The 15th Star (A Lisa Grace History - Mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page B

working with an American charity to adopt out the healthy ones. The lucky ones.
    Keiko ’s luck started to run out her freshman year in college. Her parents were killed in a car crash. Hit by a drunk driver while returning home from dinner. The offending car had been stolen and the driver never found. The cops surmised the driver was drunk because of the half empty whiskey bottle left in the abandoned wreck.
    She didn ’t find out until early the next morning. Keiko had stayed late at the library, well after midnight, studying. She chose to remember her parents the way they were and pretended they were still alive. As long as she was in college going for her masters, living in the same place, their brownstone, she could pretend that nothing had changed. Their life insurance was enough to pay off the huge mortgage and have enough left for future taxes and the expenses associated with finishing her degree, if she were frugal.
    Everyday she played the game that her parents would walk in the door any minute. They were just out for a late dinner or there was an emergency at the hospital where they both worked. They would come home after she was in bed.
    In the morning she played the same game. Mom and Dad had gotten up early and left before she was awake. It was easier not to face the pain. The horror and anger that the police had still not found the driver or made an arrest was unbearable and unthinkable. Just knowing she may never know who took them away from her wasn’t fair. The truth was important. The truth drove Keiko.
    “ So what are you working on, Keiko?” Faced with Doc’s enthusiasm she could pretend she was telling her dad, “Oh, I’m archiving a box of correspondence that was donated. It’s been sitting in the basement about fifty years now.”
    “ Well Keiko, you put us all to shame, toiling from dawn to dusk while history has a way of racing ahead day by day, new chapters being added. Yet while it races ahead, it also waits patiently to be discovered and remembered by us. What a conundrum! And with all the cuts we’ve suffered, most of it will patiently wait some more.”
    “ I like remembering. To me they are more than memories or history. I feel close to them. They were real people. They should be remembered. The box I’m working on now was donated by a distant relative of the Adam’s family.”
    “ Ah, ha! The mischief makers of the colonial set.”
    “ It looks like they came into possession of some Armistead letters. And there seems to be a connection to Pickersgill, which might prove to be interesting,” Keiko said as she sipped her coffee while warming her hands on either side of her mug.
    “ Mary, Mary, such a hard worker, always living in the shadow of Betsy Ross. I wonder if that irked her?” Doc looked up as he sat down with his mug.
    Keiko shrugged, “I never really thought about it.”
    Doc sat behind his desk and spoke, “Oh, the story behind the history, the truth behind the mystery.
    We conjecture and bring to light, whether it made the difference,
    Turning left, instead of right.”
     
    “Waxing poetic again?” A deep voice asked, as Dr. Julian Lone Wolf entered the room. Three-quarters American Indian, proud of his heritage, and an expert in Indian survival during the era of Colonial America.
    He was in charge of all exhibits pertaining to the history of the American Indians.
    Keiko loved looking at him. He looked the part of an Indian warrior. Being an ex-soldier he was a warrior. Sometimes he wore his long black hair pulled back in a ponytail or at other times, like today, hanging straight. While walking through the public areas upstairs the school kids who spotted him would whisper excitedly, “Look at the Indian!” Julian ate it up. Anything to get the kids hooked and coming back. His knowledge of all things Indian was encyclopedic. His pet project at the moment was recording the ancient language of the Cherokee and putting it on and integrating it into an interactive