The Odd Job Read online

  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 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

  IF 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 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 Kelling code was inflexible. Percy could not be left hanging. For once, it was Anne who got her oar in first.

  “Oh, Percy doesn’t have to explain things to me. We both knew Max was off on one of his hunting trips, but we didn’t see that it mattered. Sarah and Max are equal partners, Elwyn. When one’s too busy, the other takes over. Percy knew that Sarah could cope and that you’re eager to get going on your new project, so there was no reason to keep you waiting. Isn’t that right, Percy dear? Shall I tell Elwyn and Lala how Sarah rescued our sweet little girl with the parrot?”

  Percy’s aplomb was back in order. “Er—perhaps later, Anne. I believe Elwyn has some questions about the Wilkins Collection which I’m sure Sarah can answer to his complete satisfaction.”

  Turbot loomed over his empty dessert dish with his head lowered, like a bull getting ready to charge. “Then suppose you answer me this, Mrs. Bittersohn. Give me one good reason why, as chairman of the board for the Wilkins Museum, I shouldn’t slap you and your equal partner with a lawsuit for breach of contract.”

  The only sound in the room was the nonstop jangling of Lala Turbot’s bracelets. Her husband continued to loom and glower, Percy Kelling looked more than ever like a horse with a frog in its throat. Anne’s face was a careful blank. Sarah fought down an impulse to giggle.

  “I assume you’re talking specifically about a contract with the Wilkins Museum, Mr. Turbot.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then the answer is simple. You have no grounds on which to sue because there is not now and never has been any contract between the Wilkins and the Bittersohn Detective Agency.”

  Turbot wheeled on his accountant. “What the hell is she talking about? God damn it, Kelling, why can’t you follow instructions? I suppose, because you couldn’t get hold of Bittersohn, you thought I’d fall for this dumb little cutie-pants and let her waste my afternoon.”

  Lala yawned without bothering to cover her mouth. Her husband glared at her. Percy Kelling might have wanted to glare at his cousin, but that would have been unsubtle. He took a deep breath and pasted a grim smile to his lips.

  “Perhaps, Sarah, you may be able to clarify the situation?”

  “I’ll be glad to, Percy, though I certainly don’t want to waste any more of Mr. Turbot’s valuable time. Could you tell me, please, Mr. Turbot, how long you’ve been chairing the board of trustees?”

  This was pure devilment. There was no way that Sarah couldn’t have known, considering how long she and Max had been involved with the Wilkins. If she shut her eyes she could still picture what had happened on her first visit: the screaming peacock, the sprawling body, Max Bittersohn dashing down the grand staircase, Brooks Kelling standing staunch to his trust between a bogus Gainsborough and a broken-down sedan chair with a bad case of woodworm. At that time Sarah hadn’t seen Brooks for ages. After the tumult had died, she’d invited him back to the boardinghouse for supper. A staff member named Dolores Tawne had gone along with Brooks, and seen the handwriting on the wall when Theonia Sorpende helped him to a slice of something rich and delicious.

  Thus had Madam Wilkins’s palazzo become once more a part of the Kelling family saga, though there was one chapter that Sarah had never told anybody. After the old security guard’s death, when Max Bittersohn was trying to sort out the pieces, he’d persuaded his then landlady to accompany him on a surveillance mission to the Madam’s, both of them disguised as Hindus. With the help of a sedan chair and a safety pin, Sarah had managed to cope when her sari came unwrapped. The real sticker had come when they stopped at Max’s office afterward to get rid of their disguises and Sarah got hopelessly stuck in her too-tight bodice.

  There had been only one thing to do, and Max had risen to the occasion. That episode was one link in the long chain of circumstances that had brought her here now and forced Elwyn Fleesom Turbot to admit that he’d only held office since Thursday afternoon. She pressed her case.

  “Is it correct to say that until now you’d never served on any art museum board?”

  This question went down even worse than the first. Turbot was blustering like a north wind at the corner of Park and Boylston streets on a January day.

  “It was high time for new blood! The place was going to hell in a handcart, they begged me to take the chair because I’m a man who gets things done. Half those old fogies are in their dotage and the rest not far behind. I’m going to straighten that bunch out in a hurry, and don’t you think I won’t.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Sarah cooed with her fingers crossed. “My husband and I will be delighted to draw up a list of competent art experts if you’d like. Are you a serious collector yourself, Mr. Turbot?”

  If he was, Sarah hadn’t noticed any sign of it. So far, she had seen only that disgusting travesty in the barn and a slick portrait of Lala over the drawing room fireplace. It reminded her of covers she’d seen on the kind of lurid paperback novels that Cousin Mabel bought for a pittance at garage sales and burned in her fireplace to show her contempt for such trash, though not before Mabel had read them. Here in the dining room there were only matted and framed color photographs of polled Herefords, each with a blue-ribbon rosette from one cattle show or another attached to its frame.

  Lala hadn’t rated a blue ribbon, Sarah didn’t see any reason why she should. When the surly waiter served the sherbet, he’d left the Amaretto bottle close to Mrs. Turbot’s hand; she’d been adding extra dribbles of the liqueur to her sherbet as the spirit moved her. Now she splashed in a sizable dollop, raised the heavy goblet in a swift but all-inclusive toast, drained it dry, ran her tongue around her lips, and took it upon herself to answer Sarah’s question.

  “You bet he’s a collector, cutie-pants. But don’t get any ideas. He only collects cows.”

  While Turbot was trying to pretend that he found his wife’s vagaries amusing, Percy cleared his throat and took the floor. “We seem to be straying from the subject here. You were about to explain, Sarah, why no c
ontract exists between the Wilkins Museum and the Bittersohn Agency.”

  “Thank you for reminding me, Percy.”

  Sarah was easily the youngest woman there and looked even younger than she was by contrast to her weather-beaten cousin the gardener and that well-preserved tribute to the cosmetologists and the haute couture. The sedate jacket dress and the Psyche knot into which she’d twisted her baby-fine light-brown hair suggested a sub-deb wearing her mother’s clothes, as in fact Sarah had done more often than not during her less affluent years. Her eyes were an interesting mixture of brown and gray, one set a whisker higher than the other in a pale squarish face that could blush like the rose or set like a statue of Queen Boadicea as occasion demanded. At the moment, Sarah’s demeanor was nobly bland enough to have made anybody who knew the signals tread warily. Turbot would learn soon enough.

  “Since you’re so obviously new to the art world, Mr. Turbot, I should explain that it’s simply not possible for us to give our clients any guarantee as to when or whether a stolen work of art will ever be recovered. One problem with paintings is that they’re so easy to disguise.”

  Turbot didn’t like being lectured, he scowled. “Disguise how?”

  “Lots of ways. Some thieves lay a fresh ground over the surface and paint a different picture over it that can be wiped off without harming the original.”

  “Huh. What kind of picture?”

  “Anything, or nothing in particular. It’s amazing what trash can pass for art these days.” Sarah was still bitter about those vandalized barn boards. “Another way is to hide a valuable canvas under a not-so-good one and fasten them both to the same stretcher. That’s an amateur’s trick but it still gets tried and sometimes works.”