Murder in Vail (2 page)

Chapter Two

In wet feet, her short blonde hair still dripping, Sally tiptoed quickly on the black-and-white square tiles of the foyer past the wide central staircase to the front door and opened it. A slender woman in a tan suede coat with a white fur collar and matching fur-rimmed ski cap, stood in the doorway.

“Good grief, Mom. Couldn’t you at least get dressed to greet us?”

“Nice to see you too, Gwen.” Sally stepped forward to hug her thirty-three-year-old daughter.

“Don’t touch me!” Gwen exclaimed, jumping back. “You’re all wet. This is suede.”

Sally stepped back and finished drying her arms with the towel.

Gwen eyed her mother’s bathing suit. “How can you swim when it’s snowing outside, Mom?” she asked, frowning. “Can’t you skip it just one day?

“No, I can’t, Gwen,” Sally answered. “Anyway, the pool is heated. I don’t even notice the cold.”

Goldie and Silver, Sally’s blond and grey Labradoodles, came running down the stairs from an upstairs bedroom and leapt on the visitor.

“Goldie, get down!” Gwen said, trying to push the blond dog off.  The second she was successful in getting Goldie to obey, Silver jumped on her.

“Goldie, Silver, come here,” Sally called to them. But it didn’t do any good. The excited dogs kept jumping on Gwen.

“Mother, please get the dogs off of me. They’re going to ruin my coat!” Gwen cried. “Can’t you control them?”

Sighing, Sally took both dogs by their collars, pulled them through the open front door into the snow, and then shut the door quickly behind them.

Gwen made a show of brushing off her coat and examining it for any signs of stains. Finally convinced no damage had been done, she took off her large sunglasses and pulled off the fur cap, carefully smoothing her shoulder-length, strawberry blonde hair.

Sally stepped over to look through one of the long vertical window panes that ran alongside the front door as she tied the towel around her waist. “Where’s Glen? He came along, didn’t he?”

“He’s taking forever getting the luggage.” Gwen opened the door a crack. “Glen! Glen! What’s taking you so long? Hurry up!”

Gwen and Glen. Everyone thought that was so cute, so sweet. But there was nothing sweet about the relationship between Sally’s daughter and her husband.

“Coming, Your Majesty!” an irritated male voice yelled back from the driveway. That was followed by, “Get down. Get down!” to the dogs.

“Mom, why can’t you hire more help?” Gwen complained. “Every year we have to drag all of our luggage in ourselves. There’s no one around to help with anything.”

“It’s good exercise,” Sally responded tartly. “Maybe you should try helping him.”

Gwen rolled her eyes, ignored her mother’s comment, and strode through the foyer into the living room. Sally noticed small snow spots on the back of her daughter’s suede coat but said nothing. Everyone knew better than to wear suede in the snow.

In the center of the vast living room, a huge stone fireplace stretched two stories high. The entire wall surrounding it was glass from floor to ceiling, yielding a spectacular view of the snow-covered Rocky Mountains and the gorgeous snow-tipped Douglas firs that covered the landscape. Huge leather couches, rustic bookcases crammed with books, coffee tables scattered with magazines, Oriental rugs, and fresh flowers filled the room. On one wall was Sally’s favorite watercolor, one she’d painted the year after her husband died, of the very scene they were gazing at now from these windows.

A huge Christmas wreath was centered on the stone chimney, decorated with delicate white angels, silver ribbons, and baby’s breath flowers. A matching garland hung across the wide mantel of the fireplace. In the corner stood a beautifully decorated 30-foot high blue spruce Christmas tree with hundreds of tiny white lights, huge silver balls, and an intricately sculptured white angel blowing Gabriel’s horn at the top.

Gwen stopped to admire the tree. “The tree really is pretty,” she complimented. Then, gazing around the rest of the room, her critical eye focused on the floor. “But, honestly Mom, when are you going to get rid of those hideous rugs? They’re such an eyesore.”

Well, we’re off to a good start,
Sally thought with an inner sigh, ignoring her daughter’s annual insult about the rugs. Sally would never replace those rugs. She and her husband bought them on their honeymoon.

The front door flew open and a tall man with receding brown hair and the beginning of a spare tire around the middle came banging into the foyer pulling two large suitcases and carrying a shoulder bag on each arm.

“We should have brought Joseph with us,” Glen grumbled, referring to their butler back in Palm Beach.

The dogs dashed in behind him, slipping and sliding on the tile floor. Goldie bumped Glen’s leg and one of the bags slipped off his arm and fell on the floor.

“Be careful!” Gwen shrieked, running to the bag. “My cosmetics are in there!”

“I am not your man-servant,” Glen hissed at her. “Don’t talk to me like that!” Setting down the bags, he took off his beige trench coat and shook off the snow.

“I’ll take that, Glen,” Sally said pleasantly, taking the coat to the hall closet. “How’s everything in Florida?”

“Warm. We must have been crazy to leave that weather to come up here.” He gave his mother-in-law a surprised look. “Mom, what in the world are you doing in your bathing suit? Please tell me you haven’t been swimming in this weather!”

Sally cringed as she always did when her son-in-law called her “Mom.” She wasn’t his mother, and she had asked him to call her “Sally” when he married her daughter. But Glen switched to the overly personal name early on. They had never been close, and it felt like a pretense.

“Unless there’s a blizzard, I’ll be swimming,” she replied with a smile.

Glen rubbed his arms and gazed around the vast room. “It’s chilly in here.”

“I was just getting ready to build a fire. Glen, would you be a dear and do it for me while I go change?” Sally asked.

Glen seemed taken aback. “Me? Build a fire?”

Sally tried not to smile. She enjoyed giving him little assignments to see how he would react. Glen was selling boats in Miami and hanging out at South Beach bars when he met her daughter. He had become accustomed to money very quickly.

“Yes, the woodpile is out on the deck.”

Glen frowned. “Mom, I don’t understand why you don’t have a staff up here to take care of those kinds of things. This is just too much.”

“I do just fine, Glen. I have Helga. She’s all I need. She’s a fabulous cook and housekeeper—and a darn good Yahtzee player, too. We get along great.”

Gwen shook her head and pursed her lips.

“Mother, you really shouldn’t fraternize with the help,” her daughter lectured her. “She’ll just take advantage of you. She’s probably stealing from you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Helga’s been with me for years. She’s a friend.”

At that moment, a stocky woman in her fifties with graying blonde hair came into the room. It was apparent from her manner that she had overheard the conversation.

“Your bedroom ready for you upstairs,” she told Gwen brusquely with a thick Scandinavian accent. She immediately turned and left the room.

Sally glared at her daughter. “Great, Gwen! Now you’ve offended her!”

It certainly didn’t long for the trouble to start,
Sally thought angrily.
Why did she always find herself apologizing for her children?

Upset with her daughter, she started to follow Helga to the kitchen, but couldn’t resist turning back to say, “By the way, Gwen, you have snow spots on the back of your coat.”

Gwen shrieked, craning her neck around to see the stains.

Sally spent the next ten minutes apologizing to Helga for her daughter’s rude comments. But Sally could tell that Helga was turning a deaf ear. She’d spent too many Christmases with Sally’s children.

Helga had been with Sally for twelve years, from the time the youngest Braddock child had gone off to college. Helga came highly recommended from another Vail household that had sold their estate and moved two hours southwest to Aspen. Looking for a live-in situation, Helga moved into the downstairs bedroom of the Vail house and had taken care of the estate whenever Sally and her husband were in Canada.

Always close, Sally and Helga had become almost inseparable after Jack died. Sally looked to Helga to keep the large estate running smoothly, and Helga took great pride in the running of the house, almost as if it were her own. But she had never warmed to Sally’s children, and there were skirmishes every time they came home. Her children hadn’t grown up with Helga, and at times saw her as an interloper. Sally knew Helga felt the same way about them.

Chapter Three

After her shower, Sally dressed in a light pink warm-up suit, crossed by the staircase, and walked to her daughter’s room midway down the long hall.

“Gwen,” she said, tapping lightly, and talking through the door. “I have to run into town to pick up a few things. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

“No, no, wait, Mom!” Gwen called. “I want to go with you. I need to buy a new coat. I can’t wear this one.”

Sally groaned. She had hoped for a peaceful shopping trip without a constant barrage of complaints and orders from her daughter.

“All right.” Sally sighed. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

Sally waited for nearly half an hour in the living room before her daughter appeared. She started to say something about the long wait, but decided to avoid an argument this early in her daughter’s visit.

No apology, just a “C’mon, Mom!” when Sally took a second too long to put on her ski jacket.

Sally could feel the color climbing up her neck, but she was determined to keep her cool. “Only three days,” she kept telling herself.

Gwen was wearing a light purple cashmere sweater, slim-fit black Prada pants, and a Balenciaga white scarf. On her arm was a purple purse.

“Interesting purse,” Sally said, as they walked to the car. “Is it new?”

“Yes! Can you believe it? I was able to find one of Marc Jacobs’ crocodile handbags.”

Sally had heard of the designer, but the kind of purse meant nothing to her except that an animal had died for it.

“I’m afraid to ask how much it cost.”

“A little more than most of my other ones.”

“And how much would that be?”

“Fifty.”

“Fifty dollars? Pretty good bargain.”

Gwen burst out laughing. “You are kidding, aren’t you? You know I meant fifty thousand.”

Sally shouldn’t have been surprised knowing her daughter’s spending habits. But she was floored at that price tag.

“For a purse? That’s disgraceful.”

“A little high. But, Mom, in Palm Beach, it’s important to keep up. Some of the women down there spend a lot more than that.”

“You know, Gwen, when I graduated from high school, I took some of the money I got as gifts and bought the most expensive purse I’d ever owned. It cost thirty-five dollars. A beautiful beige leather purse—the first purse I ever had that was real leather. And three days later, the lid fell off a felt-tipped pen and left a huge black circle on the side of my new purse. It was ruined, and I was sick. My high school boyfriend laughed at me and said it served me right for wasting that much money on something as silly as a purse. And you know what? He was right. I haven’t bought an expensive purse since.”

“You should have been more careful with your things, Mom.”

“That’s not the point, Gwen. The point is that it’s just a purse. It’s ridiculous to pay that much money for something to carry your stuff around in.”

Gwen rolled her eyes. “Mom, you’re living in the past. Next you’re going to tell me you walked miles in the snow every day to get to school.”

“Well, I lived in Southern California, so I didn’t walk through the snow, but I did walk over a mile to school each way every single day.”

“Mom, seriously. Stop living in the past! You need to be living in the here and now. And now, good purses are expensive.”

Gwen opened the car door and stepped into the passenger seat, putting an end to the conversation. Sally just shook her head, took another deep breath, and got in the driver’s side of her four-wheel drive Jeep Wrangler. It didn’t matter how much money they had, she would never understand such wastefulness.

On the twenty-minute drive down the mountain, Sally barely said a word as Gwen began a nonstop tirade against Glen.

“He’s gone all the time, Mom. He’s always down at the marina. All he cares about are those damned boats. He owns five of them! All different sizes for whatever his whim of the day is. And, Mom, you know I don’t like being out on the water. I get seasick.”

Sally nodded, trying to look sympathetic, but privately wondered if part of the reason Glen went boating so much was because Gwen didn’t like to go.

“He
was
selling boats when you met him,” Sally reminded her.

“I know that, Mother! But I thought it was just a job. I didn’t know he was obsessed.”

“It’s a shame you don’t share a common interest with Glen. Your father and I—”

“It’s like now that he has money, he wants to buy every boat he used to sell!” Gwen interrupted.  “And he always goes back to the place in Miami where he used to work to buy them. He loves flaunting it at them.”

“Does he discuss it with you before he buys a new one?” Sally asked.

“No! And now, he’s looking at buying a yacht. He wants to totally gut it and renovate it. Teak everywhere, gold faucets, even a swimming pool on the deck. Do you know how expensive that will be? It will cost millions.”

Sally sighed in disgust. What a waste. What would her husband say?

“Can’t you discourage him from buying it? Is he able to get to your money without your approval?” Sally asked with concern.

Gwen turned away sullenly. She nodded. “Yes. He can spend whatever he wants. I was stupid. Everything is in a joint account. He seemed offended when the lawyer brought up a different arrangement before we got married, so I insisted everything be put in a joint account so that we would have equal access to the money.”

As they drove down the mountain on the narrow, two-lane road, the thick forests of snow-tipped firs and spruce trees began to thin out and were replaced by clusters of the tall white trunks and golden leaves of aspen trees. The snow also stopped about halfway down the mountain.

Interstate 70 came into view, and Sally turned left onto the highway to drive into the village of Vail. The traffic was heavier than usual with both visiting skiers spending the holidays in Vail and local residents doing their last-minute Christmas shopping.

“Mom, speed up. Everybody is passing you left and right,” Gwen instructed. “You’d never make it in South Florida. They’d blow you right off the road.”

“As you can see, Gwen”—Sally gestured to the tall piles of packed snow by the roadside—“we are not in South Florida. You’re at sea level. We’re up 8,000 feet. When you’re driving on roads that could be icy, you need to take it a little slower.”

Ignoring her, Gwen continued to backseat drive. “Mom, go around the Winnebago,” she said, leaning forward and pointing to the passing lane. “You’re tailgating.”

With growing exasperation, Sally told her, “You know, Gwen, I don’t know how I’ve managed to survive driving for nearly forty years without you right here by my side telling me what to do every second.”

Her daughter responded matter-of-factly, “I don’t know either.”

Turning off the highway, Sally pulled into the Vail Village parking structure, took a token, and drove up to the top level, her daughter instructing her on precisely which parking space to take.

As they walked down the wide pedestrian walkways of the picturesque Alpine village, they crossed through a quaint covered bridge over a fast-flowing stream bubbling with whitewater. Every hotel, restaurant, retail store, and business on the pedestrian street resembled a Swiss chalet, with gabled rooftops, exposed beams, and intricately carved railings on each balcony. All were aglow with twinkling white Christmas lights, and bright red poinsettias hung from every balcony. Looming high above the village were the snow-covered peaks and winding ski runs of the tallest ski mountain in Colorado.

While Vail had the look of a nineteenth century Bavarian village, it actually had been built in the early 1960s, when World War II veterans of the mountain ski patrol discovered the challenging ski mountains and opened the Vail ski resort. Today, the village included dozens of hotels and ski lodges, elegant restaurants, boutiques, spas, and a golf course. It had also become a center for nature studies as well as symphony, dance, film, and other cultural events.

“I need to go to the ski shop,” Sally said, as they strolled past busy restaurants and boutiques, crowded with holiday shoppers. “I want to buy a new pair of ski boots. My left one has a big crack in it. And I’d like to buy Helga a ski cap and scarf that I saw advertised a couple of weeks ago to go along with her Christmas bonus.”

A sheepish expression crossed Gwen’s face. “Look Mom, I’m sorry that Helga heard what I said and that she’s upset. But you really should be careful about getting too close with the help. You never know what people are really like. I worry about you.”

Sally appreciated her daughter’s apology and concern, and told her so, but she ignored the unsolicited advice about Helga. She trusted her longtime housekeeper completely.