known facts that Cousin Max’s hair was still showing not a hint of gray, much less a bald spot, that his doctorate had been earned at a university which was not Harvard, and that no evidence could be found to show he had ever joined a fraternity. Or one of the right clubs. Or even a wrong one. The man was an enigma.
But a successful enigma. Sarah was beginning to read the fine print. Percy must be working up to have one of his upper-echelon assistants drop a hint into Mr. Bittersohn’s ear about advantages that could accrue should Mr. Bittersohn care to consider transferring his accountancy business to the prestigious firm of Kelling, Kelling, and Kelling. This engineered visit, taking Percy’s cousin to meet one of Percy’s affluent clients, was just another case of the camel’s nose and the nomad’s tent.
Naturally Percy would not come straight out and admit that Turbot was one of his clients. Percy was chary of naming names; but if Turbot hadn’t been on Percy’s books, then Percy would not have been here today. Turbot had just been elected to chair the Wilkins Museum Board of Trustees. Max Bittersohn still carried their carte blanche to seek out and return as many as possible of the museum’s stolen originals. Just why these circumstances should become a tempting hook to catch another well-heeled client didn’t make a great deal of sense to Sarah; but why else would Percy have primed his dutiful wife to lure her into acting as bait?
Sarah saw no earthly reason why Percy couldn’t have approached Max directly. It wasn’t as though the two were strangers, they’d met often enough at Kelling family festivities and funerals, between which there was often not much difference. It was simply that directness was not Percy’s way. He loved to plot some intricate plan of action, then turn over the legwork to one of his trusted deputies. Since engineering these sorties was about the only fun Percy ever allowed himself, his reasonably well-treated staff were quite willing to fall in with his schemes, playing their parts like real old Yankee horse traders. And this despite the fact that two of them were Finnish and one was Japanese.
* The Family Vault
Chapter 2
I F MAX WANTED TO play games with Percy, that would be up to him. All Sarah wanted was to hear his voice. Max might be trying to reach home right now, hearing her taped message on the answering machine and wondering why she wasn’t around to take his call.
Well might he wonder. On Wednesday, she’d had her work schedule and her support group all lined up in perfect order. Early Thursday morning, the kind lady who obliged at Ireson’s Landing had woken up with some kind of stomach bug and didn’t think she’d better come to work for fear of passing it on to Davy. Normally Max’s sister Miriam Rivkin, who lived nearby in Ireson Town, would have been delighted to take Davy long enough for Sarah to get some work done, but she and Ira, her husband, had rented a vacation cottage on a lake that was just too far away for a reasonable commute.
That left Sarah and her son alone at the Landing, with Mariposa and Charles holding the fort on Tulip Street. Late Friday night, Mariposa had got an urgent summons to the bedside of a cherished great-aunt who was fading fast and calling for her. The aunt was in Puerto Rico. Sarah had spent most of Saturday rushing to Boston, with Davy in the car because she’d had nobody to leave him with, getting Mariposa paid, packed, and ticketed; turning her over to Charles for delivery to the airport, then rushing back to Ireson’s Landing in hope that a miracle would happen.
Miracles weren’t hard to arrange in the Rivkin family. Davy’s grown-up cousin Mike had offered to pick him up first thing Sunday morning, drive him out to the lake, and give him a crash course in sand castles and minnow-chasing so that Sarah could get some work done. At bedtime, Sarah had told her son a story about a minnow, given him several extra
Michelle Pace, Andrea Randall