The Odd Job Read Free

struck precisely the right note with her swept-back auburn mane and her greenish eyes, and must have cost old Elwyn a mint. The shoulder-length golden earrings, the heavy gold neck chains in various lengths, the armloads of golden bangles, the up-to-the-knuckles gold rings on all eight fingers and both thumbs were perhaps a bit much for a quiet day in the country, Sarah thought, out perhaps they helped to take Lala’s mind off the Herefords.
    If, in fact, Lala had a mind. She must have run through her entire repertoire of elevated small talk over the aperitifs. Since they’d moved to the dining room she’d done little but smile vaguely when anybody addressed a direct comment to her and keep on playing with her freight of jingling bracelets. Perhaps she’d had a drink too many, she was eating almost none of the food that a good-looking but sour-mouthed young male servitor, got up in brown denims, a floppy-sleeved homespun shirt, and a buckskin waistcoat, was handing around with no great éclat. Sarah couldn’t blame Lala for her lack of appetite; the much-touted main dish said little for the Turbot beef and still less for the Turbots’ cook.
    Sarah herself could turn out a tastier bourguignon with a cheap cut from the supermarket, and often had. Her sister-in-law could do it even better in half the time. Once more Sarah wondered what had possessed her to give up a chance to spend some time at the lake with Davy and her beloved inlaws for a cool reception and a so-so meal. She might have got more of Elwyn Turbot’s attention if she’d been a polled Hereford.
    What it would take to capture Lala’s undivided attention Sarah could not imagine, unless, God forbid, she and Anne had both shown up in garb even more exotic than their hostess’s. Neither Sarah’s sleeveless blue silk dress with its loose-fitting jacket nor Anne’s crisp, daisy-patterned shirtwaist, though both becoming and suitable to the place and the occasion, could begin to compete with all that swoosh and jingle. Whatever had possessed Anne to insist so passionately—passionately for Anne, anyway—that the Turbots were both on tiptoe to meet her interesting cousin? And why had Sarah been fool enough to capitulate?
    Along with the Tulip Street brownstone, Sarah had inherited from her first husband over thirty acres of waterfront and a dilapidated wooden firetrap at Ireson’s Landing on the North Shore. Now the old Kelling place was gone; in its stead had arisen a joyous, simple house that seemed to be made out of sea air and sunshine. Sarah’s friend Dorothy Atwood had drawn up the plans, Max’s father had supervised the building, Max’s mother had sewn the curtains, Max’s sister had embroidered the cushions. The Kelling family’s reactions had been mixed.
    Cousin Percy’s voice had been loud among those who’d excoriated Max Bittersohn and all his ilk for having destroyed the ramshackle ark that not one of the whiners would have raised a finger, much less a penny, to keep in decent repair. Actually it had been Sarah herself, alone and unaided, who had hired a wrecking crew and watched in triumph while they’d razed the drafty relic to the ground and trucked it away down to the last splinter.
    Sarah had told Percy time and again that the house had been hers and hers alone, and that its destruction had been all her own doing. Nevertheless, he’d been adamant that nobody of Kelling blood could have committed so flagrant an act of vandalism unless she’d been goaded into it by that tribe of Shylocks she’d been fool enough to get mixed up with.
    Percy had begun to modify his tone, though, now that he’d been made to realize how highly the Bittersohn family were rated around the North Shore, and where Max in particular stood with Dun & Bradstreet. No certified public accountant in his right mind could wax too censorious over an in-law whose income and reputation for probity were both right up there with Percy’s own.
    And this despite the