Twenty Blue Devils by Aaron Elkins Read Free Book Online

to take it hard."
    When John replaced the receiver he looked over his shoulder into the dining room. Nick was well into another familiar escapade, this one about the time he'd been sailing in coastal island waters on a pitch-black night (why, he never explained) and had run sharply aground on something. When he tried to pole himself off it, he couldn't reach anything under the boat to push off against. But the boat stayed stuck. Bewildered, he waited for daylight, and when morning came he found that he'd unwittingly sailed sixty feet into a cave and was caught, not by anything in the water, but by the cave's roof He was, as he was about to conclude,
    "...the only sailor in the history of the world who ever got grounded by the top of his mast."
    John, smiling in spite of himself—these would be the evening's last smiles—waited for Nick to finish the story, waited for the explosion of laughter, and walked slowly back into the dining room.
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    Chapter 7
    * * * *
    Nick took it hard, all right. One of his aching disappointments in life had been his failure to father a son. There were Maggie and Therese, of course, and indeed he loved them fiercely—especially Therese—but girls weren't boys, and Nick was simply the kind of man who needed a son. When Therese was a little girl Celine had delivered two stillborn babies, both boys, about a year apart, and after that they hadn't had the heart to try again.
    And then, a little more than twenty years later, along had come Brian Galen Scott, MBA, operations whiz, and all-around wholesome young man. Therese had brought him to dinner one night, explaining that she had met him during two otherwise ill-fated years as a business major at Bennington College in Vermont, where Nick had sent her mainly because both his sister and Maggie had gone there too. Brian had been a thirty-year-old teaching assistant, and they had gone out once or twice, but it had never come to anything at the time. But two years later, now the business manager of a computer firm in Michigan, Brian had come to the South Seas on a three-week vacation package, had looked up Therese, and well, there he was.
    And there he stayed. During that first dinner, Nick had naturally enough talked about the problems of coffee-growing, and Brian, nervous and anxious to please, had prattled on, man-to-man, about the principles of work flow and systems engineering; maybe a little too man-to-man from Nick's point of view, especially coming from a silver-spoon-in-the-mouth kid who made no bones about not knowing a coffee bean from a garbanzo bean.
    But Nick, a fair-minded man on most subjects, mulled over Brian's ideas for a day or two and then invited him to spend an afternoon seeing the farm and discussing the specifics of coffee-processing. This time he liked what he heard, and before Brian's three weeks were up he had offered him a job, at fifty percent over his current salary, as the operations manager—a position that hadn't even been in existence before. Brian had taken him up on it on the spot.
    From Nick's point of view it had worked out wonderfully. Brian had caught on with astonishing speed. And he had fallen in love not only with Therese but with Tahiti and the coffee business as well. His ideas on automation, computerization, and “organizational reengineering,” although they got some opposition—in particular from Maggie—had put the plantation firmly on its feet. It was Brian who had come up with the ideas that had made the Seattle-area mastery a viable operation. From there, as Nick enjoyed saying, it was history.
    There was another angle too. Nick got to keep Therese, on whom he doted, nearby. He had seen the handwriting on the wall that first night and had known it wasn't going to be long before he lost her. This way, his baby girl stayed within reach—his “wedding” present would he a house in Papara, two miles from his own—and he got himself a fire-breathing production genius