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supercilious amusement that usually curved her daughter's perfect lips without allowing laughter to escape. Leni often worried about Alhson's cool, amused silence; and at that moment, as her daughter and this strange girl continued to smile together, and even though she was sure those reference letters were faked, she decided to hire Laura Fairchild as a kitchen helper for the Salingers' summer stay on Cape Cod.
    Clay worked in the greenhouses and flower gardens shared by the whole family while Laura was at Rosa's side in the kitchen of Felix and Leni's house. It was tfie biggest in the compound, and Ben had instructed her to explore and sketch it for him. But by the end of their second week at the Cape she still had not done it, nor had she looked for Leni's jewels so Ben could go straight to them when he broke in. She knew what they looked like because Leni was frequently photographed wearing them at dinner parties and balls—she even took them to the Cape for the big parties in July and August —but Laura had to find out where she kept them.
    "What are you waiting for?" Clay demanded, looking up from his own drawing of the layout of the compound. They were sitting in the tiny two-room apartment Ben had rented for

    Inheritance
    them over a garage in downtown Centerville before he went back to New York, and Clay had been trying to figure out the exact distance from the guardhouse to Leni's bedroom window. "How are we going to get out of here if you don't do your part?"
    "Fm trying," Laura said. "But Rosa expects me to be with her all the time.'*
    "Rosa's a dictator," Clay said.
    "Rosa's a sweetie." Laura remembered Allison saying that and wondered why she hadn't seen her once since she started working in her parents' house.
    In fact she saw hardly anyone but Rosa and the house staff from the time she and Clay rode up in the mornings on the bicycles Ben had bought them to the time they rode away in the late afternoon. Leni was the only one of the Salingers to come to the kitchen; she came every afternoon, to plan the next day's menus with Rosa. They sat in the sun that stretched the length of the great room, from the panes of the wide breakfast bay that faced the rose garden, swimming pool and tennis courts, all the way to the brick fireplace at the other end. On the long maple table recipes were fanned out, and books of menus from past summers, and with them the two women, like generals planning a campaign, put together the schedule for the next day: usually a luncheon for a small group and then a dinner party for fifteen or more. But none of the other family members came to the kitchen, and after two weeks Laura was not even sure who was at the compound and who was away.
    "In Maine," Rosa said when Laura finally worked up the courage to ask where Allison was. "You'll find this family is very big on travel. Somebody's always somewhere and just when you think you know where everybody is, somebody comes back and somebody else goes."
    "They just leave their houses empty?" Laura asked casually. In her white kitchen uniform, her hair in a neat ponytail, she felt almost like a cook, almost Rosa's equal, and that made it easier to ask questions about the family. Still, as she stacked breakfast dishes in the double dishwasher, she was careful not to sound too curious.
    "Some of them are empty," Rosa replied. "Some with the

    Judith Michael
    staff, some stuffed to the ceiling with houseguests. You'll find this family is very big on houseguests, probably because they're in the hotel business and they think something's wrong if all the bedrooms aren't full."
    She chuckled and Laura smiled with her. It was easy to be comfortable with Rosa. At sixty-seven, with unflagging energy, she was short and round with small hands that were always moving, nimbly flicking pastry finom marble board to pie plate, or cutting vegetables and stirring soup almost at the same time, or knitting a vest for her nephew while she waited for bread to rise or a