SOMETHING
SINFUL THIS WAY COMES
McQueen Was My Valley 1
KAREN
MERCURY
Copyright © 2013
Chapter
One
“Mazel tov,” said Sol, raising his wine
glass on high.
Alexandra McQueen toasted her lawyer. They
had just accomplished a shit storm of tedious and piddling paperwork—weeks of
deeds, inspections, appraisals, and taxes—and had emerged the other side,
unscathed. Xandra was more than happy to clink wine glasses with Sol Greenspan.
Three months ago Xandra had never been
to Utah. She knew Utah as the place where Robert Redford and Mormons lived, and
something about a film festival and skiing. If someone would’ve told her that
in three months’ time she’d be sitting on the deck of her very own ski lodge
near the rim of a dazzling red rock canyon, Xandra would have thought that her
drug-addled ex-boyfriend was concocting a prank.
Now here she was. Peaceful and serene,
all the papers signed, safely away from Javier “Slippery Fish” Santana. The i’s
were dotted and the t’s crossed, the deck overlooked a wonderland of stone
spires and natural stone pinnacles, and she was toasting with her very own
lawyer. Clink.
“Dude.” That was Doug’s toast. A very
casual sort of guy, Doug Ostrovsky was Xandra’s stepbrother a few times
removed. It had taken Sol and Doug days to figure out how Doug and Xandra were
related, sitting around the long table in the lodge’s ballroom, hand-drawing
organizational charts with Doug and Xandra’s ancestors’ names scribbled in the
boxes. They’d finally decided to leave it at “stepsiblings.” Doug had actually
been closely acquainted with the lodge’s recently deceased owner, Wanda Burns. Doug
had worked at the Triple Play Lodge for years, now elevated to General Manager.
But because Doug wasn’t related to Wanda by blood, only by his father’s
marriage, ownership of the lodge had fallen to Xandra, Wanda’s next of kin. “You’re
coming with us to The Inkwells, right? You need to learn the terrain beyond the
borders of the lodge.”
