the video games. John Nowack, a year younger than Todd, nagged his mother for the same.
'You're not eating breakfast?' Jane asked in amazement. To her, a real breakfast was one of the primary reasons for going on vacation. Naturally, human beings who preferred cold, sugared cereals that pretended to be fun and had never cooked bacon in the morning for themselves wouldn't value the experience quite as much.
'Aw, Mom, we ate hours ago!'
Mel explained that this meant Twinkies and a gallon of milk fifteen minutes earlier. 'Jane, do you mind if I take Mike skiing today?'
'I'd be glad for you to.' He and her son had always had a cordial, if slightly uneasy, relationship. 'It's everybody's vacation to do whatever they like. Well, except for Katie and Denise, who would like to spend a thousand dollars a day and have no restrictions at all.'
'As long as you put it that way, I'll pass on breakfast so we can get going right away.'
Mel went off to find Mike as Shelley and Jane went into the restaurant. There was a breakfast buffet with every imaginable food, including quite a few Jane couldn't identify but suspected were fruits more prized for their exotic origins than for their taste. A handsome, dark-haired young man who looked like an American Indian stood at the end of the buffet table, making omelets to each diner's specifications. Jane indulged herself in an omelet that involved cheese, mushrooms, artichoke hearts, and crumbled bacon. 'I'm trying for a cholesterol prize,' she told Shelley as she dug in. 'There's a bowl of butter over there that I'm going to slather on myself when I'm through eating.'
Shelley, who had chosen sausages and corn fritters with a thick coating of powdered sugar, smiled and said, 'Just think, only a few hours until lunch. At least we're uphill from Chicago. We can tuck in our arms and legs and somebody can just roll us home.'
They were sitting back, having a second cup of coffee each, when a man approached their table. He was tall, thin, in his sixties, and had the apricot-colored hair that real redheads get when they start going gray. 'Excuse me, is either of you ladies Mrs. Nowack?'
'I am,' Shelley answered.
'I have a message for you,' he said, handing her a slip of paper on hotel stationery.
Shelley glanced at it. 'Just my husband saying where he'll be for the morning. Thanks very much. Are you a hotel employee?'
The man laughed, showing a lot of unusually good teeth. 'An old geezer like me? No, I'm retired, I'm glad to say. I'm a guest. I was just coming by the front desk and poor Tenny looked so harassed at trying to get all the accountants checked out that I asked if there was anything I could do to help her. Those people check over their bills very carefully, let me tell you. She was looking for you, so I volunteered to find you.'
'How nice of you, Mr…?'
'Lucky Lucke. Dr. Ronald Lucke, in my previous downtrodden life. But everybody calls me Lucky.'
'Will you join us for a bit, Lucky? I'm Shelley, and this is my friend Jane Jeffry. How are you enjoying your stay here?' she asked, answering Jane's silent question as to why Shelley was 'taking up' with strangers. She was being the wife of a potential investor.
'It's a wonderful place. Lots of space for our meetings. Terrific food.'
'Don't you mind having to go elsewhere to ski?'
'Not me. They've got that little bunny slope out back and that's all the skiing I'd ever want. I've never broken a bone in my life and I don't intend to start now.'
'I hope you don't get called out of retirement and are asked to set somebody else's bones while you're here,' Jane said.
'Wouldn't do much good to ask me to. I was a dentist,' he said, grinning. 'Are you ladies here for the skiing?'
They both laughed. 'No, we aren't into exercise,' Shelley said. 'We're just along for a break. My husband is here looking into some investments.'
'Ah, one of the people thinking of buying Bill out, huh?'
Shelley looked stricken. 'Oh, dear. I didn't mean to be indiscreet. Mr. Smith is the owner of this resort,' she explained to Jane.
'No, no. You didn't let any cats out of any bags,' Lucky assured her. 'It's just that I know Bill Smith and know he's real anxious to sell out so he can retire to Florida. He and Joanna have a bungalow and a nice boat down there already.'
'So you're here because you're a friend of the owner?' Jane asked. 'How nice.'
'Well, in a manner of speaking, I guess you could say that.'
At their questioning looks, he elaborated. 'You see, I'm the current president of the Holnagrad Society. Uh- oh. I can see from the way you drew back at the word that you've met our Doris. I'm right, aren't I?'
'Your Doris being the very tall, severe-looking woman?' Shelley asked uneasily.
'Looks like Lincoln? Yup. That's Doris Schmidtheiser.'
'Yes, we met yesterday.'
'Well, we're here and we all know Bill because Doris has a bee in her bonnet about him.'
'Oh?' Jane said politely.
'Yup. The way Doris figures it, Bill Smith is the rightful Tsar of Russia.'
Chapter 3
Jane nearly spewed coffee all over the table.
When she'd recovered herself, she gasped, 'I'm sorry. It just struck me as funny. Bill Smith, Tsar of all the Russias. Somehow it doesn't sound quite right.'
Lucky laughed. 'It doesn't sound much better to Bill, I can tell you.'
'Mr. Smith doesn't want to be Tsar?' Shelley asked, smiling. 'I guess I can see why. Look at what happened to the last one. I'm sorry. That was a grim thing to say. How did Mrs. Sm—'
'Schmidtheiser,' Lucky said.
'How did Mrs. Schmidtheiser come up with this theory?'
'Well, you've kinda got to understand about the Holnagrad Society to start with. Holnagrad's a little speck of a place in the Balkans. Russia had already gobbled it up before World War One. Most of our ancestors fled the country then. And another mob came over during and just after the Second World War. There weren't a lot of people there to begin with and most of them fetched up in the U.S. So the Society was formed in the 1920s to keep traditions alive from the Old Country. You know — dances, songs, language, history. Anyhow, an important function of the Society is the concern with genealogy, and all these years we've been trying to get church records and cemetery records and the like out to help trace our roots. Every now and then somebody'd get a visa to go back — for a long time the country was behind the Iron Curtain — and would smuggle out some more copies of original documents. All very cloak-and-dagger, with hidden cameras and sneaking into churches in the dark. Sorry, I'm telling you a lot more than you wanted to know. Anyhow, when the Soviet Union fell apart, lots of records were suddenly available and Doris got her teeth into some.'
'Did she go there?' Shelley asked.
'No, but another member of our group did, and Doris was helping her translate and catalog documents. Doris is a whiz at reading old handwriting. Don't know how much you ladies know about history, but Tsar Nicholas abdicated and his younger brother Michael refused the crown. On their own behalf and that of their children. The next in line…' He paused. 'Well, the next in line — according to one theory, let's say — was a cousin of Nicholas and Michael's who was married to a woman from Holnagrad — a princess. This Romanov cousin saw which way the wind was blowing even before Nicholas abdicated, and he — the cousin, that is — dropped out of sight. A lot of people figured he went to Holnagrad to hide out with his wife's people. But nobody's ever proved it.'
'But Doris found something that did prove it?' Jane asked.
Lucky moved his hand in a 'so-so' motion. 'Maybe. She found some church records that seemed to be of the same family, but they were calling them-selves Romanofsky. This Romanofsky, the Tsar's cousin — if he
