Living in Threes by Judith Tarr Page A

just couldn’t resist—”
    “Of course you couldn’t.”
    I held my breath, but it seemed I didn’t have either Thief or Liar painted on my forehead.
    Aunt Jessie wasn’t really looking at me. She had an odd expression on her face. “You have visitors,” she said.
    Now that was odd. Who in the world…?

    Who’s the world traveler in the family?
    Dad was waiting for me in the lounge outside the dining commons. It had a lot of leather chairs and couches and bookshelves full of anything and everything, a piano that Jonathan had told me belonged to Howard Carter—the man himself, the one who found King Tut’s tomb—and a television set so old it didn’t even have a remote, and a sound system so new I wasn’t sure if some of its components had been invented yet.
    I wasn’t at all surprised to find Dad fiddling with the sound system. He had it playing a funky mix of Beatles songs, which was a totally Dad thing to do.
    I love my Dad. When he can be bothered to be around, he’s more fun than anybody I know. He’s been everywhere and done everything, and there isn’t anything he isn’t interested in.
    Mom used to be like him, everybody tells me. By the time Dad bought the sailing schooner and started running charter cruises out of Key West, I’d come along and Mom was ’way over her experimental phase. She bought the house on the mainland and joined the law firm, and Dad stopped by in between cruises.
    The visits got further and further apart. By the time I taught myself to read, one of the first things I figured out was a postcard from Dad from the Bering Sea. He’d signed on for a season on a crab boat, then he was headed to Mongolia to run a trekking company. Ponies on the steppe, nights in a yurt—every horse kid’s dream.
    That’s how I got into horses. I was determined to learn to ride and then go and help Dad with his company. Dad moved on; he always did. I stayed with the horses, and Florida, and Mom.
    The last I heard, he was in India doing something high-tech. Or training elephants; his messages weren’t too clear. Now here he was in Luxor, looking just the same as always, long and tall and sunburned.
    He didn’t have a beard this round, and he’d cut his hair. I liked him that way. His bright blue eyes hadn’t changed even slightly, or the wide white grin. He picked me up and hugged me so tight my ribs creaked.
    I was getting old for that, but just before I started to go stiff, he put me down. “Fancy meeting you here,” he said.
    “That was my line,” I said. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in an ashram or something?”
    “That was last year.” I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at me or not. “I just got off a Greenpeace cruise in the Indian Ocean. Since I was so close, relatively speaking, I thought I’d stop by and see how you’re doing.”
    I narrowed my eyes at him. Dad would think like that, for sure, but he never had just one thing going on.
    “If you’re not too tired,” he said, “I’d like to take you to dinner. You up for it?”
    I glanced at Aunt Jessie. She wouldn’t hesitate to tell either of us if she thought he was full of it, but she spread her hands. “Up to you,” she said.
    I was tired and jetlagged and I had more on my mind than a sane person ought to have, but if Dad was up to something, I wanted to know it now instead of days or weeks from now. “All right,” I said. “I’ll go get changed.”

    Trust Dad to stay in a hotel that looked as if you’d find Indiana Jones in the next room, or the kind of lady archaeologist who’d stow a sword inside her parasol. It had actual, modern air conditioning, but the big ceiling fans were still there and still turning, and the dining room was full of potted palms and people in khaki. There was at least one busload of German tourists, and the British accents were out in force.
    The waiter was a disappointment. They wear the same uniform in Florida, white shirt and black pants. The fact