Hot On His Trail. Kristin Eckhardt

Isabella became pregnant, but there were complications. Love for her handsome son, Josiah, born in 1920, wasn’t enough to stop her from grow-ing weaker by the day. Knowing she couldn’t leave her husband to tend to all the children if she died, she set out to find families for each one of her orphaned charges.

      And so the Trueblood Foundation was born. Named in memory of Isabella’s parents, it would become famous all over Texas. Some of the orphaned children went to strangers, but many were reunited with their

      families. After reading notices in newspapers and church bulletins, aunts, uncles, cousins and grand-parents rushed to Carmelita to find the young ones they’d given up for dead.

      Toward the end of Isabella’s life, she’d brought together more than thirty families, and not just her orphans. Many others, old and young, made their way to her doorstep, and Isabella turned no one away.

      At her death, the town’s name was changed to Trueblood, in her honor. For years to come, her simple grave was adorned with flowers on the anniversary of her death, grateful tokens of appreciation from the families she had brought together.

      Isabella’s son, Josiah, grew into a fine rancher and married Rebecca Montgomery in 1938. They had a daughter, Elizabeth Trueblood Carter, in 1940. Elizabeth married her neighbor William Garrett in 1965, and gave birth to twins Lily and Dylan in 1971, and daughter Ashley a few years later. Home was the Double G ranch, about ten miles from Trueblood proper, and the Garrett children grew up listening to stories of their famous great-grandmother, Isabella. Because they were Truebloods, they knew that they, too, had a sacred duty to carry on the tradition passed down to them: finding lost souls and reuniting loved ones.

      Special thanks and acknowledgment to Kristin Eckhardt for her contribution to the TRUEBLOOD, TEXAS series.

      For my wonderful mother, Charol Pleiss

      Special thanks to Dr. Lisa Bladt for her medical expertise

      Contents

       Prologue

       Chapter One

       Chapter Two

       Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

       Chapter Eighteen

       Chapter Nineteen

       Chapter Twenty

       Chapter Twenty-One

       Chapter Twenty-Two

       Chapter Twenty-Three

       Excerpt

       PROLOGUE

      Texas Children’s Hospital

      Houston, Texas, 1992

      DR. PAULA BENNING, one of Houston’s busiest pediatric cardiologists, stood outside the door of the consultation room, her stomach twisting in dread. She loved every part of her profession—except this one.

      A headache throbbed in her left temple, a signal that her blood sugar was low. She knew she should eat something before she broke the news, or at least find a carton of orange juice. But she’d learned early on in her career that delaying unpleasant tasks only made them harder. So she took a deep breath as she reached for the doorknob, then walked inside.

      A man and a woman sat on the worn plaid sofa, their faces drawn and their hands clenched together. They looked up at her, guarded hope reflected in their eyes. Dr. Benning glanced hastily at her watch. A signal that she didn’t have time to waste. Get in and get out. In her thirteen years of practice, she’d learned that was the best way to deliver devastating news. Best for her, anyway.

      Walt Graham rose to his feet, pulling his wife along with him. “Is Calley all right?”

      “She’s in stable condition now,” Dr. Benning confirmed.

      “I’ve never been so scared,” Liv Graham confessed, her voice cracking. A petite woman, she looked almost as frail as her daughter. They both had the same wide-set blue eyes and flaxen blond hair. “Calley couldn’t catch her breath and she was so pale. I didn’t know what to do.”

      She glanced up at her husband, a detective with the Houston police force. Walt Graham wore his worry in the deep lines etched in his forehead and between his thick, dark brows.

      Dr. Benning wished she didn’t know so much about the Grahams. Wished she didn’t know that they’d struggled with infertility for years before they’d finally been blessed with a daughter. Liv Graham, a renowned local photographer, had been past forty when she’d conceived Calley, automatically classifying the pregnancy as high-risk. But she’d delivered a healthy baby girl, then went on to chronicle the first fifteen years of her daughter’s life with incredible black-and-white photographs that had brought Liv recognition throughout the state.

      Ironically, one of those photographs of Calley, her golden pigtails flying as she leaped toward the sky, graced a wall in the ICU, where the girl now lay cocooned in a hospital bed, tethered to earth by an IV line and a heart monitor.

      Dr. Benning cleared her throat. She’d put off the inevitable long enough. “Perhaps you should sit down.”

      Walt Graham ignored her suggestion, his green eyes intent on her face. He stepped forward and curled one large hand around the top of a chair, his knuckles bleached white. “What’s wrong?”

      Liv Graham forced a smile, looking back and forth