“I’m supposed to be at the salon in fifteen minutes. The only thing this place is missing is bells to signal the end of one class and the start of another,” I said, and he laughed. I followed him.
“The first few days are always the hardest.” He paused to turn back to me. “With anything,” he added.
“Was that the way it was for you?” I asked when we reached the top of the stairway.
“Oh, yes, but for different reasons. When Mrs. Brittany found me, I had just broken up with someone. I had a shattered heart, but she knew how to help put me together again. That’s her real talent, you know,” he said in a whisper.
“What’s her real talent?”
“Matchmaking. That’s why she’s so successful at this escort business. She knows exactly which one of her girls will be most successful with this one or that one.”
“If she’s so good at matchmaking, why didn’t she ever remarry?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said, smiling, “I can’t imagine any one man with whom she would be satisfied for a long period of time. She’s too . . .”
“Bossy?”
“Let’s just say independent. It’s a kinder term,” he told me, and winked.
We paused at my door, and I opened it. He brought in my books and magazines and put them on the vanity table.
“This all right?”
“No. I’d rather they were locked in the closet, but I have no choice,” I said. “That’s my homework. I thought I had escaped all that.”
He laughed. “You never escape all that.” He looked around. “This is my favorite suite and I think Mrs. Brittany’s, too. She must think you have great potential if she’s favoring you. One thing she hates most of all is wasting her time. She has a wonderful head for business, as does Mrs. Pratt. Between the two of them, with the special inside information they get,” he added sotto voce, “they’ve built quite a little financial empire. She doesn’t have to work another day of her life, but that woman loves what she does. I think she believes she is a female Cupid or something, destined to provide opportunities for pleasure and happiness, even love, as I can attest to.”
“How is that?”
“She introduced me to Ron Carter. He’s the house manager, in charge of overseeing just about everything here. At the time, he was going through a bad breakup, too. I’m sure you’ll meet him soon. We stay in the west end of the mansion, as do most of the staff.”
We started out of the suite.
“I saw a young woman today for a moment,” I said. “She went out to the pool to sun herself and read. I noticed she needed a cane and had a maid carry out her things for her. When I went to speak with her, I saw she had a prosthetic leg. Is she another one of Mrs. Brittany’s girls? Maybe to satisfy some weird fetish one or more of her clients have?”
“Oh, goodness, no. Heaven forbid. She’s Mrs. Brittany’s granddaughter.”
“Granddaughter? No one mentioned a granddaughter. All I was told was that Mrs. Brittany married a man, a count or something, who was much older, and he had died.”
“Yes, but they had a daughter, and she had a daughter, the girl you saw. Her name is Sheena. Mrs. Brittany disapproved of her parents naming her that, but she disapproved of most everything they did.” He shook his head. “Sheena. What a tragedy there.”
“What happened to her?” I asked as we started down the stairs.
“When she was only twelve, she contracted bone cancer. The hope was that surgery to remove the tumor would end it, but it didn’t, and as a last resort, her leg was amputated.”
“Oh. That explains it. How sad.”
“Mrs. Brittany is arranging for her to have the most up-to-date prosthesis.”
“So is she just visiting now?”
“No, no, she’s lives here. She’s in Mrs. Brittany’s wing of the mansion. She’s a very sweet girl.”
“How old is she?”
“A little more than eighteen. Mrs. Brittany always blamed her daughter for what happened. Apparently, Sheena had been complaining for some time about pain, but her mother was not only a selfish bitch, she was a heavy drinker. She neglected her so long that the options were limited when she finally did get to treatment. Mrs. Brittany’s daughter became a severe alcoholic, left her husband—or he left her—and basically neglected Sheena while she was recuperating.”
“What happened then?”