Jill Churchill - From Here to Paternity

"How'd your dinner go?"

"Lovely. Tenny arranged it all and the food was fantastic. I called around, trying to find you about nine last night. Where were you?"

"Oh… here and there. Want to come over? I've got lots to tell you. Did you know Mrs. Schmidtheiser died last night?"

"No! Oh, how awful. Poor thing. What was it? A heart attack?"

"Maybe so. Maybe not."

"Jane! What do you mean by that?"

"I'll tell you all about it when you get here. Give me about twenty minutes. The girls are going to try skiing, and I told them I'd go over to the bunny slope with them and make sure they had everything they need. Like money, I suspect."

Jane was slightly delayed by Willard. The green-eyed white cat had made another casual appearance on the deck, and this time Willard saw it and went berserk. When she took him outside a few minutes later, he was determined to find the cat and, as he was on a leash, dragged Jane all over the woods before she managed to haul him back inside. But she and the girls finally got on their way.

It had snowed again overnight, and there hadn't been enough skiers yet to mess up the pristine sweep of the slope. A few hearty souls had already trudged up the hill, making a sloppy herringbone pattern with their skis and wobbling tracks coming back down. The three instructors were helping others get ready to ski. Jane sat down on a bench at the bottom of the slope and waited patiently as the instructor showed the girls how the skis attached to their boots, demonstrated a few basics, and sent them up the hill.

Jane told the devastatingly handsome young instructor her name and room number, just in case one of the girls broke a leg or something.

"Don't worry, ma'am. Nobody's ever gotten seriously hurt on this slope. It's a baby hill. And most people don't break their legs anyway. They break their thumbs."

"Thumbs? How—?"

"With the ski pole when they fall. It's hard to make newbies understand they have to let go and just fall freely. They want to hang onto something and all they've got is the pole. It whips around and snap !"

"Oh, that's a big comfort to know. Thanks."

The instructor grinned dazzlingly. "Don't worry, I'll take good care of them. They're not as fragile as mothers think."

No, not physically, but you could break their hearts with that smile , Jane thought.

She sat watching them for a few more minutes and decided their chances of ever getting to the top of the hill were so remote that she didn't need to worry about how they got back down. Each of them had already fallen a couple of times just trying to master the awkward toes-out method of climbing. Right now they were both lying facedown in the snow, laughing uncontrollably.

Above them, Jane caught a glimpse of crimson and noticed that it belonged, once again, to the skier she'd seen twice yesterday. He or she must be somebody who regularly did some kind of cross-country skiing. Maybe a local person. He — there was, Jane decided, something essentially masculine in the stride — stopped as she watched. Put binoculars — no, a camera — to his face. And then fumbled around in his jacket. It looked as if he'd taken out a small pad or book and might be writing something in it. How strange. Some kind of nature study or bird watching, no doubt.

As she glanced one last time at the girls, now trying to help each other up in a Keystone Kops manner, she noticed something new at the bunny slope. Over at the edge, near the woods that bordered the area, there was a snowman. Looking at it, she realized it was the first snowman she'd seen since being in the mountains. Apparently when people were surrounded by this much snow, they didn't think to use it for the usual games. This, however, was an elaborate one— short and squat, but quite big, with a tablecloth or something around its shoulders as a cape and something gold and sparkly on its head like a crown. It had sticks for arms and big mittens on the ends of the sticks.

Her timing was perfect. Shelley was just arriving at her cabin when she returned. "Let's go get breakfast. I'll tell you along the way."

"Mel must be going crazy," Shelley said when Jane had explained about Mel's problems with the sheriff after they'd found Doris.

"Uh-huh. He keeps claiming that he's on vacation and not interested, but he was pretty wild about the haphazard way the sheriff was treating the crime scene. If it was a crime scene. Mel's so meticulous, and this guy seems to be a lazy good ol' boy. A real conflict of styles of law enforcement, to say the least."

"What do you think?"

They were approaching the entrance to the hotel and slowed down. "I don't know," Jane said. "It seems real odd to me that the papers looked like they were thrown around after she died. Naturally, it could just happen that there weren't any where she fell, but it seems unlikely. You should have seen the place, Shelley. It looked like a tornado had gone through."

"Still…"

"I know. She had heart trouble and had a nasty afternoon. Before we go in where somebody might overhear us, let me tell you about my conversation last night with Lucky—"

When they went in to the restaurant, they made a point of getting an isolated table so they could continue to talk, albeit in near whispers.

"I'm with you on this, I think," Shelley said as they got settled. "She might well have died of natural causes, but when you factor in the mess in her place and that at least one person has a good reason to want her out of the way, you can't overlook the possibility of foul play."

"Tell me your impression of Stu Gortner," Jane said. "I didn't hear any of the debate and only met him for a minute. He winked at me."

"Ugh!"

The waiter appeared and invited them to either order from the menu or have the buffet breakfast. "I didn't think I'd ever hear myself say this, but I'm not very hungry," Jane said. "Could I just have some fruit and coffee?"

"We've got some nice papaya and kiwi," he began.

"No, just ordinary fruit. An apple, maybe?"

"No apples. But there are some peaches. How about one of those sliced over some cold cereal?" he suggested.

"Perfect. But plain cereal. Nothing with oats or nuts."

"Rice Krispies?"

"You're a good man."

"Make it two," Shelley put in.

When he'd brought their coffee, Shelley said, "Stu Gortner is a slick number. Utterly charming. Good-looking in an almost elder-statesman way, as you know. And he never really did one single thing to Mrs. Schmidtheiser that you could point to or repeat and say, ' That was rude.' It was much more subtle. It was the cumulative effect. He didn't quite interrupt her; he didn't quite make faces when she was talking; he didn't quite laugh when he repeated her points. But he danced real, real close."

"I guess from the way Mrs. Schmidtheiser tore out of the room that she was well aware that he was doing better than she was."

"I don't think she did realize that until near the end of the thing. At first she just kept bombing along, so absorbed in her own notes and documents and slides that she really didn't pay much attention to him. She'd talk; then, when he talked, she'd frantically rustle things around, getting ready for the next part of her presentation. But, toward the end, she seemed to catch on."

"In what way?"

"She started listening to him. He'd say something suave and amusing that cut her off at the knees and she'd gape and go all red in the face. I'd sure like to know what somebody like Lucky thought of it. After all, I don't know a thing about the 'content' of what they were saying."

"When he talked to me last night, he indicated that Gortner really didn't have anything to say on his own behalf — that he was only making Mrs. Schmidtheiser's evidence look silly."