That Boy From Trash Town Read Free

cans were color-coordinated and neatly aligned; and flowering bushes peeked cheerfully over the top of well-kept wooden fences.
    Most of the houses on Macon Street were 1920's models that young, upwardly mobile couples had bought and restored to their former glory, but the street hadn't always been such a pleasant place to live. When Whitney was six, she'd thought that the street, and the people who lived on it, were somehow different from real people. Like creatures from another world, she found them to be both exciting and scary. Mostly scary. Everyone except Dean. Even back then, when he was well on his way to becoming a juvenile delinquent, Dean had been her hero. And Whitney had badly needed a hero.
    When Lloyd Grant died in a boating accident, Whitney had lost more than a father. She had lost her friends and her home, as well, because only weeks after her father's death, she and her mother had left Winnetka, Illinois, and moved to San Antonio.
    Anne Harcourt Grant had family in San Antonio. Lots and lots of family. Rumor had it that the Harcourts had been in the Alamo city since Moses was a boy. They were an institution in south central Texas. They were old money. It didn't matter that the fortune Great-great-grandfather Harcourt had acquired before the turn of the century had been made in a real estate scam. Time had obscured the origin of the Harcourt fortune, and each succeeding generation of the family had not only added to the coffers, but had carefully put down another layer of varnish over the self-assumed Harcourt esteem.
    Ames Harcourt, Whitney's maternal uncle and the present head of the family, didn't actually work, but he hired people who did, people who invested and acquired. To Whitney, turning a large amount of money into an enormous amount of money didn't seem a worthwhile goal, but it apparently gave Uncle Ames a good deal of satisfaction.
    On returning to the bosom of the family, Anne and Whitney had taken possession of a graceful little two-story cottage at the back of the Harcourt's thirty-acre estate. The cottage had been built for Grandmother Harcourt, Whitney's great-grandmother, who had spent her last twenty years there. Uncle Ames called it the Dower House, a pretentious title from a pretentious man. Luckily for Whitney, the cottage sat on the back edge of the property, almost a quarter mile from the main house and Uncle Ames.
    When she first arrived in San Antonio, five-year-old Whitney knew nothing of Harcourt history. She had only known that she and her mother were going to be with family. And although her father's death had knocked the wind out of her, she comforted herself with the thought of having cousins to play with, children who would be more than friends because they were blood.
    It didn't take he long to discover her mistake.
    Whitney had five new cousins. Uncle Ames had two girls and a boy—Allie, Baby and Ames Junior—and Aunt CeeCee, Anne's older sister, had a boy and a girl—Tad and Muffy. Whitney could have gotten used to the ridiculous names, but their attitude was something else. For some reason, all her cousins hated Whitney on sight.
    With the exception of Uncle Ames's infant son, her cousins were all older than Whitney, but they went to the same private school that she did; they even had the same riding instructor and the same dance teacher. By all rights, that should have given them something in common. But somehow, from the very beginning, Whitney was out of step.
    The Harcourt cousins didn't hesitate to show Whitney that they noticed the difference and were offended by it. They played spiteful little tricks on her when the adults weren't looking. Sometimes the tricks were harmless—like tying knots in the ribbon straps of her ballet slippers, or telling nasty things about her in whispers to the other children at school—but sometimes the tricks were more serious, like the time one of them pot a burr under her horse's saddle.
    The day it all changed, the day she