Fortune's Hand by Belva Plain

Author:Belva Plain [Plain, Belva]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780307805409
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-23T14:00:00+00:00

He sighed. This had been a hard week, starting with Grant’s funeral. He had died in his office without immediate warning, without pain. Standing in the crowded church with Ellen, and especially Julie who had so loved her grandfather, he had examined his own feelings and arrived at a not very original conclusion: Every one of us is an enigma. There in the coffin, at rest under a mound of red carnations, lay a charitable, upright, scrupulously honest man whose rigid persona required perfection. Penn was not perfect. Therefore, the person who had with cunning brought Penn into an otherwise unblemished family must not be forgiven; yes, outwardly for the sake of decorum, he might be and had been, but in the heart, never.

Heredity or environment? You figure it out. But mercy upon Grant anyway, and pity for Ellen’s grief.

After a while, it was time to go home. In the parking lot he met Will Fowler, who when he saw Robb, inquired with a meaningful grin whether he had had the usual visit from Devlin.

“You may be sure I did,” said Robb, responding in kind. “Quite a character, isn’t he?”

“That’s for sure. But you have to admire his ambition. I’m damned if I know what you do with all that money, though. I wouldn’t know how to spend it if I had it.”

“Nor I,” Robb said.

A sense of assurance surged in his chest as he thought of the tidy sums he was now for the first time able to lay aside. The feeling was warm, a most comfortable feeling after these last few hours.

As if he were enjoying his release to the outdoors, Will apparently wanted to linger. It was a mild winter day under a melancholy, clouded sky, but the small wind was refreshing, and the two men stood for a while talking cheerfully about nothing in particular.

“Yes,” Will said, coming back to the opening topic, “yes, it’s astounding. He just gave me as a list of his holdings, office buildings bigger than this one, low-income housing, upscale housing, those malls you’ve heard about, and that’s not everything. He’s got at least one other law firm handling his stuff on the West Coast, and probably more than one for all I know. It’s like Aladdin’s lamp. When Devlin takes a dollar and rubs it, he turns it into ten.”

“But real estate—is it that safe?”

“It is generally if you buy top quality. Of course, that takes money to start with, which is sort of a catch-22, isn’t it?”

“I know. But what I meant was, is property safe in these times as things are now? I know almost nothing about it. All I own is the house we live in.”

You don’t even own that. It came from Ellen.

Will shrugged. “When it’s good, it’s very, very good. And right now, it is. It’s like the stock market.”

“But property—land—is tangible. It seems to me that’s a whole lot safer than stocks.”

“Maybe so. But in case you’ve got any thoughts, let me advise you not to get mixed up with Devlin.

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