The Odd Job Read Free Page B

good-night kisses, sung him to sleep, packed his small duffel bag, and staggered off to her own bed. Shortly after daybreak, Mike and his girlfriend had zoomed up the drive. The girlfriend had picked up the duffel bag, Mike had slung Davy over his shoulder and carried him off gurgling with joy.
    Sarah had stood waving until they were out of sight, gone back inside to get dressed, decided it wasn’t worth the bother, and carried a cup of coffee out to the deck. The seagulls weren’t much company but they were better than nothing.
    Not a great deal better. Sarah had had a premonition that, once Mike had got Davy out to the lake, Miriam would be on the phone suggesting that he stay on a while so that Sarah could get some work done. Sarah had seen beneath the artifice. Miriam and Ira wanted Davy to themselves, she’d be lucky to pry him loose by the end of the week. A whole, long week without Max, without Davy, without Miriam and Ira, without Brooks and Theonia, without Mariposa, even without Jesse. It was a grim prospect.
    But somebody had to mind the store, as Max was wont to say. Sarah had weighed the situation and decided to drive back to Boston sometime during the afternoon; it would be neither fair nor prudent to leave Charles alone at Tulip Street. She’d had to let Mr. Lomax, who’d been tending the Ireson’s Landing property since before Sarah was born, know that his services as caretaker would be particularly needed this week. It wasn’t a good idea for the seaside house and grounds to be left unwatched and she didn’t know how long she might get stuck in Boston.
    At least this ordeal of a meal could not go on much longer. Sarah managed to suppress a sigh of relief as the sullen young waiter took her plate away. She’d done all that could reasonably be expected of her. She’d made admiring noises about the polled Herefords, she’d struggled to find words of praise for the stiff, garish, ruthlessly clipped and weeded plantings about which even Cousin Anne, consummate gardener that she was, couldn’t wax enthusiastic. Because Anne had said Cousin Sarah was an artist, she’d been herded into the painfully restored barn and forced to look at the ever so quaint, mildly pornographic, too devastatingly folk-arty mural that some vandal had painted on a long panel knocked together from beautiful pumpkin pine boards, each nearly two feet in width. Those boards must have weathered at least a century of legitimate use, only to be sacrificed to an idiot’s whim. Sarah felt queasy again at the recollection, or perhaps it was the boeuf bourguignon.
    Fortunately, dessert was nothing more deadly than melon sherbet dribbled with Amaretto, served in squatty green glass goblets and garnished with the sort of expensive cookies that get sold through mail-order catalogs geared to the affluent suburbanite. Elwyn Turbot gobbled his sherbet in two spoonfuls, heaved himself to his feet, and made a quick switch from genial country squire to masterful man of destiny.
    “First off, Mrs. Bittersohn, would you kindly tell me why your husband failed to show up for this meeting? I thought I’d made it sufficiently plain to your cousin that I wanted Bittersohn present.”
    Sarah had sensed something like this in the wind, she was not a bit surprised. “I’m sorry you’re disappointed, Mr. Turbot, but my husband’s away on business. Percy, why on earth didn’t you explain that to Anne before you badgered her into phoning me?”
    It was a rotten thing to say, but Sarah was not a bit sorry she’d said it. This was the first time in her life that she’d ever got the chance to watch Percy Kelling squirm.
    Percy was one of the rock-ribbed, horse-faced Kellings. For approximately half a second, his craggy features were suffused with the exact same shade of russet as the Turbots’ Herefords; and his wife’s with the identical look of bland satisfaction that Sarah had noticed on those gentle, white-jowled ruminants’ faces. Still, the