leaving the small bridge and Diamond behind, the ninety-six horses of the Hudson’s engine had started to whine, and Hell No had dropped to a lower gear. The car’s protest was understandable, for now the uneven dirt road headed up at almost a forty-five-degree angle and wound around the mountain like a rattler’s coils. The road’s supposed twin lanes, by any reasonable measurement, were really only a single pregnant one. Fallen rock lay along the roadside, like solid tears from the mountain’s face.
    Oz