The House on Olive Street Read Online Free Page A

the west side of the house toward the detached five-port garage and ample parking area. Double doors led into a foyer in front of the open staircase to the second floor. Flagstone pathsled around the house to the lakeside entrances or to the poolside entrances. Too many doors to be locked at night, but a glorious openness by day.
    Sable did all her living upstairs. At the top of the stairs to the right were twin offices—hers facing the lake, her secretary’s facing the pool. Between them was a roomy powder room. To the left was her bedroom suite, though it was almost a small apartment. There was the king-size bed and rosewood bureaus, a sitting area comprising settee, two chairs with ottomans, cocktail table and wall unit of television, VCR, stereo and wet bar. There was a master bath in which Sable could serve tea for ten should she desire, complete with sunken Roman shower, deep whirlpool tub, commode and bidet, massive closet and chaise lounge. She could rest between brushing her teeth and picking out her shoes. And of course, decks, furnished with chairs, tables and chaises, stretched the length of the second story, both poolside and lakeside.
    It had been hard to find an architect to create the house from Sable’s vision—a fantasy she had begun putting together in her head twenty years ago. It had sometimes been the vision of the house, to which she kept mentally adding rooms and furniture, that had gotten her through the hard times. The many, many hard times in her secret past.
    No use thinking about that now. She went to her secretary’s office. Sable had expected to be at Gabby’s all day and told Virginia she could have that time off. She ignored the pile of faxes and the blinking message light. It was only her business line anyway.
    Before leaving Gabby’s house, bereavement duty had been divided among the women. Eleanor was to speak to family members—Don, Sarah and David, Gabby’smother, Ceola. Plus she would take care of Daisy temporarily and help with funeral arrangements. Barbara Ann was to call all the writers’ organizations she knew Gabby to be active in. Beth, the shyest of them all, would go to work on writing obituaries to be released to publications from local newspapers to national writers’ and booksellers’ periodicals. Sable was to call editors and agents.
    Sable was perfect for the job. Her fame was such that there wasn’t an editor or agent in New York for whom she would have to leave a message. Anyone within fifty feet of a phone would take her call.
    She began flipping through her Blackberry, calling Gabby’s last agent first. Then the last editor with whom Gabby had worked. And then it began to snowball. Odd that Sable hadn’t foreseen this; Gabby was both well-known and well liked in publishing. Although she’d never reached bestseller status, her works were respected, her reviews had been good and she was highly regarded as a bright, talented professional. Gabby’s reputation in New York was sterling. In her twenty years and twenty titles—five nonfiction and fifteen novels—Gabby had worked with some of the industry leaders. On each call she made, Sable was given the names of two more people to be notified, many of them publishers and presidents. As the California clock ticked on and business in New York wound to a close, she was given home phone numbers or extensions to bypass the publishers’ switchboards. Naturally, everyone wanted updated information—the cause of her death, the date and place of the funeral, et cetera, something Virginia could follow up later.
    It was five o’clock when she found she couldn’t go on. Her mouth was dry and her insides were cramped.She hadn’t eaten anything all day and hadn’t paused in her telephoning even long enough to get herself a cold drink. Of course, Dorothy wouldn’t trudge up the stairs to ask if there was anything she needed. Sable dragged herself wearily away from the desk and down the stairs to the kitchen—the