Chapter 1

“You’ve keyed it in wrong,” Gerald Preece said. “There’s no O in Sutherland.”

“Yes, there is.” Jane Preece watched her husband stare at his computer screen. “They were very specific,” she continued. “S-O-U-T-H-E-R-L-A-N-D, from Seattle and San Francisco, a suite and two doubles.”

Gerald looked at her over the rim of his half glasses.

“Honest,” his wife said.

“But that makes it south. You can’t say Sutherland if you spell it Southerland.”

“It’s theirname,” Jane countered. “They can do whatever they want.”

Gerald’s little finger retreated from his delete key, but the former partner of Kreps, Helwig, Bibby, and Preece remained unsettled with this particular bit of disorder.

“Leave it alone,” Jane said from across the lobby.

“Is Jennalee practicing?” Gerald asked, paging down through a host of Sutherlands who managed the correct spelling.

“Why can’t you call her Lee like she wants?”

“Why can’t she practice for me?”

Jane shook her head and pinched a withered bloom off an aging summer bouquet. “Piano should be good for the pianist,” she said. “All you’re doing is pushing her away.”

“And if I stop pushing, she’ll do nothing at all.”

“How do you know that? You never give her a chance.”

Gerald reached the end of the reservations list and began to page up. “Who’s this Laidlaw?” he asked, but Jane had already left the room. “I thought they were all Sutherlands,” he mumbled. “Garden Grove. Where in hell is Garden Grove?”

When he keyed over to his bookings page and saw every room—one through fifty-five—reserved for the July Fourth weekend, he relaxed as much as was possible for a man of forty-eight who’d endured a quadruple bypass the year before and subsequently given up his law practice in San Francisco on orders of a doctor who remained in the city attending the symphony Gerald did not. “Find something less stressful,” Ben Mertens had counseled, and so Gerald and Jane Preece sold their Pacific Heights house and purchased the Malvern Gardens Inn, which rested quietly among California’s golden hills some hundred miles east. Malvern was a gold rush remnant trading on a colorful past that brought a good tourist trade much of the year.

“I wish they’d given us more information,” Gerald said as Jane sailed back through the lobby.

“Fifty-five rooms, four nights,” Jane replied. “What else do you need?”

“The reunion aspect, I mean. They’ve booked the Oak Room both Friday and Saturday nights plus Sunday morning, and I know they’ve hired Benita Witherspoon to cater, but she hasn’t called. I just think we ought to be more involved, or at least in the know.”

“They appear to know what they’re doing. Mrs. Burkett said this has been going on for twenty-two years.” Jane had returned to peer over the desk.

“They’ll expect us to dothings,” Gerald insisted. “I know they will. And they’ll be expecting Ralph and Dorothy Burkett and find us instead.”

“It’s theirreunion, Gerald, and they already know the Burketts are gone. Everyone who called or emailed asked for Dorothy or Ralph and I introduced us each time so they know, Gerald, they know. It’s not like we’ve committed a crime. We bought the place, we didn’t steal it.”

“If it’s a sit-down dinner, they’ll need tables and chairs. I should have been told which night Benita’s been booked for. Fifty-five rooms, how many people? Let’s see.”

Jane came around behind her husband and absently rubbed his shoulders. When she found him tense, she whispered, “Relax,” and began kneading as he keyed into his totals page. He was adept at Hotel-Motel, the software package he’d downloaded soon after buying the desktop computer. Ralph and Dorothy Burkett had done it all by hand, which Gerald found incomprehensible. “You can’t run a business without a computer,” he had insisted, and while Jane agreed, she sometimes thought it more maintaining a link to his old life in San Francisco than developing a tool for the new one.

“One hundred forty-three,” Gerald announced as he hit a print command and the laser printer behind him began to whir. “Do we have that many chairs?”

“Don’t you have that in your inventory program?” Jane rubbed his shoulders until he began to squirm.

“Don’t dothat,” he said, shrugging her off. “And yes, I have it in my inventory, but I keyed it off Ralph’s list. We’ve never verified the number. We need to do that.”

“Lee and I will count the chairs and tables.”

“If she’s not practicing, where is she?” When Jane didn’t respond, Gerald glared at her. “You don’t know, do you?”

* * * *

Jennalee Preece would have enjoyed the moment had she not been otherwise occupied. Since the move, she had abandoned piano in favor of tormenting her father, whom she intended to make miserable for uprooting her from her senior year at Lowell High School, where she had enjoyed a multi-ethnic group of friends, intermittent study, and piano lessons with Mr. Mendel. That she had enjoyed a brief sexual relationship with eighteen-year-old Howard Li only heightened the anguish of departure, and she compensated by taking up with the Malvern boys, one of whom at this moment had his erect penis in her hand.