Sooner or Later Read Free Page B

might help instead of laughing.” She shot Maya a glare, clutching the boxes to her chest, her bare toe pointed.
    “Or maybe a ballet dancer.” Maya climbed from the car. She was on her way to yoga class and had on a black leotard and sneakers, and not much else, and she was stopping traffic. She slid the shoe onto Ellie’s foot. ‘And I’m the fairy prince who turns into a pumpkin at midnight.”
    “Cinderella’s
coach
turned into a pumpkin and she married her prince.”
    Maya put her hands on her hips, looking at Ellie, still clutching the sliding boxes. “Fat chance you have of marrying a prince, or anyone else. You’re a woman married to your work. Anyhow, where are you going?”
    “To see Miss Lottie.”
    Maya nodded; now she knew why, instead of herusual jeans, Ellie was wearing the ice-blue flowered skirt and a deeper blue skinny-knit top. And her mother’s pearls—the ones taken from her throat after the automobile accident that had killed her. She dropped a kiss on her cheek. “Give her my love.” She got back in the car, wishing Ellie would get herself a date. It was all work and no play for her.
    Ellie dashed back to the cafe, locked up, then drove, too fast as always, to the Santa Monica homeless shelter where she dropped off the food, hoping it would help, if only a little bit.
    Checking her watch, she climbed back into the Jeep, wondering where the time had gone.
    As she headed north on 101, Ellie thought worriedly about her grandmother. Miss Lottie lived in a run-down old mansion in Montecito with just a housekeeper to help. She was well into her eighties and her mind wandered erratically. She could lose decades between one thought and the next, but then she would recall in perfect detail, the time she had bought a hat in Paris in 1939, though there were moments Ellie suspected she simply chose to be vague, when there was something she just didn’t want to discuss.
    “Old age has its advantages, my dear,” Miss Lottie had said smugly, when Ellie exasperatedly accused her of faking. “I brought you up properly after your poor mother died. You’ve flown the nest, I have no more responsibilities. Now I’m without a care in the world.”
    Ellie only wished it were true. Meanwhile, the traffic was hell and she was going to be late. Again.

         3
    L OTTIE P ARRISH ’ S “ COTTAGE ” STOOD ON TWENTY PRIME acres of land in the affluent little resort township of Montecito. Ten minutes farther north was Santa Barbara, site of the old Spanish Mission and a campus of the University of California. And just over an hour and a whole lifestyle to the south, lay the great smog-scorched urban sprawl of Los Angeles.
    Beach houses and Spanish casitas hugged the curve of the bay, shaded by palms, and orange and lemon and fig trees. Tropicai-hued bougainvillaea sprawled in abundance in shady gardens and along Coast Village Road, which was lined with little boutiques and restaurants, and tourists. But for all the activity down in the “town,” life up on Hot Springs Road might not have changed since the thirties, when the grand Italianate mansion had been built by Charlotte Parrish’s father.
    Waldo Stamford, a Boston Yankee, had fallen in love with the tiny, flower-bedecked coastal community. He’d built his house of imported cream limestone with a columned arcade, tall French windows leading onto shadypatios, fountained courtyards and gardens copied from a Palladian villa in the Veneto region of Italy. Each of the twelve bedroom suites had its own bath and sitting room, with green wooden shutters to close out the afternoon sunlight. And each had been fitted out with every luxury, from European antiques and priceless rugs, to gold faucets shaped like dolphins and the very best Irish linen sheets. Which in those days were changed every morning by uniformed maids, and washed and ironed in their own laundry, a special building hidden in the birch woods near the back gates.
    Waldo and his young