From Here to Paternity jj-6

by Jill Churchill

  That was where Shelley found her an hour later, sound asleep with the book over her face like a tent.

  Chapter 16

  "Jane, wake up. The sheriff wants to talk to you," Shelley hissed.

  Jane sat up, angry with herself for falling asleep and feeling so fuddled. "Give me a minute to slap myself awake," she said, tearing toward the bathroom, where she slapped some cold water on her face and brushed her teeth fiercely, thinking at least her gums and cheeks would be awake and they were both fairly close to her brain.

  As it turned out, she didn't need any special wits for this interview. The sheriff asked her the same things he'd already asked before. Did she know Doris or Bill before coming here? Was she a member of the group that was meeting here? Why did she go to Mrs. Schmidtheiser's cabin? Why did she head toward the snowman? This was a new one and it made Jane laugh, which the sheriff clearly found a distasteful reaction. "I wasn't 'heading' for anything! It was the first time I ever skied and I had absolutely no control over where I ended up! Do you really imagine I'd have risked running into a tree or something by heading for the woods?"

  "I couldn't say. I just couldn't say, ma'am. But it sure is odd that there's two bodies and somebody who says she never knew the people before found both of them, don't you think?"

  This was at least the third time he'd made this observation. The first time it had surprised her, the second time it irritated her, but this time — in her own temporary "home" and with her daughter in the next room — it made her furious.

  "Are you making an accusation?" she said coldly.

  "No, ma'am. Nosiree. Just sayin' as how it's odd."

  She stood up and walked to the door of the cabin. "It was unpleasant and unfortunate. And I find this conversation to be even more so. I've told you everything I know. And I've told it to you several times. If you have in mind asking me the same questions again, you'll have to ask them of my lawyer. Frankly, I'm tired of this. Get out of here."

  "Now, don't go gettin' all riled up—"

  "Get out!"

  He put his hands up. "Okay, okay, I'm going." He backed out the door, making vaguely apologetic noises, but Jane cut them off by slamming the door as soon as he was outside. She leaned back against it, shaking.

  Shelley looked at her admiringly. "Wow! I've never seen you do anything like that. I'm really impressed!"

  "You're rubbing off on me, I guess. That ignorant, nasty-minded hick! How dare he—"

  "Now calm down. He's gone."

  A few minutes and a restorative cup of coffee and cigarette later, Shelley ventured to reopen the subject. "You see what this means, don't you?"

  "I have no idea," Jane said.

  "Look, the people here are bright and much more sophisticated than they like to let on. They wouldn't have anybody as sheriff who really is as much of a rube as he acts like. So he must be smarter than he seems."

  "He'd have to be!"

  "And if he has the wits to stay sheriff, he must know you're telling the truth."

  "Rave on," Jane said. "So why is he bothering with me?"

  "Because he's at a dead end."

  "Are you suggesting that I should be encouraged by this?"

  "Not encouraged, but it does mean there isn't any evidence that we don't know about that's helping him any. So we are just as well equipped to figure this out as he is."

  "And just as motivated," Jane added sourly.

  "Okay, so we can assume that either both deaths have to do with the whole Tsar/Holnagrad thing or they don't."

  "That's a big help."

  "Jane, it gives us a structure for analyzing what we know."

  "If you say so."

  "All right. Let's assume first that it does have to do with the Tsar business. Which certainly seems likely, since one death was the person promoting Bill Smith as the heir, and the other death was Bill himself."

  "Okay, I see where you're going now," Jane said. "Who are the people involved in any way? Pro or con?"

  "Right. There are the two victims, of course. There's Pete, and we've already talked about him pretty thoroughly. There's Stu Gortner, who is really the one with the greatest motivation to get rid of the competition for his candidate."

  "Wait — go back to Pete. What would this fight he got into with HawkHunter have to do with it?"

  "Hold it, Jane. Don't sidetrack me yet. We're just laying out the groundwork for how we're going to think about this."

  "So we're thinking about how we're going to think? You wouldn't like to offer to run a couple states and several major corporations in your spare time, would you?"

  Shelley ignored that remark. "So — we have Bill, Doris, Pete, and Stu as interested parties. Now we have to add Joanna. Don't make faces like that. Joanna's very much a concerned party. Suppose Doris had made some kind of grand announcement to the press about Bill being the rightful Tsar. On Bill's behalf as well as her own, that would have a real impact on her life."

  "Okay, I'll give you that."

  "We've also got to consider Lucky. He's the president of the Society and had both Doris and Stu trying to get him on their sides. Maybe he is quietly involved with one or the other of them."

  "But that could be true of practically anyone in the Society."

  "Yes, but the rest of them don't appear to have much of anything at stake. Stu sees his candidate as his way to fame and fortune. Same with Pete. Doris saw it as a private coup. Even Lucky, who seems to care deeply about the Society, may feel that the group itself could either triumph or dissolve in the publicity a 'new Tsar' would generate."

  "I notice you're not mentioning Tenny."

  "No. Except that Tenny didn't want her uncle bothered with it, I can't see a motive for her. Even if she did have a motive to knock off Doris to protect Bill, she'd hardly hurt Bill. So there are the suspects if it has to do with the Holnagrad Society."

  "What else could it logically have to do with?"

  "The sale of the resort, for one thing."

  "You suspect Paul!"

  "Jane, quit being silly."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Since the two deaths occurred so close together and right now, I think we have to assume that something in particular precipitated them. Nobody around here is a drooling maniac, so you have an otherwise normal person who has to do something terrible immediately for some reason."

  "To keep the sale from going through, maybe," Jane said, nodding. "Or to make sure it does go through. The great problem is Doris. I can't imagine that there's any way that Doris's death would make the slightest difference either way."

  "Unless Doris's death was suicide."

  "Come on!"

  "I know it seems absurd, but it is possible. Jane, we don't know anything whatsoever of her background. For all we know, she could have lived half her life in mental institutions. It's not likely, but it could be that the humiliation of that debate drove her over the edge. On the other hand, we know absolutely that Bill's death was a murder. So let's deal with him for a minute. A handful of people had a stake in the sale of the resort. Joanna again — Bill's death allows her to avoid Florida."

  "It also makes her a widow."

  Shelley shrugged. "Maybe she wanted to be a widow. A rich widow. Just because she crochets the ugliest afghans west of the Piedmont doesn't mean she might not have simply snapped and said to herself, "I can't stand another day with this man!" Wives have felt that way before. And Pete has any number of possible motives here, too. Bill and Joanna have no children. He and Tenny are their logical heirs. That makes them both suspects."

  "But Joanna's still alive. And she's sure to inherit everything."

  "According to Tenny, I remind you. Even if she does inherit everything, either Pete or Tenny might have thought they could put something over on her that they couldn't put over on Bill, who could apparently hang onto his money extraordinarily well."

  "Are we still just thinking about thinking, or may I speculate?"

  "Not yet. If the sale of the resort
is the reason for Bill's death, we also have to consider HawkHunter."

  "Oh, good. I like him as a suspect."

  "Jane!"

  "I didn't mean that quite as smart-alecky as it sounded. Sorry. But he is the sort of person who thrives on rousing people's emotions. A catalyst type. Maybe not directly responsible, but the person who makes other people act. Like goading Pete into punching him. Maybe he goaded Pete into killing his uncle. Think about him for a minute while I refill our coffee."

  "No more for me, thanks."

  When Jane got back, Shelley was deep in thought. "I don't know about HawkHunter. I see what you mean about goading people, but what about a motive of his own?"

  "He's a fanatic," Jane said.

  "But lots of people are fanatics about one thing or another. That doesn't make them murderers."

  "What I meant is, this sale touched on his fanaticism. The tribal graves up on the hill. He could have really believed that the graves were safe from desecration only as long as Bill owned the land, because Bill respected the tribe — oops. I just proved he wouldn't murder Bill, didn't I? No, let me think. Bill was set on selling the land. Maybe HawkHunter learned from Joanna's friends in the tribe that she probably wouldn't want to sell out and leave if Bill died first. How's that?"

  Shelley shook her head. "It's still just a matter of time. Joanna won't live forever. Someday the land will be sold. If not now, then later."

  "But it might have been time he needed. Maybe he felt that if he only had another six months or whatever, he could prove the graves were up there. Or prove there was something illegal about the original land grant."

  Shelley nodded, but without enthusiasm. "I guess that's possible."

  The phone rang. "Hi, Mel," Jane said after she'd answered it.

  "Are we going to dinner and the big dance? Or is it canceled because of Bill's death?"

  "Oh, I'm sure Joanna has insisted that it not be canceled. Have you managed to learn anything more?"

  "A few useless bits and pieces. We'll talk about it at dinner, okay? Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?"

  "Sure," she said, glancing in a nearby mirror at her nap-crumpled hair and thinking, No way!

  "Say, Janey, I hate to mention this, but I'm starting to wonder if this thin air is doing something to Mike's brain. When he came in this afternoon, he suddenly burst into laughter for no reason at all, then wouldn't explain it."

  "What were you doing when he came in?" Jane asked, suspicious.

  "Just looking around on the floor of the closet for a missing sock. Why?"

  "You weren't humming anything, were you?" She giggled. "Never mind. I'll explain later."

  She hung up. "Shelley, talk fast. Mel's on his way over. Girls!" she yelled down the hallway. "We're leaving in a few minutes. Get ready."

  "Okay," Shelley said, garnering up cups and saucers and setting them in the sink. "The third possibility, which I mention only for form's sake, is that the death or deaths have nothing to do with anything we know about."

  "A ripe field of inquiry," Jane said. "Are we finally through getting ready to think?"

  "I believe so."

  "So when do we do the real thinking?"

  "Oh," Shelley said airily, "we'll let our collective subconscious work on that while we eat dinner. First dibs on the bathroom."

  Chapter 17

  Mel and the boys arrived shortly, and while they all waited with varying degrees of impatience for Katie and Denise to get ready, the boys took Willard outside for a run in the snow. "Poor old Willard," Jane said. "He knows how to pee downwind in a Chicago gale, but he can't figure out how to manage with snow up to his shoulders."

  "That's one of the many things I've always admired about Willard," Mel said. "That peeing-downwind trick."

  "What did you learn from the sheriff?" Jane asked, ignoring the sarcasm.

  "Nothing of any real use," Mel admitted. "There's no question, of course, of finding footprints. For one thing, it had snowed lightly after the snowman was built, and that pretty well obliterated any marks. And by the time you, half the skiers, and all the police had stumbled around, there was no hope left."

  "I wouldn't think snow would hold footprints anyway. Up here in the mountains, it's so powdery that the least wind must make it move around like sand," Shelley said. "What else?"

  "Plinkbarrel, or whatever his damned name is, says there were wool fibers in the snow that had been packed around the body. From mittens, he speculated. They didn't match anything the victim was wearing."

  "Ah! That sounds helpful," Jane said.

  Mel shook his head. " 'Fraid not. The sheriff, or more likely one of his minions, checked out the stuff in that lost-and-found room and discovered the mittens there. Still damp. And the insides of fuzzy wool mittens won't hold fingerprints, I'm sorry to say."

  Jane thought for a minute. "Doesn't that imply premeditation? I mean, a deliberate plan to murder him, not just a momentary rage? Before murdering Bill, somebody took the mittens that couldn't be traced to himself or herself and then returned them later."

  "Possibly. But not for certain. The perp may have borrowed the mittens for no purpose at all except warmth, then recovered his or her wits enough to put them back. For that matter, they might not have even come from the lost-and-found originally. They might have belonged to the murderer, who just figured that was a good way of disposing of them without being caught with them in his possession. I wouldn't think anybody keeps track of every mitten in that room. It's just a hodgepodge that probably gets culled only once each spring."

  "But that does limit it to people with knowledge of the hotel," Jane said.

  "I guess it does," Mel admitted. "But I don't think that was ever in doubt."

  "Where did the other stuff come from?" Shelley asked. "That bowl thing that was the crown, and the whatever-it-was that looked like a robe?"

  "The bowl is one that's in a lot of the cabins. A local firm delivers fruit gift packs in them," Mel said. "They're usually left in the cabins. And the robe was just a standard-issue blanket — one of the extras that are in the closet of each cabin. Unfortunately, they get shifted around, too. Family groups like this one move around, people get cold and use a blanket like a shawl to run back to their own cabins, and so forth. They only get sorted out if the maids happen to notice that mere's an excess in one cabin and a shortage in another."

  "None of which is any help at all," Jane said.

  "Unless the sheriff knows a lot he's not telling me. Which is possible," Mel replied.

  "And what did he say about me?" Jane asked, then added, "Never mind," as the boys and Willard came back in. She certainly didn't want the kids to know she was under suspicion, however absurd the idea was.

  Katie and Denise were eventually dragged away from their bathroom, where they were still feverishly consulting on makeup, and the whole mob moved off toward the lodge. Mel went ahead with the kids, who were engaged in a traveling snowball fight. The snow was so cold and dry that it was hard to form into a ball at all, and most of them exploded into powder before ever reaching a target.

  "It must have been hard to build a snowman," Shelley speculated.

  Jane nodded. "I think that was the reason for the blanket/robe thing. So the back didn't have to be covered. Maybe you have to pour water on snow to make it hold its shape here. To form a crust. That's probably why you don't see many snowmen."

  "I don't suppose the sheriff is likely to confide in us whether that was done," Shelley said. "But it could be significant. You'd have to have some kind of thermos along."

  "I don't think that would be much help in narrowing down suspects, though," Jane said. "Lots of people carry around thermoses. They even sell them in the equipment hut with a sort of belt-loop thing so you can hang it onto yourself somewhere. I noticed because it looked like a good way to carry coffee."

  "You're right. I'd thought of that, too, but had forgotten."

  "But there's something we've kind of overlooked about this," Ja
ne remarked. "The fact that the snowman was gotten up to look — well, regal. Doesn't that mean Bill's death had something to do with the Tsar thing?"

  "Not necessarily. You said yourself the robe thing was probably a device to save somebody from having to cover the body all the way around."

  "True, but there was the crown, too. There was no practical purpose for that. Nor for the old bent ski pole the snowman was holding in its stick arms that looked like a scepter. Doesn't all of that look like deliberate mockery of the whole concept of Bill Smith as Tsar?"

  "Unless the motive was completely unrelated and the murderer just did that to make it look like the genealogists were guilty in some way."

  "Jeez, Shelley! If a murderer were really that clever, he'd have thought of a better way to solve his problem than to kill Mr. Smith — and maybe Mrs. Schmidtheiser, too."

  "You'd think so, but that's because we haven't got what a murderer has — a conscience, or lack of con-science, that even allows the thought of murder as a solution to a problem."

  "Yes, but it still seems most likely that the whole 'royal trimmings' business does point to the Holnagrad/Tsar situation."

  "I agree it's very likely," Shelley allowed. "But where does that get us?"

  "I dunno," Jane said wearily. She suddenly realized she was sick and tired of the whole business. She'd come here for a long-awaited and well-deserved vacation and — dammit! — she was going to have fun — if it killed her.

  The Saturday night dinner and dance were fun.

  The casual dining room had been set up with a stupendous Tex-Mex buffet. Jane planned to sample a tiny bit of everything, but couldn't get through half of her testing. Not only was there a huge variety, but she found a casserole dish called King Ranch Chicken that she fell so much in love with that she had three helpings.

  "I'm going to get this recipe if I have to beat up the chef to make him reveal it," she exclaimed. "Try it, Shelley. It tastes sort of plum-blossomish."