Judith Krantz by Dazzle Read Free Book Online Page B

thought, in good time to help her father with the preparations for the great annual Fiesta that was being held Sunday as it had been every September since early in the 1800s.
    Jazz’s father, Mike Kilkullen, was the fourth in a direct line of Kilkullen men to own and run the ranch, a hundred square miles of property, roughly five times the size of Manhattan Island. This private empire lay south of the small town of San Juan Capistrano. It was an almost fan-shaped piece of land that stretched down toward the Pacific from the mile-high summit of Portola Peak, a summit that could be envisioned as the handle of the fan. From the heights of Portola, the boundaries of the ranch widened steadily on both sides, descending all the way down to the ocean, where the shoreline formed the uneven edge of the fan. Every wave for twenty miles crashed on the Kilkullens’ broad sandy beaches; on their wide, horseshoe-shaped harbor; on Valencia Point, the natural breakwater that stretched far out to sea. Beyond Valencia Point waves exploded around large white rocks that stuck up from the ocean floor and defied the Pacific to grind their fantastic shapes down into pebbles. When Jazz was five and her father taught her how to sail her own small boat that was tied up on an inlet at the Kilkullen boathouse, he warned her notto venture out too far since the next landfall after Valencia Point was Hawaii.
    One hundred and thirty-eight years earlier, in 1852, another Michael Kilkullen, Jazz’s great-great-grandfather, had sailed to America from Ireland, an ambitious, industrious, unencumbered young man with a modest hoard of savings. Like so many others, he had heard that gold had been discovered in California, but unlike most, he was shrewd. Michael Kilkullen realized that he had more chance to make his fortune by selling hardware and lumber to the frenzied miners than by joining them in their hardships. In little more than a dozen years he had accumulated enough capital to venture south to follow his dream.
    Land-hunger had always run in the young Irishman’s blood, growing stronger by the year once he left the confines of his native island and realized the possibilities of the United States. In the tragic years of 1863 and 1864 the Great Drought had ruined almost all of the California cattle ranchers. Land was desperately cheap and Mike Kilkullen, like a few others, took advantage of it, paying fifteen thousand dollars in gold for the
mas ó menos
sixty-four-thousand-acre Rancho Montana de la Luna, property of the family of Don Antonio Pablo Valencia. The flamboyant, hospitable, now-penniless Valencias had owned this land and lived on it in near-feudal conditions since 1788, when Teodosio Maria Valencia, an Andalusian veteran of the first Spanish expedition to set foot on the soil of what was to become California, had received it as a grant from the Crown of Spain.
    There had been many other ranchos for sale at bargain prices in those days, but Mike Kilkullen fell in love with Don Antonio’s only child, Juanita Isabella, who would have been heiress to the rancho had her father not been forced to sell. Dona Juanita Isabella Valencia Kilkullen had been Jazz’s great-great-grandmother, and Jazz had been named after her, although only her father ever called her by that name.
    Suddenly excited by her closeness to home, Jazzturned off the highway below Three Arch Bay and headed toward the ranch, swearing with impatience at the fifty-five-mile-an-hour limit. Soon she was on narrow inland roads that earlier Kilkullens had built and maintained, but the Orange County police were not impressed by history, she reminded herself. Although she couldn’t bring herself to part with her T-Bird, something utterly rakish about the car invariably attracted unwelcome attention from the forces of law and order.
    Jazz kept just under the limit along the miles of strictly fenced-in land until she turned in at the massive open gates that were the main entrance to the