From Here to Paternity

'What were you doing when he came in?' Jane asked, suspicious.

'Just looking around on the floor of the closet for a missing sock. Why?'

'You weren't humming anything, were you?' She giggled. 'Never mind. I'll explain later.'

She hung up. 'Shelley, talk fast. Mel's on his way over. Girls!' she yelled down the hallway. 'We're leaving in a few minutes. Get ready.'

'Okay,' Shelley said, garnering up cups and saucers and setting them in the sink. 'The third possibility, which I mention only for form's sake, is that the death or deaths have nothing to do with anything we know about.'

'A ripe field of inquiry,' Jane said. 'Are we finally through getting ready to think?'

'I believe so.'

'So when do we do the real thinking?'

'Oh,' Shelley said airily, 'we'll let our collective subconscious work on that while we eat dinner. First dibs on the bathroom.'

Chapter 17

 

Mel and the boys arrived shortly, and while they all waited with varying degrees of impatience for Katie and Denise to get ready, the boys took Willard outside for a run in the snow. 'Poor old Willard,' Jane said. 'He knows how to pee downwind in a Chicago gale, but he can't figure out how to manage with snow up to his shoulders.'

'That's one of the many things I've always admired about Willard,' Mel said. 'That peeing-downwind trick.'

'What did you learn from the sheriff?' Jane asked, ignoring the sarcasm.

'Nothing of any real use,' Mel admitted. 'There's no question, of course, of finding footprints. For one thing, it had snowed lightly after the snowman was built, and that pretty well obliterated any marks. And by the time you, half the skiers, and all the police had stumbled around, there was no hope left.'

'I wouldn't think snow would hold footprints anyway. Up here in the mountains, it's so powdery that the least wind must make it move around like sand,' Shelley said. 'What else?'

'Plinkbarrel, or whatever his damned name is, says there were wool fibers in the snow that had been packed around the body. From mittens, he speculated. They didn't match anything the victim was wearing.'

'Ah! That sounds helpful,' Jane said.

Mel shook his head. ' 'Fraid not. The sheriff, or more likely one of his minions, checked out the stuff in that lost-and-found room and discovered the mittens there. Still damp. And the insides of fuzzy wool mittens won't hold fingerprints, I'm sorry to say.'

Jane thought for a minute. 'Doesn't that imply premeditation? I mean, a deliberate plan to murder him, not just a momentary rage? Before murdering Bill, somebody took the mittens that couldn't be traced to himself or herself and then returned them later.'

'Possibly. But not for certain. The perp may have borrowed the mittens for no purpose at all except warmth, then recovered his or her wits enough to put them back. For that matter, they might not have even come from the lost-and-found originally. They might have belonged to the murderer, who just figured that was a good way of disposing of them without being caught with them in his possession. I wouldn't think anybody keeps track of every mitten in that room. It's just a hodgepodge that probably gets culled only once each spring.'

'But that does limit it to people with knowledge of the hotel,' Jane said.

'I guess it does,' Mel admitted. 'But I don't think that was ever in doubt.'

'Where did the other stuff come from?' Shelley asked. 'That bowl thing that was the crown, and the whatever-it-was that looked like a robe?'

'The bowl is one that's in a lot of the cabins. A local firm delivers fruit gift packs in them,' Mel said. 'They're usually left in the cabins. And the robe was just a standard-issue blanket — one of the extras that are in the closet of each cabin. Unfortunately, they get shifted around, too. Family groups like this one move around, people get cold and use a blanket like a shawl to run back to their own cabins, and so forth. They only get sorted out if the maids happen to notice that mere's an excess in one cabin and a shortage in another.'

'None of which is any help at all,' Jane said.

'Unless the sheriff knows a lot he's not telling me. Which is possible,' Mel replied.

'And what did he say about me?' Jane asked, then added, 'Never mind,' as the boys and Willard came back in. She certainly didn't want the kids to know she was under suspicion, however absurd the idea was.

Katie and Denise were eventually dragged away from their bathroom, where they were still feverishly consulting on makeup, and the whole mob moved off toward the lodge. Mel went ahead with the kids, who were engaged in a traveling snowball fight. The snow was so cold and dry that it was hard to form into a ball at all, and most of them exploded into powder before ever reaching a target.

'It must have been hard to build a snowman,' Shelley speculated.

Jane nodded. 'I think that was the reason for the blanket/robe thing. So the back didn't have to be covered. Maybe you have to pour water on snow to make it hold its shape here. To form a crust. That's probably why you don't see many snowmen.'

'I don't suppose the sheriff is likely to confide in us whether that was done,' Shelley said. 'But it could be significant. You'd have to have some kind of thermos along.'

'I don't think that would be much help in narrowing down suspects, though,' Jane said. 'Lots of people carry around thermoses. They even sell them in the equipment hut with a sort of belt-loop thing so you can hang it onto yourself somewhere. I noticed because it looked like a good way to carry coffee.'

'You're right. I'd thought of that, too, but had forgotten.'

'But there's something we've kind of overlooked about this,' Jane remarked. 'The fact that the snowman was gotten up to look — well, regal. Doesn't that mean Bill's death had something to do with the Tsar thing?'

'Not necessarily. You said yourself the robe thing was probably a device to save somebody from having to cover the body all the way around.'

'True, but there was the crown, too. There was no practical purpose for that. Nor for the old bent ski pole the snowman was holding in its stick arms that looked like a scepter. Doesn't all of that look like deliberate mockery of the whole concept of Bill Smith as Tsar?'

'Unless the motive was completely unrelated and the murderer just did that to make it look like the genealogists were guilty in some way.'

'Jeez, Shelley! If a murderer were really that clever, he'd have thought of a better way to solve his problem than to kill Mr. Smith — and maybe Mrs. Schmidtheiser, too.'

'You'd think so, but that's because we haven't got what a murderer has — a conscience, or lack of con- science, that even allows the thought of murder as a solution to a problem.'

'Yes, but it still seems most likely that the whole 'royal trimmings' business does point to the Holnagrad/Tsar situation.'

'I agree it's very likely,' Shelley allowed. 'But where does that get us?'

'I dunno,' Jane said wearily. She suddenly realized she was sick and tired of the whole business. She'd come here for a long-awaited and well-deserved vacation and — dammit! — she was going to have fun — if it killed her.

The Saturday night dinner and dance were fun.

The casual dining room had been set up with a stupendous Tex-Mex buffet. Jane planned to sample a tiny bit of everything, but couldn't get through half of her testing. Not only was there a huge variety, but she found a casserole dish called King Ranch Chicken that she fell so much in love with that she had three helpings.

'I'm going to get this recipe if I have to beat up the chef to make him reveal it,' she exclaimed. 'Try it, Shelley. It tastes sort of plum-blossomish.'

'It must have corn tortillas torn up in it,' Shelley said, taking a bite from Jane's overloaded plate. 'They have that plum-blossom taste. Mmmm. That's wonderful!'

'Glad you think so. You can beat up the chef, then. It's much more your line.'

Shelley grinned. 'I've never laid violent hands on a chef. Yet. I save that for IRS agents.'

It was a festive evening, in spite of the recent death of the resort owner. Jane even noticed Joanna looking in the doorway of the restaurant once, smiling as if genuinely pleased at how well she was managing to implement