From Here to Paternity (12 page)

"Keep going, Jane," Shelley said. "Think about lunch."

"There's that person again," Jane said, shading her eyes and looking up at the top of the hill.

"Which person?"

"I don't know. Just a person I keep seeing. He has cameras and binoculars. A nature nut, I imagine."

"Jane, stop talking."

They stairstepped some more, and it was Shelley this time who wanted to stop. "Look at that! We're nearly halfway up the hill."

"We could just go from here."

"No, we're going to the top. Once. Look at the cute snowman."

"Hadn't you noticed him before? He appeared overnight."

"What's he got on his head?"

"I think it's supposed to be a crown."

"I know, but what is it really?"

"I dunno. Maybe one of those sort of fluted fruit bowls? Remember the gold plastic ones we used for that PTA fund-raising party with a Tropical Holiday theme? To quote a friend of mine, stop talking!"

After two more rest stops, they reached the top of the hill and sat down to get their breath. "Wow! This is neat up here," Jane gasped. "Look, the whole resort's laid out like a map. You should have brought a camera along. You could have taken a picture for Paul so when he gets home and wonders just where the various buildings and wings are, you'd have it. Are you ready to go?"

"Not yet. I'm never coming here again for the rest of my life, so I want to appreciate it for a few minutes. The snowman looks weird from the back. Just the cape and crown showing."

Jane was gazing around behind them. "The Indians who were demonstrating said there was a graveyard up here. It doesn't look like that to me."

"Jane, it's covered with snow. How would you know? You expect to see a mausoleum or a totem pole or something sticking up?"

"Hmmm. You have a point. It's certainly flat enough to make a good cemetery. Looks like somebody took a gigantic knife to it and sliced the top off. You could land a 747 along here."

Shelley was hoisting herself to her feet. "Speaking of landing, are we ready to take off?"

"I guess so. It sure looks a lot steeper from the top."

"How are we going to do this? One at a time all the way down?"

"Okay. Who goes first?"

"I do. I want to get this over with."

Shelley took a deep breath, turned her skis forward, and started gently drifting away. She picked up speed gradually until, apparently feeling it was too much of a good thing, she sat down suddenly, plowing a bit of a trench before she came to a complete stop. She yelled up to Jane, "Come this far and we'll go the rest of the way together."

Jane set out, cleverly charting a course a little farther left than Shelley had gone so that she wouldn't run over her. The first few minutes were okay. She started going a little faster, discovered that she could actually breathe at the same time she skied. And a little faster yet. She tried toeing-in to slow herself, but that just made her veer more to the left. Maybe, she thought frantically, it was toe-out. She glanced down at her feet, which was how she made her fatal mistake. When she looked back up a second later, she realized she was headed toward the woods. Specifically, straight for the snowman just on the edge of the woods.

She tried to sit down, but was leaning too far forward.
Crouch
! she told herself frantically, but she was so tense that her knees just wouldn't get the message.

With a terrific mental effort, she made her legs go limp and sat down. By that time she was moving so fast that she kept going for another five feet, sending up a spray of snow. The thing that finally stopped her was the snowman. She didn't so much crash into it, for her speed had diminished considerably, as bump into it firmly. Very firmly.

The snowman's head rolled off, sending the crown/ bowl spinning across the snow.

"Jane! Are you all right?" Shelley yelled from someplace off to her right.

"I'm okay," Jane said, trying to stand up. Where had her skis gone? she was wondering. If they'd buried themselves in the snow, how would she ever find them? Still shaky from her adventure, she leaned on the snowman, placing her gloved hand where its head had been. But as she did so, the whole front section of the snow crumbled away in a slab.

And there, inside the snowman where there should have been nothing but more snow, was the body of Bill Smith.

It was another hour before Jane and Shelley could get away. The sheriff and his deputy had been summoned, people had been questioned extensively (especially Jane, who had discovered the body), the bunny slope had been cleared of skiers, and finally the earthly remains of Bill Smith had been taken away. By that time Jane and Shelley were frozen clear through. They hadn't been allowed to do anything but sit impatiently on the bench next to the equipment hut.

"At the risk of seeming insensitive, I'm starving," Shelley admitted when they were finally allowed to leave.

"Me, too," Jane said. "Let's go get some sandwiches at the lodge and take them to one of our cabins. I wish I knew where Mel was. He should have been there before the sheriff and his crew of bumblers trampled everything. I guess that's not really fair to say. They seemed to be taking it very seriously this time."

"I wonder if the sheriff is going to look more closely into Mrs. Schmidtheiser's death now."

"Surely he'll have to," Jane said. "I didn't like the way he started asking me more questions when he realized I was the one who had found her, too."

"It's just a weird coincidence, Jane."

"You and I know that, but that's when he asked me how I knew them both before I came here. Not
if I
knew them, but
how
I knew them. Shelley, I'm really uneasy about this."

The atmosphere at the lodge was subdued. Apparently word that the proprietor of the hotel had died had filtered down through the guests. And though few of them had ever seen him, much less met him, the news clearly dampened everyone's spirits. There was no sign, of course, of Tenny, Joanna, or Pete.

"Jane, you order us some sandwiches and chips and maybe some salad," Shelley said. "I'm going to give Paul a quick call on the house phone and see where all the kids are and what they're up to. I don't like not knowing exactly where they are."

"Me, neither. Keep an eye out for Mel, too, would you?"

Jane ordered plenty of sandwiches, assuming that they might end up feeding children as well as themselves. Even if the sandwiches weren't consumed right away, they'd have them for snacking. Shelley came back as Jane was settling in front of the fireplace in the main lounge. "Got the food yet?"

Jane shook her head. "They're real busy. It'll take about ten more minutes."

"Okay. I've got everybody accounted for. Katie and Denise have taken the shuttle to town to shop at the music store. Mike is skiing with the girl he met yesterday," she said, ticking them off on her fingers as she spoke. "Todd and John are playing Nintendo in Mel's cabin and they want lunch."

"I ordered lots of extra sandwiches. Did you find Mel?"

"Yes, and he's meeting us at your cabin."

"Did he know about Bill?"

"Yes. Don't sidetrack me. I'll forget the rest of my list. Paul's leaving in an hour. He says that naturally their negotiations have been put on hold and he thinks it would be bad for the investors to hang around looking like vultures waiting to pounce on the grieving widow."

"Oh, dear. I guess we should all go, shouldn't we?"

"No, no reason to. In fact, he asked me to stay on to attend the funeral. And it would cost the absolute earth to get plane tickets on such short notice for all of us. If you don't mind, I'll just move in with you, though."

"Fine by me."

Ever efficient, Shelley nodded and continued. "Now, if you'll wait for the sandwiches and bring them along, I'll go ahead, say good-bye to Paul, grab my stuff, then get a nice fire started in your cabin so we can get good and warm. I'm not sure I'm capable of getting warm again, but I'd like to give it a shot. Let me have your key."

And without any more fuss, she was gone. Jane marveled, as she had so often over the years of their friendship, at how well organized Shelley was under the slightest pressure. She seemed to be able to pluck information out of the air—her rapid determination of where all the children had gone was proof of that— and to make quick, sensible decisions whenever they were required.

Jane waited another ten minutes and went back to the carryout section of the restaurant. Linda Moosefoot was waiting there, too. Her eyes were red.

"Oh, Mrs. Jeffry, I was just on my way to your cabin. Do you mind if I have a fast lunch first? I should have been there an hour ago, but what with…" Her voice trailed off and she sniffed.

"Good heavens! Don't think about it. There's no need to tidy up after us."

"No, I'm glad to have something to do."

"Then bring your lunch along and eat it with us. I'm waiting for sandwiches."

Just as she spoke, the waiter came through the door from the kitchen, took a look at her, and slapped his forehead. "Shit," he muttered and then looked even more upset that she'd heard him.

"You lost my order?" Jane asked.

"I'm so sorry. We had a cancellation of an order and I think I canceled yours by mistake."

"No harm done. Let's start over."

Linda said, "Give him your order and I'll bring it along with mine."

"Thanks. My toes are numb. I have to get these boots off to see if they're still alive," Jane said.

As she reached her cabin, actively shivering now, Shelley opened the door. "I've dumped my stuff in the bedroom and the fire is going. Come in. You look half dead yourself."

They didn't talk about the body until Jane had replaced her boots with warm, fuzzy slippers and was huddled in front of the fireplace.

Shelley had fixed them both hot cocoa. "I thought it was better for shock," she said, handing Jane a steaming mug.

Mel arrived a minute later. He was both angry and concerned. "I should have known, if there was a murder victim anywhere within a ten-mile radius, that you'd stumble onto it," he said to Jane.

"Not so much a stumble as a slide," she said, her voice weak.

"Are you all right?" he asked contritely.

"Fine. Just cold and hungry."

"Tell me what happened."

Jane recounted her collision with the snowman. "That's why it was so large and squat. Bill Smith's body was inside the body of it. He was in a sitting position. It looked like the snow had been piled up around him, and then I guess the snowball head was stuck on top of the pile. Putting aside the fact that murder is unthinkable in itself, why on earth would anybody do anything so bizarre?"

Mel said, "Not so bizarre, really. If you hadn't run into it, the chances are that nobody would have found him until summer."

"Ugh!" Shelley said. "Just imagine—"

"Better not to," Mel said. "By then the chances of anybody remembering when the snowman had appeared would be almost nil. All possible witnesses would have been long gone, and half would have forgotten most of the details of their stay here. And there certainly wouldn't be any question of physical evidence—time of death, footprints, anything like that."

"But footprints are really a lost cause," Jane said. "By the time the sheriff's people got there, the whole area was trampled. And anyway, it had snowed overnight and covered them up. I do remember when I was heading for the thing, there wasn't a mark anywhere near it. And I would imagine packing a body in snow would make havoc of body temperature. Not only is snow cold, but I understand it's an insulator. At least the gardening programs say so."

"Tell me what the sheriff's people did," Mel said.

"They actually seemed fairly thorough. They took a lot of photographs. They brought two toboggans up the hill. One for Bill, and the other to put the snow on as they removed it from around the body. They packed the snow into plastic containers and labeled them."

Mel nodded. "Good. They can melt it down and check for fabric fibers. What else?"

"Well, after they took the body away, they dug a big circle around where it had been. I mean dug the snow, not the ground. The woods must act as some kind of windbreak or snow fence. The snow wasn't awfully deep right there. They took away a lot of samples of that, too. I guess they were looking for anything the murderer might have dropped."

"Not necessarily the murderer, keep in mind," Mel said absently, gazing past her at the fire.

"What do you mean?" Shelley asked. She had gone to the kitchen and came back with a third mug of cocoa for Mel.

"Nothing, really. Just that the person who killed him and the person who put him in the snowman aren't necessarily the same. They probably are, but that's not proof."

"But why else would anybody build the snowman around him if they didn't kill him?" Jane asked.

"I don't know. A grisly prank, maybe? I didn't mean to suggest that it was likely, just that you can't afford to jump to any conclusions with something like this. Did the sheriff say it was murder? Smith didn't, by any chance, die of natural causes, did he?"

"No, the sheriff said there was clearly a violent blow to the head. Fortunately, I didn't see that much. I only saw his shirt and hand and knew it was a person; then I screamed and turned away. I didn't find him on purpose, you know," she added, harking back to his earlier criticism.

"I know. I'm sorry I was nasty about it. It's just that you do have a way of finding bodies."

"The sheriff mentioned that, too. Rather pointedly. It's a talent I do nothing to encourage," she said wryly.

He nodded and changed the subject. "Do you have anything to eat here?"

"Linda Moose foot is bringing our lunch with hers. She should be along any minute now."

And as if summoned by the thought, Linda opened the door, calling out, "Hello? Mrs. Jeffry?"

"Come in, Linda."

Mel and Shelley extended their sympathies to her on the death of her employer.

"To tell the truth, he wasn't a really likable man," Linda said. "But I'm sorry he's dead. His ties to our tribe go back a long way. We have good reason to be grateful to him. They're saying it was murder. Is that true?"

"I think so," Mel replied. "Who's saying that?"

Linda shrugged. "Everybody. Well, finding him in a snowman… and all the sheriff's people… what else could people think?"

"True enough," Mel admitted.

"How are Tenny and Joanna doing?" Jane asked.

"Pretty well. They were expecting it, after all."

"What?" Mel exclaimed.

"Oh, I don't mean that he'd be murdered. Nobody expected that. But that he'd die. See, he had a very bad heart condition. Not too many people knew. He was real private about his life. But he'd had a couple heart attacks, a pacemaker, angio-whatever. All of that. I guess that's why he was so anxious to sell the resort and retire in what little time he had left. Tenny asked those who knew about it to keep very quiet. They didn't want the investors to be swayed one way or the other by knowing. I guess they didn't want anyone to think they were desperate to sell—or to feel sorry for him. Either is likely. I s'pose I shouldn't be telling you now, but it doesn't matter anymore."

Shelley had prepared yet another cup of cocoa and handed it to Linda before starting to unpack the food from the insulated bags Linda had brought along.

"Thanks, Mrs. Nowack. Anyway, Tenny and Joanna had known for a long time that he could literally go at any minute, and I think in a way they'd already done some of their grieving, if that makes sense."