Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 03 - The School for Psychics by Carolyn Jourdan Read Free Book Online Page A

assistance to you. Unfortunately I’ll never be able to share the driving, unless you’re really and truly desperate.”
    Phoebe laughed at that last bit, but shuddered inwardly at the feeling she got when J.J. said it. Really and truly desperate was not exactly a rare condition for her, and certainly not since she’d joined The School for Mysteries and Psychics .
    The way her life had been going lately, she knew without a doubt that there would come a time in the not too distance future when J.J. would be driving and she would be the passenger in a car.
    It was inevitable.
    * * *
    They sat on the porch for a while and enjoyed the breeze after the heat of the day. Then Phoebe went back to the Hotel Lanai where she slept peacefully in her cozy room, under a gently faded Polynesian quilt.
    The next day was perfect . Of course it was. She was in Hawaii! Phoebe told herself to enjoy it while it lasted. Tomorrow, where they were going, it would be winter. The temperature would drop thirty to forty degrees. France would be freezing.
    When she arrived at J.J’s cottage to pick him up, he was sitting on the porch in navy trousers and a blue oxford shirt with a medium sized black duffel bag beside him. “You travel light,” Phoebe said. “You know we’re going to the real world now. I hope you packed for the cold. Can I help you with your gear?”
    “It works best for me if I can take your arm and walk slightly behind you. It helps me anticipate how level the ground is by whether you’re stepping up or down. And this way people won’t notice anything unusual. The dark glasses at night used to be a dead giveaway, but I’m told it’s fashionable now.”
    Phoebe smiled and agreed that this was true. Then she took J.J.’s bag and set it in the back of the Jeep next to her duffle. He got in and she drove them to the main dock where she left the keys under the mat as directed by the rental agent, and they boarded the boat that would take them to Maui.
    * * *
    Phoebe trudged slowly along the crowded jetway in the queue with a coupla hundred other people boarding the commercial airplane. Ugh. Honolulu to Newark in just under ten hours, then eight more hours to Paris.
    She knew she was being ridiculous. She’d had one measly trip in a private jet and she was hooked. She craved them. She couldn’t go back in time and erase her knowledge of the fabulousness of a private airplane. Once you’d experienced it, you couldn’t bear to go back, but you had to.
    On her way out to Hawaii, Phoebe had dreaded the long flights, but she had tickets in first class on the legs of the westward trip where the planes were big enough to have it. That had made things more pleasant. She felt truly sorry for everyone in economy. The same thing was true for J.J. and her when they flew back to the east, except the planes on the way back were bigger, so First Class was even better.
    Her dread had been for nothing. Air travel was pretty fabulous when you had your own pod . Privacy, a bed, and your own television, transformed a cramped nightmare into fun. A couple of First Class pods and eighteen hours later they landed at Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris.
    Ain’t we a pair? Phoebe thought, mimicking Tina Turner’s line in a Mad Max film. Here they were—an old maid and a blind man, a late middle-aged Marion Ravenwood and Indiana Jones. Be afraid world, be very afraid .
    * * *
    As they shuffled through the long lines at customs, J.J. started up a conversation in French with a gentlemen who’d occupied a nearby pod during the transatlantic leg of the flight. Phoebe loved hearing the rapid speech. French was so beautiful, even when you didn’t understand it.
    She heard J.J. say, merci several times. The words for thank you were part of her microscopic French vocabulary. He turned a happy smile on Phoebe and said, “We won’t need to worry about catching a train and renting a car. Monsieur Brissac has kindly offered to take us to our