“You?” Ian shook his head in confusion. “So what happened? You sold it to someone?”
“No.” Reluctantly, I pushed the book away and stood. “No, I gave it away.”
“Well, then there’s no problem.”
I laughed, but the sound was empty. “Believe me-there’s a problem.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” he muttered, and began to pace back and forth between the conference table and his massive antique mahogany desk.
Confused and unsure what to do, I leaned my hip against the table and glanced around the office, trying to distract myself by admiring Ian’s latest artwork. He still had the Diebenkorn painting of a woman drinking coffee prominently displayed behind his desk, but there were three miniature Rembrandt engravings on the wall closest to the door that I didn’t remember seeing before.
As always when I visited Ian, I thought how nice it would be to borrow from the vast Covington collection to furnish one’s office. And if the artwork didn’t impress a visitor, one could always enjoy the incomparable view of the Golden Gate Bridge seen through the big picture window by the conference table. I turned and stared out at the wide expanse of the bay and tried to appreciate the amazing vista.
“You want to tell me what happened?” Ian asked from close behind me.
I sighed and slowly turned around. “It’s a long story. Are you ready to hear it?”
He folded his arms across his chest. “I suppose I’ll have to.”
I smiled. “Did Austin ever introduce you to Max Adams?”
“Max? Sure. Didn’t he die a few years ago?”
“It was almost three years ago,” I said. But thanks to the reappearance of Beauty and the Beast, I was reliving the day as if it were yesterday.
I’d had a crush on Max Adams from the first day I’d laid eyes on him when I was ten years old. Max’s family had followed Avatar Robson Benedict-otherwise known as Guru Bob-to the Sonoma commune he’d established, just as my family had a few years earlier. So we all grew up together in Dharma. Max was my oldest brother Austin’s best friend until they each went away to different colleges.