by Ann Evans
“I think he has control issues. Pop says it’s just the D’Angelo stubborn streak in him.” She straightened. “Whatever it is, looks like he was able to talk Tessa into coming.”
She inclined her head toward the path that led to Nick’s cabin. Kari turned and watched Nick, his mother and Tessa make their way to join them on the front drive. Nick’s and Rose’s features were blank, but from the look of Tessa’s red-rimmed eyes, it was clear the girl was miserable. The tight slash of her mouth indicated that coming on this trip was the last thing she had in mind.
No one said a word, and to keep from becoming part of these awkward family moments, Kari quickly jumped into the van and maneuvered into the third seat.
Nick drove, and Addy, apparently excited to be doing something constructive and determined to keep the mood upbeat, chattered all the way down the mountain. Everyone listened politely to her instructions and nodded their heads in unison like dashboard puppies.
They drove through the tiny town of Broken Yoke, then swung onto the interstate and eventually into Vail Valley. Nick’s attitude was a disappointment. He remained quiet and preoccupied. However cordial he’d been to her yesterday afternoon, he seemed to have fallen back into ignoring her most of the time. The hope that they were beyond petty grievances withered and went to dust, though she supposed that his thoughts were preoccupied with Tessa’s attitude.
She sat up front beside her father, but her attention seemed riveted out the side window. She made no effort to contribute to the conversation. Father and daughter spoke, but their exchanges were brief and painfully polite.
They passed East Vail and traffic picked up considerably. The true heart of the town, Vail Village, didn’t allow anything but foot traffic, so Nick parked on the nearest side street. They all piled out, and almost before everyone had stretched out kinks and adjusted clothing, Addy was awkwardly passing around large handfuls of the flyers.
It was early yet, but plenty of people were already on the streets. Somewhere up ahead in the village, a polka band was tuning up. Although there was no snow on Vail Mountain, the chairlifts were running. With its heavy influence of Bavarian-style architecture, the town was a little too cute, a little too planned for Kari’s tastes, but the crisp snap of fall air and clear blue sky overhead made her glad she’d come.
Addy was still the majordomo. “Mom, why don’t we work that parking lot?” she suggested, motioning toward a lot filled with an ocean of cars. She glanced at Kari and Tessa in turn, then inclined her head toward the cluster of shops, restaurants and hotels within the village. “Why don’t you two hit all the stores on the pedestrian mall? See if they’ll let you put flyers by the registers. Pass out as many to the tourists as you can, too. And don’t forget—charters aren’t cheap, so pick out people who look like they can afford us.”
Nick had a huge stack of the flyers under one arm. “I’m going to the Visitor’s Center. See if I can make a deal for some free advertising.”
Addy looked pleased. “Let’s all meet back here in an hour to see how we’ve done. Stop frowning, Nick. I know this will work.”
He shook his head and gave her a rueful smile. It was the first one Kari had seen this morning. “Only for you, Addy. No one else could get me out here shucking our wares like someone in a Turkish bazaar.”
Addy laughed, balancing a stack of flyers on her extended arms. “If this gets us more business, next time I’m going to try a contest or something. Maybe the winner could get a half hour flight up the Front Range.”
“You should make the prize at least an hour’s flight,” Kari suggested as she withdrew more flyers from the stack. “It needs to have a perceived value. I once did an article on market research companies, and they have a slogan in the business—Peanut Prizes, Monkey Customers.”
“See, Nick?” Addy said with a grin. “There may be all kinds of things we can do if you’ll just let me.”
“Let’s just get through this first,” he said, and the look on his face made Kari wonder if she should have remained silent.
“Stubborn as always,” Addy said, heading off with her mother by her side. “Good luck, everyone! One hour.”
Kari and Tessa trooped up the sidewalk obediently. The street was lined with small businesses, the practical everyday kind found in most towns. Nothing as tony or tourist-oriented as they were sure to find in the heart of Vail Village.
The first place they came to was an optometrist, not a likely candidate for flyers.
Tessa looked peevish about going in, but Kari was determined. “Let’s see what kind of reception we get and work on our pitch while we’re at it.”
Sure enough, the office manager said no to the flyers, and they were back on the street in no time. If Tessa had been unenthusiastic before, she was ready to mutiny now.
“This is stupid,” she said. “We sound like total losers.”
“We’ll get better,” Kari replied in a firm voice. “We just need to practice a little.”
She headed off again, and Tessa fell reluctantly into step beside her. It was going to be a miserable morning if the girl didn’t snap out of it, Kari thought. She tried to come up with a topic they could discuss, but she hadn’t been a teenager in a long time and she was awfully rusty when it came to small talk.
Finally she took in a deep lungful of air. “The mountains almost take your breath away, don’t they?”
“Uh-huh.”
Kari pointed toward a huge mountain face off to the right, completely covered in yellow aspen and dark evergreens like a patchwork quilt. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”
“Only every year around this time.”
Oh, yeah, she was her father’s daughter. They had non-communication down to an art form.
A couple of teenage girls outfitted in dirndl dresses and holding tap shoes passed them, evidently headed for some dance group.
“I wonder if one of them is Heidi,” Kari remarked when they were out of earshot.
“Heidi who?” Tessa said in obvious irritation.
“Heidi. You know, from the children’s book?”
“No.”
Guess kids don’t grow up reading about Heidi and her adventures in the mountains anymore, Kari thought. Probably too tame for this generation. She decided to take a chance. “Tessa, do you want to talk about what’s bothering you?”
“No.”
She stopped and turned toward the girl. “I’d like to point out that I’m not your father or your mother. As far as I know, I haven’t done anything wrong lately, so a little friendly conversation wouldn’t go amiss. It might make this job go a little faster. And it will definitely take your mind off other problems.”
Tessa gave her a wide-eyed, horrified look. “Did my dad tell everyone about Mom’s phone call?”
“He didn’t tell me anything. I overheard your grandmother and Addy talking about it.”
The girl seemed immediately contrite. “Sorry.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”
“No,” Tessa said, but in the next moment, she shook her head wildly. “I hate my parents. Mom is totally selfish. She makes promises all the time and never follows through. And Dad…Dad is so mean and bossy and…and he’s worse than she is!”
Oh, boy. Kari was almost sorry she’d said anything. “Any particular reason why?”
“He knows I don’t want to be here today. But he made me come.”
“He probably thought it would be better for you to be out with us than sitting at home by yourself.”
Tessa expelled a tragic sigh. “I wasn’t going to be by myself for long. A bunch of us were supposed to go kayaking today on Lake Dillon. But Dad said I couldn’t go. He says it’s because he wanted me here with him, but I know that’s not it.”
“Then what do you think the reason is?”
“It’s because there were going to be boys there and no adults to supervise us.” Her mouth pinched. “I guess he thinks that somehow I’m gonna have se
x in a kayak.”
Kari didn’t know what to say. She didn’t have parenting instincts to guide her, and taking the girl’s side in this could be dangerous. “Tessa…” she began, despising herself for sounding so tentative.
“Oh, I don’t want to talk about it,” the teenager said, and threw up her hands in disgust. Her voice shook as if she were trying to bring it under control. “Mom might not want me around, but Dad treats me like a baby, and he’ll never be any different. Let’s just do this and get it over with.”
Kari groaned inwardly as she watched the girl take off down the street. She was no good at this sort of thing, no good at all.
She caught up with Tessa and, without any further conversation between them, they placed flyers in three shops. They skipped a hardware store, a bar and a small café that weren’t open yet. By the time half an hour had passed, they’d barely made it into Vail Village.
“We should split up,” Tessa suggested. “We’ll never get everywhere if we don’t.” She pointed to the opposite side of the street. “I’ll take that side, you take this one. We’ll meet in half an hour…” she glanced back, pointing toward the first place they’d gone into, the optometrist, “—back where we started. Okay?”
Kari hesitated. She couldn’t argue with that logic, but she wasn’t sure they should separate. The crowd had grown in the time they’d been at this, and it would be easy to get lost. On the other hand, Tessa wasn’t a child, and the street was narrow enough that they could keep each other in sight.
She nodded and gave Tessa half the stack of flyers. “Just don’t go any farther than the covered bridge,” she said.
Tessa rolled her eyes. “God, you sound like Dad.”
“A half hour,” Kari stressed.
The girl nodded and jogged across the cobblestone street, dark hair bouncing on her shoulders. Kari watched as she disappeared inside a skiwear shop.
It wasn’t a bad plan. Without Tessa’s surly presence by her side, Kari was able to make real headway. She placed flyers in every single shop on her side of the street and began to think she’d missed her calling in sales. Tessa seemed to be having similar luck. Every so often Kari caught sight of her across the crowded throng of festival-goers, and she occasionally smiled and lifted her hand to give Kari a thumbs-up signal.
In the last shop she went into the woman behind the counter was especially enthusiastic. She’d always wanted to take a helicopter ride over the mountains. Kari gave her the speech Addy had prepped them with, then improvised a little when the woman seemed ready to take off right there and then. When Kari emerged on the street again to meet up with Tessa, she’d left the last of her flyers propped by the register.
The atmosphere was infectiously playful on the pedestrian mall. There were street performers and craft booths and so much music that Kari found herself humming a dozen different tunes while she waited for Tessa. The smell of corn dogs and popcorn made her stomach growl. She was thirsty and beginning to think about lunch.
Five minutes passed. No Tessa.
Deciding not to wait any longer, Kari crossed the street and went into the last shop on Tessa’s side of the block. The bright yellow flyers sat at the cashier counter, so Tessa had to have been there. Kari went back outside to scan the street.
They’d agreed to meet at the optometrist’s, and Tessa had probably decided not to wait for her. Glancing at her watch, Kari saw that the half hour was well up. In fact, in another ten minutes, they were all supposed to meet back at the van. She wove quickly through the crowd, back the way she’d come.
By the time she backtracked all the way to the optometrist’s office, Kari was starting to worry. Now that she’d left the main street of Vail Village, the crowd had thinned a little. In the distance up ahead Kari could make out the lodge van and two figures standing beside it. Addy and Rose.
No Tessa in sight.
Her heart had begun to beat with a hard, steady rhythm now. There had to be someplace else the teenager had decided to place flyers. She and Tessa were only temporarily separated, that’s all. She just needed to look a little harder.
She certainly wasn’t willing to go back to the van alone to tell Nick she’d misplaced his daughter.
DARN IT, TESSA. Where are you?
Another ten minutes had passed. The first stirring of panic shivered up Kari’s spine. She heard a noise behind her and turned to see that the café they’d previously bypassed had opened now. In agonizing slow motion, a lanky teenage boy was flipping chairs upright around umbrella tables.
Kari walked over to him. “Have you seen a girl come by here recently?” she asked. “Shoulder-length dark hair, wearing a red T-shirt. Maybe carrying a handful of yellow flyers. Kind of cute.”
“Yeah, I saw her,” he said. “She wanted to buy a soda, but I told her the manager’s not here yet with the key to the beverage cooler.” The boy’s face screwed up. There was nothing but smothered anger in the set of his mouth. “The old fart thinks I’ll drink up all his beer if he doesn’t lock it up like Fort Knox.”
Lord, save me from sullen teenagers, Kari thought. Trying to hang on to her patience, she offered him a sympathetic smile. “Did you happen to notice which way she went?”
“Sure.” The kid rubbed the side of his nose with one finger, flicked away some foreign object, then used that same finger to point in the direction of Vail Village. “I sent her up there.”
“Up to the village?” Kari asked.
“Nah, not that far.” He pointed again. “She can get something there.”
Kari lifted her hand to shade her eyes. The Black Diamond, a hole-in-the-wall local bar they’d decided to bypass earlier, now looked open for business. Kari swung back to the boy. “You sent her to a bar? She’s only fourteen!”
The kid blinked stupidly. “Well, she sure didn’t look it.”
You idiot, Kari wanted to shout at him, but there was no point wasting time. She took off up the sidewalk, pushing past tourists and anyone else who stood in her way.
Don’t panic, she told herself. Don’t panic. There was no reason to think anything would be wrong. So how come her breath felt as though it had been squeezed into one small box in her chest?
She hit the front door of the Black Diamond hard, almost knocking down a couple of men heading out. Then she had to stop to let her eyes adjust to the low lighting.
The place lacked the monied ambience of some of the bars they’d passed in Vail Village. This was a local watering hole, closed up against the sun and smelling faintly of beer and body odor. It was too early for there to be much of a crowd, but a couple of die-hard drinkers looked up as she came in.
Then she saw Tessa, talking to the bartender.
Not wanting to look as uneasy as she felt, Kari walked slowly up behind the girl. Tessa didn’t notice her. She was too busy being angry at the bartender. “Why not?” Kari heard her ask the man.
“Because you shouldn’t be in here,” the bartender said, calmly wiping out a beer stein with a hand towel. He’d probably been face-to-face with underage drinkers a million times. “Now skedaddle, before you get me in trouble.”
Kari moved into the girl’s line of sight and touched her arm. “Tessa, let’s go.”
Tessa looked momentarily contrite. “I just wanted a soda.”
On the other side of the girl, a beefy guy in cowboy denim suddenly came off his bar stool and leaned close. Even in the dim lighting, his bloodshot eyes made it clear he’d had more than one beer already today.
“Aw, give her a soda, Hank,” he told the bartender. Then he winked at Tessa. “Hell, give her a beer on me, if she wants one.”
He patted Tessa’s arm, then let his stubby fingers stay there. She went taut, glaring at the man. “Hey!” she said. “Don’t do that.”
Kari moved to slowly brush the man’s hand away. The guy was drunk, not very coordinated, so he didn’t look as though he was going to be much of a problem. “Thanks anyway,” she said to him. “But we really have to go.”
She nudged Tessa in the direction of the door.
The drunk looked offended. “I’m only being nice,” he complained.
“Leave her alone, Bobby,” the bartender told him. “The kid’s jailbait, you idiot.”
Bobby grinned at Kari. “Yeah, but she isn’t,” he said, and suddenly his fingers latched on to Kari’s arm.
“Tessa, go outside,” Kari ordered in the calmest tone she could manage. “Now.”
“But—”
“Go outside. I’ll be right out.”
Tessa hurried out the door. Kari turned to face the drunk, giving him a small smile. “Okay, big guy. You can let go of me now.”
“I don’t see why I should,” Bobby said, looking as disappointed as a kid who’d had his toy taken away from him. “You’re a lot prettier than that little squirt, and I’ll bet you know more, too. Like what to do with that pretty little mouth of yours.”
With Tessa safely out of harm’s way, Kari was starting to feel cranky. She’d fended off enough unwanted advances from men in her time, and they always left her feeling slightly soiled. “I do know more than she does,” Kari agreed. “I know what will happen if I start screaming bloody murder and the barkeep has to call the cops. He doesn’t want trouble, and neither do you. Right?”
“Let her go, Bobby,” the bartender spoke up, clearly on her side now.
“Let me buy you a beer.”
The guy’s fingers tightened on Kari’s forearm. Tomorrow she’d have a bruise from his careless, beefy grip, and she didn’t like that.
“Let…go,” she said firmly, tired of being nice.
“I just want someone to listen to me for a while. Someone who doesn’t make judgments.”
“Then get a dog.”
She pulled her arm out of his grasp. He started to make another grab for her. She turned toward him, brought up both hands and shoved hard against his chest. Off-balanced, Bobby lost hold of his beer, stumbled and went down. He landed on his back. His beer splashed across his denim jacket and the glass rolled against the foot rail of the bar.