"Huh?"
"Your fingernails," Jane explained.
Katie held her hands out and stared at them as if they didn't belong to her. "Euuw, gross! Fungus city!"
"We met this ski instructor yesterday—" Denise said.
They both squealed in ecstasy.
"He said he'd give us a lesson if we'd come over there," Katie continued.
"Where is over there?" Jane asked.
"Down the road. We take the shuttle. Nobody even has to drive us. We just need lift tickets and money for ski rental and boots and poles and lunch—"
"About ten dollars, then?" Jane asked.
"Ten dollars! Mom!"
Shelley intervened. "Girls, everything you want to do here is free and there's lots to do. Starting with breakfast. Go get dressed and you can come down to the lodge with us." When they'd gone, she said, "I saw the ski instructor in question yesterday. He's a thirty-five-year-old lech."
"His age and 'lechiness' weren't even an issue. If Katie's going to break any limbs, she's going to have to find a cheaper way to do it. I was glancing at some ads in the airport while Mel was looking around for what the airline had done with Willard. The prices for lift tickets and equipment rental were astonishing. Oh, Shelley, do we really ever have to go home?" She strolled over to the living room windows and gazed out. "This place is beautiful."
"It is, isn't it?"
Jane drew back, startled. "Oh, it's a cat! I thought it was a big snowball come to life!" A large white cat was sitting on the woodpile at the end of the deck outside. It turned and stared, green-eyed and smug, at Jane for moment, then hopped over the rail and out of sight.
There was a skier sweeping gracefully down the slight incline exposed between the trees. The blue sky, the green-black pines, the shimmering brilliance of the snow, and the skier's crimson pants and jacket created a breathtaking palette of color. As Jane watched, the skier came to a stop, put his (or was it a woman's?) hands on hips for a minute, then held up a pair of binoculars and took a look around.
"It reminds me of Switzerland," Jane said. "My sister, Marty, and I went to a boarding school there once for a semester. Of course, we were just dumb kids and didn't care about the scenery — only about the ski instructors, come to think of it. But even we came out of our haze of hormones once in a while and noticed that it was spectacular."
"What were you two doing in a boarding school? I thought your parents always took you with them on their postings."
"They did, but my dad was on a stint in some particularly unstable little Balkan country — Holnagrad. Hole in the Ground, we used to call it."
"Holnagrad!" Shelley exclaimed.
"What? You've heard of it?"
"Just yesterday. That's where the historical-society people here are from. Well, not exactly directly from, but their ancestors were."
"The historical — oh, Abe Lincoln and crowd. Are the girls making any progress? I'm starving."
After trying unsuccessfully to hurry their daughters, Shelley and Jane gave up waiting and went ahead. Although it was some distance to the lodge by road, there was a shoveled path running behind the cabins and alongside a crystal-clear stream. The path cut directly through the woods and came out behind the main building. Jane had only seen the front entrance the evening before and was astonished that daylight revealed a very large, sprawling building. The exterior was rough, of large logs and cedar shingles, but banks of spotless windows glittered in the sunlight. Rustic-chic, Jane would have called it if forced to sum up the style.
"There are all sorts of meeting rooms in that wing. There's even computer hookups, modems, and a mini-travel-agency service," Shelley said, acting the tour guide. "At the end is a really elegant restaurant that overlooks the lake this little stream runs into. In the central section there's an indoor pool, an outdoor pool for summer use, saunas, exercise rooms — no, don't panic, nobody's going to make you exercise — a casual restaurant, where we're headed, and a beauty shop. The wing that goes down the hill in stair-step fashion — you can't see much of it from here — has shops, game rooms, a library and a bookstore and I don't know what all else."
They entered through a door by the outside pool, passed alongside the indoor pool, where a few alarmingly healthy individuals were doing morning laps, and emerged into the central lobby just as Mel and the boys entered from the front.
"Jane! You're up," Mel said, surprised. "I thought you'd want to sleep in."
Her sons, Mike the senior in high school and Todd the middle schooler, greeted her and asked for money for 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?"