Bones of Contention by Jeanne Matthews

Author:Jeanne Matthews [Matthews, Jeanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781615951215
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Published: 2010-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-four

“There you are! I been lookin’ high and low.” Cleon found Dinah in the great room playing solitaire. “You look tight as a string on a fiddle. Something worryin’ you?”

“Oh, no.” Since absurdity knew no bounds.

“Your motor’s been idlin’ too long, child. Ride into town with me for the readin’ of Fisher’s will. Neesha’s gone on ahead to do her shoppin’ and I could use some female companionship.”

The day had unfolded on a geologic timescale. Breakfast was epochs ago, in the Precambrian period. While the earth’s crust slowly solidified, she’d read one of Mack’s mythology books and struggled with the concept of song lines. At ten, she phoned the number Jacko had given her, but he wasn’t in. Sometime during the Paleozoic period, she decided to accost Lucien and tell him just what she thought of his hurtful outburst yesterday, but she chickened out at the door to his room and took a jog instead. At two o’clock, she’d tried Jacko again. The woman she spoke to said he’d be in the Katherine office around four. The world seemed determined to make her wait.

“Cat got your tongue? What d’ya say?”

She wasn’t sure if he was inviting her to the reading or just for the drive, but either way she had no desire to sit around here waiting for the dinosaurs to come and go. And if she did attend the reading, she’d have even more information to pass on to Jacko. “A drive into town would be lovely.”

“Then let’s roll.”

In no time at all they were on the road, tooling down the rutted dirt track in Cleon’s plush, black Mercedes with Dinah rethinking Lucien’s advice to hold onto the paintings until the market improved. Why should she follow his advice? So what if she didn’t wring every last cent out of the sale? If she didn’t net the max, it would be, as Lucien so churlishly put it, her fuck-up.

She thought, I’d get more from the sale of just one of the paintings than I ever dreamed of having. I could hold one back until a more propitious time and if Lucien apologizes and shows a little respect for my needs and my opinions, he can keep it for me in his house.

Of course, a painting that valuable would have to be insured. That would cost a pretty penny and eat into her profits from the sale of the other one. But no, even if the timing was wrong, she would sell them both. She wondered what an apartment in London would cost. Or Paris. She visualized her life in Paris. It wouldn’t take long to dispel the noir of Nick in the City of Light.

Dispelling the noir of Lucien would be harder. He and Cleon had banged heads many times before and, up until now, they’d found a way to smooth things over. But she and Lucien had never fought and his hostility came as a shock and a betrayal. Again, she was beset by the thought that he wanted the Homers for himself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.