Tassy Morgan's Bluff by Jim Stinson

Author:Jim Stinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

Standing on Tassy’s front stoop, Norman Stihl revved up to resume his campaign. He’d prepared it with a couple of scribbled project plans for an excuse and a bottle of chardonnay for persuasion. The wine ought to impress Tassy, because Bess at the market said it was good and it’d set him back eight bucks. A bourbon man himself, Norman saw wine ignorance as a guy thing of some importance.

He rang and in due course was admitted. “Hey, Tassy, you tied up? Oh, hi, Wolfie.”

11

Up the street, Linc sat in a New England rocker at the kitchen table. The chair was civilized by a seat pad and lit by a lamp bright enough to read by. Tonight he’d fallen back on a fat science fiction saga from the stash in his room after failing to find anything in the parlor bookcases.

Typically, the shelves in B and B’s and summer rentals offered Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, paperbacks yellowed enough to trigger asthma, ancient economics texts, and, if you were lucky, a hardbound Pearl S. Buck novel with a $2.95 price on its front jacket flap. But like everything else in this B and B, Ellen had designed and assembled the book inventory from scratch to match a hypothetical profile of guests who would pay hundreds of dollars a night for a suite but bring nothing to read in it. The result was a bountiful library that appeared to have grown over twenty years of eclectic but upscale collecting, though it had been less than two months old when the B and B was shuttered by Ellen’s death.

The best laid schemes. Hmh. If he reopened the joint he’d rename it Gang Aft Agley.

He wouldn’t reopen; he’d known that, though he’d avoided confronting the implications. Now, without warning, the implications were getting right in his face.

What would he do? He was fifty-one, healthy, unencumbered, and just rich enough: not a billionaire, so he lacked both the power conferred by staggering wealth and the moral imperative to use it well—not that big CEOs and financial twisters seemed unduly oppressed by moral imperatives.

On the other hand, he had vastly more income than he needed. He could live anywhere on earth he chose. He could party with the people who party and sleep with the women who sleep with rich men, even if they’re over fifty—especially if they’re over fifty. For fun, he could produce boutique movies—it had worked for the Weinsteins—or follow the ski season or play venture capitalist or pretend to be a Montana rancher....

But the operative words there were fun, play, pretend, and that wasn’t Linc’s style. He’d gone with the B and B idea because it was something to occupy him. He couldn’t care less about inn keeping, but he had cared about Ellen and hoped that getting her launched could preoccupy him, at least for a while. Then a while had turned out to be just six weeks.

He wouldn’t go back to the entertainment business; by now he’d be Rip van Winkle in Hollywood, and he was fed up with that whole life anyway.

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.