School of Fortune (26 page)

Ginny put down her glass. “Who the hell is that?”

Fearful intuition drew Pippa to the window. She half expected to see Mitzi outside pressing the doorbell with her trunk. What she saw was equally bad: a green Volkswagen. “It's the guy who nearly drove us off the road in traffic school,” she whispered in panic, dropping to the floor. “He must have traced your Lexus plates.”

Ginny handed Pippa the keys to her BMW. “I'll invite him in. While I'm roasting his ass, you go to Olivia's.”

Outside, Pippa saw her breath: the temperature had dropped thirty degrees since sundown. Quiet as a thief, she crept around the lodge. Once she heard Ginny's front door slam, she tore over to the BMW and careened down the hill, by some miracle remembering the route back to Olivia's in the darkness. Pippa pounded the front knocker so hard that the porch vibrated.

“Coming!” Olivia had just polished off a box of animal crackers. The crumbs now clung to her turtleneck like bionic dandruff. “Lotus! This is a surprise.”

Villeroy and Boch, the black teacup poodles, began joyfully shredding Pippa's camouflage cuffs. “If you don't mind, I'll be staying with you tonight. I don't want to be late for class in the morning.”

“I'm so pleased.” Three hundred bucks in her pocket! Olivia shut the door. “Are you ready for bed, dear? You're wearing pajamas.” She didn't comment on Lotus's perfume, which could knock out an entire opera house.

“I'm sorry. This is Miss Ortlip's house uniform.” Pippa noticed Olivia frowning at her purple-fleeced feet. “The slippers don't scuff her spalted Georgian maple floors.”

“And that awful army hat?”

Pippa whipped it off. “My head was cold.”

“Very well. Come downstairs. We're just finishing an evening class.”

Olivia led Pippa to a capacious laundry where four students were ironing newspapers. Clapping her hands, Olivia announced, “May I introduce your new classmate, Lotus Polo, personal valet for Virginia Ortlip, heiress of a Dallas oil fortune and renowned wilderness explorer, with homes in Dallas, Aspen, and Manhattan.”

Olivia led Pippa to the first ironer. “You met Brenda this afternoon. As you may recall, her employers, the Pitts, own a multinational sand and gravel empire.” Too busy getting the creases out of
Doones-hury,
Brenda didn't look up. Olivia proceeded to the next ironing board. “This is Cornelius. He works for Ralph and Brando, the famous clothing designers with homes in Palm Springs, Palm Beach, and Provincetown.”

“And
Ibiza.” A houseboy in head-to-toe white silk and waxed arched eyebrows extended his hand. “Camo is so
out,
Lo.” He resumed ironing
W.

“This is our dear Logan,” Olivia continued, smiling at a petite Indonesian fellow in a pale orange tuxedo. “Personal valet to Biff De-laney, dot-com trillionaire from Seattle with vacation residences in Nantucket and Cancún. One of the most eligible bachelors on the planet, I might add.”

“He's an animal,” Logan muttered under his breath.

“Logan! No dissing employers during class time.” Olivia winked at Pippa. “After class is a different matter.” She proceeded to an elderly black woman struggling to iron the kinks out of
Readers Digest.
“This is Maisie. She has worked fifty years for the Dudley Stringham-mer family, which controls pork bellies futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. They live in a chateau on Lake Michigan and summer in Newport.”

A socially proud woman, Maisie took one look at Pippa's camouflage pajamas and sniffed, “Nouveau.”

“What is Miss Ortlip's favorite reading material, Lotus? I'll purchase a copy and teach you to iron it properly.”

“Powder.”
Pippa had seen a copy on Ginny's coffee table. Alberto Tomba was on the cover.

“I had no idea she was interested in makeup.” Olivia rapped two cans of spray starch together. “Attention! I'm showing Lotus to her room. When I return, I want everything ironed perfectly.”

“That's pretty special, ironing newspapers,” Pippa said, following Olivia up the back staircase. Even Thayne didn't expect her overworked staff to do that.

“Attention to detail sets my school apart.” That and the astronomical tuition. Olivia led Pippa to a room on the top floor. Everything in it was yellow. “We spent all afternoon preparing this room for a visiting head of state. It was a wonderful exercise.”

“Thank you. I love yellow.”

“It was my private fitting room. Twice a year Saint Laurent flew in from Paris to hem my skirts here.” If Olivia's lawyers performed up to spec, those days would return. She turned down the perfectly made bed. “May I be frank, Lotus? I wish you would reside with me for the entire course. It's difficult to concentrate on studies when you must return home every night and prepare blackened impala or whatever it is Miss Ortlip eats. The additional cost would mean nothing to her.” Four thousand bucks: Olivia presumed that Ginny, like most people who sent their staff here, blew twice that every week on cocaine, Ritalin, and Lipitor.

“I'll discuss it with her at once.”

Olivia helped herself to one of the chocolate truffles in a yellow dish. “It may not be easy. Miss Ortlip seems overly protective of you.”

Pippa became worried. “Will staying with her affect my graduation?”

“It certainly can't help. Good night, Lotus. You'll get a wake-up call at sunrise.”

Pippa pounced on the phone the moment Olivia left. She dialed Sheldon, who picked up because he thought Pippa's caller ID was that of an old client in Aspen. “Thankyou thankyou for answering, Sheldon. I've been so worried! How are your eyebrows?”

After a long pause he said, “I wouldn't know. At the moment I have none.”

“I had no idea you'd try to use that lighter. Well, actually, I thought you might use it but I didn't think it would blow up in your face. There was a fifty percent chance that it wouldn't. It must have gotten shaken up in the mail. Half of it is Mace, invented by a welder brother of the limousine driver named Mike in—”

“How may I assist you, Pippa? As you may have guessed, that piece of damp paper you sent to me is not a qualified diploma. I don't care if Vladimir Putin himself signed it.”

“Thank you for that vote of confidence. I'm now enrolled at the Mountbatten-Savoy School of Household Management in Aspen.”

“You're going into real estate? Excellent. Aspen's a terrific area for it.”

“Actually, it's more a school for managing homes from the inside out. Ironing newspapers, pouring tea, things like that.”

Sheldon worked those images through to their abysmal conclusion. “You're learning how to become a
servant?”
That was even worse than a clown.

“I'm trying to get a damn diploma!” Pippa filled the frigid silence with details of Olivia's address, neatly printed on a card next to the truffles. “I owe Ginny Ortlip some money. I'll need about ten thousand bucks, a cell phone, and some more suits. Can you get my ATM card working again? It got soaked in the Delaware River.”

“What happened to the Prada suits? Not to mention your cell phone?”

“I had to leave clown camp in a rush. Oh, I need a car.” “What for?”

“I just feel better with a car.”

“And to whom might I direct these dire necessities? Jeevesina But-leroni?”

“Lotus Polo.” It didn't sound like an improvement. “Thank you so much, Sheldon.”

“I didn't say I'd do it,” he fumed, hanging up.

Pippa immediately called Ginny. “Did you kill him?”

“Not yet. The swine is drinking all my beer and watching kinkajou videos. You may as well stay at Olivia's tonight. I'll come get my car in the morning.”

“Could you bring a few more camo pajamas? I told Olivia it was my uniform.”

Starving, Pippa finished all the chocolates. She had just gotten into bed when she heard tiny whimpers outside her door: Sub and Zero, the brown teacup poodles. They stationed themselves on either side of her pillow, like tiny clones of Pushkin. Pippa read aloud to them until they drifted asleep.

Next thing she knew her phone was ringing. “It's six o'clock, Lapis,” Maisie said.

“The name's Lois. I mean Lotus.” Too much Cristal. Dull headache. The dogs were gone. Where was she?

“We're waiting for you downstairs.”

Crap! Pippa cycloned to the kitchen, where four immaculately uniformed classmates eyed her wrinkled pajamas with disdain. “Your boss allows you to be seen like that?” Brenda huffed.

“This is my tropics uniform. We just got back from Costa Rica.”

Olivia and her six teacup poodles swept in. Today she wore a red dress that Saint Laurent had hemmed back in the halcyon days. A clip-on bow rested high on her bouffant, giving her the appearance of a standard-sized poodle. “Good morning! Today we will study the art of perfect toast.” Olivia gestured to two dozen loaves of bread, six brands of butter, and a herd of jams and marmalades covering the granite island. “As you see, the variety is endless.”

Maisie looked displeased. “I don't see any Wonder bread here, Sig-nora Villarubia-Thistleberry.”

“Correct. I wouldn't feed that to the squirrels.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Stringhammer have been eating it every morning for the last fifty years.”

“In which case I'm sure you already know how to toast it perfectly. You are excused from class. Go to your room and review the chapter on Orderly Medicine Cabinets. Be careful you don't step on my little dogs.” They were spiraling between everyone's legs.

Maisie straightened her headdress and left. “She's such a snob,” Cornelius the gay houseboy whispered. “Fifty years with pork bellies can really skew your outlook. What's she even doing here?”

“Maisie is taking the Ancillary Geriatrics course.” It was a serious new source of revenue for Olivia. “And doing very well indeed. Find a serrated knife, everyone. Take a loaf. You have thirty seconds to cut it into half-inch slices.” Olivia watched as her students sawed away. “Stop!” She gathered everyone around a stainless-steel box the size of a milk crate. “This is the most advanced toaster on the market. It works on color recognition, ejecting the toast the moment it turns amber brown. This model costs three thousand dollars and looks very handsome on the counter.”

In a cultivated household, Olivia taught, melted butter must stop a half inch from the crust, otherwise it would soil the fingertips of those picking it up and shoving it into their mouths while they read the stock quotations. Olivia waited with a tape measure until each student had produced a slice of perfectly buttered toast. “Your next challenge is jam, which must go up to, but never over, one-sixteenth of an inch from the edge of the melted butter.”

Again Olivia waited until each student had finished. “Bravo, all.

Lovely work. However, your toast is ice-cold. How are you ever going to manage breakfast for twelve?” No one answered. “Practice until you run out of bread.” On the way out Olivia helped herself to a few slices.

“Is she making this up?” Pippa asked Logan. “No one butters toast to the sixteenth of an inch.”

“Don't tell that to Olivia. She's serious about bringing back the Gilded Age.”

Pippa practiced slicing as her classmates traded ribald stories about their employers. Cornelius's main purpose in life was to keep Ralph and Brando's daisy chain replenished. Brenda violently hated her employer Mr. Pitt now that he had married a woman two years younger than herself. Poor Logan was worn out keeping Biff Delaney's fifty mistresses from running into each other on the way into or out of his boudoir. “We looked up your boss on the Web,” Cornelius called over. “Her only claim to fame was some outrageous wedding.”

Pippa's stomach lurched. “Miss Ortlip keeps a low profile.”

“Who's she sleeping with?”

“I have no idea.” That got heavy guffaws: every servant on the planet kept a meticulous diary of the boss's fornications. Their retirement funds depended on it.

At nine o'clock, all convened under Olivia's Chihuly chandelier for a review of How to Announce Callers. Between phone conversations with her private investigator, Olivia passed along all she knew about intercoms and closed-circuit television deliveries as well. “Look, class! There's a real person outside.”

“That's Miss Ortlip,” Pippa cried.

“Show her to the parlor, Lotus. Everyone else practice security codes.” Olivia settled in with Villeroy and Boch, Reed and Barton, Sub and Zero. “How are you today, Miss Ortlip?”

“Fine, thank you. I brought Lotus some fresh uniforms.”

“Wonderful. I know you're anxious to go out and shoot a few reindeer, so I will come straight to the point. In my opinion Lotus should board at school for the entire course.”

Ginny was not thrilled. “What do you think, Lo?” When Pippa remained frozen, she added, “I severely need you to wax my skis.”

“I severely need that diploma,” Pippa croaked, handing back the BMW keys.

“Have it your way.” Shaking her head, Ginny left.

“Bravo, Lotus,” Olivia said after the front door slammed. Four thousand bucks in her pocket! She looked more closely at the young woman in camouflage pajamas. Lotus did not comport herself like a domestic: quite the opposite. Nevertheless Ginny gave her anything she wanted. “May I ask—” Olivia's phone interrupted. “Mountbatten-Savoy School of Household Management. Olivia Villarubia-Thistleberry speaking.”

“This is Leigh Bowes from Las Vegas,” a woman's voice said. “Your name has been given to me by one of my dearest friends, Dusi Damon, who said you supplied Thayne Walker with a wedding planner on an hour's notice.”

That would be Cedric, her former handyman, an ex-marine. For an enormous fee, Olivia had slapped on a phony resume and shipped him off to that brouhaha in Dallas. To everyone's amazement he was still there. Cedric still sent Olivia two thousand bucks a month commission for landing him the gig. “How may I help?”