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Chapter 1
The thunderous crack woke Niki a little after 3am on Christmas Eve, the one-year anniversary of her fiancé’s death. Her eyes flicked open, no hesitation, no groggy surfacing from sleep, though she’d been deep in a dream. She didn’t move at first, not sure what was happening. Was it like one of those nights where she heard the doorbell ring, got up and went to answer it, only to find no one there? She always woke with her pulse hammering, apprehensive, afraid to see who was there.
Waking now alarmed her as much as those dreams, but wasn’t the same. For one, the timeshare condo she’d rented didn’t have a doorbell, being more like a hotel suite than a private residence. Someone would have to knock, and no one had knocked. Like waking from the dreams, however, anxiety swept up the inside of her throat and she found it hard to breathe.
She sat up and forced her panicked heart to slow, while listening for several seconds. Blizzard winds wrapped the balcony in the soft, high-pitched howling she’d become accustomed to each night. Sapphire Ridge had received a record-breaking 10-plus feet of snow in the last 72 hours, at least 30 inches more than any of the other Tahoe resorts, according to her building’s concierge. For the legion of skiers and their families come to spend the holiday here, it was a fantasy come true. All were looking forward to when the storm was forecast to move on, leaving the powder deep and pristine for the two most important days of their vacations.
Niki wasn’t a skier and that wasn’t why she was here, but she’d come to love the sound of the winds depositing foot after foot of fresh snow, draping trees and buildings and landmarks in soft, ermine white until almost nothing was recognizable and the world transformed into an entirely different place from the one she knew. Another familiar sound, the yellow tractor with shovel on one end, snow plow on the other, had showed up to clear the parking lot and larger common areas while guests slept. Other people might have found the intermittent beep-beep-beep of warning the huge machine made each time it backed up with a load irritating, but it comforted Niki. It was an orderly sound, reassuring her that at least one person existed who looked out for her and others while they slept.
No beeping now and there should have been. The storm was over; the winds had died. A capricious breeze sanded away at snow already fallen on her railing, picking up the top layer, ghost grey in the night, and sending it into the darkness.
All was quiet.
Yet, she’d swear her condo had shaken. Crack. Like the building had taken a gunshot to the gut.
Climbing out of bed, she crossed plush carpeting to the balcony’s sliding glass doors and looked out.
She saw ragged gaps in the line of icicles hanging from the underside deck of the balcony above hers. Several had broken away, fallen, and speared the drift of snow in front of her.
Earthquake?
Could that be what she’d felt? Maybe a 4.0? Growing up in California, she’d been in earthquakes, small and large. A crack, however, wasn’t how she’d describe the sensation. Tremors jerked at you; the ground jumped, jolted, swayed or rolled. No, they hadn’t had a quake.
Something was wrong, though. She felt it. Something bad.
Down in the parking lot, three stories below, she saw the tractor, shovel heaped with snow, paused in the middle of dumping its load. The machine idled and the man driving it stood on its running board staring up at the mountain.
Niki followed his line of sight. Sapphire Ridge was known for its night skiing, but no one skied here at 3am in the morning and the lights that lined the slopes were shut off, the mountain nothing more than a wall of black under thick cloud cover.
Then she heard it. The distant rumble. It barely registered before it swelled to a roar and then incredibly, something even bigger, deafening, almost too loud to be heard.
A freight train, that’s what it sounded like. An entire train falling off the mountain, sliding, cars tumbling, uncoupling and flipping again and again, disintegrating in a wave of shrapnel that grew larger and more violent the closer it came, plowing down the mountain straight for the Village.
Not a train.
“Avalanche,” she whispered.
Her brain shut down. She froze, splayed fingers pressed against the glass. Down on the tractor, the man remained similarly rooted in place. She knew she should do something. React. But how? Where did you go to escape something you couldn’t see?
Trees splintered hundreds of yards above. Metal skreeked and tore, so outsized a din it made her think of the Titanic’s hull ripping open on the iceberg.
The chair lift. It’s taking down the lift.
Electrical lines snapped and arced. Jets of sparks shot from the first of the ski slope’s lights to be caught up in the tsunami of debris, and Niki got her first glimpse of the slide coming to bury them alive. It stretched even farther, loomed even taller than it sounded. Instead of being completely white, the wave appeared dirty, mixed with a host of flotsam, quad chairs and lift towers, a tangle of heavy cable and green safety fencing, snowmaking equipment, shredded evergreens and dirt. Multi-ton boulders bounced, yes, bounced, out front of the wave.
The sight was enough to motivate the man in the parking lot. Niki watched him take off, running for his life. She imagined the security camera nearby that would catch his desperate attempt at escape. He’d be a blurry figure, difficult to identify, but the footage would likely go viral within hours.
Run, she ordered herself. Go.
She had ten seconds at most.
But where? Would any part of the building be any safer than another? Would it be better to be caught in a hallway or a stairwell when the complex came down? She had no doubt the avalanche was large enough to decimate her four-story building, taking out the bottom floors completely, leaving the upper stories to collapse and pancake or fall apart. She prayed fervently she would not be buried alive. She could think of no worse horror.
Please let it be quick. Please.
At the last, survival instincts freed her from paralysis. She backed away from the window and shut her eyes tight, crossing her arms protectively in front of her face.
Impact.
The shock wave threw her into her bedroom’s mirrored closet door. Her head hit the glass, dazing her, but not hard enough to knock her out. Walls and floors reverberated. Windows rattled. Still, she kept her feet.
Within seconds, the shaking died out.
She didn’t understand.
That’s it? Everything that had hurled itself down the mountain and this was it?
Relieved, she peeled herself off the closet door, but the unholy roar continued, as loud as ever.
Why?
Cautiously, she moved back to the balcony doors.
Sapphire Ridge was designed around an alpine town center. Five condo and hotel buildings edged the open space in a horseshoe, with the top of the “U” left open on the side nearest the slopes. Dotted here and there on the side of the resort facing the mountain was the occasional isolated restaurant or ski shop. A Bavarian-style beer hall opposite her building had taken the brunt of the slide. Blown apart under the assault, enough of the skeleton of the place and mounds of wreckage remained to block and funnel the slide away from them. The avalanche didn’t peter out. It merely changed directions, slamming into the oldest condo complex in the village.
Horror-struck, Niki watched the smaller lodge, only two stories tall and dating from the early 80s, devoured whole. It didn’t just crush it; the wave’s fury chewed it up. Walls, furniture, drapes were sucked into the debris flow. Half the lights in the village had gone dark, but she could still make out bits and pieces flung up into the air, a shower door, a television, a Christmas tree with tinsel sparkling, only to fall back to Earth and be yanked violently under tons of debris.
A person.
Niki hissed in distress and turned away.
Oh, God. How many?
Chapter 2
Niki’s fiancé had been the first person she loved whom her mother also hated, possibly because D
ante’s ego was large enough to battle her mom’s and win. Maybe not the war, but at least a skirmish or two. His pursuit of her, the attention he lavished on her alone, had given Niki the respite she so badly needed in her life. On the endless highway of being her mother’s helpless lackey, Dante was the turn out, the welcome niche carved out of the side of the mountain where she could rest and catch her breath, and more importantly figure out how to separate herself from her mother’s toxic orbit for good.
Dante’s desire for her and his seeming inoculation against her mother’s gift for seducing, manipulating and controlling anyone she wanted proved intoxicating. His passion and the special ways he expressed it with her blew her mind.
Blonde and fit from a decade-long habit of cycling a minimum of 150 miles a week, he exuded energy. He was a foodie’s foodie, who owned a restaurant in Napa Valley with a slavish and vocal following. Food being his life, his natural inclination toward oral gratification drove their nights. And afternoons. And mornings. The sly brush of his tongue sampling the curve of her breast could make her shiver with delight. When his teeth grasped a nipple and gently bit down, Niki knew he tasted and appreciated her the way he would an exotic dish set before him. On one of their last nights together, they had made love in the fantasy kitchen he’d designed for his sleek contemporary home built into the hillside above a vineyard.
* * *
Naked atop the rustic farm table that could seat a dinner party of twelve, he drank her with a bottle of Stags Leap Cask 23. Ounce by ounce, swallow by swallow, he decanted then consumed the Cabernet Sauvignon from her navel, the tiny hollow at the base of her throat, the shallow dimples low on her backside with soon to be inebriated abandon.
“I’ve never tasted a more exquisite vintage,” he told her, his wine-soaked breath somehow sexy instead of off-putting.
Drifting across her cheek, it smelled real in a good way, like it came straight from the bottle, but contained notes of their lovemaking combined with an earthy finish that was pure lust and just a hint of debauchery.
“$500,” he said.
“Hmm?” she’d asked, still drowsy with contentment.
He held up the empty bottle of cab. “I just spent $500 on you.”
Five hundred dollars on a wine she’d tasted only on his lips.
* * *
Looking back, Niki didn’t know what bothered her more, that he hadn’t shared the wine with her, or that he was the type of man to buy a $500 bottle of wine to use as a sexual aid and then brag about it. How had she missed the signs when they’d been there all along? He’d never been the person she’d thought he was.
Chapter 3
Five minutes after the shaking stopped, and the avalanche had finished with the lodge to the south of them, Niki stood in her building’s lobby with at least a hundred of her fellow guests, many of whom had the same idea as she did.
“Let us out!” a bearded man wearing ski pants pulled hastily over pajama bottoms shouted. “They need our help.” His chest was bare under his open jacket, but he was ready to go to work.
Other shouts matched his, people jostling her. Not everyone wanted to help. More than a few were terrified the rest of the mountain would let loose any moment. Security blocked the exits leading out into the center of the village. This seemed like a bad idea to Niki, given the human propensity to stampede, but their building stood solidly as ever.
“Folks, please,” one of the security people raised his voice, begging for the crowd’s attention. The lights flickered off, then on, then went into brownout mode, only causing more people to talk, the excited din growing louder. “Folks, listen to me.”
A piercing whistle from the back of the room cut the noise, and brought instant silence. “Shut up and let the man talk,” the whistler said.
“Thank you,” the security person said. Niki could tell he wasn’t used to being in charge. None of the three guards she saw were. If she were to guess, the head honchos had already rushed to the scene, leaving these guys behind to corral her and the other timeshare residents. “I appreciate you want to help, but we don’t know that this thing is over and it’s safer for us all to stay inside.”
“Yeah, let’s all stay safe,” said Pajama Bottom Guy in disgust. “Meanwhile people are buried under all of that, dying. You do know most people don’t survive more than thirty, forty minutes in an avalanche.
“I understand,” the guard said. “But things are wrecked out there. We don’t know what’s going to stay up and what will fall down. You got live power lines out there. Whole towers from Moonfire lift teetering like seesaws. Don’t make more work for the first responders by getting hurt, too, or getting in their way.”
“I demand to know what’s happening,” a woman standing by the checkout desk said. Her arms enclosed three children all under the age of ten in a tight embrace. “I want to know whether more is going to come down. I want my babies out of here.”
“Ma’am, please. Just go back to your unit. We’ll get information to you, to all of you, as soon as we can.”
First one, then two alarms sounded at opposite ends of the building, people probably hitting the emergency exits after tiring of being held back.
Messy human behavior reigned for the next several hours. Due to the size of the disaster, rescue efforts proved uncoordinated and largely improvised at first, people emotionally tearing into the icy slagheap that remained of the lodge without care for their own safety, as the security guard had cautioned, or how their movements might endanger those trapped below.
Niki signed her name to a list of volunteers eager to help survivors, included her cell phone number, and then sat in the lobby, waiting to be called upon. After the first hour, she became restless and got up to wander the huge common space, passing other would-be rescuers who adhered to the security guard’s request for patience, people curled up and dozing in chairs or sacked out on loveseats, fidgeting near the windows facing the chaos outside or pacing, as she was.
Returning to Sapphire Ridge was a mistake, not just because she had the misfortune of being here during a tragedy, but because it woke the ghosts of last Christmas, bringing them to life to torture her in ways they hadn’t already done over this past year. Niki considered herself haunted. She could still hear Dante’s voice in her head. She wished she couldn’t. Some people freaked out on the day they realized they could no longer recall the unique sound of a loved one’s laughter. For Niki, remembering hurt too much. Dante lived on within her, as did her best friend, Iris, who had died in the accident with him.
Pausing by the two-story Christmas tree at one end of the lobby, she recognized the same red and gold ornaments from last holiday. Different tree this year, a Fraser fir instead of the previous season’s noble fir, but the same glass Santa Clauses, pinecones, icicles and snowmen, identical tinsel and faux pepper berry garlands, even the same gold lace bows.
From the tree, she glanced toward the massive river rock hearth that served as the room’s focal point and flinched.
Dante and Iris.
She saw them the way they’d been that final evening by the fire.
And me.
All three of them sat warmed by the crackling and spitting logs, the memory so strong in her mind’s eye it felt real, a virulent revenant she could not exorcise.
* * *
Dante sat between the two of them facing the fire, arms cast wide along the back of the oversized chair. In the vintage merino après ski sweater from the 1960s and with his carefree Italian looks, he reminded Niki of a mid-century playboy. Psychologically, his open gesture included both Niki and Iris in his personal domain.
“That’s new,” Niki said, nodding at the sweater and taking a sip from her Kahlúa and cream.
“Old, don’t you mean, mia cara?” Dante said with a charming smirk and winked at Iris, indicating he was joking with Niki, pretending she was slow.
“I mean I didn’t know you were into vintage,” Niki said. Why aren’t you wearing what I gave you for Christ
mas? Did I choose the wrong thing?
“Well...” he paused, and she got the feeling she’d caught him without an answer. “Not until now.”
“He looks like an extra out of the original Pink Panther movie, don’t you think, Niki?” Iris said. “You know, where David Niven and Robert Wagner crash the Princess Dala’s party at the lodge in Cortina d’Ampezzo? Everyone flirting and dancing around the open fireplace while the snow falls outside?”
“Meglio stasera,” Dante started to sing the Italian love song from the scene Iris referenced, “che domani o mai.” It Had Better Be Tonight in English.
“Don’t quit your day job,” Niki said, as she and Iris snorted at his pale warble of a tenor.
Dante stopped immediately and pouted. “Anyway, I don’t like you calling me an extra.”
“Oh, so you’re a star now?” Niki said and blew him an indulgent air kiss.
“I will be,” he said. “Soon.”
“Oh?”
“Dante was telling me just before you got here that he’s had an offer of a cooking show on the Gourmet Network.”
“Are you kidding me?” Niki’s eyes opened wide at the surprising news. “That’s incredible!” she said, though a part of her silently asked, you told Iris before you told me?
“I know I’ve been bad, Niki, keeping the secrets lately.” Dante leaned over and kissed her, an I’m-sorry-but-I’m-forgiven-now-that-you-know meeting of the lips. Aren’t I? his look queried in earnest. “That’s why we can’t spend Christmas together. That’s what the business trip tomorrow is about. I’m flying to New York to meet with their development director.”
“You had to remind me,” Niki said. “I’d almost forgotten we’d all be leaving tomorrow.”
“I know. I’m sorry, my love. I promise. Next year, once we’re married...”
“And I’m going to miss you both, too,” Iris said. “Why my parents can’t live without me this particular holiday I don’t know. We haven’t spent one together since I turned thirteen.”
Spirits of the Season: Eight Haunting Holiday Romances Page 22
