Calamity Mum

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CHAPTER ONE

THE BEACH WAS CROWDED. A group of college students on spring break were gathered around a ghetto blaster, happily unaware of the vicious looks they were getting from older sunbathers.

“Turn it down,” Shelly Astor suggested, grinning as she nodded toward two glowering faces behind them on the beach. “You’re creating enemies for us.”

“Don’t be a wet blanket,” the boy chided. “We’re young, it’s spring break, no more biology and English and algebra for a solid, sweet week!”

“Yeah, right,” another student muttered. “I might as well drown myself. I flunked my first exam in prealgebra!”

“Less fun, more pencil-to-paper contact,” another suggested.

“Right, Mr. Egghead,” came the reply and a glare. “Edwin here blew the curve in biology 101,” he added, jerking his thumb at the tall, thin, redheaded boy. “He made 100.”

“Dr. Flannery says I’m the best student he’s ever had. Can I help it if I’m brilliant?” Edwin sighed.

“You’re not brilliant in trig,” Pete murmured to him, then said to the others, “I had to tutor him or he’d never have passed Bragg’s exam.”

“Can’t you turn that damned thing down?” An exasperated bellow broke the silence.

“Have a heart, man!” Pete wailed, facing his attacker. “We just survived eight weeks of hell, not to mention trigonometry!”

“And one of us failed it!” Edwin yelled, pointing at Mark.

“We’re all on the cutting edge here,” Pete agreed, shaking his head. “If we don’t get a music fix, God only knows what we might do to the world at large!”

The irate man began to laugh and threw up his hands. He made a dismissive gesture and lay back, closing his eyes in defeat.

Shelly grinned at her friends. “Pete’s a sociology major,” she whispered to Nan, who was her best friend. “Minoring in psych. Isn’t he great?”

“A true credit to his alma mater,” Nan agreed. She got up and went to dive into the surf, with Shelly at her side.

“Isn’t it wonderful here?” Nan sighed. “And you weren’t going to come!”

“I had to fight to get to go to college, much less come to Florida with the group for spring break,” Shelly said quietly. She pushed back her windblown blond hair, and her soft blue eyes echoed the smile on her full lips. “My parents wanted me to go to finishing school and then join the young women’s social club back home in Washington, D.C. Can you imagine?”

“You haven’t told them that you want to become a caseworker for family and children’s services, I guess?” Nan fished.

“My father would have a nervous breakdown,” she mused. “They’re sweet people, my parents, but they want to give me a life of luxury and serenity. I want to change the world.” She glanced at dark-eyed Nan with a mischievous smile. “They think I’m demented. They have a nice husband picked out for me: Ivy League school, old family name, plenty of money.” She shrugged her slender shoulders. “That’s not what I want at all, but they won’t take no for an answer. I had to threaten to get a job and go on the work/study program to get my father to pay my tuition.”

“I wonder if all parents want to live through their children?” Nan asked. “Honestly my mother has pushed me toward nursing school since I was in grammar school, just because she got married and couldn’t finish nurses’ training. I get sick at the sight of blood, for Pete’s sake!”

“Did someone mention my name?” Pete asked, surfacing beside them with a grin.

Nan sent a spray of water at him with a sweep of her palm, and all the serious discussions were drenched in horseplay.

* * *

BUT LATER, WHEN they went to the motel to change before supper, Shelly couldn’t help wondering if she was ungrateful. Her father, a wealthy investment counselor, had given her every advantage during her youth. Her mother was a socialite and her brother was an eminent scientist. She had an impeccable background. But she had no desire to drift from luncheon to cocktail party, or even to do superficial charity work. She wanted to help people in trouble. She wanted to see the world as it was, out of her protected environment. Her parents couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand that she had to feel useful, to know that her life had a purpose of some sort beyond learning the correct social graces.

She enjoyed school. She attended Thorn College, a small community college in Washington, D.C., where she was just one of the student body and accepted without hassle, despite her background. It was the kind of atmosphere that was friendly and warm without being invasive. She loved it.

Living off campus did limit some of her participation in social activities, but she didn’t mind that. She’d always thought in her own mind that she was rather a cold woman—at least where men were concerned. She dated, and boys kissed her from time to time, but she felt nothing beyond surface pleasure at the contact of warm lips on her own. She had no desire to risk her life for the sake of curiosity, experimentation or for fear of ridicule. She was strong enough not to flinch at the condescending remarks from one of the more permissive girls. Someday, she thought, she would be glad that she hadn’t followed the crowd. She stared at her reflection and smiled. “You-stick-in-the-mud,” she told herself.

There was a quick knock on the door followed by Nan’s entrance. “Aren’t you ready yet?” she grumbled. She glared at Shelly’s very conservative voile dress, yellow on black, with sandals and her long hair in a French braid. “You’re not going like that?” she added, groaning. “Don’t you have any idea what the current style is?”

“Sure. Spandex skirts or tights and funny smock blouses. But they’re not me. This is.”

“Wouldn’t catch me dead in that.” Nan sighed. Her curly hair sported a yellow-and-white bow, and her white tights were topped off by a multicolored short dress.

“You look super,” Shelly said approvingly.

Nan struck a pose. “Call Ebony magazine and tell them I’m available for covers.” She chuckled.

“You could do covers,” came the serious reply. Nan really was lovely. Her skin had a soft café au lait demureness. Combined with her liquid black eyes and jet black hair and elegant facial structure, she would have been a knockout on the cover of any magazine. She looked like an Egyptian wall painting. “I’ve seen gorgeous movie stars who were uglier than you are,” she added.

Nan chuckled. “You devil, you.”

“I’m not kidding. Why haven’t you ever thought of modeling?”

Nan shrugged. “I have a good brain,” she said simply. “I don’t want it to get lost in the shuffle. I’m going to be an archaeologist.”

Shelly groaned. “Don’t remind me that I have two more exams to go in introductory anthropology or I’ll scream!”

“I’ll coach you. You’ll do fine.”

“I won’t! I barely passed biology! We’ve still got fossil forms of man and kinship systems and subsistence patterns to go…!”

“Piece of cake.” Nan dismissed it. “Besides, you got Dr. Tabitha Harvey, and she’s the best. Oops, I mean Dr. Tabitha Reed. Can you imagine her getting married? And to such a dish!” She shook her head. “But to get back to the subject, don’t you realize that anthropology is part of sociology? How can you understand the way we are as a culture today without understanding how we came to be a culture in the first place?”

“Here you go again.”

“I love it. You would, too, if you’d let yourself. I’ve taken every anthropology course Thorn College offers. I loved them all!”

“This stuff is hard.”

“Life,” Nan reminded her, “is hard. You can’t appreciate a good grade in anthropology until you’ve had to dig for it.” She looked surprised. “I made a funny!”

“On that note, we’re leaving,” Shelly murmured, dragging her friend out the door.

* * *

THEY HAD SUPPER IN THE SAME restaurant each night. It was their one extravagance, and mainly because Nan had a crush on one of the other diners, a student from Kenya whom she’d met on the beach.

Shelly looked forward to the evening ritual because of another patron who frequented the restaurant. She ran into him everywhere, accidentally. He nodded politely and never stopped to talk, but she watched him with open fascination, to the amusement of her friends. In fact, her fascination was a ruse to keep her friends from trying to pair her off with Pete. She liked Pete, but her attitudes weren’t casual enough to suit him. By pretending infatuation for a stranger, she elicited not only sympathy for her unrequited love, but also avoided well-meaning matchmakers among the group she’d accompanied on spring break.

Her unwilling object of affection was beginning to notice, and be irritated by her, though. It had become a challenge to see how far she could push him before he exploded. The thought was oddly exciting for a woman who almost never took chances. In fact, in all her twenty-four years, he was the first man she’d ever pursued, even in fun. It was unlike her, but he wouldn’t know that. Her flirting seemed to disturb and irritate him.