Read The Truth About Love and Lightning for Free Online

sworn those eyes were Sam Winston’s. But it couldn’t be him. It wasn’t possible. This stranger looked older than the almost sixty years Sam would have been, and besides, Sam Winston had died long ago. “Who are you?” she asked, a tremble in her voice.
    “Don’t know,” he whispered back and winced.
    “It’s okay.” She squeezed his shoulder gently. “Do you think you can get up?”
    “Help me?”
    Gretchen held on to him as best she could, offering support as he slowly staggered to his feet. As lanky as he was, his dead weight felt like a bag of bricks as he leaned hard against her, making their progress from the grove a Herculean effort.
    “Careful,” she told him as his bare feet slipped over the walnuts strewn in their path. It seemed an eternity had passed before they reached the farmhouse, both of them out of breath. “We’re nearly there.”
    Up the back steps they went, Gretchen’s legs wobbling and arms aching. The man swayed unsteadily, seemingly ready to collapse at any minute. She braced herself before releasing him long enough to pull open the screen and kick wide the mudroom door.
    Overhead, the porch light flickered like a firefly, which made no sense at all, considering they had no power.
    The man sucked in a painful breath, and Gretchen shouted into the house: “Bennie! Trudy! Help! Hurry!”
    “What the devil’s going on?” the elder twin asked, grabbing for the door and keeping it open as Gretchen half dragged the man into the house. “Is someone with you?”
    “A man . . . he’s injured,” was all Gretchen could say between huffs and puffs as she urged the stumbling fellow through the kitchen and dining room, into the parlor. Along their path, lamps stuttered and came on again, and Gretchen couldn’t help but wonder if the fierce lightning had left behind some kind of residual charge.
    “Does he need a doctor?” Bennie asked, doing a good job of following in their footsteps. “Though we can’t call out with the phone dead—”
    “And we can’t drive him anywhere either, not with the oak blocking our way out,” Gretchen told her as she struggled beneath the man’s weight, drawing him toward the claw-foot sofa.
    “No doctor,” the man managed to say, shuffling alongside her. “Just need . . . lie down.”
    “Okay,” Gretchen agreed, knowing that unless she walked the five miles into town for help, they were pretty well stuck out on the farm anyway. “Here you go,” she said and, as gently as possible, let him down on the couch.
    He crumpled like a rag doll upon the worn linen cushions, and she gently lifted his legs and settled a pillow beneath his head. She rested her palm against his grizzled cheek as his head fell slack, his eyes closed.
    “Sir, are you still with us?” she asked. “Can you speak?”
    He didn’t answer. Didn’t even moan. He’d slipped hard and fast into unconsciousness.
    “What’s going on? Who’s with you, Gretch?” Trudy wondered aloud, coming up behind her sisters.
    “She found a man,” Bennie said.
    “Out on the farm?”
    “In the walnut grove,” Gretchen told them both, watching the slight rise and fall of his chest. “He was lucid and he’s breathing, just banged up a bit.”
    “What if he’s got internal injuries?” Trudy wrung her hands. “We could be doing him more harm than good by keeping him here.”
    “But we have no choice,” Gretchen insisted and took a deep breath. What did they expect her to do, perform surgery with a steak knife and suture with knitting needles? They had little more in the house than a basic first aid kit. “Look,” she said and rose from her crouch, facing her sisters, “I won’t let him out of my sight tonight, okay? And when the phone’s back on, we can call for the doctor. We can’t haul him anywhere until the tree’s been cleared. So we’ve got no choice but to stay put. We’ll have to do the best we can and hope that it’s enough.”
    Trudy nodded. “You’re right,