“Now I’ll just be even more of an oddity,” she said. “Pretty soon they’ll come into the bookstore just so they can see me. That would be a heck of a deal.” And not something she even wanted to think about. If her boss ever thought that would work, he’d be all over it.
By the time Wendy arrived to pick her up, Gabby was bored and tired of waiting. She jumped into the front seat and let her girlfriend drive her back home again. Once there, the other women, her roommates, were exclaiming, and some were even crying over her.
She just gave them all a smile and said, “I’m fine. Really. I’ll go have a bath and get to bed.”
Immediately they shared commiserating looks, and one of them spoke up. “Yes. Yes, that’s a good idea. You need that.”
Gabby went in to have her bath, but, instead of soaking and relaxing, she found herself full of energy and all keyed up. Instead of that fall wiping her out and shaking her up, it seemed like it had energized her. That worried her more than anything. Once in her small bedroom, the only space that was hers alone, she closed the door, pretending to need to sleep, when really she just wanted to be alone to think things through.
She hadn’t told anybody about the crazy message she’d received while she was on the mountain, and now she wasn’t even sure if she had actually heard it. It was just too far-fetched to believe. At the same time, if she had heard correctly, then somebody had whispered in her ear, in her head, and she needed to figure out how that worked, what that meant.
He’d said that he was Death. But since when did Death speak? So that part made no sense. She frowned, as she lay here in bed, looking on her phone, surfing for anything about the person that Damon had said died up on the mountain. It took a good hour, trying to stay quiet, hoping that her friends would all leave her alone.
Finally she found it. Or at least she had found out about one death on an Aspen mountain. Just a small article about this woman who had been hiding out in Aspen just seven years ago. After her death, the authorities found out she had been accused of murder in another state, although nothing could ever be pinned on her. The article didn’t explain how she died, just that it happened on the local mountain. The gossip about her took the forefront of that piece.
Immediately chills went up and down Gabby’s back. Murder? Since when did somebody come to Aspen to get away from murder charges?
She always thought of this as a resort town, a place where everybody came for fun and a holiday. Maybe that’s what a murderer had done? Maybe that’s how she enjoyed life and was coming here to get away? Gabby couldn’t find any of the details on who this woman supposedly murdered, only that she had died in a bad fall up on the mountain. And with one puzzle solved in her world—yet more murders happening here than she liked to know about—Gabby closed her eyes and somehow fell asleep.
*
Damon walked into the office several hours later, after checking out a stuck vehicle and some party revelers who were a little too drunk to make their way home safely. Damon was tired and fed up. He didn’t even know why he was here. He should have gone straight home. But something about that Gabby woman had him keyed up.
“What are you doing here?” asked his partner, Jake Perkins.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I should be home, sleeping.”
“Especially after boarding all day on ski patrol duty. And I hear you had quite an incident on your watch.”
“Bad news always travels fast, doesn’t it?” he muttered, shaking his head. “If you can believe it, she was that same idiot passing off the tarot card readings as being real.”
“Oh, her,” Jake said, then laughed hysterically. “That’s funny.”
“I don’t think it’s very funny,” he said. “Matter of fact, it feels very unfunny.”
“I don’t know about that,” Jake said. “For the rest of us, that whole tarot deal is bad news. But it’s not ugly news.”
“I get it,” he said. “She’s probably just fleecing a few bucks off some people. But more than that, she’s setting off a raging panic with those readings.”
“Sure, I suppose,” he said. “But it sounds like the mountain tried to teach her a lesson today. And you and I both know how ugly that mountain can get when she’s in a pissy mood,” he said. “The last thing we need is any more deaths.”
“I know. We were all hoping to get through a winter without any for once. Hasn’t happened yet.”
“Nope, it sure hasn’t. But we keep trying.”
“True enough,” he said. “It’s hard though. Out of nowhere, she just went flying, so badly I thought for sure she was a goner. When she took that last drop down, I couldn’t believe it when I came up over the rise to see her, sitting up, tucked against the mountain, petrified at where she landed. Any other person would have gone over the cliff.”
“True enough,” his partner said. “Obviously it was one hell of a lucky fall.”
“I know, and then she had the nerve to blame it on a ghost.”
Jake looked at him and sniggered again.
“It’s not funny,” Damon snapped. “When I asked her what the hell happened, she said she was pushed.”
“Pushed?” Jake stared at his partner in surprise.
“I know,” he said. “And I did see her out snowboarding, not that I knew who it was immediately, but I didn’t see anybody around her at the time, when suddenly she was careening off the mountain.”
“No, you’re right,” he said quietly. “That’s really strange.”
“It is, and I just don’t know what the hell is going on.”
“Well, you already thought she was two bricks short of a load after the tarot card stunt, right?”
At that, Damon rolled his eyes. “Can you believe it?” he said. “Like we haven’t got real crimes here to worry about.”
“Well, apparently not,” Jake said with another snigger.
Damon glared at his friend and said, “What? Am I supposed to put that ghost remark in the report?”
“Why not?” he replied. “It’s what she said.”
“True.” He thought about it, then shrugged. “Well, I can put it in italics at least. They can laugh all they want, but it’s the truth.”
“Exactly. Besides, we must be truthful. And, hey, maybe she’s setting up an insanity defense.”
“It’s not like she’s ripping people off though by almost falling to her death from the mountain,” Damon said, suddenly feeling the need to defend her. “And we only had the one anonymous complaint on her readings.”
“But what were they complaining about then?”
“Well, the woman lost her husband,” he said. “So she’s obviously acting out of grief. But she feels like Gabby should have known that what she said in the reading was the truth and should have done something to protect the woman’s husband.”
“Really?” Jake stared at him. “How does somebody protect somebody else from death? If she could bottle some of that, she’ll be a trillionaire in a heartbeat, right?”
“It just didn’t bear thinking about. And that’s assuming Gabby’s even correct in any of these premonitions, which, so far, we haven’t seen any actual proof of.”