The Geomancer's Compass by Melissa Hardy

Author:Melissa Hardy [Hardy, Melissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-77049-365-0
Publisher: Tundra
Published: 2012-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

For some reason – we weren’t thinking straight and, besides, Moose Jaw’s downtown seemed to exist in some strange parallel universe, a Bizarro World with no Starbucks – we made our way back to Nicky’s Restaurant and took the same booth we had vacated a couple of hours earlier. I tried ordering a variety of things ending in “cino” and involving “latte” somewhere in the title; in the end I had to settle for something Svetlana swore was coffee, although I had my doubts. As for Brian, he ordered a piece of saskatoon berry pie à la mode and a gigantic glass of milk. “When in Rome,” he said, by way of explanation. Then he pointed his fork at me in a menacing way. “Spill the beans, Randi.”

“Spill what beans?” I stared at my coffee. It didn’t look safe. I opened one of those little creamer thingies they give you at restaurants and poured its contents into the abyss. Then another. Now it looked oily.

“All the beans,” he insisted. “See it from my perspective. Aunt Daisy collars me when I get home from work yesterday and, out of the blue, informs me that I have to drop everything I’m doing and come to Moose Jaw today to do something very mysterious and oh-so-important with you. ‘What?’ I ask. ‘Your cousin will tell you,’ she says.”

“I told you!” I defended myself. “We’re looking for Qianfu’s grave.”

“Which is impossible to find. Oh, and then just to mix it up a little, we run into our deceased great-great-grandfather on a virtual reality tour and you say, well yes, this isn’t the first time that’s happened. What? Did it slip your mind?”

“Of course it didn’t. It’s just that … I told you, Brian. I didn’t know whether it counted, whether you could say that an encounter in a VR environment was something that actually took place.”

He shut me down fast and hard. “Uh-uh. No. I’m not buying it. You’re withholding information. You’re telling me what you think I need to know and nothing more. You think I’m stupid, but I’m not.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid.”

“Yes you do. All of you. Don’t think I don’t know it.” The look on his face … I’d never seen him so serious. Or was that hurt I was reading in his expression? I felt a stab of guilt in my gut. He was right, of course. I had always thought of him as kind of dumb; we all did. “Crazy Brian!” we’d say. What we meant was “Crazy dumb Brian.”

“You’re dyslexic, not stupid,” I muttered, looking at the greasy pools of creamer sliding across the surface of my coffee.

“So they say.” His tone became brisk. “I’m going to draw a line in the sand, Randi. You’re going to tell me why we’re looking for Uncle Fu Man…Qianfu’s bones because, in case you hadn’t noticed, ‘why’ is very important. You’re going to tell me now. And you’re going to keep nothing back. And if you don’t tell me everything,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.