Wind Raker - Book IV of The Order of the Air by Melissa Scott, Jo Graham Read Free Book Online Page B

Ballard promptly. We have another week until school is out. And then it's just insanity ahead!" She put her purse on her shoulder and led Jerry through a side door to another door labeled "Do Not Open." She opened it, letting the warm air and sunshine in and showing a tiny staff parking lot outside.
    "You have children?" Jerry asked, making conversation as he followed her carefully down the two poured concrete steps.
    "My son's in fifth grade," she said. She unlocked the door of a sleek blue Packard. "And my daughter's studying physical therapy at the Naval Hospital over at Pearl Harbor. I think every young person should have a means of adequately supporting themselves, don't you?"
    "I suppose," Jerry said, easing himself into the passenger seat. It was quite a luxurious car.
    "My older daughter is married and back east," she said. "And of course my husband is on the post a good deal of the time, but he should be around later. I think it will be just the three of us tonight. Buddy has some sports thing or other and Ruth will be late at the hospital. It's an excellent program. She should qualify as a fully certified physical therapist at the end."
    Jerry rolled the window down, letting the hot air out of the car where it had been sitting in the sun. "Are you an anthropologist?"
    "Only an amateur." Bea put on her sunglasses and popped the car into gear with a great deal of stomping on the clutch. "Actually, I'm a writer."
    Jerry's eyebrows rose. "Oh?"
    "I've published a number of short stories and my first novel is coming out next year." The corners of her mouth twitched. "It's about interracial marriage and gods who act through their mortal avatars and how bloods mingle in the womb. And war and sex and eternal love, of course."
    "That sounds ambitious," Jerry said. And not at all the sort of thing someone so aggressively respectable-seeming would write.
    "Well, I expect Henry Kershaw will buy a copy."
    “Henry Kershaw?" Jerry blinked.
    She gave him a quick smile as they stopped at a traffic light. "I asked Henry about you when I saw your name on the list for the dig. I thought you seemed familiar and then I remembered."
    "The Great Passenger Derby," Jerry said. That was why she looked familiar. He'd seen her at Henry's launch party in Los Angeles the night the cursed necklace was stolen.
    "You're in Mitchell Sorley's lodge," she said, and Jerry winced. Henry had no business babbling about lodges or who was in what. Discretion was the rule, both spoken and unspoken. "I had a good chat with him at the party. And then we found the safe cracked."
    "Ah," Jerry said. Now he had her placed. The woman Mitch had been talking to the police with. He didn't think he'd actually seen her for more than a moment.
    She shot him a quick glance as the traffic moved on. "I'm Isis and Serapis myself." And that was proper — to expose oneself the same way one exposed the other, mutual jeopardy. "We have a very eclectic meeting here in the islands, a little of this and a little of that, rather than sticking to one formal tradition. There are people from all over, you see. This is a place where people pass through, and it welcomes all travelers with its spirit of aloha."
    "Doesn't that mean hello?" Jerry asked.
    "What does 'ave' mean?" She downshifted as they went around a switchback and started climbing a steep hill. "It means hello. And goodbye. And a lot of other things too. But for now I give it to you as a gift and a beginning."
    W illi Radke sat on the lanai of the Moana Hotel, staring out at the beach where the surf flashed white in the twilight, the last mai tai of the night half-finished in his hand. It had been an interesting day, to say the least, even if he had had to spend more of lunch than he would have liked tap-dancing around the question of who had put up the money for this most unlikely of digs. Buck was suspicious, for which one could hardly blame him, and he could foresee weeks of awkward conversation around the topic. He