From Here to Paternity (2 page)

"I know," Jane said smugly. "It's a gift. So how's it going? Is Paul going to buy this place?"

"I have no idea. He and the other investors spent the day just looking around. Tomorrow they're going over all the paperwork and financial statements. The owner's niece, a really nice woman around our age named Tenny Garner, has put herself in charge of us. If there's anything you need, just call the front desk and ask for her."

"Shelley, the place looked deserted as we drove in."

"No, it's really not. For one thing, it's awfully late, and for another, the whole place is arranged in such a way that everything seems very isolated and private and disguises the fact that you're surrounded by mobs of people. That's one of the advantages."

"But, Shelley, who comes to a ski resort without ski facilities—besides you and me and other people dedicated to the sedentary life?"

"Conventions. Right now there's a gang of accountants just getting ready to leave, the regional representatives of an agricultural co-op arriving in a couple days, and some kind of historical society meeting now. They're a tad bizarre. If you run into a woman who looks like Abe Lincoln in drag, you might want to veer off before she can bend your ear."

"I think if I spotted such a person I'd hide on general principles without the warning. But thanks anyway," Jane said, yawning. "So what's the plan for tomorrow?"

Shelley got up and started hunting for her gloves, boots, and hat. "Jane, you have to readjust your thinking. There are no plans! You can do whatever you want. That's what vacations are for."

"I haven't had one for so long I'd forgotten that. Besides, the last couple of vacations I had were with Steve before he died, and he was a competitive vacationer. So many miles a day to cover, so many sights to see, meals mapped out in advance. Up at the crack of dawn to enjoy—by God!—every minute. Unscheduled potty breaks made him wild."

Shelley shuddered dramatically. "If it's not too crass, may I remind you that Steve is dead and it's a mercy for a lot of reasons, and besides, this is not that kind of vacation. Get up whenever you feel like it. You can have breakfast brought to you, or come down to the lodge. I suggest the lodge. It's beautiful. Give me a call when you're stirring. I put my number on the notepad on the kitchen counter."

"Shelley! You said that word again! Kitchen!"

"Sorry. See you tomorrow."

Jane sat for a while, staring at the dying embers of the fire. The wine, the cheese, the warmth of the fire, the comfort of the deep chair—it was all too good to be true. She finally forced herself to get up and stagger to the bedroom. The girls, to her surprise, had actually turned out their lights and seemed to be asleep, although she wondered, from the smell as she looked in on them, if maybe they'd just succumbed to nail polish fumes.

She had dumped her belongings on the bed nearest the door, so she tumbled into the one closest to the glass doors—which she decided was probably the most comfortable bed in the Western Hemisphere. She dreamed briefly about Abe Lincoln riding a moose before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

When Jane finally awoke, she was on her side, facing the glass doors, and for a moment she thought she was dreaming herself into a calendar picture. Blinking, she sat up and gazed in awe. Through the glass doors, beyond the deck, there was a cloudless sky of a pure, clear azure no artist could get away with, and a spectacular rugged, white-crowned mountain peak framed by nearby snow-laden pines. A fat squirrel with tufts on its ears that made it look like a cross between a squirrel and a rabbit sat on the rail of the deck, unabashedly posing. Jane went to the doors and stood mesmerized for long moments. Willard woofed halfheartedly at the squirrel before laying his big head down and going back to sleep.

Jane bathed hurriedly and dressed in the warm clothes she'd brought along—thermal underwear, heavy socks, corduroy slacks, and a flannel shirt with a turtleneck underneath. "I'm a mountain woman, Willard," she said, giving him a gentle prod with her toe. "An overstuffed, but stylish, yuppie mountain woman."

Williard heaved himself to his feet and ambled along with her as she explored the rest of the house. First she actually entered the dreaded kitchen, found some gourmet coffee Shelley had left, and started the coffeemaker. Then she donned coat, gloves, and boots and took the big dog outside. While he visited a patch of ground under a trio of pines where the snow was only halfway up his legs instead of clear to his belly, she stood sucking in lungfuls of thin, cold, snow-and-woods-scented air. It smelled so good she wished she could drink it. Or warm it up and bathe in it.

She took Willard back in, fed him from the bag of his dry food she'd brought along, and gave him a big bowl of water. By that time her coffee was done and she poured a huge mug before dialing Shelley's number. Shelley's first words were, "Did the view knock your socks off when you woke up?"

"I'll say!"

"I was afraid you might close the curtains before you went to sleep and ruin the surprise. I'll be right over."

She was there in a matter of moments, dressed in an aqua ski outfit that made her eyes look the same color, even though Jane knew perfectly well it was an illusion. Shelley was great at fashion illusions.

"I've been exploring," Jane said. "And I'm amazed. This is really some place you could just move into and live in. There are jigsaw puzzles in the cabinets over there. And extra blankets and pillows and even a vacuum and cleaning supplies, besides the extra boots and mittens, in the closet by the front door." She paused warily. "This doesn't mean anybody expects me to clean, does it?"

"No. But normally there isn't any daily maid service. The units are only cleaned thoroughly between guests. Of course, we're an exception because they're trying to sell us on the place and we're getting the VIP treatment."

"I'd guess, though, that the real cream in the fridge is your doing."

Just then the girls stumbled into the living room, sleep-stupid but eager. "Mom! Isn't this place great?" Katie asked, running a set of mauve-taloned fingers through her tangled hair.

Shelley's daughter, Denise, forgot for a moment that she was a teenager and not only sat down next to her mother, but leaned into a hug.

"It's wonderful, Katie. What are you girls doing today? Trying out for parts in a horror movie?"

"Huh?"

"Your fingernails," Jane explained.

Katie held her hands out and stared at them as if they didn't belong to her. "Euuw, gross! Fungus city!"

"We met this ski instructor yesterday—" Denise said.

They both squealed in ecstasy.

"He said he'd give us a lesson if we'd come over there," Katie continued.

"Where is over there?" Jane asked.

"Down the road. We take the shuttle. Nobody even has to drive us. We just need lift tickets and money for ski rental and boots and poles and lunch—"

"About ten dollars, then?" Jane asked.

"Ten dollars! Mom!"

Shelley intervened. "Girls, everything you want to do here is free and there's lots to do. Starting with breakfast. Go get dressed and you can come down to the lodge with us." When they'd gone, she said, "I saw the ski instructor in question yesterday. He's a thirty-five-year-old lech."

"His age and 'lechiness' weren't even an issue. If Katie's going to break any limbs, she's going to have to find a cheaper way to do it. I was glancing at some ads in the airport while Mel was looking around for what the airline had done with Willard. The prices for lift tickets and equipment rental were astonishing. Oh, Shelley, do we really ever have to go home?" She strolled over to the living room windows and gazed out. "This place is beautiful."

"It is, isn't it?"

Jane drew back, startled. "Oh, it's a cat! I thought it was a big snowball come to life!" A large white cat was sitting on the woodpile at the end of the deck outside. It turned and stared, green-eyed and smug, at Jane for moment, then hopped over the rail and out of sight.

There was a skier sweeping gracefully down the slight incline exposed between the trees. The blue sky, the green-black pines, the shimmering brilliance of the snow, and the skier's crimson pants and jacket created a breathtaking palette of color. As Jane watched, the skier came to a stop, put his (or was it a woman's?) hands on hips for a minute, then held up a pair of binoculars and took a look around.

"It reminds me of Switzerland," Jane said. "My sister, Marty, and I went to a boarding school there once for a semester. Of course, we were just dumb kids and didn't care about the scenery—only about the ski instructors, come to think of it. But even we came out of our haze of hormones once in a while and noticed that it was spectacular."

"What were you two doing in a boarding school? I thought your parents always took you with them on their postings."

"They did, but my dad was on a stint in some particularly unstable little Balkan country—Holnagrad. Hole in the Ground, we used to call it."

"Holnagrad!" Shelley exclaimed.

"What? You've heard of it?"

"Just yesterday. That's where the historical-society people here are from. Well, not exactly directly from, but their ancestors were."

"The historical—oh, Abe Lincoln and crowd. Are the girls making any progress? I'm starving."

After trying unsuccessfully to hurry their daughters, Shelley and Jane gave up waiting and went ahead. Although it was some distance to the lodge by road, there was a shoveled path running behind the cabins and alongside a crystal-clear stream. The path cut directly through the woods and came out behind the main building. Jane had only seen the front entrance the evening before and was astonished that daylight revealed a very large, sprawling building. The exterior was rough, of large logs and cedar shingles, but banks of spotless windows glittered in the sunlight. Rustic-chic, Jane would have called it if forced to sum up the style.

"There are all sorts of meeting rooms in that wing. There's even computer hookups, modems, and a mini-travel-agency service," Shelley said, acting the tour guide. "At the end is a really elegant restaurant that overlooks the lake this little stream runs into. In the central section there's an indoor pool, an outdoor pool for summer use, saunas, exercise rooms—no, don't panic, nobody's going to make you exercise—a casual restaurant, where we're headed, and a beauty shop. The wing that goes down the hill in stair-step fashion—you can't see much of it from here—has shops, game rooms, a library and a bookstore and I don't know what all else."

They entered through a door by the outside pool, passed alongside the indoor pool, where a few alarmingly healthy individuals were doing morning laps, and emerged into the central lobby just as Mel and the boys entered from the front.

"Jane! You're up," Mel said, surprised. "I thought you'd want to sleep in."

Her sons, Mike the senior in high school and Todd the middle schooler, greeted her and asked for money for the video games. John Nowack, a year younger than Todd, nagged his mother for the same.

"You're not eating breakfast?" Jane asked in amazement. To her, a real breakfast was one of the primary reasons for going on vacation. Naturally, human beings who preferred cold, sugared cereals that pretended to be fun and had never cooked bacon in the morning for themselves wouldn't value the experience quite as much.

"Aw, Mom, we ate hours ago!"

Mel explained that this meant Twinkies and a gallon of milk fifteen minutes earlier. "Jane, do you mind if I take Mike skiing today?"

"I'd be glad for you to." He and her son had always had a cordial, if slightly uneasy, relationship. "It's everybody's vacation to do whatever they like. Well, except for Katie and Denise, who would like to spend a thousand dollars a day and have no restrictions at all."

"As long as you put it that way, I'll pass on breakfast so we can get going right away."

Mel went off to find Mike as Shelley and Jane went into the restaurant. There was a breakfast buffet with every imaginable food, including quite a few Jane couldn't identify but suspected were fruits more prized for their exotic origins than for their taste. A handsome, dark-haired young man who looked like an American Indian stood at the end of the buffet table, making omelets to each diner's specifications. Jane indulged herself in an omelet that involved cheese, mushrooms, artichoke hearts, and crumbled bacon. "I'm trying for a cholesterol prize," she told Shelley as she dug in. "There's a bowl of butter over there that I'm going to slather on myself when I'm through eating."

Shelley, who had chosen sausages and corn fritters with a thick coating of powdered sugar, smiled and said, "Just think, only a few hours until lunch. At least we're uphill from Chicago. We can tuck in our arms and legs and somebody can just roll us home."

They were sitting back, having a second cup of coffee each, when a man approached their table. He was tall, thin, in his sixties, and had the apricot-colored hair that real redheads get when they start going gray. "Excuse me, is either of you ladies Mrs. Nowack?"

"I am," Shelley answered.

"I have a message for you," he said, handing her a slip of paper on hotel stationery.

Shelley glanced at it. "Just my husband saying where he'll be for the morning. Thanks very much. Are you a hotel employee?"

The man laughed, showing a lot of unusually good teeth. "An old geezer like me? No, I'm retired, I'm glad to say. I'm a guest. I was just coming by the front desk and poor Tenny looked so harassed at trying to get all the accountants checked out that I asked if there was anything I could do to help her. Those people check over their bills very carefully, let me tell you. She was looking for you, so I volunteered to find you."

"How nice of you, Mr… ?"

"Lucky Lucke. Dr. Ronald Lucke, in my previous downtrodden life. But everybody calls me Lucky."

"Will you join us for a bit, Lucky? I'm Shelley, and this is my friend Jane Jeffry. How are you enjoying your stay here?" she asked, answering Jane's silent question as to why Shelley was "taking up" with strangers. She was being the wife of a potential investor.

"It's a wonderful place. Lots of space for our meetings. Terrific food."

"Don't you mind having to go elsewhere to ski?"

"Not me. They've got that little bunny slope out back and that's all the skiing I'd ever want. I've never broken a bone in my life and I don't intend to start now."