Free The Prodigal Son by Colleen McCullough

the Christian God as it did on His ministers, their reluctance to accept science as a part of God’s grand design. How Tinkerman must be writhing at the thought that he dared not use his most powerful tool — racial prejudice. No, he wouldn’t run the risk of being accused of that. His tactics would be oblique and subtle.
    How expressive was a feminine back? Surprisingly so, Carmine concluded, going down the row of the high table’s ladies’ backs, all he could see. Angela M.M. bobbed up and down like a sleek yet busy bird, the two Parson wives sat haughtily straight thanks to old-fashioned corsets, and poor little Mrs. Thomas Tarleton Tinkerman looked like a plucked fowl, her shoulder blades vestigial wings, her backbone knobby beads. It was more difficult to catalogue Millie, in a Universityof Chicago Ph.D. gown, but certainly she wasn’t hunched over in defeat; just, it was plain, ignored by all the other women save wafty Angela. How she must be missing Dr. Jim, almost the distance of the table away from her — and who had placed her between the Parson wives?
    Neither Millie nor Jim had gone to the expense of buying doctoral robes; theirs were hired, which meant a generic robe mixed-and-matched. It showed as what it was — shabby, much used by many, and not the right size.
    Heart feeling twinges for the Hunters, Carmine returned to his own table to join in a merry discussion with Derek Daiman and Manny Mayhew about the merits of teaching Shakespeare to hoods.
    Once Mrs. Maude Parson ascertained that the rather common girl next to her had a doctorate in biochemistry, she dried up defensively, while Mrs. Eunice Parson on Millie’s other side didn’t seem to speak to anybody. Only Angela M.M. knew that the billionaire ladies were abysmally educated, and utterly intimidated at being in this kind of company. Had Millie only known, she would have made an effort to talk to them, but what happened in reality was a Mexican standoff: one potential conversationalist was terrified by so much money, the other two by so many brains. Poor M.M. was carrying the major burden of conversation, Angela helping valiantly, but it was not, the President of Chubb said to himself, one of the better banquets. That was what happened when you let someone likeHester Grey of C.U.P. do the seating arrangements. And Nate Winthrop instead of Doug Thwaites — was the woman mad, to demote Doug to the floor? If anyone he hated wound up in his court within the next six months, he’d throw the book at them — and his chief target would be M.M., innocent.
    Millie did have a memorable exchange of words with the new Head Scholar, seated almost opposite her. It commenced when he looked her up and down as if he felt she would be more appropriately situated peddling ass on a street corner.
    “I believe your father is the Holloman County Medical Examiner, Dr. Hunter?” Tinkerman asked, inspecting his chicken breast to see what the filling was — ugh!— garlic, apricot chunks, nuts for pity’s sake! Whatever happened to good old sage and onion stuffing and giblet gravy?
    “Yes,” said Millie, demolishing her broiled scrod with unfeigned relish; expensive foods were rare on the Hunter table. “Dad has turned an old-fashioned coroner’s morgue into a forensics department without parallel in the state. It can perform the most difficult assays and analyses, and the autopsy techniques have changed almost out of recognition.”
    “Oh, science!” said Tinkerman, screwing up his mouth. “It is the cause of all our human woes.”
    Millie couldn’t help herself. “What an asinine thing to say!” she snapped, having no idea she was thrilling the Parson wives, who would have given their billions to say that to a man in doctor’s robes. “I would have said God was the cause of human woes — look at the wars fought in God’s name,” she said.

    If she had thrown him into a vat of cement, he could not have grown any stiffer. “You blaspheme!” he