3 Requiem at Christmas

“You can’t back out
now! We are so close.”

“But he’ll know it was
me. We can’t do it!” Desperation was growing and it showed in his voice and the
sweat on his brow.

“It won’t matter. By
then we’ll have the money. We can leave. We wanted to be there to see the
rebirth of our spiritual home.”

“Look, I can’t. I just
can’t. It’s too dangerous. We’ll find some other way.”

“There isn’t any other
way.” The usually lovely voice was flat. “And it has to be now. The elections
are coming.”

“No! I won’t and I
won’t let you. Don’t push me on this! You keep pushing and someone will end up
dead.”

*
 
*
 
*

Juliet Henry loved snow. Without snow there was no
cross-country skiing. No skiing and there was no Christmas spirit, however
feeble, to shine on the bleak winter. While others might scan the December
skyline looking for the first Christmas lights in their neighborhood, or search
the stores for the principal Christmas tree to go up at the mall, or even to
hear the first Christmas carol to grace the airwaves, each winter she waited
for the weather reports and news of the first fat flakes falling in Maine.

Or Vermont.
She wasn’t fussy. Any snowy
reason to leave D.C. and office politics behind was fine with her, and her boss
had always arranged leave early in December no matter what was going on because
seasonal pathos turned her into Scrooge’s twin sister if she didn’t get time
away before the bell-ringing, hall-decking, manic-shopping season began.

She had known, of course, that things would be different in
California. Down in her heart, she had a flatlander’s mistrust of the western coastal
expanses that have both serious-sized mountains with yearly killer mudslides in
winter and deadly fires in summer—and those violent, random earthquakes which
happened in any and all seasons. It had taken time to adapt and to cease
expecting disaster at every turn.
Especially after their
brush with fire the summer before.

Also, one had to admit, a lot of very strange people lived
in California. The state encouraged eccentrics of all stripes, including the insanely
brave who dared to build their cities right out to the coast when it was slowly—and
sometimes quickly—being eaten away by the ocean. And it was being eaten away.
Every winter more houses toppled into the sea. But now that she had made the
adjustment she wouldn’t give up living in the coastal mountains for anything in
the world.

So she had been sure she could adapt to a more New Age kind
of holiday as long as there was snow sometime in the winter. But it turned out
that the coastal mountains rarely saw snow and never enough to ski on. Last
year she had been sick over Christmas and had been very busy with work as well,
so her skis had been in the closet since she moved, chiding her for their
neglect every time the door was opened. But this year would be different.
Had to be different.

In spite of adapting in every other way, somehow she had
expected—and desperately needed—more than a
Winter
Fireworks Spectacular!
at
the beach to get her in
a holiday mood. She wasn’t just looking for time away from the job anymore. She
actually liked the exertion of skiing. Without it, she was left feeling
downtrodden and cheated, unable to bustle about like the rest of her neighbors
who seemed to adore the holidays, smug in the knowledge that they had family
and friends who would keep them from ever being alone on the world’s most
depressing holiday.

She decided that this year she would need to travel to the
Sierra Nevada Mountains where they had real snow—and now she had a good reason
to go. And also
an inexpensive package deal
at the inn
where Harrison had booked a block of rooms for the concertgoers.

Perhaps it would have been wiser to have left Wednesday and trekked
to Tahoe on the bus with the other artists from Bartholomew’s Woods so that she
would miss driving in the first real storm of the season. But vanity, vanity—all
is vanity. She had been sure that she could finish her Christmas sweatshirt
order on Thursday, get paid, and cope competently with the falling barometer
and extreme cold predicted by the owl-eyed meteorologist on the weather channel—if
she got an early enough start. After all, she had chains and four-wheel drive,
and
bus travel with Carrie Simmons was not—
not
—going to happen
. The woman
had always been a self-aggrandizing chatterbox, but the condition had worsened
when she was almost killed by an irate lover during the early summer. The men
in the compound pretty much thought she was attractive and scatterbrained, but
that was because most of them hadn’t noticed that it was all big breasts
unleavened by brains or charm. They had also conveniently forgotten that the
collateral damage from her last internal affair had involved three deaths and
two serious injuries.

Perhaps if her company had been diluted a bit Juliet would
have
chanced
the group travel arrangements, but Darby
O’Hara had gone ahead with Harrison Peters. They were romantically involved and
the retired vet was being his prop and mainstay as he rehearsed the orchestra
at Saint Clair Church, which was a gorgeous mix of Swiss chalet and old-world
cathedral, but with tricky acoustics that made recording difficult.

And Raphael and Esteban, her two favorite people and both
men of excessive good looks, had had some mysterious task up north they needed
to see to before they could holiday and had left two days previously.
So that left only Asher and Elizabeth, Rose Campion, Hans, and
Mickey, and the two new tenants—Jerry Hill, an inarticulate glassblower, and
Thomas Jones, a stuttering potter—both friends of Robbie Sykes.
Jerry
and Thomas were very quiet and inclined to hide behind books, and that simply
wasn’t enough to water down Carrie in full dramatic performance. Bus travel was
trying enough without being cooped up with someone who could always be depended
upon to make an irritating situation even worse.

No, she would manage on her own. This was her second winter
in California. She had seen what people called storms and they were nothing.
How much worse could it be in the Sierras?

Marley had known better, being a cat and being sensible. He
had listened carefully to the weather report and warned her before she left him
with Sheriff Garret that the wisest course would be to throw another log on the
fire, pour herself a little spiked eggnog, and have some Christmas cake. She
could be happy with a box of sparklers and a seat by the reservoir where they
would set off pretty red and green explosive synchronizations to “Grandma Got
Run Over by a Reindeer” and “Jingle Bell Rock” if she just tried a little
harder.

But no, Harrison Peters was preforming the Requiem Mass he
had written for his father, who died in Afghanistan. He had a venue at the
Celtic Christmas Festival just outside of South Lake Tahoe and she wanted to be
there to hear it, and to pray for peace on earth and an end to all wars.

And to ski.

So Juliet had donned her thermal underwear and pulled on her
warmest sweater, which happened to be something Rose made her for her birthday,
in a cheery red wool woven from itchy goat hair she got from a nearby farm—and
which, when damp, still smelled vaguely of that farm. She strapped her skis on
the Subaru and then, armed with a thermos of coffee and pumpkin cupcakes from
the bakery and a full tank of gas, she hit the road for her great Christmas adventure,
leaving her bungalow thick with paint fumes behind.

Juliet loved the coastal highways, but for the sake of
efficiency she cut inland almost immediately and traveled by the most direct
route toward Sacramento. The traffic in the Silicon Valley was appalling and
the roads ugly and monotonous until she reached the foothills.

As promised, the snow began as soft as a bridal veil,
billowing gently in an easy breeze. Rooftops looked like vanilla cupcakes with
sugar sprinkles and brought on a small burst of giddy pleasure. Snow! Real
snow! Taking a vacation was a great idea!

But soon pewter skies tarnished black, the veil thickened
into a shroud, and all thought of cupcakes and sugarplums disappeared. Sleet
and then heavier snow began to come down west of
Kyburz
and she stopped to have chains put on the tires. Progress became slow and the
heater had to be threatened with bodily harm before it saw reason and started
getting serious about its job.

Her nose reminded her that she had pumpkin cupcakes, so she
tore open the bag and fortified
herself
with sugar and
fat as she crawled into the ever thickening storm.

Juliet admitted to herself that it had been a mistake to
listen to her GPS when it recommended another route in order to avoid a bad
traffic accident on Highway 50.
Her
newly purchased “smart”
GPS kept track of traffic reports. It did not listen to the weathermen who, the
car radio proved, were gloomy in their most recent prognostications. In her
defense, the snow hadn’t begun falling in earnest until she turned off of the
main highway and onto what was laughably labeled a two-lane road, abandoned by
a logging company a decade before. By a mile in, the snow was coming down in sobering
waves that rolled over her with the wind. For another fifteen miles, she
thought about how pretty the snow was and how great the skiing would be. After
that, she thought about little except finding the reflective markers that
showed her the edge of the road which was increasingly more difficult to do
with sleet clogging her windshield wipers.

She passed a few small summer cabins, but they were dark,
huddled boxes and no smoke came from their chimneys, no porches were shoveled,
and no children played outside under twinkle lights. There was one charred ruin
where two deer were crowding together, looking miserable. She couldn’t blame
them. A strong crosswind had begun to blow, its voice a low moan that could be
heard even above the radio static. The only hope of human help, should she need
it, was from a ranger’s station, hidden from view by a belt of trees but likely
there since there was still a sign for it.

The road had been plowed since the last storm the previous
Monday, creating a six-foot-high drift on one side, which failed to hide the
jutting pustules of the rock wall beneath, and a mere curb on the other that
did nothing to disguise the steep drop into a wooded, boulder-strewn chasm
where the wind wished her to go. Though this was the first snow since the plowing,
there had obviously been at least one thaw and subsequent freeze, because under
the fresh powder the road was a slick as an ice rink and she had trouble
keeping traction.

Soon even the sparse cabins disappeared. Once in a while
there was a break in the rocks perhaps caused by a long ago earthquake. There,
people had forced in narrow roads that led to small shacks built decades ago,
but these looked like storage sheds rather than buildings intended for human
habitation, and as with everything and everywhere else on the mountain, there
were no signs of life.

There was only one other car coming the opposite way, a red
something that was long and low to the ground and whose engine could be heard
over the wind. It had on its high beams which it didn’t bother to lower as it
barely scraped by her door, forcing her very near the snow drift whose solid
gleam proclaimed it to be of ice and stone and not billows of cushiony snow.
She glanced at the driver through the frosted windows. All she saw was a profile.
He was an older man with long, silver hair and a rictus grin, who clung to the
wheel like grim death. Juliet thought there was a passenger too, but the car
was past her before she could be certain.