Iced (21 page)

“What am I, your private laundress? There was only enough soap for one load.” Willeen dropped the lid and within seconds a low groan from the bowels of the machine gave way to the energetic spinning sound of the revolving basin as it picked up speed. Short, sharp blasts of water being sprayed in to break up the soapy residue were a further assurance that the machine was functioning again.

“I tell you, Judd. Everybody we meet in Aspen is parking their behinds in nice hotels and we’re stuck here staying in this dump. And these two . . .” She tilted her head in the direction of the guest bedroom. “Are you sure you’ve got it all figured out?”

“I told you, I’m sure, damn it!” Judd snapped. “We’ve got two more nights before we’re out of here. Please cooperate with me.”

Willeen went into their bedroom and slammed the door.

In the next room, Eben felt his heart start to pound. He knew it was a bad sign when the people in on the plan started arguing. They’re getting edgy, he thought, and we’ve only got two days to get out of here. He looked over at Bessie, whose hair was now falling out of her carefully pinned braids.

“Bessie,” he whispered. “We’re going to have to try and get one of your hairpins. Maybe I can use it to pick the lock on our handcuffs.”

“They’re not the type that just fall out,” she whispered back. “It might not look it now, but they’re in pretty tight.”

“When they go out again, I’ll try and get one with my teeth.”

“What?” she whispered indignantly.

“This isn’t kidding around,” Eben said in a dead-serious voice. “It’s time for us to do something, or we’ll never get out of here alive.”

Tears filled Bessie’s eyes as she realized that he was right. “Okay, Eben.” She turned her face into the pillow and felt a tear roll across the bridge of her nose. If I die, she thought, I’ll be with my parents. It was the only comfort she could find in one of her darkest hours.

42

A
FTER MIDNIGHT, AS he sat in bed, the Coyote watched with amusement as Judd and Willeen came in from their night of partying and pulled their clothes out of the dryer.

“What the hell is this?” Judd said, holding up his pants, which were covered with little green fuzzies. “Those cheap towels of Eben’s shed all over everything.”

“We wouldn’t have had to use them if there were any decent towels in this joint,” Willeen hissed.

“I have to get my tux pressed for Thursday night,” Judd snapped as he futilely brushed away at his pants. “I’ll bring these with it to the cleaner’s tomorrow morning.”

“Since you’re asking, yes, you can bring my dress too,” Willeen said sarcastically.

The Coyote laughed out loud. “You two are beginning to lose it,” he said. “But you don’t even know what more . . .” He stopped at the mention of his name.

“. . . there’s no way the Coyote could beat us to it again, is there, Judd?”

The Coyote continued laughing and finished his sentence. “. . . well, I guess you do know what you’re going to lose.” He snapped off the set and turned out the light, anxious himself for the next forty-eight hours to be over with.

43

G
ERALDINE SAT PROPPED up in her bed, with her pillows around her and her quilt pulled up under her chin. She liked to sleep in a cold bedroom and she had opened the window because she was trying to stay awake while she read Pop-Pop’s diary.

Her eyes were exhausted. I’ve read all day, she thought, when I should have been out in the barn searching out more Spoonfellow family personal effects for the museum opening on New Year’s Day. They promised to put out anything worthwhile as long as they got it before the doors opened on Sunday.

But nothing, Geraldine had decided that morning, nothing could be more important than seeing if Pop-Pop had written about
it
.

She decided to read just one more page before turning out the light. Not too much of interest on this page in the grand scheme of things, Geraldine thought. I know by now that Pop-Pop enjoyed his days on the turnip farm. He sure did get carried away writing about it. She finished the page and sighed. Time to call it a night.

She turned the page to put in the bookmark when her name caught her eye and read the first line. She let out a bloodcurdling scream. “Yippee, yippee!” she yelled. Here it was!

No longer aware of a headache or the fact that her eyes felt almost blinded, she raced through the page with a haste that would have been the envy of a recent graduate of a speed-reading course. It was all there. From the moment it began until . . . until . . . Geraldine turned the page and swooned. Her newfound knowledge made her light-headed. “Oh dear Lord, dear Lord!” she cried as she read on. “I never knew!!!”

When she had collected her senses, she jumped out of bed and sprinted across the cold floor in her bare feet, heading for the kitchen, where she poured herself a tumblerful of Wild Turkey. It was now 1 A.M. East Coast time, she thought. No use trying to phone the investigator until the morning.

“But I want to!” she yelled into the air. “I don’t want to waste another minute!”

She threw back her neck and swallowed the firewater. “Aaaaah,” she sighed. “That might calm me down but I don’t think so.” She knew that this was going to be the longest night of her life, the hours between now and the civilized hour of 8 A.M. East Coast time, when she could pick up the phone.

Geraldine hurried back to bed and picked up the diary. My fatigue is gone, she thought. I’ll never sleep tonight. Forget counting sheep. There aren’t enough in Australia to make me tired.

All of a sudden the impact of what she had read overcame her and she started to cry. Tears streamed down her face. “Please don’t let it be too late, dear Lord,” she sniffled. “At least let part of it be okay. Pop-Pop, if you’re listening, thank you for being such a good man. And thank you for sending that nosy reporter who pulled your picture out from behind the wagon wheel. Otherwise I never would have started digging around the barn, otherwise known as the Spoonfellow junkyard. Amen.”

Just then, Geraldine’s bedside light blinked. “I knew you were listening,” she whispered.
“Now help me out!”

44

Wednesday, December 28

R
EGAN AND KIT sat with Louis in the dining room having breakfast. He had the help in a frenzy of brass polishing.

“How’d you sleep, Louis?” Regan asked.

“What’s sleep?” he answered. “I lie awake and think, did I take care of this, did I take care of that? It’s terrible.” He took a sip of coffee and inspected his fingernails. “I just hope everything gets done before tomorrow night.”

Kit swallowed the toast in her mouth. “What’s left?”

“I don’t know,” he whined. “That’s why I’m awake at night. It’s everything and nothing.”

Regan put down her coffee cup. “Louis, you’ve got the food?”

“Yes.”

“The dinner is sold out?”

“Yes.”

“The paintings of the local artists will be dropped by tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“The band is coming?”

“Yes.”

“The program is printed up?”

“Yes.”

“The media is coming?”

“Yes.”

“So don’t worry.”

“Famous last words.”

“Two days from now you’ll be sitting here, having launched a successful restaurant. Just wait and see.”

“I feel like the bride,” Louis said, “knowing that everyone’s going to find something wrong no matter how good the party is.”

“There you go,” Regan said. “If you know that some of that is going to happen anyway, then you can just relax. People are going to have a good time. Believe me.”

“I hope so, Regan. I guess I should be happy we haven’t heard any more from Geraldine. I wonder how she’s doing.”

“She’s probably cleaning out her barn and getting ready for her presentation tomorrow night. She’s going to make a speech, right?”

“Which is another worry. She’s been known to ramble when she gets the floor at town meetings. Something tells me we’re going to have to get out the hook.” Louis sampled a tiny spoonful of his oatmeal.

“I can’t wait to meet this Geraldine,” Kit said.

“She’s great,” Regan said. “She’s probably rehearsing her speech right now.”

45

B
RIGHT AND EARLY, for the third time that week, Angus Ludwig sauntered into the Wonder Properties real estate office.

Ellen Gefke stood up to greet him. “Hello, Angus. I didn’t expect to see you today. How are you?”

“Itchy. Itchier than a bad case of the chicken pox.”

Ellen smiled. “Will a cup of coffee help?”

“We could give it a try.”

Ellen thoroughly enjoyed her job as a Realtor in Aspen. Forty years old, she’d moved to Aspen after her divorce three years ago and had never been happier. Always an athletic outdoorsperson, she loved to ski and felt that she’d finally found a real home. That’s why she so enjoyed finding the right home for her clients. “Aplace,” she’d say, “where you know right away you belong.”

At the coffee machine, she poured the steaming liquid into two mugs, handing one to Angus, knowing by now that he liked his black.

“Thanks, Ellen,” he said. “I’ll tell you why I’m here. I’m dying to get a look at that house you were telling me about, the fixer-upper.”

Ellen shook her head and sat back down at her desk. “Angus, it’s rented until Saturday. I’d be happy to show it to you then. We hate to pressure our rental tenants to let us in when they’ve paid good money to have a place of their own for a few weeks. They have a right to their privacy.”

It was obvious that this didn’t bother Angus. “Who are they, anyway?” he asked.

“I’ve never met them. The reservation was made through a company who sent a check. I sent them the keys and a map.”

Angus sipped his coffee. “Hmmm. I’m feeling restless, Ellen. I get it in my bones about doing something and then I’m like a little kid at Christmas. Being back in Aspen makes me feel so happy. Why don’t we just drive by the place? How does that sound? I’d love to at least get a look at it from the outside.”

Ellen checked her watch. She pushed back her blond hair and stood up. “Okay, Angus. You twisted my arm. Let’s go now because I have an appointment coming in a little later.”

Angus smiled his most charming smile. “I knew I came to the right office! Something about your ad made me pick up the phone last week. Isn’t there sometimes a feeling you get about somebody, like you’ve known them a long time when you’ve only just met? I like doing business with you...”

“Sure, sure,” Ellen said. She came around her desk, walked to the back, and poked her head into a private office.

“I’m leaving. I’ll be back in a little while.”

In her car Angus regaled her with stories of the old Aspen. “Yup, this place has changed, but it still has that feeling of magic. You breathe in this air and your lungs never felt so good.”

“That’s why I like living here,” Ellen said as she concentrated on the winding roads.

Angus continued undaunted. “I left here before Walter Paepcke and his wife Elizabeth came here from Chicago in the forties and really got this town going as both a skiing and a cultural center. From what everybody tells me, they both did a lot for this town.”

“They sure did,” Ellen said. “They started the Aspen Ski Corporation, the Aspen Music Festival, the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. It’s really thanks to them that Aspen is a National Historic District.” They were several miles from downtown Aspen. She turned off the main road onto an unmarked narrow dirt road that twisted, turned and bumped for half a mile.

“Where in tarnation are we going?” Angus asked as he hung on to the dashboard.

“You told me you wanted privacy and a breathtaking view. That’s what you’re getting!”

Finally she stopped and pointed. Nestled at the foot of the mountain, down a long driveway, was a small Victorian farmhouse surrounded by tall evergreens. A car was visible in the driveway, which curved around toward the back of the house.

“There’s a barn out back,” she said. “The house needs work. But the possibilities are endless.”

Angus breathed in and stared, imagining what he could do with the place. He could picture this location in every season. Sure, the house looked neglected, but with a coat of paint outside and some TLC, this place could do me just fine, he thought. Just give me three months to get it shipshape.

“It looks like they’re home,” he said, hinting.

Ellen playfully smacked his hand. “Now, Angus, I told you, we can’t do that.”

Angus turned his piercing blue eyes on her. His white hair looked crisp in the sunlight. With mock indignation he said, “I thought you told me everybody was friendly around here.”

Inside the house, Willeen and Judd were about to freak out.

“Who’s that?” Willeen asked. “What are they doing, Judd?”

“How am I supposed to know?” he answered sharply. “I know they want to sell this place, but according to the contract they’re not allowed to show it while we’re here.”

Bessie and Eben had been having their cereal when the car stopped at the end of the driveway and could be seen through the living-room window. In a panic, Willeen and Judd hurried them back to their room. Judd took two scarves and tied them around their mouths. “Don’t try anything,” he warned.

“They’re opening the car door,” Willeen practically screamed. “I’m going out there and tell them the place is a mess.”

“Wait!” Judd yelled. “I didn’t want anyone to know who we were. All right, go out there and get them out of here.”

Willeen pulled on her jacket and boots and ran out the front door, which they’d never used. She trudged through the yard and down to the car. “Hi,” she said in her sweetest voice. “Can I help you?”

Angus shook her hand. “Angus Ludwig. We didn’t want to bother you. I’m thinking of buying a place out here.”

“And I’m Ellen Gefke, the real estate agent for the house,” Ellen explained quickly. “Mr. Ludwig wanted me to drive him around. He was just stretching his legs. We don’t want to disturb you.”