When the Snow Falls

by Fern Michaels

  “Oh, you’re such a doll, such a doll! Jane, I’ve been wanting to meet you. Your mother is so wonderful. You’re such a lucky girl.”

  I couldn’t see her face because she was squeezing me so tightly. Over her shoulder, I watched a man in a red plaid flannel shirt heft the tree to my front door, plop it onto the tiny porch and stare back at us with a long-suffering look.

  “You brought a Christmas tree?” And here I’d pictured an overnight bag with makeup, toiletries, a pair of pajamas and an outfit or two.

  “I’d already ordered it. That’s how quick this has been. It’s already paid for, but I couldn’t let him have it when . . .” Her voice had risen into the tight, squeaky range.

  I patted her on the back and tried to ease myself away. “Well, I didn’t have a tree, so it’s all good.”

  “Really?” She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue she must carry all the time. Those eyes were big and brown and filled with woe. She was about four inches shorter than I was, with ash-blond hair cut in a no-nonsense straight style that just reached her chin. She was trim and wore gray pants and a loose pink shirt. A little angel pin made of carved green glass was affixed to her upper left shoulder.

  She began babbling away some more about how absolutely great Mom and I were, how distressing her life had abruptly become and how she loved the holidays, but this year was going to be really tough. The deliveryman looked at me askance, and I opened the door and led them both inside. Well, that’s what I thought, until I realized Roberta had already used the extra key and there was a trail of stacked boxes snaking across my living-room floor. I have a tiny fireplace that I don’t often use, so after our silent helper put the tree in a stand that Roberta had brought along as well, we positioned the tree in front of it. It looked as if Roberta had shuttled all her belongings to my house, but when I commented on the amount she was bringing in, she assured me she had a whole storeroom full as well.

  “I just couldn’t leave anything with him. These are my things and she can’t have them!”

  “She?”

  “Oh, your mother didn’t tell you? Gary has a girlfriend .” The way she imbued the word with abhorrence and disgust put it in the four-letter-word range. “She just found him, zeroed in and took him over, and he’s such a dolt he can’t see her for what she is.”

  “Parasite?”

  She harrumphed. “I was thinking more of the c word.” I wasn’t going to touch that one with a ten-foot pole, but luckily she informed me quickly enough, “Cheap. And crass, too. Mouth like a truck driver.”

  “Ahhh . . .”

  A week, Mom had said. Just through Christmas.

  The Binkster had been overseeing the deliveryman putting up the tree, but she’d since retired to her little doggy bed and had now placed her chin on its edge, her eyes following me closely. I suspected she was worrying about what would be happening next, and I felt her pain.

  After the deliveryman left, I tried to apologize about the bedroom situation, but Roberta waved me away. She’d heard it all already and didn’t care. She was just darn grateful she had a place, other than a motel, to immediately land.

  “I have to get going,” I said, glancing at my watch.

  “Oh, sure. Please. Do what you need to do. The doggie and I will be just fine.” She went over and patted The Binks’s head a couple of times. “Won’t we, boy? Come on up on Berta’s lap.” She started dragging The Binks out of the bed, and The Binkster frantically rolled her eyes my way.

  “You know, we’ve got a bit of a flea problem,” I lied. “That’s one of my errands. Get some flea medicine. Advantage, or First something . . .”

  Roberta immediately eased herself away from the dog but leaned into her face. “Oh, poor guy,” she said.

  “Gal . . . girl . . . The Binkster’s a female.”

  “Really?”

  This has proven to be the running gag of my life. Everyone, but everyone, assumes The Binkster’s a male because she sports a face like the old-time actor Ernest Borgnine. “I’ll be back,” I said, and I was gone.

  Dwayne called me as I was meandering around Lake Chinook, eating up time. The snow had stopped for the interim, so I’d parked outside of Foster’s on the Lake, my favorite eating establishment when I feel flush. The proprietor, Jeff Foster, thinks I’m a total cheapskate and resents that I try to mooch free drinks and food off his staff. He’s as much of a skinflint as I am, but he only works in the evenings, so I was left alone to ply my skills on Manny, one of my favorite bartenders. He was only up for comping me a diet cola, which was fine, as I wanted to be on my toes when I interviewed Karen Aldridge, and besides, the wine bar was still calling me if I wanted to get my drink on.

  “Hey,” I answered my cell.

  “Tomorrow at ten,” he said. “We’ll have to leave by about eight.”

  Mistletoe hunting with Mr. White Hot. “I’ll meet you at your house.”

  “Where are you now?” he asked.

  “On my way back to see Karen Aldridge at her place of employment. You were right. No need to ask her to lunch.”

  There was a hesitation on his end. This was very un-Dwayne-like, so I asked, “What?”

  “Your friend Darcy called me.”

  Speaking of white hot, there was the jolt of pure fear. “Oh, yeah?” I asked cautiously.

  “She was talking around something, but she wouldn’t get to what it was. She said I should ask you.”

  All the crass, cheap, truck driver swear words Roberta had complained about ran across my mind. I didn’t utter one of them, luckily, but I sure wanted to. “I don’t know,” was all I managed to mumble, and I clicked off as quickly as I could.

  Darcy was someone to avoid. I’d known it, I knew it, and now I’d been reminded again. Good. God.

  I was feeling a lot more sympathetic toward Karen when I reentered Joe’s Jo. For inexplicable reasons, I’d found a parking spot a lot more easily my second time in the area. About the same amount of people were milling around the shop, though the elf with the Covet Bars and middle-aged Trina weren’t in evidence. Karen was the only one behind the counter.

  “It’s four,” she said to me, like an accusation.

  “Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Well, I really get off at five. I just said four because . . .” She shrugged.

  Because I’d pissed her off and she’d tried to lie to me but had done a terrible job of it. I was glad she hadn’t gone the other way and said six because then she would have been gone and I would have made the trip for nothing. “I’ll wait,” I said, taking my same seat.

  The hour passed slowly. My mind alternated between Darcy getting naked and draping herself around Dwayne and Roberta hauling The Binkster out of her bed and feeding her grapes and chicken bones and everything else harmful to dogs. It was a mental horror show, and the slowly revolving minutes made the torture go on and on.

  Maybe I shoulda had a drink after all, and I’m not talking coffee.

  Finally, a young guy whistling “Jingle Bells” strutted in and went for one of the green aprons and Karen was released. She walked up to my table and plunked herself down. She’d had some time to think, so before I could say anything, she jumped in with, “I don’t know who you are or what you want, but I don’t have anything to say to you. I told that woman and her husband that they could talk to my attorney!”

  “Darcy asked me to—”

  “I don’t give a shit.”

  “You’ve threatened to keep the police involved if the Wexfords don’t meet your demands,” I said. “Even though the DA doesn’t really think there’s a case.”

  “She kidnapped me! Of course there’s a case.” Her eyes were practically bugging out in fury. I wanted to tell her to try to keep her voice down because people were starting to stare but sorta knew already that it would be wasted breath. “She took me there and kept me against my will!”

  “The thought is, you didn’t have to get in the car with her.”

  “
Have you met her? Do you know how crazy she is?”

  “I know Darcy,” I said doggedly, aware that I was treading on shifting sand. “She’s a little bullheaded sometimes, but she tries to help people.” It was difficult getting that last part out because of my own feelings about Darcy.

  “I’m suing their asses,” Karen said firmly. “They’ve got all that money. They want me to live, well, fine. They can pay off my student loan, and they can buy me a house as nice as theirs.”

  “That’s one way to look at it, I suppose.”

  “I don’t really want to send her to jail, but I was feeling so low and she made everything a million times worse. Those people on the bridge? They’re not supposed to touch you. They can talk and talk and talk, be my guest, but don’t touch me.”

  She inadvertently reminded me about the group Darcy had joined, Think Twice. It wasn’t the main group that patrolled the bridge. That honor went to Friends of the Vista Bridge. I didn’t know a heck of a lot about Think Twice, but it didn’t sound specific to the Vista Bridge, or maybe any bridge.

  “Look, I don’t want to talk anymore,” she said abruptly. “I’ve got a lawsuit going and nothing you can say can talk me out of it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?” she repeated suspiciously.

  “I’ll let Darcy know that you’re unswayed.”

  “That’s it?” she asked, perversely annoyed that I’d given up so easily, apparently. In point of fact, she’d pushed some of my buttons in a way I had yet to analyze. My overall hit was that she just didn’t seem like someone who would attempt suicide, and though there was ample evidence to the contrary, once the thought was in my mind, it burrowed in deeply.

  I left a few moments later, but I waited in my car. It took another forty-five minutes before Karen decided to leave, and by then it had been full dark for nearly an hour.

  I followed her home. I knew where she lived. Darcy, in all those hours, had managed to extract a lot of information from her, but I felt like following her anyway. It seemed like there was more to the story, and I wasn’t going to get it unless I dogged her. When she didn’t head to her apartment, my antennae lifted. My curiosity increased when, after a trip to a convenience store for chips, salsa and red-and-green Peanut M&M’s—enough of my kind of food to make my stomach groan—she drove back across the river to the west side.

  Where’s she going? I wondered and then realized she was headed in the general direction of the Vista Bridge. My palms grew sweaty as I considered she might be thinking about a second attempt, so I was relieved when she parked across the street from a nearby apartment complex. A few minutes later, she walked through a thin layer of sloppy, wet snow, up a set of outside steps and to a door at the end of the row on the second level. She rapped on the door, and when it opened, I caught a glimpse of a skateboarder type in a watch cap and baggy clothes before the door closed behind them. A boyfriend? A friend? What did he think about her suicide attempt? I wondered.

  Chapter 4

  As I was in the area, I drove to the Vista Bridge. Snowflakes were flirting with gravity as I reached the iconic structure and I drove over it slowly, noticing both the temporary chain-link fencing that Karen had tried to climb over and the two people standing stoically in the cold, a man and a woman who stood on opposite ends of the two-lane structure. I crossed the bridge, then pulled to a narrow spot on the side of the road, the only place around that had room for me to squeeze in even temporarily. It was near the woman, and she stared at me with laserlike intensity as I approached.

  “I’m not going to jump,” I assured her, though her expression didn’t change. “I’m investigating a suicide attempt from about a month ago.”

  “Oh.” She relaxed a bit and nodded. “The girl that’s suing that . . . woman.”

  Something about her tone led me to believe she wanted to say “suing that crazy woman” but thought it might be inappropriate, considering her job was supposedly counseling people from making an emotionally charged decision that could end their lives.

  “Darcy Wexford,” I supplied.

  She pressed her lips together, as if to hermetically seal them as she bounced a little on her toes to keep warm.

  “I just met with Karen, the woman she . . . took to her home,” I prodded.

  “I’m not with Think Twice, but their rules can’t be that much different than any other groups’, and we’re not supposed to do anything like that.”

  “Darcy just acted impulsively.”

  “Stupidly, more like it. Sorry. She gave all of us such a black eye, no matter what group we’re with, and now there’s a question if we should even be allowed to patrol.” She sniffed in disgust.

  “Is there anyone from Think Twice patrolling now?” I looked hopefully at the man on the opposite end of the bridge.

  “No, but you could ask Paul about them. He knows a few, I think.” She inclined her head toward him.

  While we were talking, a steady stream of traffic had been moving across the bridge as it was rush hour. The structure didn’t feel wide enough for me to walk along it and deal with the traffic, too. I wanted to have a heart-to-heart with Paul, so I headed back to my car. It took an interminable amount of time before I could get the Volvo turned around and headed back across the bridge. There was nowhere to pull over on his end at all, so I drove around the neighborhood for a while before finally pulling into a no-parking zone near some houses that must have spectacular views of Portland’s downtown. I knew I was risking a ticket, but I needed to be thorough. Sometimes I can hear Dwayne in my head, asking me if I’ve followed every lead, pulled every thread, tried my bestest. Since I’m a bit of a slacker by nature, I get highly defensive. I can recognize my flaws, all right, but it’s another story when they’re pointed out to me.

  Paul watched me approach over a thick gray scarf that was wrapped around his neck and covered his nose and mouth.

  “Hi,” I said, then explained I was looking into the attempted suicide and alleged kidnapping of Karen Aldridge. “The lady over there said you might know other people with Think Twice,” I said, hooking a thumb toward the woman I’d just spoken with.

  “You mean besides Darcy Wexford? Maybe her husband, although he doesn’t patrol Vista. Think Twice starts and begins with Darcy, a made-up group for the benefit of Ms. Wexford. It’s all for show.”

  Although this coincided with many of my feelings about Darcy, perversely, I felt compelled to defend her. “She did stop Karen from killing herself,” I pointed out.

  “She’ll try again.”

  He sounded so grimly confident, I let that one go.

  “She has a boyfriend who lives near here,” I said, apropos of nothing, but it was on my mind.

  “Karen Aldridge? No.”

  “She does,” I insisted. “I just saw her go into his house.”

  “Sure it wasn’t her brother? I heard she told Ms. Wexford that he was a black belt or something, and if she didn’t let her go, she was going to have her brother take care of things.”

  “Meaning?”

  “What do you think? Word is, he’s one mean son of a bitch.”

  “Word from . . . ?”

  He shrugged. “Check with Darcy Wexford if you want more. That’s all I’ve got.”

  I wondered where the brother fit into Karen’s life. I thought of my own brother, who was with the Portland PD and trying to work up to detective. Booth and I are close, even though we don’t talk to each other on a regular basis. If he believed I’d attempted suicide, he would be by my side night and day until he assured himself I was fine. I wouldn’t be able to get rid of him.

  But then, he’s not a mean son of a bitch.

  By the time I got home, I was half starved, and I was wondering if I should pick myself up something to eat when I remembered that I had a houseguest. Well . . . damn. Was I supposed to worry about feeding Roberta, too? It seemed rude to just ignore her.

  When I parked the Volvo and climbed out, I was greeted by Christmas mu
sic throbbing from inside my home. Oh, no, I thought, worried about The Binkster. If it was this loud outside . . .

  I opened the front door and beheld a Christmas tree festooned with tinsel, strings of what looked like real cranberries and lit candles on the boughs.

  “. . . beginning to look a lot like . . .”

  “Holy God,” I breathed in fear.

  “. . . Christmas, ev—”

  Seeing me, Roberta turned down the iPod she had set up in its docking station, then returned to where she’d been standing: in the center of the room, staring at the tree.

  She turned to me with moist eyes. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “I—yes—but I—the candles—”

  And that’s when The Binks toddled toward me with a little jingle, jingle, jingle. Around each of her paws was a red-and-white circle with a bell on it. She walked just far enough into my line of sight for me to get a good look at her, but she wouldn’t take one more step. Her expression was half tortured, half pissed off.

  “This is how they did it in yonder years,” Roberta said, touching one of the candleholders that was strapped onto a tree limb.

  “They didn’t live that long, either,” I pointed out, hurrying to my dog to remove the instruments of torture from her legs.

  “She doesn’t have fleas,” Roberta informed me with a sniff. When she saw I was removing the bells, she asked, hurt, “You don’t like Jingle Paws? I saw them in the store and just had to have them. I knew they’d look so cute on your little doggie.”

  “I don’t think they’re really working for her,” I said tautly, holding back my annoyance with an effort. I was going to have to have a long talk with Mom as soon as I could get away from Roberta.

  I was trying to figure out how to leave politely to forage for food, but it turned out Roberta had made something in my tiny kitchen. Sandwiches. Really good ones, out of chicken breasts she’d sautéed and then diced up and mixed with mustard and herbs and put between slices of nutty wheat bread with butter lettuce, onions, tomatoes and I don’t even know what else. They were sitting on a plate on the kitchen table, even decorated with little sprigs of parsley. My annoyance melted. I could have eaten three, but I held back after wolfing down one as I stood looking out the back window at a mixture of rain and snow stippling the surface of the canal. Instead of kicking her out as I’d intended, I asked Roberta to blow out the candles on the tree, which was dry enough to already be dropping needles on the ground.