Read Online Death Qualified by Kate Wilhelm - Free Book Online Page A

wrinkled with white lines like valleys in the brown ridges of his face. He was a wheat farmer, and Nell knew that he wouldn't really go away and leave everything for a week unless he was convinced that it was desperately urgent. He embraced her with self-conscious awkwardness, but he was almost childlike with the children.
     
        "How did he look?" Nell asked in a low voice as the children ran back and forth stashing their things in John's station wagon.
     
        "What did he say?"
     
        "Looked fine, healthy. Said damn little. He was pretty tired. Said if anyone came asking for him to say he hasn't been around in years. I said who would come, and he said anyone. You know how he can get."
     
        She nodded.
     
        "But-" "Car comes to turn around in the drive, you know how they do. And he was' up like a shot, ducking out of sight, watching from the side of the window drape. Like a man on the run, honey."
     
        "Mom, can I take the camera?" Travis yelled from the back of the station wagon.
     
        "Certainly not."
     
        John squeezed her arm slightly and said, "If there's room for me in that wagon, guess we'd best be on the way.
     
        Honey, take care of yourself."
     
        Carol ran back inside to look for her Cabbage Patch doll, and Travis began to look for some comic books for the trip, and finally John Kendricks got into the wagon and leaned on the horn. Both children dashed back out.
     
        Nell saw to it that their seat belts were secure; there were more kisses and promises to call, to write, to be good.. ..
     
        Then she stood in the driveway and watched the station wagon vanish around the first curve.
     
        When silence returned she walked to the main house to warn Tawna that Lucas might show up.
     
        The year Carol turned one, Nell's grandfather had died.
     
        Nell had tried to call Lucas; she sent a registered letter;
     
        she sent a telegram. There had been no response. John and Amy Kendricks had worried about her being alone in such an isolated place. She inherited the land, but there was little real money, spending money, and she was afraid to touch the capital of her inheritance. And she couldn't start selling the walnut trees, not yet. Finally she had decided to rent out one of the houses, and with the same decision, she realized that she wanted to live in the original house with her two children. Besides, the big house' could be rented for three times as much as the little one, and she needed the money.
     
        Tawna and James had applied, along with dozens of other people. They had been having trouble finding suit able housing, Tawna had said with a clipped Boston ac cent. She had been hired at the university, and James could practice his veterinary medicine just about anywhere, but they also had teenage children. Their daughter played the flute. And sometimes James brought his work home a sick animal that he nursed around the clock. She had been very proper, almost distant, as if relating someone else's problems, not her own.
     
        "He treats big animals," she had said, finishing.
     
        "Does he do elephants?" Nell asked.
     
        "No," Tawna had said gravely, and just as gravely added, "But he'd swap all the gold in all his molars for the chance." She smiled then, an expansive, illuminating smile that grew and grew, and her teeth certainly had no gold to swap. They both laughed, and Nell said the house was theirs.
     
        Now Nell knocked on the door, and Tawna called, "Come on in. Be right down."
     
        Nell entered the kitchen. The table was covered with ceramic jewelry in brilliant colors. Tawna taught French and did ceramics as a hobby. She might have been able to make a decent living making jewelry, but the odds were against her, she said. The jewelry on the table was dazzling.
     
        "Wow!" Nell said, moving closer, touching nothing.
     
        "Hey, all