Read Online Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) by Christine Kling - Free Book Online Page A

crawled out from under her favorite bougainvillea bush, and jumped around barking at us. When Zale turned his face to look back at the begging dog, I saw that his cheeks and nose were glowing bright red from the cold. I waved him into the deckhouse.
    “You look like you’re freezing out there. Why don’t you come in here and warm up?”
    The noise of the tug’s Caterpillar engine made conversation difficult, but you could hear as long as the other person was willing to shout.
    “I like it out there on the bow. It’s always my favorite spot on a boat.”
    “Me, too,” I said. “It’s a good place to go to feel alone. A good place to think.”
    He nodded, but didn’t go back out to his post on the bow. It was not until we were entering the Intracoastal Waterway at the mouth of the New River and turning northeast toward Bahia Mar that he spoke again. I’d idled the engine down a bit and the noise level was kinder to conversation.
    “Are you religious?” he asked.
    I had been reaching for the VHF microphone to hail the harbormaster at Bahia Mar, but I paused with my arm in the air and stared at him for a second. “Not in the sense of any kind of organized religion,” I said, dodging the real question as I usually did, and lifting the microphone out of its holder. “Why do you ask?”
    “Well, you know my mom,” he said, climbing onto the wheelhouse bunk and crossing his legs Indian-style. Sitting like that, he looked even younger. Much too young to be juggling these issues. “She never really took me to any church when I was growing up. The only one who ever talked to me about stuff like that was my great-grandmother. ”
    I hailed the harbormaster to ask where he wanted us to dock, then said, “I remember meeting Molly’s grandmother. She’s quite a character.”
    “Yeah? You know Gramma Josie?”
    “When I was little she used to scare me.”
    “How come?”
    “She was so different, so foreign. Molly’s mom, your grandmother, she grew up on the Seminole reservation, but she never really wanted to talk about Indian stuff. But when Gramma Josie came, that was all she talked about. I guess I’d seen too many movies where Indians were bad guys.”
    “Nah, Gramma Josie’s cool. She lives in this neat house out at Big Cypress, in the Everglades. Mom and I used to go out there for the weekend sometimes and stay with her. It was fun. When I’d go outside and play with other kids out there, they always thought it was a big deal that my gramma was Josie Tigertail. I guess she’s like an old medicine woman in the tribe or something. She’s kinda’ hard to understand because she doesn’t speak English too good. She says her language is called Creek. She used to tell me these stories about animals and stuff, and they would, like, have secret meanings to teach kids to be good and all.”
    “Do you remember any of them?”
    “Sure. Mostly, though, I was thinking about when she used to talk about God and heaven. She called God the Breath Maker, and she said when people died they went to a place called Skyland.”
    “I don’t ever remember her talking about that to your mom and me.”
    “Gramma Josie calls me an ‘old soul.’ She says I’m too serious for a kid my age. I can’t help it. I’m interested in stuff like that. I read a lot. She once told me that the Seminoles believed that they had to leave a place if a person died there because their spirit would haunt that place. Then, the spirit wouldn’t go on to join the Breath Maker. And she said when you buried someone, you always had to bury their possessions with them so they could use them in the afterlife.”
    I nodded. I wanted to comfort him, to tell him that I was sure his dad was happily residing up in Skyland, but I had too many of my own questions on that count. Besides, even if I believed in heaven, I thought it might be a stretch to think they’d let Nick in.
    It was dark by the time we started back up the river in Gorda after docking