Looking for Miracles
Read Looking for Miracles Online
Authors: Lynn Bulock
“Am I too close?” Mike asked.
“No. Yes. Let’s just say I’m not used to this much, uh, male company.”
“So don’t think of me as male company. Think of me as a computer tutor.”
“That will take some doing,” Lori muttered. He hadn’t moved any farther away, and it was all she could do to think, period.
“Where was I?” He leaned even closer to her, and she could feel the warmth of him along her back as he studied the screen with her.
His voice rumbled in her ear. “I think it was your interest. I mean, interest in figures. No, I mean the interest figures. On the spreadsheet.” He leaned his forehead down to her shoulder. It felt so good to have him there, leaning on her. “Am I making much sense?”
“Not much. But I don’t mind.…”
Books by Lynn Bulock
Love Inspired
Gifts of Grace #80
Looking for Miracles #97
Silhouette Romance
Surprise Package
#1053
And Mommy Makes Three
#1154
LYNN BULOCK
lives near St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband, two sons, a dog and a cat. She has been telling stories since she could talk and writing them down since fourth grade. She is the author of nine contemporary romance novels.
Looking for Miracles
Lynn Bulock
I can do all things in Christ who gives me strength.
—
Philippians
4:13
To Joe, always
and
To CJB, who never ceases to amaze me.
Dear Reader,
Friedens, Missouri, is not a real place. At least, you won’t find it on any map. I’ve gotten quite familiar with it in the course of the past six months, though. So familiar that I didn’t want to leave it behind as I have most of my fictional places. Friedens (which is German for “peace,” in honor of the German settlers like my ancestors who built most of the towns in eastern Missouri) is a combination of a dozen of my favorite real Missouri towns. They’re those places that still have a county courthouse, a real town square and a solid brick-and-stone library.
The town square has turned into antique shops and craft stores and restaurants to keep the town café company. And I had Friedens reflect this. Maybe knowing so much about all those places made me reluctant to leave the town behind.
In any case, Steeple Hill has been kind enough to let me stay on in Friedens. Look for Carrie’s story, and those of her two older sisters, all set in my favorite town.
I love hearing from readers, especially those who share my love of small towns that make the heartland of America what it is. You can contact me at: P.O. Box 514, St. Peters, Missouri 63376.
Yours in Christ,
Contents
Chapter One
L
ori Harper needed a miracle. It didn’t have to be a big, showy miracle. Not like the time she and Tyler were down to peanut butter, crackers and half a bag of flour in the whole house and Tyler had reached his hand between the couch cushions and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill like a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat.
She pushed her shoulder-length blond hair out of her face and shifted her unwieldy body on the edge of the bed. It didn’t even have to be a medium-size miracle. There had been plenty of those in her life, and she was thankful for them. Of course there were times when even miracles didn’t help, or she wouldn’t be in the fix she was in.
She still didn’t understand why Gary had to go
and run the car off the road last August or why he didn’t get out before the car sunk in the lake. There had been no miracles that day, unless it was the kind crew from the county fire-and-rescue team that had broken the horrible news.
The young woman, especially, had been wonderful. Carrie had helped Lori face all the awful arrangements. She’d even bullied Gary’s boss, Clyde Hughes, into giving them a replacement car, even though Gary had no insurance, and no paycheck coming except from the week he died. Carrie had stood her ground and argued toe-to-toe with the prominent businessman in a way that Lori couldn’t imagine doing.
That was a minor miracle, even though Gary hadn’t left any others in his wake. He did the best he could as a father and husband until the day he died. Lori wished he could have lived long enough to be here today. Even more, Lori wished she’d told Carrie about this baby. She hadn’t been showing noticeably in August, and didn’t feel like seeming even more pathetic than she did already in this awful place with only her son Tyler for company.
Lori arched her back. The only thing moving did was remind her that her swollen belly dwarfed the rest of her slender body. It didn’t ease her discomfort. Still, she considered herself fortunate. Even if it was out here with no neighbors, at least they had
a roof over their heads, and it was warm and dry and there weren’t any crawly things in it, like that one apartment in Kansas City.
A sharp wave of pain across her belly brought Lori back to the present. Yes, this time a little miracle would do just fine. Like the time the lady from the next farm over, where they had a telephone, stopped by the way she did that once before Gary told her to leave them alone. Right now she’d even take Gary’s old boss coming out to ask his aggravating, enigmatic questions.
“Anybody,” Lori said aloud through dry lips. “Anybody at all would be a miracle.” And she needed that miracle soon. Because this time Lori Harper had to admit something to herself. Unlike the time with the peanut butter, when she and Tyler would have been hungry and uncomfortable, she was in real trouble now.
This time it looked as though she was going to give birth in a trailer with no phone, miles from anyone except her five-year-old son. It hadn’t been an easy pregnancy, and if she was reading the signs right, she had maybe an hour until the baby arrived. This time, Lori admitted, if she didn’t get her miracle she could very well die.
“I hate my job.” Mike Martin didn’t answer his friend Carrie Collins because he knew she wasn’t
talking to him. She was talking to Dogg, who took up most of the bench seat of the pickup between them. The big black-and-tan shepherd thumped his tail and moaned softly at the attention from Carrie. “I hate my job, I hate my life, I hate…”
“Aw, knock it off, Carrie,” Mike told her. “You don’t hate your job. You’re one of the best fire-and-rescue officers in the county, maybe even in the state of Missouri. You only hate the fact that it’s winter, it’s cold and you’ve got to go out in the middle of nowhere and remind some woman she’s a widow.”
“Like it’s going to surprise her, I’ll bet,” Carrie said glumly, still holding Dogg’s massive tawny head in her hands. “But still, why do I have to do this?”
“Because it’s your job,” Mike reminded her, looking over at the slim redhead. “And despite saying you hate it, you’re very good at it. Besides, you took the original call on this one. And you insisted that Ms. Harper be the one that the department took up their collection for. And let’s add the fact that the captain knew that being a woman, you’d give this part of the job the right kind of sympathy.” What Mike didn’t add was that nobody else wanted to touch the assignment with a ten-foot pole, so naturally it fell to the junior member of the team.
That part was unspoken but agreed. “You gonna help out?” Carrie asked him.
Mike snorted. He might be built like a brick wall, but he was more intelligent than one. “Lady, this is your job. I just drive the truck, remember?”
“Drive the truck, dive for things in the pond, do search and rescue with Mister Big here—the whole nine yards,” Carrie said. “You should be doing my job, you know.”
Mike felt a column of ice replace his spine. He looked straight ahead to where the wipers scraped snow off the windshield. His dark hair was still damp from his shower, and the cold made him shiver. At least he would say it was the cold, and not the thought of doing Carrie’s job. “Never in a million years. You do your job, I’ll do mine. I can handle driving, diving and spending most of my time waiting between volunteer calls back at the real-estate office. But regular patrol work? No, ma’am. Not in this lifetime.”
“Suit yourself. I still say you’d be good at it. How about being backup anyway out here?” Carrie wheedled. “I mean, since my partner deserted me and everything…”
“Bart didn’t desert you. He was listening for the dispatcher.”
“Yeah, well, only because he’d rather spend the morning waiting for a call that might not come than
do what I’m doing.” Carrie wore the ghost of a pout on her snub-nosed face.
“Oh, get real,” Mike told her. “Anybody would rather do that than go out to a spot ten miles from anyplace and tell some girl her Christmas is going to come from the fire department because she’s the most pathetic case they had all year.”
Anybody sane, Mike added silently. He’d long ago counted himself among the other part of the population because he would have given his well-muscled right arm to be able to do what the woman sitting next to him did. But like he told her, it wasn’t going to happen in this lifetime. This was the closest he was going to get to her kind of work, with good reason. There was enough trouble in his past to convince Mike he wasn’t capable of the kind of strength this took.
“You’ve got a point,” Carrie admitted. “And you still haven’t answered my question. Are you going to be my backup here?”
Even in the cold Mike could feel himself break out in a sweat. “I hadn’t planned on it. I mean, you’ve got the training in this. I’m just a guy with a truck, the guy who’s dumb enough to drive you out here, remember?”
“All too well,” Carrie said. “You won’t even put on the red suit. Could we at least try the antlers on Dogg?”
“If you want to try antlers on Dogg, go ahead. I am not helping, unless he bites you. Can’t let the old EMT training go to waste,” Mike said, wondering why he’d even agreed to get out of the truck.
His part of this job had been done in August. He’d taken a johnboat across that pond to where Dogg unmistakably told them there was a body somewhere under the surface. He’d put on his wet suit and probed the murky water until they’d found the battered car that yielded Gary Harper’s body still behind the wheel. Facing his widow, even this many months later, was beyond him.
Granted, she might not be that brokenhearted to be a widow. Everybody in the department pegged Gary Harper for a small-time drug runner, out on parole this time for less than a year. The car had yielded evidence that he’d moved here to Franklin County to set up his old trade of running a meth lab. He probably hadn’t been any prize to live with.