Welcome to Last Chance (Last Chance #1)(43)
Author: Hope Ramsay

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, ma’am, I’m not kidding. But here’s the catch. People fake 1943 pennies all the time. The usual methods are to put a copper coating on a 1943 steel penny or to alter the eight in a 1948 copper penny. I used a refrigerator magnet to see if your penny was steel. It’s not. So it’s not copper-plated. It appears to be real copper. You should have someone appraise it.”

“A refrigerator magnet?”

“Yeah. A magnet can pick up a steel penny, but it won’t pick up a copper penny.”

She opened her palm and looked down at the penny and almost laughed. It might be a rare and precious object, or it might be a bad penny. But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t a bad penny. It was the penny Clay had found in the bottom of her purse last Thursday morning. It was her good luck charm.

That made it priceless. Worth more than the value of the thing itself. Like a MasterCard commercial.

“Thanks,” Jane said in a shaky voice.

“There’s just one more thing,” the agent said.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that shirt.”

“Huh?”

Hannigan nodded toward Sharon Rhodes’s pink T-shirt that lay in a soggy pile on the table. “I guess it’s your lucky shirt, huh?”

She didn’t really know what he meant by that, so she unwadded the T-shirt until she could read what was written on its back. Two angels, standing with wings outstretched, framed a verse from Psalm 91:

No evil shall befall you,

Nor shall any plague come near to your dwelling,

For He shall give His angels charge over you,

To keep you in all your ways.

Her vision blurred with tears. What was the Universe trying to tell her? What was Hannigan trying to tell her?

“Look, Jane, don’t beat yourself up over Woody,” Hannigan said. “The fact is, you saved that little girl’s life today… you were her guardian angel in a really tight spot. That’s probably why she’s coping with the trauma the way she is.”

Jane blinked away the tears. “Uh, Agent Hannigan, do you know how Ruby Rhodes is doing?”

He shrugged. “She’s in the hospital up in Orangeburg with a head injury. I don’t know the details, but the county is watching it closely. That woman dies and Woody’s up for murder, instead of just assault and kidnapping.”

“Oh, God, I need to go there.”

“If you want, I can give you a lift.”

She closed her eyes as the monumental truth settled into her head. She didn’t have anywhere else she wanted to go. And Miriam Randall had been so right. Jane needed to ask for more.

“I really need a lift up there,” she said in a tiny voice.

She had to apologize to Stone and Clay and the rest of the Rhodes family. For once, she had to face the mistakes she had made.

Then she had to fight for what she wanted. That was the point. Running away had never solved anything in her life. She had saved Haley. And she had tried to warn Ruby. She wasn’t a bad person, even though bad things had happened.

She was worthy of Clay’s love. She needed to make that statement right out loud—like the biggest affirmation of all. She needed to rescue herself.

Clay stepped out of Ruby’s hospital room, making a place for Tulane, his younger brother, who had just driven down from Florence. Since Momma was in the critical care unit, they only allowed two family members at a time, and Daddy was one of them. Daddy hadn’t left Momma’s side, even though she hadn’t regained consciousness yet.

Clay walked down the hall to the waiting room, where the family and a few of Momma’s church friends kept vigil. Stone and his children; Clay’s little sister, Rocky; Aunt Arlene; and Uncle Pete had all come up here to wait. Reverend Ellis had come along with Thelma Hanks and Miriam Randall, to sit with the family and do whatever was needed. Clay knew good and well that the rest of the Ladies Auxiliary were back in Last Chance cooking up more than enough food to feed everyone for the next month. There was nothing like a life-and-death emergency to bring out the banana pudding and squash casserole.

Clay sagged against the wall for a moment trying to find the positives in this awful situation. There were a few that came to mind. Woodrow West had turned out to be a lousy shot, having only grazed Momma’s head. Bobbi Lee Andrews, who worked at the doughnut shop next to the Cut ’n Curl, had seen Ruby go down and immediately called for help. The flooding that blocked the road from Last Chance to Orangeburg had lasted all of fifteen minutes, so the EMTs had been able to get Ruby to the hospital fast.

Even so, the .45-caliber bullet had knocked Momma back, and she’d fractured her skull in the fall. The doctors were guardedly optimistic, despite the brain swelling. They said her EEG and CAT scan looked good.

But the scenario reminded Clay of the night Ray hit his head on the windshield of Clay’s old Dodge. The doctors were optimistic then, too, only Ray hadn’t come out of that in one piece.

How was he supposed to feel guardedly optimistic? What the heck did that mean, anyway? He felt weary and used up… and alone.

He pushed away from the wall and found himself a seat on one of the hard waiting-room chairs between Stone on his right and Miriam Randall on his left.

His older brother had shed his uniform, and his puffy shiners made the rest of his face look pale and sallow. Stone had lost all composure this afternoon after Haley started babbling about angels. Stone might be “due” for a breakdown, but Clay didn’t like the idea of Stone losing his composure. Stone was supposed to be a rock. Now Stone sat with Haley in his lap, holding her with a death grip—like if he let her go something bad would happen to her.

Unfortunately, something bad had already happened to her. Haley sported scrapes on both knees and a purple bruise on her noggin. The doctors said the little bruise wasn’t much to worry about. However, they had suggested Haley needed the services of a psychologist to help her over the trauma of the experience. Haley had always been scared of lightning, and they figured she had seized upon the idea of angels as a coping mechanism. Lord only knew, she had heard enough talk around the dinner table about Daddy and his angels. Apparently, Haley had invented a few just to help her through what must have been a terrifying situation.

Of course, angels had not rescued Haley from the criminals Jane had brought to Last Chance. The very lightning that Haley feared had been responsible for everything that had happened. The lightning strike had exploded the propane tank, and that set off a cascading series of events that ended in the complete failure of Golfing for God’s water management system.

Stone had tried to explain the situation to his young daughter, but Haley didn’t really understand the engineering.

Clay looked away from Haley and tried not to think about what she had endured. Instead, he became uncomfortably aware that Miriam Randall was scrutinizing him with a pair of wise and knowing eyes.

Boy, he was a dunce. How could he have ever misunderstood the things Miriam had said to him yesterday at church? Obviously, Miriam didn’t think Jane was his soulmate. How could his soulmate be a criminal?

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Miriam said suddenly, into the silence that hung in the room.

“What’s that?” Thelma Hanks asked.

“The floods. Have you ever heard of a fifteen-minute flood?”

Thelma shook her head. “No, can’t say as I ever have.”

“It was the angels,” Haley said in a surprisingly chipper voice.

“It was not,” Lizzy said in a defiant voice. Lizzy slumped in a chair on the other side of the room, as far from Stone as a person could get. The thirteen-year-old and her father had a stormy relationship, and the kid was going through a real obnoxious teenager phase.

Lizzy leaned forward and gave her little sister a snotty look. “Just get off the angels, okay? Nobody wants to hear it. They all think you’re crazy.”

“Lizzy, don’t be ugly,” Thelma said in that churchlady tone of voice. “Your granddaddy talks to angels all the time.”

Lizzy folded her arms across her chest and looked away from Thelma. Thank goodness, she had the good sense not to challenge authority, for once. Clay felt terrible for the kid. She’d already lost a mother at a young age. And now this. He couldn’t imagine what losing her grandmother would do to Lizzy. Clay read the fear in Lizzy like she was an open book. He wanted to tell her everything was going to be okay, but he didn’t believe that.

And he wasn’t going to lie. Not to Lizzy.

Clay’s throat clogged and he had to swallow back his own fear.

“Well,” Miriam said in her little-old-lady voice, “I don’t think Haley’s crazy. Don’t you believe in angels, Lizzy?”

Lizzy rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure I do. In the Bible. But not at Golfing for God in the middle of a thunderstorm.”

Haley squirmed out of her daddy’s arms and scrambled down onto her feet. She turned toward Clay and leaned her little hands onto his knees. His skin warmed under her touch.

Haley stared up at him for a long, uncomfortable moment. She wore a pink T-shirt with the words “Girls Rule” across the chest, and she looked dangerous and adorable. All Clay could think was thank God she was whole and in one piece.

“They were beautiful angels,” Haley said, looking up into his face with her big, innocent eyes. “They had white wings, and there were boy angels and girl angels, and they were all around us. Some of them protected us, and the rest smited the bad guys. The Sorrowful Angel was the one who smited them hardest of all. She was really, really angry.”

“Haley, stop it,” Stone said in a low voice that sounded near the breaking point.

She leaned in toward Clay, something lighting up her face in a preternatural way. “The Sorrowful Angel is here all the time, but the rest of them came when Jane called ’em. She said it would be good if they could come and help out, and they did.” Haley whispered this last bit, so that her daddy wouldn’t hear what she said.

Clay stared down at the child. “What?”

Haley nodded her head once, and then she turned around and went back to her father. She climbed up into his lap, and for the life of him, Clay got the feeling that the child was comforting the adult, not the other way around.

Miriam took that moment to touch his hand. Her fingers were cold, and her ancient skin felt papery, but there was something alive in that touch.

“Innocent faith is such a wonderful thing,” she murmured. “It can move mountains, sometimes.”

And that’s when enlightenment hit him, like a hammer blow to his hard head.

Oh, crap. He was an idiot.

He stood up. “I gotta go,” he said, looking down at the old woman.

Miriam smiled up at him like an angel herself. “I was starting to think you were never going to figure it out, boy. For a sensitive man, you sure are boneheaded.”

Oh, yeah, he sure was.

The only thing Jane had done today was save Haley’s life. Even if she hadn’t summoned angels, that woman had run half a mile with Haley on her hip. Maybe she had brought trouble to Last Chance, but she hadn’t done that on purpose. Trouble had followed her. And Clay knew how it felt to have trouble follow you.