Snow Place to Die : A Bed-and-breakfast Mystery

“Damn!” Judith exclaimed. “I forgot about that thing! How

do I make it stop?”

Renie sighed. “First off, you look in the little window to

see who’s calling you. Then you press a button that’ll keep

it from reringing. Those things are set up so that they keep

going off until you acknowledge that you’ve taken the call.”

“Oh.” Judith fished the pager out of her purse. “This is

hard to read.” She held the little device under the table lamp

next to her chair. “Drat. It’s my home number. It could be

Mother. I wonder what’s wrong? How do I answer this?”

“You can’t, without a phone,” Renie said, then brightened.

“This might be a good thing, coz. If it really is an emergency,

then maybe somebody will figure out that you can’t call

back.”

Judith looked askance. “Meanwhile, Mother is lying on the

floor of the toolshed with her dentures wedged in her gullet?”

“Something like that,” Renie murmured. “Now if it were

my mother, she would already have tried to page me about

fifty times. It’s a wonder she hasn’t given me a pager for my

birthday or Christmas. I keep hoping she won’t figure out

how they work. Her half-dozen phone calls a day are already

enough to make me nuts.”

Judith was well aware that Aunt Deb’s obsession with

134 / Mary Daheim

the telephone—and with Renie—went to extremes. But

Gertrude abhorred the phone and disdained the pager. She

wouldn’t try to contact Judith unless something serious had

happened.

“Now I’m worried,” Judith said, getting up and starting to

pace around the library.

“That makes a lot of sense,” said Renie. “You’re worried

about something that may or may not have happened and

about which you can do absolutely nothing. In the meantime,

we’re sitting here like…sitting ducks.”

Judith stopped pacing. “Meaning what?”

Renie laid her head back against the soft brown leather.

“Meaning that you and I are not OTIOSE employees. We

have nothing to gain by keeping our mouths shut. That, in

turn, means that the killer has nothing to lose by getting rid

of us. Now do you get it?”

Judith got it.

Lunch was a moribund meal. Judith and Renie served

sliced ham and turkey, three kinds of bread, four varieties of

cheese, what was left of the fresh fruit, and a pasta salad

prepared beforehand at Hillside Manor. For the most part,

the conferees picked at their food and kept conversation to

a minimum. Whatever had gone on during the damage

control meeting had markedly dampened their spirits.

“Poison,” Judith heard Nadia whisper. “What if we’re all