Ice Maiden

by Dale Mayer

  Chapter Two

  Gabby woke the next morning, feeling rested and well. She bounced out of bed, got dressed, then raced out and put on the coffeepot. After her day off—she rolled her eyes—she was supposed to go to work today. Her roommates, minus Tessa, looked up at her in surprise. Gabby turned and said, “Oh, I didn’t realize you guys were up already.”

  “Yeah, we didn’t get any sleep,” Wendy groused. “I had nightmares all night.”

  “Nightmares about what?” Gabby asked in commiseration, as she sat down beside her friend.

  “You,” Wendy said, “going over that cliff. I may never snowboard or ski again.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gabby said with remorse. “That must have been terrifying to watch.”

  Liz and Betty nodded.

  “You don’t even know the half of it,” Wendy replied. “I think all I did was scream because my throat is so raw today.”

  And, in truth, her friend’s voice did sound gravelly. “Hey,” Gabby said, “I’m really sorry. I don’t even know what happened, but I feel really good today.”

  “How can you possibly feel good?” she said. “I don’t know how you could have slept either.”

  “Stress, exhaustion, I don’t know,” she said, showing her palms, “but I feel good, and, for that, I’m grateful. I do have to go to work today.”

  “You’re going to work?” Liz asked in horror. “You need to stay home and recuperate.”

  “Yeah, not happening. I have expenses to pay. Remember? So I have a job. And I need to keep it.”

  They watched mutely as she poured coffee into a thermos, checked her watch, and said, “Of course I overslept.”

  “How about food?” Wendy asked.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I’ll grab something at work.”

  “Remember the money thing?” Wendy asked. “You weren’t going to buy lunch out anymore.”

  “I know,” she said, “but I’m late.”

  “We have some muffins here that Tessa made. Grab a couple,” Wendy urged. “At least take that much.”

  Gabby looked around and saw them, then snagged two without even wrapping them. “Thanks,” she said, as she headed out the door and walked down the street to work.

  When she got around the corner, she raced toward the bookstore, reveling in the crisp cold air. There was something to be said about living in a place like this. She thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. The five of them together had done decently as roommates, and it was nice that Wendy had shared some of Tessa’s muffins.

  They often did that. Somebody would cook a batch of something, and everybody would share it together. But other times it didn’t work out quite that way. But none of them liked wasting food, so, when someone had too much to eat themselves, they usually passed it around to the others. It worked out well.

  And it saved all of them a few dollars along the way, which was good because Gabby made what seemed like pennies off her job. As she walked into the bookstore, her boss looked at her and then pointed at his watch. She checked, smiled, and said, “Look at that? I’m right on time.”

  He checked his watch, frowned, and said, “Oh, I thought it was a few minutes later than this.”

  “Nope, I’m on time,” she said, giving him a bright, cheerful smile. “How was it yesterday?”

  “It was fine,” he said. “I did ask if you could work yesterday too.”

  “And I probably should have,” she said, “since my trip up the mountain yesterday turned out quite differently than what I had intended.”

  “Huh. I heard somebody had a near miss,” he said.

  She glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at her. “There are always a lot of near misses,” she said and got right to work. A couple hours later, when she grabbed yet another cup of coffee, her boss looked at her and cleared his throat before speaking.

  “Did you come up with anything else to bring in some business?”

  She looked around and saw four or five people already in the store. “Today seems pretty good, business-wise.”

  “Sure, but tomorrow won’t be,” he said, in that perpetually glum tone of his.

  “Maybe it will be,” she said. She was the eternal optimist, and he was the eternal pessimist. But somehow, most of the time, they got along very well. She had to admit she had messed up a time or two, and he hadn’t really appreciated that, but what could he do when it was all a learning experience for her? She’d thought about other marketing ideas to bring in more customers but wasn’t sure that he’d be up for any of her ideas after the last one.

  He had a tendency to claw onto the negative and to hang onto it way too long. She was the opposite. She liked to keep trying new things, until she found something that worked. While she sat here at the front counter, she polished off the first muffin and then ate the second.

  He looked at her and asked, “Did you not eat this morning?”

  “No,” she said. “I brought these two muffins, but I’m still hungry. I’ll get lunch from across the street, maybe grab a sandwich.”

  “I brought a bunch of sandwiches,” he said. “You can have one of those.”

  She looked at him in surprise. He wasn’t well-known for his generosity. She beamed and said, “Thank you. I could really use it.”

  He motioned toward the small fridge he kept in the office. “Go ahead and grab one. I think I brought like four today. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Hey, it’s perfect for me,” she said with a bright smile. She raced into the office, as no customers were at the cash register, then snagged the top sandwich, and came back out. Even before she got back to the cash register, she’d taken several bites.

  “You must be really hungry.”

  “I am,” she said. “Must have been the day on the mountain.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I skied.”

  “Go back to it,” she said, in that encouraging voice.

  He shook his head. “No, people die on the mountain.”

  At that, she stopped, froze for a long moment, and then nodded slowly. “That’s very true,” she said. “They do.” She frowned because it seemed like her voice suddenly got thick, almost tense, and she didn’t know why. She turned and looked at him and asked, “Did anybody you know die on the mountain?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “I just thought it would be a horribly personal thing to have happened.”

  “Well, it would be,” he said. “It’s bad enough to lose anybody you care about, but, on a mountain like this, even worse.”

  “Why a mountain like this?”

  “It’s very unforgiving,” he said, staring at her in surprise.

  “I just never looked at it that way,” she said.

  “That’s because you don’t live here,” he said with a nod.

  She found that almost insulting. “Well, I do live here,” she said. “I just haven’t been here for very long.”

  “I meant, you’re a newcomer,” he said, by way of explanation.

  “Well, everybody is a newcomer,” she said, in that matter-of-fact tone of voice, “until they’ve been here long enough.”

  He rolled his eyes at her. “Meaning, you aren’t an old-timer because you don’t know all the old stories or some of the old happenings.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, we had a serial killer at one point in time,” he said, “and he murdered young women on the mountain.”

  “Really?”

  “He was a ski instructor at the time, and he’d pick his victims from his students.”

  “Wasn’t that like setting himself up to get caught? It seems a little too obvious.”

  “Well, it still took a long time for him to get caught, if that’s the case,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t know much about it, but it took them over a decade to actually find him. I think it was because he was poisoning his victims. Once the cops figured that out, then further autopsies and drug panels helped solv
e those cases. They did get him in the end though. He died in jail a few years back.”

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s terrible.”

  “Yes, it was,” he said. “I lived here during that decade, and it was a terrible time.”

  “Is that why you don’t go skiing now?”

  “That’s one of the reasons. But it really doesn’t matter. It’s not like I’ll be taking any ski lessons, and it’s not like some serial killer will target me,” he said with a shrug.

  She wasn’t so sure about that. A lot of women—young women—went after old men, if they had assets. And Aspen was full of very wealthy people. On second thought, her boss, Jerry, wasn’t exactly a wealthy old man. “I don’t think you have enough money for somebody to murder you,” she said cheerfully.

  He snorted. “If that is one of the prerequisites, then, no, I definitely don’t.”

  She grinned at him. “Besides, isn’t it time you got a girlfriend?”

  “What is the correlation between our last conversation and this one?” he asked in exasperation.

  Blithely she shook her head and said, “No clue. But, hey, it’s what came to mind.”

  “And it seems like whatever comes to your mind,” he snapped, “comes flying out of your mouth, without any regard for the conversation at hand.”

  “I’ve always been this way,” she said, trying not to dim her enthusiasm.

  “Well, you’re even worse today,” he said, groaning. “I’ll head back to my office and get some work done.”

  “Okay,” she said, “I’ll be right here.”

  As a customer came toward her to check-out, Gabby turned with a smile. “Hi,” she said. “Let me help you with those.” As she reached for the items to ring them up, she started in on a conversation, asking if the woman had found what she was looking for, if she needed anything else, and was she looking for any other books. By the time the woman had left, her boss was back out again, a glare on his face.

  “Now what?” she said, raising her hands.

  “Don’t be so chatty,” the boss growled. “That poor woman was trying to get away from you, and you were talking so much.”

  She looked at him, feeling hurt. “That’s not true,” she said. “It’s not even fair to say something like that.”

  He groaned. “Not everybody is a social butterfly,” he snapped. “So just keep it under control.”

  After that, she tried hard to keep her natural enthusiasm down, but it seemed even harder today. Instead of being shell-shocked and lifeless from her nearly catastrophic event up on the mountain, it seemed like she’d been energized by it instead. She frowned at the thought. Just then, one of the customers came up and said, “Hi, I was looking for a book on the history of Aspen.”

  “Sure,” she said with a bright smile. “Let me show you where those are.” She walked her around to the section where the local books were and pointed out two that discussed local history. The woman picked up one and bought it. Later in the day Gabby remembered she’d wanted to look at the same thing herself. When a lull in the bookstore’s traffic came, she headed back to the two books she had pointed out to the woman. Gabby wanted one for herself but winced when she saw the price of them.

  Of course, as was so very typical of the bookstore, these were thirty dollar books. She needed to find something less expensive to match her measly income. She flipped through the first book and didn’t find anything too interesting, and then, as she picked up the second one, her boss came by and said, “If you’re looking for a good book on the history of Aspen, there’s another one, only it’s about the dark history.”

  “Oh,” she said, “where do you keep that one? I don’t remember seeing it.”

  “That’s because I don’t sell it,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because things like that shouldn’t be perpetuated. It’s gruesome.”

  “And yet,” she said, with a slight smile, “you’re telling me about it, so I can go look it up.”

  “Yes, but then that’s you.”

  Frowning, she didn’t know what to say to that but made a note of the book he was talking about. “Is it something we can order in?”

  “Probably,” he said. “Anything like that has a great sell-through rate.”

  This just made her itching to again ask why he didn’t carry it here, but she held her tongue because either he was in a weird mood or she was. It didn’t matter. She thought she’d go by the secondhand bookstore when she got off work. Seemed like the wrong thing to do, but she couldn’t afford to pay for brand-new books. By the time the end of the day rolled around, she still wasn’t the least bit tired. She had enough energy to spare that she could easily walk the few blocks over to the other bookstore.

  Saying goodbye and leaving Jerry to lock up, Gabby headed out the door and down the street and turned at the corner. She’d been into the secondhand bookstore a couple times, and the woman there knew where she worked. As she walked in, Emily looked up, smiled, and said, “You’ve only got a few minutes. I need to close up on time tonight.”

  “Yeah, you usually open and close a half hour later than we do,” she said. “I was looking for a book on the local history,” she said and gave her the title that her boss had mentioned to her.

  “Ah, you’re talking about The Dark Past. That’s its actual title.” She walked over to one wall, quickly thumbed through several books that she had there, then nodded and said, “Here we go, one copy.”

  “Oh, perfect,” she said. “How much is it?”

  “Well, it’s in nearly perfect condition,” she said, “so it should be fifteen dollars.”

  At that, Gabby winced.

  “But, for you,” she said, “how about ten?”

  “That would be great,” she replied, smiling with relief. “I can just about manage that.”

  “I’d suggest you get another job, but I know jobs in town are hard to come by.”

  “They are if you can’t do restaurant duty,” Gabby said. “I’m just way too klutzy for waitress work.”

  At that, Emily laughed and said, “Here you go. Enjoy the book.” She handed it over, after ringing up the sale.

  With the purchase tucked inside her oversize purse, Gabby headed home. The snow had picked up, and it was blustery out. But still it was a beautiful day. She just loved Aspen, almost dancing along on her way home.

  As she neared her apartment, she thought she heard her name called.

  You’re mine, Gabby.

  But she didn’t understand what that meant.

  Oh, you understood, the voice in her head said. You just don’t want to listen.

  Then it disappeared.

  *

  Damon drove through town, heading toward the apartment that Gabby had listed as her address. He had stopped in at the bookstore at the end of the day but had just missed her. As the owner of the bookstore had said, she’d left already. He took a few minutes to walk the area and then hopped into his vehicle to give her enough time to get home. But, once he arrived at her place, nobody answered.

  He waited in his car until she showed up, and, when she did, she looked quite pleased with herself. She ran through the snow, bouncy and fresh looking. He wondered at that. He hopped out and called to her. “Gabby?”

  She immediately froze, a frown taking over her features, but she didn’t acknowledge Damon.

  “Gabby?” he called out again.

  She stopped, turned, and looked at him. He could see that she recognized him, and then she bolstered up a smile for him.

  He sighed. “Hey, I’m just checking in to make sure you’re okay from yesterday.”

  Immediately the fake smile disappeared, and she beamed at him. “I’m doing great,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

  “No aftereffects?” he probed gently.

  “No, I feel really great,” she said.

  “I figured you’d be home, spending the day recuperating in bed.”

  “No, not at all,” she said. “An
d you’re not the first one to point that out to me. But I feel fine, honest.”

  “Well, that’s good,” he said, frowning. “I really expected you to have some residual effects today. You know? Bruises, abrasions, sore muscles, something. That was a hell of a fall.”

  “Hey, I got a second opportunity at life. I’m determined to live it.”

  “But do you really realize how lucky you were?”

  “Yes. I’m trying not to dwell on the accident part,” she said, on a more serious note.

  He nodded to himself. At least she understood how close she’d come to losing that life she found so precious. “So,” he said, crossing his arms, hating that he did it defensively, but finding it hard not to. “Yesterday you said that you were pushed.”

  “Yes,” she said immediately. “I was. I know it.”

  “Did you see who did it?”

  “I already told you that I didn’t,” she said. “You just don’t like the other answer I gave you.”

  “Not when it doesn’t make sense,” he said.

  “Well, I can’t make it make sense for you, can I?” she said. “You’ll have to investigate and make it make sense for me.”

  He stared at her in confusion.

  “It’s what you do, right?” she said helpfully.

  “And how do you figure that?”

  “You’re a detective,” she said. “You solve puzzles.” And, with that, she gave him a beaming smile and added, “If that’s all, I’ll go inside and make some dinner.”

  “I do have a few questions for some of your roommates. Who was out on the mountain with you when I arrived?”

  “That’s Wendy,” Gabby said. She unlocked the main entrance door, pushed it open, and asked, “Do you want to come up and see if she’s there?”