Читать онлайн «Found money»
Автор Джеймс Гриппандо
James Grippando
Found money
Prologue: July 1979
It was dying. No way to save it. And Amy Parkens watched with a child’s fascination.
The night was perfect. No city lights, not even a moon to brighten the cloudless sky outside her bedroom window. Billions of stars blanketed the vast blackness of space. Her six-inch Newtonian reflector telescope was aimed at the Ring Nebula, a dying star in the constellation of Lyra. Amy liked that one best. It reminded her of the smoke rings her grand father used to blow with his cigar — a faint, grayish-green ring puffed into outer space. Death was slow in coming, over many millennia. It was irreversible. Astronomically speaking, the Ring Nebula was light-years beyond Geritol.
Amy peered through the eyepiece, pushing her hair aside. She was a tall and skinny eight-year-old with sandy-blonde bangs that dangled in her eyes. She’d often heard grown-ups say she was destined to be the Twiggy of the eighties, but that didn’t interest her. Her interests were unlike those of most third graders. Television and video games bored her. She was used to spending time alone in the evenings, entertaining herself with books, celestial maps, her telescope — things her friends would have considered homework. She had never known her father. He’d been killed in Vietnam before Amy could even walk. She lived with her mom, a busy physics professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. A passion for the stars was an inherited fascination.
Long before her first telescope, Amy would look into the night sky and see much more than twinkling lights. By the time she was seven she could name every stellar constellation. Since then, she’d even made some up and named them herself — distant constellations, beyond the reach of even the world’s most powerful instruments but not beyond her imagination. Other kids might stare through telescopes all night long and never see Orion or Sirius, because the stars didn’t line up exactly right for them. For Amy, it all made perfect sense.Amy switched on her flashlight, the only light she needed in her small pink bedroom. With colored pencils she sketched out the Ring Nebula on her notepad, her own makeshift coloring book. She was the only kid in her class with no fear of the dark — so long as her telescope was nearby.
“Lights out, sweetie,” her mother called from the hallway.
“Lights are out, Mom. ”
“You know what I mean. ”
The door opened, and her mother entered. She switched on the little lamp beside Amy’s bed. Amy squinted as her eyes adjusted to the faint yellow glow. Her mother’s smile was warm but weak. Her eyes showed fatigue. She’d looked tired a lot lately. And worried. Over the last few days, Amy had noticed the change, had even asked what was wrong. Her mother would say only that it was “nothing. ”
Amy had gotten ready for bed hours ago, well before the celestial sidetrack. She was dressed in her yellow summer pajamas, her face washed and teeth brushed. She climbed down from the chair and gave her mom a hug. “Can’t I stay up a little longer? Please?”
