Double Black (Ski Diva Mystery Series) [NOOK Book]

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ONE

When Stacey Curtis found the dead man on the bed, she knew it was time to get her own apartment.

The writing had been on the wall for a while and she’d ignored it for as long as she could. These empty condos on the mountain were convenient—they had clean sheets and plenty of hot water and maybe even a packet of somebody’s left-behind instant oatmeal to toss in the microwave come morning—and it seemed like a shame to let them sit unused. Especially when she was new in town, just sprung from an engagement gone bad, and living out of a tip jar.

A tip jar and an ’87 Subaru, to tell the whole truth.

But everything changed when she flicked on the light and found this total stranger in this strange bed, blood everywhere, and the jagged oily chain from a chain saw yanked tight around his neck. She knew right away that it was time to move on.

At first she thought the thing around his neck was barbed wire. Why not? She didn’t exactly make a study of it, not that she’d have recognized the chain for what it was if she’d found it in the hardware store. Stacey Curtis, born and raised in the Back Bay and only recently arrived here in the Green Mountain State minus any kind of support system, had no experience with that sort of thing. Chain saws, that is. Or murder.

No wonder she spent a few minutes in the Italian-marble master bathroom before she called 911.

At least they had 911 up here in the woods. She didn’t have a lot of confidence that it was going to work (Wouldn’t that have been great? You call 911 and you get that voice saying your call cannot be completed as dialed? What do you do next?), but she pressed the buttons and listened and the call went through just like that. God knows where the dispatch center was. Boston, for all she knew. India, for that matter, although the operator sounded like a Yankee. Stacey held the phone in a hand that was still gloved and gave the Yankee Indian lady a name that was not hers and told her that the problem was a dead man. A dead man in the bed. A dead man in the bed who looked for all the world as if he’d been strangled or something at least. Yes, strangled. With some kind of a spiky chain.

She stood in the bedroom door with the portable phone to her ear and she tried not to look at the dead man but she looked anyhow. The chain was all kind of dug into his neck and one bent-up end of it was lying across the pillow.

Yes, she said, there was blood. No, he wasn’t breathing. Yes, she’d just come in the door and found him that way.

She turned her back on the dead man and doing that gave her the creeps even worse so she turned back, because at least this way she could keep an eye on him.

What address? She didn’t know, exactly. Snowfield Condos. Building D. That much she was sure of. As for the unit number, she mumbled something about how the shock must have blanked out her memory and took the cordless and went to see what it said on the door. Going back inside the condo took everything she had, what with the dead man on the bed and all, but she did it rather than stand out there in the hallway where somebody might see her. She closed the door and told the lady that yes, she’d wait for the sheriff. And then she hung up the phone, grabbed her pack, pulled her cap down over her ears, and got the hell out.

So she’d have to sleep in the Subaru. She’d done it before. And come morning she’d hit the slopes and come afternoon she’d go to work and one way or another it would all blow over.

By the time Stacey started her three o’clock shift at the Broken Binding, Tina Montero had it all figured out. A local from the ground up, Tina knew everybody in town and didn’t mind talking about them. She’d been the Binding’s best customer for years. She’d lied about her age and downed her first beer at the Binding in the sixties, back when the place was brand-spanking new and the distressed barnboard paneling was only for show. Back when it was called the Broken Binding for the first time. She’d held on through a brief period in the seventies when a group of German investors rechristened it the Edelweiss and gave it a new dining room with a hokey Bavarian theme. She’d endured a number of dark years that followed, when the ’Weiss (those in the know said "Vice") passed from hand to hand until a drunk with a snowplow took the sign out for good and the place reached its low point as a biker bar with no name that anybody knew for sure. And now that Pete Hardwick had arrived as its savior—Pete Hardwick with his investment banking fortune, Pete Hardwick who gave the Broken Binding back its original name and décor in a move that could only be described as retro sentimentality—Tina Montero felt right at home.

"I used to babysit for that one," she said as she took her usual place at the bar. "And if you want me to tell you about him in a single word, it’s pain-in-the-ass."

Stacey always felt this way when Tina started a conversation. As if she’d arrived right in the middle of something, something that she wasn’t entirely sure she had any interest in. " ‘That one’?" she asked.

"The dead one."

"Oh, that ‘that one.’ "

"David. David Paxton. I babysat him. His brother was older. I babysat David."

"So you said." Stacey had been hearing about the dead man all day long—on lift rides and in the ladies’ room and over the boot dryer outside the cafeteria—and although she would rather have put it out of her mind, she kept alert to any rumor that might involve a young woman and a 911 call and some shadowy prowler in a beat-up Subaru. Four or five fresh inches of snow had fallen overnight, though, and between the skiers and the plows she was pretty certain she’d left no trace.

Tina was still going on, clarifying. "He was the younger one, David. By maybe five or six years. I don’t know exactly. Ricky was older, anyhow."

"I thought he went by Richie."

"Old habits die slow, honey. I always called them David and Ricky. Like the Nelsons."

Stacey shook her head, trying to dislodge the reference and failing.

"That old TV show," Tina went on. "Ozzie and Harriet."

"Still nothing," Stacey said.

"Never mind. Anyhow, that younger one was a royal pain in the ass."

"So you said."

"Not like his brother. Ricky was always sweet as pie. At least to me."

"His brother. Richie."

"David was sharp, though. You got to grant him that. Sharp as a tack."

"I’ll bet."

"A lot of good it did him." She raised her chardonnay in a sorry toast. "He crossed somebody and brought it on himself."

"You think?"

"If I know him. And I know him."

"You knew him."

"If you know the child, you know the man."

"I suppose."

"Besides, what man isn’t just a little boy anyhow?"

"You’ve got that right." She was thinking of her failed engagement.

Tina tilted her half-empty glass and ran the bottom in circles on the coaster. There was something else on her mind and she would not be long in letting it out. At last she righted the glass and looked square at Stacey. "You know something? They say there was a woman involved."

"They say that?" she said, wiping at a glass. "Who?"

"People."

"How come?"

"The 911 call. Word is, there was some gal made it. Nobody knows who."

"Really."

"Folks say he’d already been dead a while, though."

"Who’d know that kind of thing?"

"Dead a while when she called, I mean. A day anyhow. Maybe more."

"Who’d say—"

"I can’t tell." Zipping her lip. "Folks who ought to know, is all."

"Hmm."

"Speaking for myself, though—if there was a woman, I don’t think she had anything to do with it. If there was a woman. David crossed somebody and got himself killed and maybe some gal knew about it but she sure as heck didn’t do it. I think maybe she knew about it and she got cold feet. Who wouldn’t? Imagine that body laying there all by its lonesome. Just all by its lonesome in that bed. Imagine that."

Stacey winced. "Don’t make me."

"If any woman could know about a thing like that and didn’t call the sheriff, I’d be surprised."

Stacey dragged her attention back to the job she was being paid to do, back to the bar at the Broken Binding, where nobody was dead and life went on. "You want another chardonnay?"

"In a minute." Tina was building up to something and she wasn’t going to let a second drink get in the way of it. "Anyhow," she said, "if you want my take on it, that’s as much as there’s any woman involved. To begin with, David wasn’t like that."

" ‘Like that.’ " Stacey was lost all over again, trying her best to catch up.

"Like that with women."

"Like that with women—"

"I’m sorry, honey. I forget you haven’t been around as long as I have." Tina pushed her glass to one side and leaned forward over the bar, her décolletage straining for what would not be the last time this evening. "David was queer," she said. "Folks knew that when he was still in the Cub Scouts."

Before the après-ski rush kicked in, Stacey went back into the cooler for some alone time. She kicked herself for having not spent at least part of the day looking for an apartment, but between the four or five inches of new snow and the dead man who wouldn’t stay out of her head there was just no way she could stop skiing early. And now here she was back at the Binding, having cleaned herself up as usual in the lavishly equipped employee locker room that those big-spending Germans hadn’t been able to live without and the bikers hadn’t been able to ruin no matter how many lines of coke they must have snorted off all those stainless-steel countertops. God bless ’em, those Germans built things to last. Maybe when the Subaru finally gave out—if it ever gave out—she’d find herself a nice used VW.

So here she was, taking a moment for herself in the cooler. The cooler full of cases and kegs of beer and God knows what-all pre-made and raw stuff for the kitchen, the cooler that stayed a steady thirty-eight degrees night and day. Thirty-eight degrees was a lot warmer than it was going to be overnight in the Subaru, and the steadiness of it was a comfort. It was high time she had something steady in her life, even if she had to put on her jacket and go into the cooler and sit on a keg of Magic Hat to enjoy it. She stayed there as long as she dared, loaded up her apron with a pile of lemons and limes, and went back out to brave the crush.

Excerpted from Double Black by Wendy Clinch.
Copyright © 2009 by Wendy Clinch.
Published in January 2010 by Minotaur Books.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.