Sandra Hill - [Jinx] Read Online Free PDF Page A

motel. The turn-of-the-last-century mansion was located in Loveladies at the northern end of Long Beach Island, New Jersey—a strip of land bracketed by the ocean on one side and Barnegat Bay on the other. Nearby was the historic Barnegat Lighthouse.
    The house, which sat on more than an acre of land, would probably bring a cool five million in today’s market, even though her grandfather had certainly let it go. Shutters dangled from some windows. Blinds were pulled down in others. The weathered wood shakes appeared really . . . weathered. The mansard roof probably leaked, if some of the tiles that had fallen to the ground were any indication. And the sea grass in the front yard was a shoulder-high jungle.
    What happened in the past three years, since she’d been here last, to bring on such neglect? Her grandfather was a nutty old coot, but he cared about this family home—or at least he used to. She remembered something then. This was
her
family home now, if the lawyer was right.
My God! I don’t have the kind of money to refurbish or keep up a place like this. The taxes alone would eat up a good portion of my annual salary.
    It was springtime, and, although it was balmy, the summer crowds had not yet flooded the town or beaches. Long Beach Island, like much of the Jersey shore, was loaded with commercial enterprises, but not so much here at the northern end. The stillness of the off-season atmosphere, combined with the crashing of waves on the beach, gave a lonely feeling to her grandfather’s house.
    Even though she’d taken a Pepto-Bismol tablet to settle her stomach, she held her breath to block out the scent of salt water while she knocked on the front door. No answer. She tried again. Still no answer. But Frank’s vintage black Mustang convertible and a late-model red pickup truck with the Jinx, Inc., logo were parked in the driveway. He must be around. Turning the doorknob, she realized it was open and stepped inside.
    “Anybody home?” she called out.
    She thought she heard voices coming from the opposite side of the house, the one facing the beach. Walking down the corridor, she saw rooms covered with dust and filled with draped furniture. Paintings were missing, judging by the lighter rectangular spaces on the faded wallpaper. There were no antiques or the horrible Buddha with the foot-long penis that had given her nightmares when she was a child. In the library, she noticed that the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were half-empty, and assumed it was the collection of first editions that was gone. Even the stuffed animal heads mounted on the paneled walls—the taxidermied nightmares bagged by some nitwit Jinkowsky on an African safari years ago—were gone. Thank God for that.
    The Jinkowsky brothers—Frank’s grandfather and two great uncles—had made their money making kielbasa in the early 1920s, first in a butcher shop in Jersey City and eventually in a Newark factory. The Kielbasa Kings, they’d been called. Those days were long gone. In fact, the year Frank married Lillian prior to both entering Stanford Law, the Jinkowsky company had been sold due to the grandchildrens’ lack of interest in entering the business. Frank had come into a small fortune along with the Long Beach Island mansion. Instead of hotfooting it off to law school—a tradition in Lillian’s family that he’d promised to follow—he’d decided to use his inheritance as seed money for a treasure-hunting company. That had been the beginning of the end for him and his wife, who’d felt betrayed by her husband’s change of career. The worst abomination, according to Lillian, was that Frank had gotten her pregnant before leaving.
    Dreary
would be the best word to describe the house now. Or
plundered.
Had her grandfather needed to sell everything in order to raise cash? She could think of no other reason for the house’s condition.
    She continued down the hall to the great room, with its fireplace big enough to roast a boar.