Alpine for You Read online

  I’d brought along a disposable Kodak FunSaver Outdoor camera with twenty-seven exposures. I’d thought about splurging and buying the panoramic version, but I didn’t want to be too showy. “You know how to use all those filters and things?”

  “Oh sure. I used to be a photographer for National Geographic years ago.”

  I tried to mask my shock as I imagined Shirley Angowski traveling around the world on photo shoots for National Geographic. I wondered why she quit. Probably ended up in the wrong country too many times.

  “If I’m not back when it’s time to leave, will you come look for me, Emily?”

  “You bet.”

  She headed off on a trail that circled behind the hotel. I wouldn’t have any trouble finding her if she was late. She was wearing a raincoat that was Tweety Bird yellow and hung down to her ankles. It’d be pretty hard to lose her in the crowd.

  I longed to grab a table on the hotel terrace, order a fattening pastry and cup of coffee, and relax in the sun a while, but since every table was occupied, I decided to do some exploring on my own.

  I skirted around the sun worshipers in their bikini tops and shorts in the front of the hotel and ended up on a narrow pathway that hugged the craggy rock face of Pilatus’s summit. The trail was surprisingly isolated and overlooked a deep valley where evergreen forest, brown gorse, avalanched rock, and fractured sandstone sloped downward into a vast sea of cloud. In the distance, range upon range of saw-toothed mountain peaks punctured the cloud cover, while closer in, a jagged island of rock rose from the snow-white sea like a great spiny-backed reptile.

  I removed my camera from my shoulder bag and looked through the viewfinder. The valley. CLICK. The mountain ranges. CLICK. The spiny-backed reptile. CLICK. I walked farther along the trail, snapping more photos of fractured rock, zigzagging trails, alpine huts nestled on tiny triangles of grass between impossibly steep inclines. The vista was so spectacular, I wished I had sprung for the panoramic camera, no matter how showy. But I kept well back from the guardrail because I found the view rather dizzying. Understandable, considering the highest point in Iowa is probably the top of Lars Bakke’s grain elevator, and I’d never even climbed that.

  I strolled leisurely down the path, pausing every so often to ooh and ahh to myself, to snap more pictures, to stand and listen to the quiet. After rounding a blind curve, I was surprised to find a storage area cut into the rock with the doors thrown wide open. It was a huge cave of a room that tunneled through to the other side. Inside were coils of rope dangling from pegs in the wall, shovels, picks, snowblowing equipment, fencing made of orange mesh, wooden barriers painted red and white. A sign on the door read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. I wasn’t “authorized,” but if I wanted to catch the sights from the other side without hiking all the way around the mountain, this would be the perfect shortcut.

  I looked left and right. The coast was clear. Everyone was still back at the hotel drinking coffee and eating pastry on the terrace. I entered the cave and scurried through to the other side, shivering when the temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees. And it wasn’t any warmer when I walked out into the daylight. Unfortunately, I’d left the sun and all its warmth on the other side of the mountain. But this wasn’t so bad. At least I didn’t have to worry about my makeup melting.

  Ahead of me was a wooden guardrail. I inched toward it, peering down into a crevasse that bored its way downward into total blackness. I felt the bottoms of my feet tingle and inched slowly backward.

  “Hi, Emily.”

  I wheeled to my left and looked up. The trail ended at this point and gave way to a set of wooden stairs that laddered up the rock face to the summit. Shirley Angowski was standing halfway up the staircase, her right leg hooked over the railing in what looked like an impossible contortion.

  “Oh my God,” I shouted. “Don’t jump!”

  “Smile.” She aimed her big honking zoom lens at me and clicked her camera. “I’ll mail that to you when I get it developed.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d misread her acrobatics completely. No one about to commit suicide would promise to send me photos. I mean, film processing could take as long as two weeks with some discount companies. “Thanks,” I called up to her. “Just what I need. Another picture of myself with my mouth hanging open. You don’t look too safe up there. Aren’t you afraid you’ll fall?”

  “I used to teach gymnastics. You want to see me walk to the summit on the railing? It’s just like the balance beam.”

  I was delighted by the number of job opportunities open to people who were geographically challenged, but no way was I going to encourage this kind of suicidal behavior. “I hope you’re not serious!”

  Shirley laughed. “Just kidding. Balance beam wasn’t my specialty anyway. I was better at floor exercise.”

  “Well, be careful.”

  “You too.”

  I’d seen enough for now. Anxious to check in on Nana and to monitor the whereabouts of Helen and Lucille and Dick, I headed down the trail that flanked the shaded side of the mountain and eventually found myself walking through another tunnel. Along the thick outer wall, huge windows had been cut into the sandstone like embrasures in a castle wall to allow hikers unimpeded views of the mountainscape beyond. I stood at one lookout point, amazed to find a church perched at the very edge of a precipice on a flat of land below me. On a scraggly peak behind the church stood a solitary cross, dark against the endless bank of clouds. I found the sight of a church seven thousand feet up pretty inspiring, but I did wonder if they had an occasional problem with attendance.

  I arrived back at the visitors’ center to find Nana sitting alone on a bench on the flagstone belvedere outside the Hotel Bellevue. I sat down beside her and whipped off my sunglasses so she wouldn’t confuse me with the other hot Swiss babes on the mountain. “Did you find any souvenirs?”

  She checked over both her shoulders before removing a small plastic bag from a security pocket inside her raincoat. “I got the stuff,” she whispered.

  “That’s great,” I whispered back. “What stuff?”

  She eased one of her purchases out of the bag and cradled it in her hand. “The hair spray, Emily. Remember? I bought two. One for you and one for me. Travel size. Extra hold.”

  I regarded the container. The labeling was written in a language I couldn’t read, but that wasn’t the problem. “You bought a pump spray.”

  “Of course, dear. A pump is friendlier on the environment than an aerosol spray.”

  “But we can’t stop a killer with a pump. If we spray this in his face, all we’re going to do is give him a stiff upper lip. We need to blast him with an aerosol spray that has lots of chlorinated fluorocarbons to slow him down.”

  “I hadn’t thought a that. Maybe I should try to exchange this.”

  I ran a hand over my hair, thinking that a shot of hair spray with extra hold wasn’t a bad idea. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll pay you for both of these and you can go back to the shop and try to find the aerosol.”

  “My goodness, Emily, you don’t need to pay me. I’m rich. Remember?”

  I transferred the hair spray into my shoulder bag for later use. “Have you seen the Teigs and the Rassmusons by any chance?”

  “I seen ’em in that little Swiss Express diner inside the hotel there. They were at a table beside the Stolees and Jane Hanson. They have a pretty tight little circle, don’t they? Don’t open it up to no one.”

  Yeah. And Dick Rassmuson had the gall to complain about the New Englanders not mingling. “I think Lucille might have opened up the circle to Andy Simon at some point in time, if you catch my drift.”

  “No,” said Nana.

  “It came out at breakfast. It sounded very much as if Lucille and Andy had been lovers and Dick found out about it.”

  “So you think maybe it was Dick Rassmuson who killed Andy?” Nana made a sucking sound with her lips. “Wasn’t the Rassmuson company motto, We get rid of what’s buggin’ you? Sou
nds like Andy mighta been buggin’ Dick too much, so Dick got rid a him. Dang. This is gettin’ complicated.”

  “Just be careful when you’re around them.”

  Nana stood up. “I’m gonna buy that aerosol spray right now, and if I have to use it, I’ll offer up a novena about savin’ the ozone layer. Bernice and me are gonna eat lunch in that Swiss Express when she’s done in the souvenir shop. They’re havin’ a special on somethin’ called Rosti potatoes. You wanna join us?”

  “I feel like eating something more colorful. You go on without me. I’ll catch you later.”

  I wandered over to the Hotel Kulm and found my way into a casual dining room that boasted a definite alpine flair. Shiny wood booths. Banners emblazoned with crests of arms flying from exposed rafters. Beer steins perched on display shelves. Rams’ heads mounted on wooden plaques above the doors. Alpine horns and cowbells hanging on the walls. I found an empty booth next to a bank of windows and sat down. The sun was glaringly bright as it streamed through the window glass, so I left Shirley’s sunglasses on as I looked over the menu.

  “Hello, gorgeous.” From the tail of my eye I saw a man standing beside my booth, his voice, low, breathy, seductive. I looked up.

  “Hi, Wally.”

  He scrunched his eyes up like Superman doing his x-ray vision thing. “Emily? Is that you? I didn’t recognize you. Wow. You look really good today.”

  I’m not sure what that said about how I’d looked before today, but I decided not to go there. “Must be the weather conditions,” I suggested. “First time you’ve seen me in the sun.”

  “The sun. Right.” He smiled. I smiled back. He gawked. I gawked back. If we did much more of this, I figured I’d never get to order.

  “Would you care to join me for lunch?” I asked.

  “I’d love to.” He slid into the booth beside me.

  And since he was here, “So how’s that room change of mine coming?”

  “It shouldn’t be much longer. The Swiss are very efficient. Just cut them a little slack.”

  Easy for him to say. His room probably had windows. I returned my attention to the menu. “I suspect you’ve eaten here before. Do you have any recommendations?”

  “Yeah. How about we get together for drinks tonight at the Hotel Chateau Gutsch? It’s a really romantic spot, seventeen hundred feet up. There’s a little railway that takes you up to the hotel and a belvedere platform that gives you a great panoramic view of the city at night. If the fog lifts, you might even be able to see something. I’ll be free around nine o’clock. What do you say?”

  Ordinarily, I’d leap at the chance to have a drink with a man who was a snappy dresser, had an exciting career, was kind to old people, and who was a flaming heterosexual, but my hormones were sending me signals that Inspector Miceli had ruined me for all other men. Miceli hadn’t officially invited me to dinner yet, but what if he decided to invite me tonight? If I already had plans with Wally, I’d have to refuse him, and he might never ask me again. Was I prepared to suffer the consequences? I mean, I could be in danger of losing the love of my life by agreeing to climb seventeen hundred feet to ogle the same fog I’d seen by day, only darker.

  “That’s really nice of you to offer, Wally, but my grandmother already has me booked up for tonight.”

  “What about tomorrow night?”

  I was flattered by his persistence. Boy, I must look really good.

  A woman stopped at our booth at just that moment. Saved by the waitstaff, I thought. Only, I hadn’t decided what to order yet.

  “You’ll please excuse my intrusion, but there are no other booths available, so I need to join you.” Sonya slid onto the seat opposite us. Wally looked surprised, then irritated. Kind of hard to act the swain with an audience looking on. Whew.

  “The food here is excellent,” Sonya declared as she scanned the menu. “Natural food products. Unlike your country, there are no preservatives.”

  I guess that meant the Swiss had to eat their food really fast so it wouldn’t rot. I ordered vegetable lasagna. Wally ordered Hawaiian pizza. Sonya ordered some kind of noodles with cheese.

  “I ate some cheese at breakfast this morning,” I said. “It tasted pretty good. Swiss cheese, I think.” Okay, the cheese I’d eaten at breakfast didn’t taste any better than the packaged variety I bought at the Fareway Foods in Windsor City, but I was trying to be nice.

  Sonya slatted her eyes at me. “There is no such thing as Swiss cheese.”

  My mouth fell open. This was like learning there was no Santa Claus. “No such thing as Swiss cheese? Then what kind of cheese am I buying at Fareway that’s full of holes and is labeled ‘Swiss Cheese’?”

  “It’s called Gruyère or Emmenthaler. The same families have made Emmenthaler throughout the centuries. Their cows pasture in fields untouched by the pesticides that are used in your country. They ferment their milk in iron vats over wood-burning fires, which is best. In your country they use stainless-steel vats and everything is climate-controlled. The old-fashioned way is better.”

  Gee. Too bad she was so shy about rendering her opinion. “I suppose you make chocolate the old-fashioned way, too.”

  “Lindt and Sprungli are the finest chocolatiers in the world. And unlike your country, they use no preservatives or artificial flavors. You can trust me on this. I’m a local guide. I know everything.”

  “I’m big into artificial flavors myself,” I countered. “Strawberry licorice. Cherry lip balm. Green apple hydrating shampoo.”

  “Euw boy,” Wally said under his breath.

  Sonya’s eyes grew smaller, her words more pointed. “Have you tasted the water in Lucerne? Even our water is better than in your country. We have no pollution. No chemical contamination. No lead pipes. Our water is the purest in the world.”

  The waitress came with our food at that point, which was a good thing, because I didn’t know how much higher I could lift my feet to avoid all the manure Sonya was shoveling.

  She dug into her noodles and cheese. “Is that Emmanthaler cheese?” I asked her.

  She regarded the swill of melted cheese on her noodles. “It could be, but I’m not sure.”

  Imagine that. I guess she didn’t know everything after all. I cut into my lasagna and shoved a forkful into my mouth. I bit down. Scruuunch.

  Wally turned to me. “Did you hear something?”

  Unh-oh. I moved the food around in my mouth, probing hesitantly with my tongue. Noodles. Unnamed veggies. A short metal object. Something that felt like a chunk of one of my back teeth. My tooth? I’d broken my tooth? I scraped my tongue on a jagged protrusion where a molar used to be attached. Great. This was just great. The first edible food I’d found in Switzerland and it was booby-trapped.

  I spat what I’d been chewing into my napkin and plucked out a piece of one-inch metal that I brandished between my thumb and forefinger. “That was in your food?” exclaimed Wally. “God, what is it?”

  “It lookths like the pwong of a meat fock,” I slurred. I could understand why the Swiss had no lead in their water. They put it in their lasagna instead.

  Sonya eyed the metal somewhat skeptically. “The kitchens in our restaurants are the cleanest in the world, but…sometimes things escape our notice.” She shrugged. “What do you say in your country? Shit happens?”

  Wally eyed what else was in my napkin. “Is that your tooth? You broke your tooth?” He waved his arm, calling for our waitress. “This young woman has broken her tooth on a piece of metal that was in her lasagna. What do you intend to do about it?”

  Sonya explained the incident in a language the waitress could understand. For added effect, Wally lined up the metal prong and my tooth on the table and pointed maliciously to the lasagna as if to say, “Bad lasagna. Bad, bad lasagna.” If he didn’t make it as a tour guide, he had great potential as a mime.

  The waitress nodded apologetically and cleared away the metal prong and my dish of lasagna. “More?” she said, indicating the lasagna.<
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  Right. If I had more, maybe I could find the rest of the prong and nail the molar on the other side of my mouth. “I don’t tink sho.” I scraped my tongue on the remains of my tooth again and felt a throbbing pain swell in my jaw. I was just now realizing it hurt to talk, to swallow, to breathe.

  “They’ll compensate you,” Wally assured me. “This is Switzerland. They have a strong sense of justice here, fueled by the fear of litigation.”

  “Eat your peechah,” I slurred around the pain, nodding toward his untouched Hawaiian pizza. I didn’t need to urge Sonya to eat her food. She’d already bolted down her noodles and slapped some money onto the table as she stood up.

  “A pleasure dining with you. I’ll see you back at the bus a little after two.”

  I cushioned my jaw in my hand, jealously watching Wally devour his pizza. The waitress appeared sometime later and placed a huge piece of chocolate cake in front of me. “Waths this?” I asked.

  “To make up for your tooth,” she said. “How do you say in your country? It’s on the house.”

  “Crown’s ah expensif,” I complained to Wally after we left the restaurant. “Do dentishs in Swishlin take credit cahds?”

  “I’ll find out for you. Who ever heard of compensating you for a broken tooth with Black Forest cake. Though I have to admit, it was probably the best I’ve ever eaten. Maybe the best in the world.”

  That would make Sonya happy.

  I returned to the Hotel Bellevue and entered the Swiss Express looking for Nana. If she had no objection, I was hoping we could leave early and catch a taxi back to Lucerne so I could find a dentist. I couldn’t leave my tooth untreated. I was making hamburger of my tongue every time I opened my mouth to talk.

  I found Bernice eating a piece of Black Forest cake at a table by herself. I wondered if she’d broken a tooth, too. “Wersh Nana?” I asked her.

  She frowned at me. “What?”

  “Nana.” I pointed to the empty seat across from her. “Wheyr ish she?”

  “YOUR GRANDMOTHER?” she shouted back. I guess she couldn’t remember if her hearing aid was in or out, so she wanted to make sure she could hear herself. “She’s out taking pictures. She’s been back once already to buy more film. Said she found a cute little church in a place no one back home would believe.”