Carolina Girl by Patricia Rice Read Free Book Online Page A

time to start pulling his act together if he meant to deal with the outside
world again.
    The outside world—as in Aurora Jenkins. He must be
some kind of masochist to even consider talking to an MBA, but that red-gold
hair and those amazing lips beckoned him more surely than his ideas for new
video games.
    Antagonizing Aurora would be far more entertaining than
rotting on the porch.
    He really didn’t think they were working from the same
page. He didn’t see any reason to change the island one iota. She was
talking in terms of finding ethical development, as if such a creature
existed. She’d be better off looking for a dodo bird.
    The phone rang, and, aiming for the shower, Clay was tempted
to ignore it. But he had a few feelers out on his software business, and he
didn’t want to write off any opportunity.
    Grabbing the cordless receiver, he started up the stairs.
“McCloud here.”
    “This is Ben Little in the State Parks Department. Our
attorneys are prepared to move on the purchase of the Bingham property. How is
the program developing?”
    Clay halted and leaned against the stair wall.
“I’m getting there,” he answered cautiously, crossing his
fingers as he pictured a gray-haired old lady rocking on her front porch,
creating works of art out of weeds.
    “Do you have names? Can you fax me what you’ve
found?”
    The sun-baked memory of giant turtle paths and rippling sea
grasses and reclusive old ladies cracked open a door he didn’t want to
shut just yet. “Program doesn’t work that way,” Clay answered
tersely. “It starts with names and birth certificates. We won’t get
to the verification and current address stage until the genealogy is lined
up.”
    “Can’t you speed up the process somehow, find
addresses on the names you have?” Little asked impatiently. “All I
need is one of them to agree to sell. We can have the whole parcel on the
auction block in weeks.”
    Whammo. The lawyers were in full wolf mode.
    Ticked that Aurora’s wild theory had been confirmed,
Clay set his mouth in a grim line and thought furiously. If he refused to turn
over the names, the state would simply seek another source—it
wouldn’t take them long to learn about Iris and Billy. He had to stall.
    “I can’t guarantee the accuracy,” he
answered slowly. “I’ll have to buy another computer and second
phone line to work the current findings while this one is on-line processing
the genealogy.” As if that had anything to do with the price of eggs, but
Little didn’t know that.
    “Check your budget to see if an extra computer can be
funded. We’re going nowhere until this is done. I’ll get back to
you next week.” As if he’d just checked off one more item from his
agenda, Little hung up with a click.
    Well, shit.
    Clay clicked off his receiver. With resignation, he realized
his little odyssey into obscurity was about to end.
    When actually faced with the Slugs from Slime, he simply
couldn’t hang up his sword and let them destroy the world. Too much time
in the gaming world apparently had warped his thinking into believing justice
ought to prevail.
    Maybe if he confronted the prim MBA first, she’d rid
him of his hero complex, and he could return to munching fries on the porch and
pretending the rest of the planet didn’t matter.

Chapter Five
    After taking a quick shower and donning a clean black
T-shirt and jeans, Clay hit the Harley in search of Jake’s daughter.
Roaring down the island highway, letting the hot wind pump up his warrior mode,
he drove past the peach stand marking the road to Iris’s. A half mile
past the swamp road, he located the wooden cross scrawled in fading red paint
with JESUS SAVES that Jake had described in his directions. Sweat dripped down
Clay’s forehead from beneath his helmet as he navigated the left turn and
chugged down a blacktopped lane of aging cottages.
    Peeling white paint on clapboards and mildewed siding on
trailers depicted rural poverty, but every yard