Madam of Maple Court by Joan Elizabeth Lloyd Read Free Book Online

anything illegal?
    It was time to find out everything, no matter the risk. She'd been putting off digging into her own finances, too, and had let Mark handle it all. Strange. She could do a creditable job with the computer programs that took care of the finances at two of the larger charities she was involved in, but she knew next to nothing about her own. That had to stop, too.
    The morning was bright and unusually warm for late winter, and as she walked through her bedroom she realized that work would have to begin on the landscaping of the house. It made no sense to let things go. She'd have a good look at the budget Mark had made up for her and see whether she could afford to continue the kind of outdoor work that had been done for the past few years.
    She glanced at Vin's wide closet and realized that she'd also have to do something about donating Vin's clothes to any one of several charities. She wondered which one could make good use of his thousand-dollar suits, hundred-dollar silk ties, and the shirts that weren't monogrammed.
    Trying again to put off her trip to the den, she wandered through the four guest bedrooms, now smelling just a little musty. As she opened the windows in each to let the rooms air out, she looked around. Mark had told her she needed money. That might be less of a problem than he realized. The furniture in these rooms had cost the earth and she could easily sell the expensive stuff and replace it with good, classic contemporary pieces. She'd have to see whether Carlys, the decorator who had bought most of these pieces in the first place, could be of some help.
    She could fend off the most serious financial problems for a while, but selling furniture wasn't a long-term solution. It was time to give some serious thought to what she would do in the longer term. Slowly she wended her way through the upstairs, refolding a guest towel here, fluffing a pillow there. Eventually she descended the stairs and headed for the den, squaring her shoulders as she got closer to the closed room. She had a job to do and it was time for her to do it.
    The den/office was masculine, Vin's territory, done mostly in beiges and browns, with moss green, cranberry, and navy accents. She'd always thought the room a little gloomy, but Vin liked it. An oversized seventeenth-century mahogany desk stood on one side of the room, a wall of bookcases opposite. She'd read many of the volumes but Vin didn't enjoy reading. He kept them mostly for show. She was surprised that, at every mental turn, she faced ways in which she and her late husband were different.
Opposites attract
, she thought. Yeah, but once attracted what did they have to talk about?
    She sat down on Vin's chair. The desk was much too high for her tiny frame, so she took a pillow off the small leather sofa and put it beneath her. The surface of the desk was a little dusty but uncluttered, with only a desk lamp, a computer monitor, a date book, and several pictures to mar the stark relief. The stared at the photographs: Vin with the head of a major pharmaceutical firm, Vin shaking hands with an ex-mayor of New York, Vin accepting the Ad-Man of the Year award from H&R. No personal photos. Nothing of her. She slowly shook her head. It wasn't as if her dresser was covered with intimate portraits of him, either. She pictured the highly polished silver frames filled with vacation shots: them in front of the Taj Mahal, her in front of a Buddhist monastery, them in ski clothes on top of a mountain in Switzerland. She couldn't immediately remember which mountain that had been.
    Stop putting this off
, she told herself and grabbed the center drawer. To her surprise it wouldn't move. Locked. She tried the side drawers but they wouldn't budge either. Why would Vin lock his desk? Did he have secrets from her? Where would the keys be? She thought about his briefcase and personal effects. She'd stored his case and the rest of the items she'd gotten from the police, still in a