At First Sight

Chapter 36

THE PASSENGER DOOR WAS YANKED OPEN. I ALMOST shrieked, but managed to choke it back.

"What's wrong?" Chick was saying, standing over me.

"I, uh… look, Chick, I think it's a little remote up here with all this weather coming in. Maybe we should go back to L. A. and tackle this another time."

"We'll never make it down the mountain. That road will be closed soon."

"Then we should go back to the Bear Mountain Lodge in town." "Never get in during ski season. It'll be booked solid. Come on inside."

"It didn't look too full to me, when we passed. Almost no cars. Why don't you call? Maybe the lines are back up now."

"Look, Paige, if you're feeling funny about being here alone with me, I'll try and get us some rooms in town. In the meantime, come on in. I'll get a fire going. You look like you're freezing, sitting there. At least you can get warm." He was holding the door open, as the cold, snowy air whipped around my shoulders.

Reluctantly, I grabbed my sweater and purse, got out of the car, and followed him into the cabin.

The house was impressive. Chick turned on the gas fire in the huge stone fireplace. The flames crackled, licking the edges of some preset pine logs. The living room was decorated Southwestern style with rough-hewn furnishings and lots of Navajo rugs. A few stuffed heads of mountain lions, deer, and Kodiak bears hung on the walls, their sightless glass eyes flickering in the reflected firelight. Chick saw me looking at the animal heads.

"Shot most of those puppies myself," he bragged.

Great, I thought.

"Close the door there. I'll see if I can get through to the lodge." He crossed to the phone and picked it up. "Good deal, I got a dial tone." Then he punched in a number he seemed to know by heart, and waited for an answer. "Yes, may I speak to the front desk?" He smiled at me while he was waiting. "Reservations, please." Then: "Yes, this is Charles Best. I live up on Sugarloaf. It's a little blizzardy up here right now and a lady friend of mine and I were wondering if you have any space in the lodge?" Then he looked right at me to emphasize his next point. "Since the road just got closed I guess we'll need two rooms for tonight."

He listened, frowning before he spoke again. "I see. Well, when will you know, exactly?" Another long pause. "Can I give you my number so you can call me if they don't get up the mountain? Okay, good… I'm at 555-3769. In an hour then." He hung up and turned to me.

"They're sold out. They have two rooms reserved for a family of four coming up from L. A., but they said the county plow team just lost the road, so those people probably won't make it. If they don't show up in an hour, the rooms are ours."

I sat there trying to figure out what else I should do. I was getting so many mixed messages I still didn't have a real sense of how much jeopardy I might be in.

I decided that the best way to get through this was to turn to the job at hand. Find the things that Evelyn's sister wanted for her mother, get them out of storage as fast as possible, and then get the hell out of here. If the storm lightened, or the roads cleared, we might still be able to drive back to Los Angeles tonight using the chains. Failing that, we could stay at the lodge and drive down tomorrow.

"Why don't we go get a look at the storage room, see how big a project this is going to be?" I suggested.

"Wouldn't you rather have a glass of wine first?" Chick countered.

"If we get this done now, maybe we can still drive out of here tonight. I really have things to do in L. A. If we drive slowly, I'm sure we can make it back to Fawnskin. The roads are probably still okay from there on down:'

"Good idea," he said, but he was frowning slightly. "I have a nice red Bordeaux… My wine broker is the same guy who sells to Jack Nicholson. This Chateau Gruaud-Larose is very rare. Supposedly only five cases in L. A. I got three bottles at two thousand apiece. It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Not too oakie… Got a nice little smoky quality to it. What do y'think? Or, I have two bottles of 1997 Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon. Right now, it's some of the hottest wine on Planet Earth. Cost about three grand a bottle."

"Whatever you want, if we can drink while we work."

"Deal."

He went to the bar and started looking around in his built-in wine cooler for the bottles. Then he pulled one out and uncorked the Screaming Eagle Cab. "You're supposed to let it breathe for half an hour first, but let's cheat and have a glass now." He poured some into two wine goblets, then picked his up and swirled it around, watching it hang on the side of the glass, doing the whole wine connoisseur thing. "Good consistency." He sniffed the glass. "Great nose, not too sweet or acidic… A great little wine for three grand a pop."

He handed me a glass and clinked against mine. "To new beginnings."

Shit, I thought. New beginnings? What the hell does that mean? We'd both just lost our spouses. For me, it was hardly a beginning. It was a vast, unacceptable ending. But I held myself in check, didn't respond, and took a small sip of the wine, which was remarkable. Then I looked up at him. "Let's see the list."

"I'm sorry?"

"The list. Let me have a look."

He seemed puzzled.

"The list of things your sister-in-law wanted you to find for Evelyn's mother."

He reached into his pockets and started pulling things out. "I know I have that damn list someplace." He grinned and started patting his pockets like a guy trying to dodge a dinner check. Then he looked at me sheepishly and shrugged.

No list, I thought. Great.

My panic alarms were all blaring. If there was no list, then the whole trip up here was bullshit.

I was now beginning to think I might actually be in some physical jeopardy, when he suddenly snapped his fingers and crossed the room, picked up the car keys on the hall table, and opened the door.

"Left it in the car," he said as he walked outside.

I stood there wondering what I should do next. The elk and bears hanging on the walls glared down at me. Since they were former victims, they offered no sympathy.

After a few minutes he returned, list in hand. "Got it," he smiled. "I forgot, I stuck it up under the visor while I was driving over to the hotel to pick you up. Come on, most of this stuff is out in the garage."

He picked up the wine bottle, then led the way through the house into a large game room, where more stuffed animal heads hung on the walls.

"Bagged that big guy over the fireplace in Oregon last year," he said conversationally, gesturing toward a huge dusty-looking elk head. "Mmm… " I answered.

He continued through the kitchen, opened the door to the garage, and turned on the light.

The garage was almost floor-to-ceiling junk. I'd rarely seen a space with so much discarded stuff piled randomly. There were boxes jammed up on the rafters, stacked in precarious disarray. The shelves contained more labeled boxes: old linens, tools, and household goods. Discarded furniture and scraps of broken lumber were stacked in both parking stalls.

"I told you it was going to be a big project," he said brightly. "My God, Chick, what is all this stuff?"

"We redecorated last year. This is what we didn't keep. I wanted to just throw it all away, but Evelyn wanted to clean it up and donate it to the homeless shelter down in Longview. That was Evelyn, always looking out for the less fortunate." He sipped his wine and smiled. "Boy, this really is smooth. Hard to believe it's a California red. I bet it's almost decanted by now. Let me pour you another and see if we can spot any difference."

"I'm fine. Let's get started."

He looked down at his list. "A box of her baby and high school pictures from the summer house in Michigan. Should be up there, somewhere."

He pointed to a shelf full of boxes, then found a stepladder, carried it over, and climbed up. "We brought a lot of this stuff up here when we ran out of storage space in town," he said, starting to pull out cartons and hand them down.

As I took the first box, I glanced out the window and noticed a shed of some kind behind the garage, which I hoped wasn't full of more junk. I placed the box on the floor behind me.

We worked steadily for an hour. Chick had opened the second bottle and kept topping off my glass. Even though I was trying hard not to drink, I have to admit it was a great wine, and after a glass or so, I was feeling much better. The more we worked, the more harmless it all seemed.

When we had taken quite a few boxes down, we started going through them and pulling out the things he wanted to load into the trunk to take back to L. A. Then we carried those items out of the garage and stacked them on the kitchen counter. Once we got organized, it went quicker than either of us had imagined. After an hour and a half, we were almost finished.

Chick was up on the ladder, pulling out a big box of Evelyn's journals. I picked up the list that he had left next to the wine bottle. I read the last item: "E's paintings?'

"I didn't know Evelyn was a painter:' I said to Chick, who was up on the ladder with his back to me.

"Yeah, she wasn't real accomplished, like you are, but she used to like working with watercolors. Still lifes mostly. She said painting relaxed her. There's a slew of them up here somewhere?'

I glanced down at the list, and then turned it over to make sure there were no more items on the reverse side. That's when my heart froze. The list was written on the back of an invoice from the Fawnskin gas station. The date on the top was today's. It was the receipt he'd just gotten for putting the chains on the Mercedes.

The list was less than three hours old.