A Crime for Christmas

by Carolyn Keene

  “Nancy!” Henry’s voice buzzed over the walkie-talkie. “Ski patrol is on their way!”

  “They’re okay, Henry! Liz saved Chef K from going over the edge!” I called back.

  “Chef K?!” he gasped. “It wasn’t an accident, was it?”

  “Not likely,” I replied. “Once ski patrol checks them out, have them tell Chef and Liz to meet me in the ski lounge.”

  Henry buzzed back not long after to tell me they were on the way. Luckily, neither of them had suffered anything more than bumps and bruises.

  The lodge didn’t fare as well. The entire mountain was temporarily shut down while the groomers and ski patrol raced around, making sure none of the other slopes had been tampered with. Sure enough, it was only the one Chef K had skied down.

  When I ran into Archie in the hall, he was beside himself. Not only had his star chef almost been taken out of commission, but also, closing the slopes for even a few hours was a major blow to business—especially with the lodge scheduled to close for the holidays the next day. The staff had been instructed to keep the details of the “accident” private, but it turned out some of the guests had actually watched the rescue live over one of the trail cams the lodge streams on their website. Word got out, and a lot of the remaining guests—the ones who hadn’t already checked out after the hot towel, flaming menorah, and sauerkraut stink bomb incidents—were calling their vacation quits.

  Of course Carol Fremont was already tweeting and ’gramming about it. George, Bess, and I had decided these crimes had become way bigger than just a reporter trying to land a cover story. We agreed she could be safely crossed off the suspect list, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t do any damage.

  And Carol’s tweet-storm wasn’t the only storm hitting the lodge.

  That big winter storm my dad had warned me about? The latest weather reports had come in, and they weren’t good. The storm had picked up steam and was poised to hit that night, a full twenty-four hours earlier than predicted! That meant even more guests were scrambling to book earlier flights and reschedule travel plans to make sure they were able to get home in time for Christmas.

  The following day was Christmas Eve, after all. Everyone was supposed to check out by noon so the lodge’s employees could take the holiday off, but it didn’t look like that many guests would even be left. The slow start Archie had dreaded was all but guaranteed. And there could be a lot of bad publicity going into the new year on top of it. It was a perfect storm of bad news for the Grand Sky Lodge. There was no way around it. The opening week had been a bona fide disaster.

  Or it would be if I couldn’t solve the case and set things right before my flight the following afternoon. With any luck, this winter wonderland could be disaster-free before Christmas.

  Archie was already reeling, and when I told him my opening day “accident” hadn’t been an accident either, he literally stumbled backward and had to sit down. I assured him we were going to find out who was behind this and turn the lodge’s bad start around. Then I headed for the ski lounge, hoping I was right.

  I got big hugs from both Liz and Chef K as soon as I rolled in.

  “If you hadn’t spotted me, I would have . . .” Chef K trailed off, hugging me again instead.

  “Liz deserves most of the credit. She’s the one who swooped in like a superhero!” I said. “That was one of the most amazing rescues I’ve ever seen, and believe me, I’ve seen more than a few.”

  Liz actually blushed. “It was nothing. Sorry I didn’t radio back. I was afraid I wouldn’t have time, and Brady’s radio cut out. They’re still having trouble with signals getting crossed on the hill.”

  “I’m just glad you heard the call!” I assured her.

  “Brady’s totally stoked because I was wearing my helmet cam, so we have it on video for the documentary,” Liz shared, grinning. “He wanted us to go down again and reenact it so he could get a wide shot too, but Chef growled at him.”

  Chef just smiled and rolled her eyes.

  I felt bad that it took being scared to death to bring it out of her, but I was liking this new, kinder, more fun Chef K.

  “I’m just glad you’re both okay. The trick now is to make sure you stay that way,” I told them, turning to Chef K. “Who knew you’d be the first one to ski down Round Top this morning?”

  “I take a sunrise run down one of the intermediate slopes every morning before the mountain opens, to clear my mind when no else is around to annoy me,” she said in typical Chef K style.

  “Don’t you have to get permission from ski patrol first?” Liz asked. “We had to get clearance on each of the slopes we planned to shoot on, and ski patrol only approved it because Brady and I are both expert skiers with emergency rescue training.”

  “I made Archie tell ski patrol to give me permission,” she asserted. “Marni or one of the others usually checks with the groomers and messages me the night before to tell me which slope is cleared for me each day, and they have me wear a radio and a beacon in case anything goes wrong.”

  “So anyone on ski patrol or the grooming crew might potentially know,” I summarized. “That narrows the pool down a bit, but not by much. Was it Marni who messaged you last night?”

  “Yeah, it was,” Chef K confirmed.

  “Okay, good,” I said, happy to have a reason to catch up with Marni. I had been so busy with the case that I hadn’t seen her since she saved me from that snowbank on the first day. “When she gets off her shift, I can ask her which of the ski patrollers and groomers knew what slope you’d be on and who else they might have told.”

  I wished it were under different circumstances, but it would still be nice to see her friendly face.

  “In the meantime,” I said, pointing my chair toward the door, “I’m going to track down Henry and see what I can find out about that trail cam.”

  I found him in his usual spot at the front desk.

  “I don’t see how a live stream of the mountain will help us figure out who moved the trail markers a few hours after the fact,” Henry commented, walking around the desk to lead me to the office of the Grand Sky Lodge’s tech gal, Dominique.

  “The live stream won’t,” I replied. “But if we’re lucky, there will be an archive.”

  Dominique’s office had the same exposed logs as the rest of the lodge, only this room was filled to the gills with modern computer equipment, including a monitor showing four different live trail cams looking at the mountain from different angles.

  “You’re in luck,” Dominique told us. “The system automatically archives everything for twenty-four hours before deleting itself to make room for the next day’s footage.”

  She punched a button, zooming in on a camera angle that captured three different slopes on the left side of the mountain, with Round Top visible on the far left. The slopes were still closed for inspection, so the only people you could see in the live feed were groomers and ski patrol.

  “Can you zoom in tighter on Round Top and take us back before sunrise?” I asked.

  Dominique clicked one key on her keyboard to focus on the image and another to rewind. The image wasn’t as crystal clear zoomed in, and you couldn’t see any facial details, but it was still close enough to pick out the ski patrol outfits from the groomers in civilian clothes.

  The footage sped up as Dominique rewound, Liz’s rescue of Chef K zipping by backward as the sun moved in reverse.

  The footage got a whole lot darker and grainier as soon as the sun was gone. You could still see the contrast of the slope on the mountain, but making out details was a lot harder. Even if we spotted someone, it could be difficult to identify them. Maybe there’d still be other clues, though. The time stamp on the video had just zipped past an hour before dawn when a little blip shot across the screen.

  “Pause there!” I cried.

  The speed returned to normal just as a figure emerged from the back side of Round Top.

  “It’s the saboteur!” Henry gasped. “But they
’re all in shadow!”

  “Can you zoom in further?” I asked.

  “It’s going to be pretty pixelated,” Dominique warned.

  She was right. It would have been hard to make out any detail at all—if it weren’t for the contrast of the large white ski patrol cross on the person’s jacket and the long braided ponytail flowing from the back of her helmet.

  My heart sank. There was only one ski patroller with a long braid like that: Marni.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Oh What Fun It Is

  “IT WASN’T ME, I SWEAR!” Marni pleaded, her signature long braid swaying as a deputy led her toward the police cruiser in handcuffs. The same thing had happened to Frank a few days earlier, only this time the Prospect PD really did have probable cause to make an arrest.

  “Save it for the judge,” the deputy spat. “We’ve got you on camera, and ‘I was sleeping the whole time’ is just about the weakest alibi I’ve ever heard.”

  “But this doesn’t make any sense,” Marni wailed. “My whole life is about helping people! Why would I want to hurt Chef K? I’m one of the only people who actually likes her!”

  “She’s right, it doesn’t make sense,” I told Archie, my heart sinking all over again as we watched from inside the doorway. “I wish you would have let me interrogate her before the police got here. I can’t think of what her motive would be. It just doesn’t feel right.”

  I’d been on enough cases to know that the nicest people can turn out to be some of the most devious criminals. Still, I couldn’t reconcile the sweet person who’d boosted my confidence before my first ski run and rescued me afterward as the same person who’d knowingly sent me into the trap in the first place.

  I’d tried to get Archie to let me question her myself, but he’d insisted on having the police waiting at the bottom of the mountain to put her in cuffs the second she came off the slopes.

  “This isn’t hot peppers and stink bombs anymore—this is a dangerous person, and I want the cops handling it,” Archie said, repeating the same thing he’d told me after I’d shown him the trail-cam video of our braided suspect moving the ski boundary signs that had nearly sent Chef K over a twenty-foot ledge. “There will be plenty of time for the police and prosecutors to question her once she’s safely behind bars.”

  “I’ve faced criminals who have done a lot worse,” I reminded him. “Whatever happened before, Marni and I have a rapport, and she’s more likely to open up to me than the people prosecuting her.”

  “I know you’re fond of Marni; everyone was, including me,” he assured me. “I don’t know why she would do this, but Chef K could have been severely hurt, or worse. And her actions have caused you enough harm already. I’m not about to take any more chances.”

  “I don’t know why either, and that’s what’s bugging me,” I urged him. “All I need is a few minutes to talk to her. I’ll have a better chance of getting a confession than Sheriff Pruitt will, that’s for sure. And if she really did it, we can find out why and wrap the sabotage case up for good.”

  “The case is wrapped up,” he asserted. “I wish it weren’t true, but we both saw it on video with our own eyes this time. This vendetta against Chef K has cost us a fortune. I care less about why she did it than the fact that she’s locked up where she can’t do any more harm.”

  Marni looked pleadingly at us through the backseat window of the cop car as it pulled away.

  Archie sighed, glanced at his watch, and turned back to the lobby. “I have a lot of damage control to do, and more than enough to talk about with Grant when his car gets here from the airport.”

  I stared at the police car as it grew smaller in the distance, escorting Marni to the Prospect jail a few miles below. We had her on video. You couldn’t see her face, so it wasn’t 100 percent conclusive, but it was pretty damning—possibly damning enough to get a conviction and send her to prison for a long time. I just couldn’t figure out her motivation. Fear of getting caught might give her a motive for pretending everything was hunky-dory the day I arrived and letting me ski into the trap she’d meant for Chef K, but what was her motive for setting the trap in the first place? Why would Marni try to take out Chef K? Could someone have put her up to it? Was she a hired hitter like waiter Clark? Or was she the mysterious gold-nugget-dropping burglar who hired Clark? And what did she have to gain if she was? Did it have something to do with the pipeline and the lodge’s financial problems? Or was the damage it did to the lodge just a by-product of the saboteur’s vendetta against Chef K, like Archie seemed to think? One thing was certain—I wasn’t going to get the answers from Marni.

  There was someone else who was supposed to have known about what awaited me on the opening ceremony run that broke my leg.

  Archie had already made up his mind about what happened, so I turned to my number one CI, Henry, to set up a meet with Todd, whose negligent grooming had originally been blamed for my so-called accident. I couldn’t go back to the scene of the crime to investigate it for myself, and any evidence would be groomed and skied into oblivion by now anyway. Having Todd walk me through how he’d groomed my slope for the inaugural run was my only way to re-create what the slope looked like before and after the ice warning flags were moved. If he told me the truth.

  Thanks to Henry, it wasn’t long before Todd and I were chatting over hot chocolate in Chef K’s restaurant.

  “I told everyone it wasn’t my fault, and this proves it!” Todd pumped his fist when I told him why I wanted to meet, but then he took an embarrassed look at my cast and cut the celebration short. “I don’t mean to sound happy about what happened to you or anything, and Marni being the one who did it really stinks. She was always really cool to me; it’s crazy she would do that and then let me take the fall for it too.”

  “You’re not entirely off the hook yet,” I cautioned him. “Marni was arrested for trying to take out Chef K on Round Top this morning, but we still don’t have any proof she tampered with the trail I wiped out on.”

  “Oh, I have proof,” he boasted. I leaned forward to hear what he was going to say next. Could this be the smoking gun?

  “I don’t know if it was Marni, but someone definitely for sure messed with that slope,” he declared. “I knew I’d flagged the ice patch you hit, and I told my boss Big Steve someone must have moved the flags around. He wasn’t hearing it, though, so I went back and dug a little deeper. We all knew that area tended to get a little icy sometimes, but when I cleared away the powder, there was a solid sheet of ice.”

  “That’s not news,” I informed him, my hopes for a smoking gun going up in smoke. “Marni told me it was a solid sheet of ice right after she rescued me. She said she almost wiped out on it too and blamed the grooming crew for putting the warning flags in the wrong place.”

  “Yeah, but this wasn’t the kind of ice that occurs naturally on these slopes. It was almost like someone cleared away the powder after we were done, poured water over it, then covered it back up to hide it,” Todd explained. “I tried to tell Big Steve, but he accused me of making up stories to cover my butt.”

  After my conversation with Todd, any doubts I had about my wipeout being an act of sabotage evaporated—unlike the ice the saboteur had planted under the snow! It may not have been the smoking gun that solved the case, but if it was true, it hit the bull’s-eye when it came to proving a crime had been committed. But Todd hadn’t told me anything that directly implicated Marni, and I wasn’t any closer to figuring out why she’d done it—if she had done it.

  It was time to expand my search and check out the saboteur’s predawn route to set the trap on Round Top.

  The ski-chair Liz and Brady had rigged for me was awesome, but it could only take me so far. To really explore the grounds and the backcountry, I was going to need something with more horsepower. . . .

  Like a horse-drawn sleigh! I’d been watching guests ride them around the grounds all week and figured it was about time I got my turn too. A horse-drawn sleigh
still might not be able to follow the trail all the way up the mountain itself, but the perp had to start at the bottom, and I could go there. There hadn’t been any new snow and the wind had been calm, so there was a good chance I might be able to find tracks and other evidence. The last time I’d followed someone’s tracks through the snow, I discovered a secret door!

  Joe was headed up from town to meet me at noon, which was in about an hour. I thought about waiting for him, but I was antsy to get going. It was a winter wonderland out there! I told Henry to call me the next sleigh and to let Joe know I’d be back soon in case he arrived while I was gone.

  The horse’s sleigh bells weren’t the only ones jingling when the sleigh pulled up in front of the lodge to pick me up.

  “Ahoy, Miss Drew!” Jackie called from the driver’s seat, using the reins to signal the gorgeous brown horse to stop. “Your one-horse open sleigh ride awaits! Just like the song!”

  “Hi, Jackie!” I called back.

  “It’s a one-horse open sleigh and two broken legs!” proclaimed Henry, who’d accompanied me outside when we saw the sleigh coming.

  “We can write our own verse!” Jackie said, giving her walking boot a jingle.

  “You really do a little bit of everything around here,” I noted.

  “They don’t call me Jackie-of-All-Trades for nothing!” she said. “Meet Clyde. He’s our trustiest Clydesdale! Clyde and I will be leading your tour of the grounds, right, Clyde?”

  “Nice to meet ya, Clyde,” I said, grinning. Jackie’s perky mood was contagious!

  “What’s that, Clyde?” Jackie said to the horse, leaning in like he was whispering to her. “Oh, I agree, Clyde. Miss Drew should be inside following doctor’s orders and getting rest with that broken leg of hers.”

  “Thanks for your concern, Jackie, but I feel okay, really. It barely even hurts!” I assured her. “And besides, I’m going to go nuts if I’m stuck inside one more day. It’s not the same looking at all this beauty out of a window.”