Read The Search for Free Online Page B

then come back. They seemed to spend half their time searching instead of surfing.
    Liz grimaced as more panel vans and cars with surfboards bristling out like echidna quills pulled into the parking bay. It was going to be a very busy day.
    Five kookaburras landed with a thump on the railing, eager for their morning snack of raw minced steak, so she hurried inside to the fridge and brought out a handful for them.
    ‘You guys are on the search too,’ she joked as she popped small pieces into each open beak. ‘The search for food. There you go, guys, that’ll keep you happy till the first bus comes in.’
    When the tourist buses arrived, Kay or one of the girls would get some fresh meat pieces and call the kookaburras so that the tourists could feed them and take photos. There were nine of them in the area and usually they turned up in threes, seeming to know which ‘shift’ they were on. The rest of the time they were searching for lizards and small snakes to supplement their steak diet.
    While she was in the kitchen, Liz scooped up a container of sunflower seeds for the king parrots and rosellas that were waiting patiently in the gum trees near the verandah. Then she got some millet seeds for the finches which she called the Little Guys, andsprinkled it on the ground below, because they wouldn’t try to compete with the parrots at the food trays.
    Time to go. Dragging on some navy shorts and a perky blue and white striped T-shirt, Liz darted to the door where her sneakers were airing on the steps. Shaking them vigorously just in case an errant spider or bull ant had decided to spend the night in them, she pulled them on.
    It was a five-minute walk down to the store. The sea mist was still clinging tenaciously to the hills but the sun was beginning to peek through over in the east where the surfers sat like watchful cowboys riding their boards and waiting for the big one that would carry them swooping to the shore. The road wound downhill through gum trees and scrub to cleared land where there was a tennis court and the store, with the river winding its way lazily through the valley to the left, and the camping ground sprawling on the right.
    Liz wondered whether Angela and Braden would be easy to get on with at the store this year. She knew them both from being a customer and then a shop assistant briefly over Easter. Braden was all right, although he loved to gossip, but Angela had proved to be a two-faced little cow. She was a good workerso Kay had ignored her alternate bouts of sunniness and sulkiness, but Liz had found it hard to stay calm when she was rostered on with Angela. She was never sure how the other girl would react, and sometimes the tension had stretched her nerves to screaming point. Not that she had ever actually screamed, of course. Whenever her breaks came she’d walked furiously up the hill past the holiday houses, or strode briskly along the sand and round to Shelly Beach, and burnt off her anger that way.
    Liz arrived at the store just as the sun broke through the mist and turned the sea to molten gold. Its rays were already piercingly hot on her bare arms and legs. Unless a breeze came in from the sea to cool the air, the day was going to be a scorcher!
    Already the delivery vans were rolling in and the early bus had brought the crates of milk. It was all systems go.
    Flick and Kay were bustling around inside making brekkies. The full Special Surfer’s Breakfast consisted of eggs, bacon, sausages, tomatoes, hash browns and hot buttered toast for $5, which was very good value, but Kay was smart and knew they’d wash it all down with milkshakes at $2.50 and buy other stuff to take with them. As she always said, ‘What you lose on the roundabout, you make up on the swings.’
    Privately Liz thought that the Special Surfer’s Breakfast was a total fat fest, but the guys and few chicks who tucked into it every morning didn’t pile on any weight. They probably burnt it off shooting waves all