Otto stayed where he was.
Deliberately leaving her driver's door open, Annie climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. "Fine. I'll go without you."
She wouldn't, of course. She couldn't. But the threat was enough to get her recalcitrant dog moving. Brow furrowed, he bounded over to the car and jumped in back, where he just fit amidst the boxes and Gran's crated painting of the cottage on a bright summer morning, window boxes overflowing with pink petunias. Some would dismiss it as tourist art, sentimental and nostalgic. Yet somehow it captured everything that Annie's life in her cottage by the bay had been.
Before Otto could change his mind, she quickly jumped out and shut the liftgate.
Before she could change hers, she backed out of her driveway without even a parting glance at the bay and the picturesque spot where she had lived her whole life. Here today, gone tomorrow. She'd learned the hard way that was what life was.
It was a lesson she was determined never to forget.
* * *
Chapter One
Circumstances compelled Annie to take Otto with her to her first big San Francisco auction almost three months after rolling into town. She would have left him at her gallery, up and running for six weeks now, but the woman she'd hired to cover for her today was afraid of any and all rottweilers. She would have left him at her apartment, but her landlord, who didn't have "rottweiler" in mind when he'd agreed to let Annie have a dog, was coming over to fix what passed for heat in San Francisco, and he was still afraid of Otto.
Back in Maine, no one was afraid of Otto. The whole town knew he was a big galoot.
Annie parked in the shade on the wide, picturesque Pacific Heights street and left the windows of her station wagon cracked and Otto sprawled in back. She'd let down the backseat not for his sake but because of the auction. She had one item to buy, and she meant to buy it.
"I'll be back as soon as I can," she told Otto, as if he understood.
It was a dreary day even by San Francisco dreary-day standards. Low clouds, intermittent drizzle, lapping fog, temperature in the upper fifties. Since arriving in the Bay Area, Annie had developed an impressive collection of cheap umbrellas and always kept several in her car and one tucked in the tapestry tote she carried everywhere. She estimated she'd lost at least a half dozen since Thanksgiving. It wasn't that it rained all that much in San Francisco, she'd decided, but that it didn't snow. So it seemed that it rained more than in Maine. She had tried to explain this deduction to Zoe Summer, who ran the aromatherapy shop next to Annie's Gallery, but Zoe, a native of Seattle, said Annie didn't know rain.
She felt a rare tug of trepidation as she approached the imposing, ornate Linwood house, an elaborate Victorian mansion in lemon yellow. It was one of the most famous in San Francisco. Lush green grass carpeted a regal front yard, and beautifully maintained shrubs softened tall, elegantly draped windows that were so spotless they sparkled even in the gloom. The Linwoods were up there with the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Hearsts, not the usual sort Annie was used to hanging out with on her Maine peninsula.
A uniformed guard was posted at the end of the brick walk that led to the front entrance. Annie handed him her ticket to the private auction. She had attended a few of Ernie's Saturday night auctions on the Hathaway farm, inland up toward the lakes. She had once almost talked Gran into letting her buy a lamb.
A different time, a different life.
The guard scrutinized her ticket first, then her. She told herself he probably did that to everybody, not just her. She couldn't look that different from the dealers and collectors at the auction. Although her wardrobe was still limited, she had on a perfectly respectable outfit: a silk sweater over a calf-length skirt in a dusky blue, with silver earrings and her good black leather ankle boots. She'd pulled her hair up into a passable twist and, given the uncertain weather, had brought along Gran's Portuguese shawl, which had spent the nameless, devastating storm at her office at the museum. It was black wool with bright crewel embroidered flowers and exotic birds, and Annie suspected it really was a piano cover rather than a shawl. But it was beautiful and rather Victorian-looking, perfect, she thought, for her first San Francisco auction.
"Use the front entrance, Ms. Payne. A guard will direct you to the ballroom."