He checked his watch, frowned, and said, “Oh, I thought it was a few minutes later than this.”
“Nope, I’m on time,” she said, giving him a bright, cheerful smile. “How was it yesterday?”
“It was fine,” he said. “I did ask if you could work yesterday too.”
“And I probably should have,” she said, “since my trip up the mountain yesterday turned out quite differently than what I had intended.”
“Huh. I heard somebody had a near miss,” he said.
She glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at her. “There are always a lot of near misses,” she said and got right to work. A couple hours later, when she grabbed yet another cup of coffee, her boss looked at her and cleared his throat before speaking.
“Did you come up with anything else to bring in some business?”
She looked around and saw four or five people already in the store. “Today seems pretty good, business-wise.”
“Sure, but tomorrow won’t be,” he said, in that perpetually glum tone of his.
“Maybe it will be,” she said. She was the eternal optimist, and he was the eternal pessimist. But somehow, most of the time, they got along very well. She had to admit she had messed up a time or two, and he hadn’t really appreciated that, but what could he do when it was all a learning experience for her? She’d thought about other marketing ideas to bring in more customers but wasn’t sure that he’d be up for any of her ideas after the last one.
He had a tendency to claw onto the negative and to hang onto it way too long. She was the opposite. She liked to keep trying new things, until she found something that worked. While she sat here at the front counter, she polished off the first muffin and then ate the second.
He looked at her and asked, “Did you not eat this morning?”
“No,” she said. “I brought these two muffins, but I’m still hungry. I’ll get lunch from across the street, maybe grab a sandwich.”
“I brought a bunch of sandwiches,” he said. “You can have one of those.”
She looked at him in surprise. He wasn’t well-known for his generosity. She beamed and said, “Thank you. I could really use it.”
He motioned toward the small fridge he kept in the office. “Go ahead and grab one. I think I brought like four today. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Hey, it’s perfect for me,” she said with a bright smile. She raced into the office, as no customers were at the cash register, then snagged the top sandwich, and came back out. Even before she got back to the cash register, she’d taken several bites.
“You must be really hungry.”
“I am,” she said. “Must have been the day on the mountain.”
“Maybe,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I skied.”
“Go back to it,” she said, in that encouraging voice.
He shook his head. “No, people die on the mountain.”
At that, she stopped, froze for a long moment, and then nodded slowly. “That’s very true,” she said. “They do.” She frowned because it seemed like her voice suddenly got thick, almost tense, and she didn’t know why. She turned and looked at him and asked, “Did anybody you know die on the mountain?”
“Why would you think that?”
“I just thought it would be a horribly personal thing to have happened.”
“Well, it would be,” he said. “It’s bad enough to lose anybody you care about, but, on a mountain like this, even worse.”
“Why a mountain like this?”
“It’s very unforgiving,” he said, staring at her in surprise.
“I just never looked at it that way,” she said.
“That’s because you don’t live here,” he said with a nod.
She found that almost insulting. “Well, I do live here,” she said. “I just haven’t been here for very long.”
“I meant, you’re a newcomer,” he said, by way of explanation.
“Well, everybody is a newcomer,” she said, in that matter-of-fact tone of voice, “until they’ve been here long enough.”
He rolled his eyes at her. “Meaning, you aren’t an old-timer because you don’t know all the old stories or some of the old happenings.”
“Like what?”
“Well, we had a serial killer at one point in time,” he said, “and he murdered young women on the mountain.”
“Really?”
“He was a ski instructor at the time, and he’d pick his victims from his students.”
“Wasn’t that like setting himself up to get caught? It seems a little too obvious.”
“Well, it still took a long time for him to get caught, if that’s the case,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t know much about it, but it took them over a decade to actually find him. I think it was because he was poisoning his victims. Once the cops figured that out, then further autopsies and drug panels helped solve those cases. They did get him in the end though. He died in jail a few years back.”
“Wow,” she said. “That’s terrible.”
“Yes, it was,” he said. “I lived here during that decade, and it was a terrible time.”
“Is that why you don’t go skiing now?”
“That’s one of the reasons. But it really doesn’t matter. It’s not like I’ll be taking any ski lessons, and it’s not like some serial killer will target me,” he said with a shrug.
She wasn’t so sure about that. A lot of women—young women—went after old men, if they had assets. And Aspen was full of very wealthy people. On second thought, her boss, Jerry, wasn’t exactly a wealthy old man. “I don’t think you have enough money for somebody to murder you,” she said cheerfully.
He snorted. “If that is one of the prerequisites, then, no, I definitely don’t.”
She grinned at him. “Besides, isn’t it time you got a girlfriend?”
“What is the correlation between our last conversation and this one?” he asked in exasperation.
Blithely she shook her head and said, “No clue. But, hey, it’s what came to mind.”
“And it seems like whatever comes to your mind,” he snapped, “comes flying out of your mouth, without any regard for the conversation at hand.”
“I’ve always been this way,” she said, trying not to dim her enthusiasm.
“Well, you’re even worse today,” he said, groaning. “I’ll head back to my office and get some work done.”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll be right here.”
As a customer came toward her to check-out, Gabby turned with a smile. “Hi,” she said. “Let me help you with those.” As she reached for the items to ring them up, she started in on a conversation, asking if the woman had found what she was looking for, if she needed anything else, and was she looking for any other books. By the time the woman had left, her boss was back out again, a glare on his face.
“Now what?” she said, raising her hands.
“Don’t be so chatty,” the boss growled. “That poor woman was trying to get away from you, and you were talking so much.”