Inheritance Read Online Free PDF Page B

room, four bureaus and a dressing table, nightstands flanking the bed, a wall of closets. Swifdy and silently, Laura opened them all, her slender fingers slipping among silk and cotton and lace without disturbing one perfect fold; she looked beneath the furniture without moving it; she tilted pictures from the walls without changing one angle.
    Nothing, nothing . . . where would she keep them . . .

    Judith Michael
    there's no scfe . . . Then she came to the last closet, and found it locked. Finally . . . She knelt before it. She could get it open; she'd done it so many times. She reached in her pocket for the small set of steel picks Ben had bought her for her birthday, and it was at that moment that the sitting room door opened.
    "What the hell—!" Allison's voice exclaimed. She stood in the doorway, her eyes changing as she recognized Laura. "A burglar!" she cried in mock alarm. "How terrifying! But I know you! Rosa's new assistant . . . yes?"
    Laura nodded. She had leaped to her feet but she was dizzy and her legs were weak, and she leaned against the closet. Her throat was dry, her heart was pounding; she thrust her clenched fists deep inside the pockets of her uniform to hide the picks in her shaking hands. Rosa had said Allison wasn't due back from Maine until tomorrow, and everyone else was spending the day on Felix's yacht. It was supposed to be empty up here all ctftemoon.
    "But what are you doing in my mother's room . . . Laura, isn't it? Have we started cooking dinner up here? Or were you looking for my great-grandmother's sterling that she brought over from Austria? It isn't here; Rosa could have told you it's in the dining room conunode."
    Laura shook her head. "I wasn't looking— ** She cleared] her dry throat. "I wasn't looking for sterling." She took a step^ forward. "I ought to be downstairs . . ."
    "Indeed you should. But first let's have a talk." Allisoi strode across the room, grasped Laura's arm, and forced her walk beside her out of the room, down the full length of the hall, and into anotiier suite at the opposite comer from Leni's. "This is mine. Perfectly private. Sit down." Laura stood indecisively. "I said, sit down."
    Laura sat down. Her white cotton uniform seemed plain and harsh in the delicate white wicker chair witii its chintz cush-i(m. The room was bright and airy, in gold and white with lamps and throw pillows of sea green and indigo blue. It seemed that all the colors of the Cape were there, shimmering in the sunlight that streamed across the ocean and the beach and the smooth lawns of the estate for the sole purpose of brightening Allison Salinger's rooms.

    Inheritance
    Finally Laura's eyes rested on the stack of suitcases in the comer of the room. "I came back early," Allison said. "I was exceedingly bored." She had watched Laura survey the sitting room and the bedroom, visible through its open door, and now she gave her a keen look. "Maybe this isn't the first time you've been here." Laura, frozen in her chair, said nothing. "Have you already been here?"
    Laura shook her head.
    "My God, have I petrified you into silence? What are you afraid of? It isn't a crime to look at people's rooms; I poke around to see how my friends fix up theirs; why shouldn't you do the same? I won't turn you in, if that's what you're worried about. I don't care what you do; you work for Rosa, not me. It would be different if you'd been going through Mother's closets; if the alarm had gone off there'd be hell to pay."
    Laura's heart began to pound again, the blood hammering in her ears. / should have thought. . . I should have known . . . Whafs hi^pened to me that I don't do things right in this house? "Alarm?" she asked, making it sound as casual as she could.
    "A siren that wakes the dead. It's because of Mother's jewelry, you know, all the incredible stuff my great-grandmother brought from Austria with the sterling. My father keeps telling Mother to keep it in the safe in Boston, but she says what good is