Read Online Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 02 - Lineages and Lies by Jimmy Fox - Free Book Online

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    “Not yet,” she admitted, sitting in her wheelchair in front of the monitor of the office computer, where she had been working quietly and diligently. “Still searching.” Hawty’s tone conveyed her frustration: she hated to be stymied, in any undertaking.
    There were days when no more words needed to be spoken between them. They worked well together and implicitly understood each other. Nick wasn’t the kind to tell her how much he valued her. Just as well. She wasn’t the kind to take such praise graciously.
    Hawty scooted her battery-powered wheelchair over to the wall of bookshelves opposite the windows in the narrow main room; she used her telescoping grabber adeptly to reach the volumes she needed.
    She was a dual-degree candidate at Freret University—English and computer sciences; she also taught freshman introductory literature classes. An overachiever bound for fame in any discipline she would finally choose. She had become fascinated with genealogy, to Nick’s good fortune; and he felt like a proud parent watching her knowledge and enthusiasm grow.
    Her “chariot,” as she called her souped-up wheelchair, was a veritable rolling laboratory of cutting-edge digital communication and mechanical miniaturization. The contraption was the pet project of the computer-sciences division at Freret, and each week it gained some new, astonishing capability.
    Technophobe that he was, Nick couldn’t help admiring the ingenuity of it.
    As a child, Hawty had suffered some devastating illness that left her with chronic, polio-like weakness in her legs and hips. He didn’t like to ask her about it, but he seemed to remember that it was either a reaction to a swine-flu shot or an attack by one of the spinal viral maladies that prey on children.
    Hawty was brilliant, hard working, and as tough and sassy as growing up poor and black in north Louisiana can make a person. Her given name was Harrieta; she preferred Hawty, and five minutes with her showed why “haughty” was an adjective that sometimes applied. She could be headstrong and downright rude, a tough customer, if she didn’t like or respect you. He had Professors Una Kern and Dion Rambus to thank for her—and for much else.
    “Why Bristol?” Hawty asked, now again at the brawny new computer she’d convinced Nick to buy on credit a few months earlier. At the moment, the workstation was querying Salt Lake City, Washington, D.C., Houston, and New York City for vital records—birth, death, and marriage information—to fill out the family trees of several clients. Hawty was also searching for a particular reference source Nick wanted:
Ship Departures & Passenger Lists from the Port of Bristol to America, 1700-76.
    “Just a hunch,” he replied.
    “Oh, it’s just a hunch? Why am I not surprised?” she wisecracked.
    Una and Dion had been his best friends in the English department at Freret. For a time, Una had been even more. They’d both stoutly defended Nick when the charge wasbroached that, in a published article on Keats, he’d stolen ideas from a long-dead scholar. He didn’t do it; he’d never even read the man’s work. The department’s fancy computer—with a flawed word-matching paradigm, Hawty maintained—figured in the gathering of evidence; and Frederick Tawpie, then an assistant professor in charge of the “inquiry,” cared more for his prospects for advancement than for the facts.
    The inquiry proceeded strictly according to rarely invoked rules. Tawpie and the other professors on the departmental affairs committee conveniently forgot their own constant struggle for originality in a publish-or-perish world, and glossed over their own past accidents of similarity. Deals had been struck, alliances cemented. It would have taken a mere raised hand to stop the locomotive heading for Nick, tied to the tracks. He became a target of opportunity in an ideological war that was then raging between increasingly powerful and strident