Bending the Rules Read Online Free PDF Page B

upstairs.
    Where she found herself wandering the finished rooms, thinking about the videotape Miss Agnes had left for her, Ava and Jane to view at the reading of the will almost exactly a year ago. In it the old woman had said how much the three of them had come to mean to her over the years. And she’d told them in that foghorn voice of hers that she realized they’d have to sell the mansion—but it was her wish that each would carry out one final request from her in getting it ready. Poppy sure wished, not for the first time, that she understood what it was Miss A. had had in mind when she’d requested that Poppy be in charge of the decorating part of the renovation.
    The old woman had been so good to the three of them, amazingly canny when it came to knowing what each one needed, then seeing to it that they got it. For Jane and Ava that had meant a modicum of parenting to fill in the gaps left by the always dramatic self-absorption of Janie’s folks and the benign indifference of Ava’s. For her it had meant having her passion for color indulged. Miss A. had done what few other adults would—given a young girl a paintbrush and the paint color of her choice and trusted the kid not to make a huge mess out of her mansion. And in the matter of the dining room, she’d even allowed Poppy to choose window treatments that let in light where before heavy draperies had kept it out. But that was a far cry from decorating the entire place.
    “Omigawd.” She stopped dead in the upstairs hallway. “That’s it.”
    Grabbing her cell phone from her tote, she was punching in an auto-dial number even as she rushed from the mansion. “I finally figured it out!” she crowed to Ava as she strode back to her car. Holding the phone to her ear, she adjusted her slipping tote on her shoulder and almost tripped over a raised slab of sidewalk where an ancient Douglas fir’s root had pushed it up.
    “I was making MissA.’s request way too complicated. I thought she’d completely overestimated my talents and wanted me to act as a big-time interior decorator.”
    “You could do that,” Ava assured her.
    She laughed. “You’re a true and loyal friend and I love you for it. But I design menu boards and the occasional greeting card—”
    “One of which got picked up by Shoebox!”
    Yes, that was a stroke of luck she was still dancing in the streets about—that she no longer had to scramble to come up with the rent check the first of each month. “But, face it, mostly I do catch-as-catch-can low-end commercial stuff for whoever I can convince to hire me and fast-talked my way into a couple of grants to turn on underprivileged kids to art. I’m sure as hell no interior designer.”
    She grinned like a deranged jester. “But that’s what I figured out, that Miss A. didn’t intend me to be. Jane actually tried to tell me this last fall, but my thong was in a twist at the time because I thought she was about to blow the deal I’d made with the Kavanaghs, so it didn’t really register. But I think all Miss Agnes wanted from me was precisely what I was always bugging her to let me do—rip down all those gawd-awful drapes that are blocking out the light, give the rooms a fresh coat of paint and new window treatments and maybe stage it the way Realtors do these days with a few of her nicer pieces of furniture and the odd collectible.”
    “That sounds reasonable. But, girl, don’t underestimate yourself, because you’ve already done so much more. You found us the Kavanaghs and negotiated a lower bid in exchange for the publicity they’ll get, and you’ve been the one handling ninety percent of the bills—when all you really want to do is work with your kids.”
    That made her flash on the three boys she wouldn’t have the opportunity to work with, which made her think about de Sanges, which, frankly, she’d been doing far too often in the past week and a half since running in to him again at the merchants’ meeting.
    Her