The Elementals Read Online Free Page A

wading in the bay.
    Basting quick stitches, Kate bit the thread to cut it off. Pinning the needle into her cuff, she pulled the trousers on quickly. Stuffing linen shirttails into them, she glanced at the light spilling through the crack in the door. Her fingers flew along the buttons, then she cinched everything with a fine leather belt.
    Heart pounding, she listened again. She had to figure out where her parents were so she could slip out around them. Tinny music bleated from the Victrola, which blended perfectly with glasses clinking. Knotting a tie at her throat, Kate squinted, as if that might help her hear a little better.
    “Always sorry to see the fair close,” a woman said.
    Another woman replied with a snort, “Well, there’s the
War
Exposition.”
    A burst of laughter from the room drowned those voices out. Pulling on a jacket, Kate smoothed herself out and then reached for her hat. She’d already tied her hair in a loose knot on top of her head, and the hat fit neatly over it.
    That was the perfect touch; she was transformed. A quick look in the mirror confirmed it: lovely Kate Witherspoon had become a nattily dressed young man.
    Slipping her big, boxy camera into a satchel, she took care to fold the crank down and to cover the lens. Then she walked into the party as if she belonged there.
    Technically, she did. She was her parents’ crowning achievement: a worldly girl who spoke English with an unnamable accent. Her dark eyes and full lips had already inspired any number of paintings, and once, a stained glass window. She could debate the relative merits of the Italian Masters versus the Dutch Masters, grind pigments in her sleep, and had very rarely had the same address for more than a year or two.
    Her schooling had been in traveling, learning to read with authors, studying geography by walking it. All of it, always, within arm’s reach of her parents. Her sickeningly almost-famous parents, known in “the right circles” and absolutely anonymous out of them. To that wide and limited world, she wasn’t Kate Witherspoon. She was
Nathaniel and Amelia’s daughter.
    It’s not that Kate wanted an ordinary life. She wanted a life of her
own.
    Walking purposefully, she made straight for the door. A certain thrill quivered in her belly as she moved unrecognized among familiar faces. She had a far better method of escape at the ready, but traipsing out before their very eyes delighted her.
    Someone dropped the needle on a new record, and everyone shivered with the racing beat. In the corner, Amelia threw her head back in laugher; that sound carried over the noise of the party. Hurrying, Kate darted around a clutch of painters arguing about gouache.
    Music trailed after her, even after she slipped outside and down the drive.
    The night smelled of jasmine and motor oil as Kate hopped a streetcar at the corner. Paying her fare, she hung off the back rail like the other boys did, careful to hold on to her hat and satchel. Tipping her face to the wind, she savored the rattle of the car beneath her feet and the vastness of the city at night.
    If only her camera could capture the stars. Or moonlight on the waves. Images blossomed in her mind: a lone boat on the horizon, swallowed by the night as constellations drifted in endless loops overhead. At least that idea came in black and white. If she could figure out how to shoot the dark, her father couldn’t argue that she wasn’t capturing the truth.
    When the car slowed near San Diego’s Balboa Park, Kate leapt from the platform. The Palais de Danse stood in the distance. Lights gleamed on its whitewashed entrance; its plaster spires curled toward the sky. It looked vaguely Moroccan as long as you’d never been to Marrakesh.
    Music poured from the crowded front door. The bright tease of a cornet cut the air, a clarinet squealing along with a piano. Drums and trombone competed in the luscious low notes. The syncopated beat slipped across Kate’s skin, tightening