Alpine for You Read online

  I wrestled with the possibility that I could be in the wrong place. “Did you say gold? I can’t wear gold. It turns my skin green. Do you have something a little less fancy?”

  “How much less fancy?”

  “Say, something that straps to your wrist and tells time?”

  She shoved the tray into the case and yanked out another. “This is called Paradiso and is made by Bucherer. It has a sapphire crystal, three interchangeable leather bracelets, and sells for 580 Swiss francs.”

  We were getting closer. “How much is that in American dollars?”

  She punched a few numbers on a nearby calculator. “Three hundred fifty-three dollars and eighty cents.”

  Three months’ worth of groceries. Hmm. “Do you carry Timex?”

  I caught up with Nana and Bernice just as the group was departing the area for the city tour. I buttoned the top button of my tomato red raincoat and pulled my hood over my head for warmth, but there was no hiding from the wind. I was already starting to shiver.

  “Did you find a watch?” Nana asked.

  “I sure did,” I said proudly. “And it’s a beauty.”

  Bernice didn’t find my enthusiasm contagious. “Did they forget to set the time for you? You almost missed the tour. Then what would you have done?”

  Right. Like there was a chance I could lose thirty name-tagged, white-haired, camera-toting seniors wearing Pioneer Seed Corn hats and schlepping canvas bags with TRIANGLE TOURS stamped eighteen thousand times on the front and back. But I couldn’t be upset with Bernice. If I’d woken up this morning with bags the size of craters under my eyes, I’d be grumpy, too.

  “What do you think?” I asked Nana as I flashed my wrist in front of her face.

  She made a little whistling sound through her dentures. “Gucci. Looks expensive.”

  “The clerk said the magic word.”

  “Half price?”

  “Water-resistant.” So what if it was going to set me back three months rent? At least I could walk past the shower in the hotel now without breaking out in a cold sweat. Besides, the clerk hadn’t believed I could spring for one of her watches, so I needed to prove that I could sink into debt just as well as the next guy. Boy, did I show her!

  We snaked our way down a cobblestoned alley whose storefront windows sported the latest fall fashions on mannequins who looked more anorexic than the salesclerk in Bucherer. I had a sneaking suspicion Lane Bryant didn’t do much business in Lucerne. We stopped in an open courtyard and vied for position around a woman I couldn’t see for the sea of umbrellas in front of me. “Good morning!” she called out to us. “My name is Sonya.” She spoke with a heavy accent that sounded kind of Russian to me. Or maybe Swedish. Somewhere close by I heard a high-pitched humming like a smoke alarm going off.

  “What’s that noise?” I whispered to Nana.

  “Bernice’s hearin’ aid. Her battery must be gettin’ low. Always sounds like her head’s gonna blow up when that happens.”

  “Is anyone having trouble hearing me?” Sonya shouted.

  Not now, but I would if Bernice’s head decided to explode. Time to move to a better spot. I circled around the back of the crowd and stopped in front of a stone fountain that stood in the middle of the square.

  “We’re standing on the site of…” SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT! The rain pelting the cobblestones drowned out her voice. I cupped my ear to hear better.

  “…built in 1178…” SPISHHHHHHHHHH! The fountain behind me geysered into life like an open hydrant, spewing cataracts of water in eight different directions. I hurried closer to the crowd.

  “…it’s the oldest…” WORRRRRRRRRSH! A man with a garden hose started power blasting the cobblestones beside me. WORRRRRRRRRSH! I leaped out of the way to avoid the spray. Good time to be washing down the pavement. I guess he figured a driving rain wouldn’t do the job well enough for him. WORRRRRRRRRSH! This was nice. Not only couldn’t I see our local guide, I couldn’t hear her anymore either.

  “Can you hear anything?” Jane Hanson appeared beside me, hunched beneath her umbrella and shivering in the cold.

  “What I’ve gotten so far is that this place is old.”

  “If Andy were here, he’d know.” Jane was dressed for the weather in a fatigue green belted raincoat that looked as if she’d picked it up at the Salvation Army Thrift Shop, a plastic rain bonnet, white bucks on her feet, and a camera bag over her shoulder. All she was missing was a sign around her neck that said, TOURIST. She raised her voice to be heard above the background noise. “Andy came into the drugstore last week and told me he’d done a lot of reading about the area. The Rassmusons and Teigs teased him about his cushy job, but he was very serious about his escort duties. I can’t believe he’s gone. He was one of our best customers. We issued him a Preferred Customer card only last year. The platinum version.”

  She looked genuinely sad as she continued. “I hope they don’t discover that drugs played any part in his death. It’s every druggist’s nightmare, you know. Thinking that the prescriptions they fill might be used to cause someone’s death. Poor Andy. He was always so nice to me when he’d come in to pick up a prescription. He even gave me a free ticket to that Christmas play the two of you were in. I gave him a little bouquet of flowers backstage after the play was over. He was so appreciative. He said no one had ever given him flowers before.”

  The crowd started to break up and move down another alleyway in groups of two and three abreast. Jane and I followed at the back.

  “That was thoughtful of you to give him flowers,” I said. The only thing I’d received during the production was a ticket for parking too long in a loading zone.

  “Just my way of saying thank you. He surprised me though. Uff da. He was so stiff and unemotional onstage. Not a very good actor, was he?”

  Maybe not onstage, but in real life, Andy was a great actor. How else could he trick all these women into thinking he was a nice guy? “He had a knack for playing certain parts.”

  “I overheard someone say you’re the one who discovered his body.”

  “Actually, Shirley Angowski discovered his body. I discovered Shirley.”

  “Shirley Angowski?”

  “The blonde lady who ate dinner with us last night. Remember? The geography expert from Rhode Island.”

  Jane nodded recognition. “Andy was going to send me her E-mail address so I could include her name on our mailing list. I guess she’ll have to give it to me herself now. We’ll be running a two-for-one special on hair care products when I get back. She looks like she uses a lot of hair care products.”

  She had my interest now. “Two-for-one? Even on specialty items like strawberry volumizer and kiwi mousse?” The volumizer smelled so real, I counted it as a fruit exchange on my list of daily nutritional requirements.

  “Andy never should have come on this trip,” Jane said, as we crossed a promenade leading to the waterfront. “He put himself under too much stress wanting to be the perfect escort. All that planning, and reading, and packing. The pressure must have killed him.”

  He’d probably read a couple of guidebooks and thrown his underwear into a suitcase. She was right. Way too much stress for a guy to handle.

  “Do you suppose his wife will fly over here to accompany the body on the trip home?”

  I shook my head. “Louise is phobic about flying. Maybe one of his five ex-wives will get the urge to volunteer.”

  “Poor Louise is going to be grief-stricken when she hears the news,” Jane brooded. “I should find a sympathy card and send it to her. You wouldn’t happen to know where the nearest Hallmark card shop is, would you?”

  “Nope, but I can tell you where you can find a nice watch.”

  We stopped along the promenade at the base of a really long covered bridge that spanned the water at a lazy forty-five-degree angle. It was constructed of weathered brown wood, and in flower boxes across its expanse was a profusion of red geraniums that brightened the pewter grayness of sky and water. Fr
om the front of the crowd I heard Sonya’s voice. “This is called Chapel Bridge. It was constructed in the year 1300. As we cross over it, please note…”

  The wind caught her words and scattered them in the opposite direction from where I was standing. It was chillier standing by the water, the wind more gusty. Cold glazed my cheeks. Cold numbed my mouth and fingertips. I turned my back to the wind.

  “Whoa!” My arm nearly wrenched out of its socket as an updraft swooshed under my umbrella and snapped it inside out. The wind ripped my hood off my head. Rain spat in my face. In my eyes. Down my neck. A sudden strong gust tore at the unbreakable metal spokes and bowed them into the impossible shapes of a broken Erector Set. “My umbrella!” I fussed with the spokes, not knowing whether they should be straightened or bent. I scrunched the Kevlar panels together and tried to slide the runner back down the rod, but the damage was irreversible. The mechanism was shot. “It was brand-new,” I grieved in a small voice. “It was unbreakable. It matched my raincoat.” But worst of all, “It was automatic.”

  The group surged forward, carrying me with it. I pouted for a few seconds over the loss of my umbrella, then pitched it into a nearby trash receptacle before we maneuvered up the stairs to the bridge.

  “The triangular paintings under the gables were painted in the seventeenth century by Heinrich Wagmann,” Sonya began. I hugged my hood more closely around my face and shifted my feet from side to side. I couldn’t hear what Sonya was saying anymore. I checked my watch to see how much more time we were scheduled to walk around. Two hours and twenty minutes. Great. In two hours and twenty minutes I’d be suffering frostbite and would need to have my fingers and toes amputated, which would be a real waste considering how much nail polish I’d bought recently. I sneaked up behind Dick Teig, hoping his head would give me some protection from the wind.

  “Say, Sonya,” Dick Rassmuson called out in a cloud of cigar smoke, “how much would it cost me to buy a house around here?”

  “We discuss paintings this morning! In two days you may ask me about real estate.”

  “Then how about cars?” Dick persisted. “What’s your average car sell for?”

  “You may ask about automobiles when I arrive at that part of my talk on day four.”

  “What did you say is the name of this river we’re crossing?” George Farkas wanted to know.

  “I didn’t say! You don’t need to know that now!”

  Wally had been right. Sonya knew everything there was to know about Lucerne. If you asked her on the right day, she might even be willing to share the information with you.

  The wind chased us along the bridge. An octagonal stone tower rose from the depths of the river and abutted the bridge near the opposite shore. It had a witch’s cap of a roof and looked like part of a castle. “This is the Water Tower,” Sonya told us. “It was erected in the fourteenth century and measures 140 feet from top to bottom. The people of Lucerne have used it as a watchtower, a corner pillar of the city’s fortifications, a prison, and a torture chamber.”

  I wondered what kind of torture the Swiss had used on their prisoners. Probably forced them to take the walking tour, with a test afterward.

  By the time we left the bridge and struck out along the promenade toward a two-towered stone church, the rain had diminished to sprinkles, but the wind was still howling off the water and cutting through every layer of clothing on my body. Sonya led us to a plaza that fronted the church and positioned herself in front of an old-fashioned black wrought iron lamppost. “Behind you is the Jesuit Church…”

  I stood on tiptoe to see her. Black coat. Black slacks. Black hair with neon yellow highlights streaked across the front. Lily Munster meets Dennis Rodman. Off to my right, Dick Teig and Dick Stolee wandered toward an area where granite steps led down into the river. I suspected that, in the summer, this would be an ideal place to sit and dangle your feet in the water, but today, I was more interested in getting inside the church to get out of the wind.

  “We can proceed into the church now,” Sonya instructed. “Please use the door on the left and remember, this is a church, so…”

  “Balls!”

  I turned to my right to see an object that resembled a clump of parched sod swirling in the air above Dick Stolee’s head. I heard Nana whistle through her dentures behind me. “Boy, when his hair decided to fall out, it went really fast. Lookit him. Bald as a Q-Tip. Poor fella. Someone shoulda warned him about the wind here. He mighta opted for the Velcro strips.”

  He leaped into the air after the toupee, but it sommersaulted higher, floated for a moment, then dive-bombed straight into the river. “BALLS!” He shoved his camcorder at Dick Teig and ran to stand at the top of the stone steps, gesticulating wildly. “It’s starting to sink. Son of a bitch!”

  I jogged over to where he was standing as the rest of the tour group filed in a hurried line into the church. He grabbed my arm. “I paid three thousand dollars for that hairpiece, Emily!”

  We stood for a moment watching it tread water. “I hope it’s insured for water damage.”

  Dick Teig palmed the camcorder and started filming. “The river.” He panned left and right then held steady. “Dick’s hairpiece in the river.”

  Dick Stolee bent down to unlace his shoes. I eyed him curiously. “What are you doing?”

  “If I lose that rug, Grace will never let me buy another. I’ve gotta jump in there and fish it out!”

  I looked at Dick. I looked at the river. I looked at the hairpiece. “ARE YOU NUTS?”

  “There’s time. It’s still floating.” Off came one shoe.

  “Can you swim?”

  “Of course I can’t swim. No one in Iowa can swim.” Off came the other shoe.

  “I bet Sonya can swim,” shouted Dick Teig. “I think Sonya should do it.”

  I could see Dick Teig capturing the whole event on tape: Dick Stolee diving into the river. Dick Stolee sinking to the bottom of the river. If he ran off half-cocked and killed himself, I’d be accused of allowing someone to drown my first day on the job. This would not be a big selling point on my résumé. Nuts.

  I looked at Dick. I looked at the hairpiece. I sighed with resignation. “Put your shoes back on, Dick. I’ll do it.”

  “You can swim?”

  “‘Fraid so.”

  “Why didn’t you say something sooner? Hurry up.” He jammed his feet back into his shoes and urged me down the steps. “It’s getting away.”

  It was four feet from shore and doing a slow backstroke toward the middle of the river. I shrugged out of my raincoat and kicked off my shoes. I pulled off my cardigan. I looked up to find Dick Teig focusing the camcorder on me. “This is the plaza in front of the Jesuit Church. This is Emily getting naked on the plaza in front of the Jesuit Church.”

  I rushed down to stand on the last step above water level. I reached out as far as I could. It was about five feet away now and completely out of reach.

  “If you wait long enough, maybe the tide will carry it to shore,” Dick Teig called out. I rolled my eyes. Being a native Iowan, the only tide Dick Teig knew about was the laundry detergent, and if Helen was in charge of the wash, he wouldn’t even know that much.

  “Be careful when you grab it,” Dick Stolee advised. “Try not to damage the part.”

  “How deep is this water?” All I could see were steps disappearing into liquid murk.

  “Don’t sweat the water. Just dive in and get it.”

  “I’m wearing cashmere, all right? Diving is not an option!” I was sorry already for taking this job. With mindless courage, I stepped onto the first submerged riser. “YEOOOOOOW!” My ankles and toes numbed instantaneously. I could hear Dick Teig filming behind me.

  “This is Emily freezing her ass off.”

  I lunged for the toupee. It bobbed away on a little wave. I descended another step, and another. The water was up to my knees. I hopped to the end of the riser and stretched as far as I could. Almost. It was just beyond my fingertips. Jus
t a little farther…

  KERPLUNK!

  I thrashed to the surface in a frenzy of sodden clothing and frozen limbs. I opened my eyes. The hairpiece was just beyond my nose. I’d taken Red Cross lifesaving. I knew how to save a drowning body, but I wasn’t sure if the same technique would work on a hairpiece.

  I swiped at the toupee and crushed it in my fist, then swam the four feet to shore. Dick Stolee helped me out of the water and up the stairs. He snatched his hairpiece from me. After wringing a gallon of river water out of it, he smacked it against his thigh in what I figured was the male version of the blow-dry method. “Looks like it’ll be good as new. Thanks, Emily. You’re all right.”

  “D-don’t mention it.” I was shivering so badly, I thought my jaw would crack. My teeth chattered. My knees knocked together.

  “It’s damn cold out here, Emily. You’d better get into some dry clothes.” Dick looked at his watch. “And you’d better hurry. We only have a couple of hours until we head back to the bus.”

  I stared at his watch in horror. Unh-oh. Everything had happened so fast. Had I remembered to remove my watch before I’d done my Little Mermaid routine? I lifted my arm and reluctantly coaxed the sleeve of my sweater past my wrist. No. NOOOO!

  “Something wrong with your watch?” Dick inquired.

  I waved it in front of his face. “It’s f-full of water. How can it be f-full of water? It’s brand-new! It’s w-water-resistant!”

  “I think what you wanted was water proof. Remember that next time. Gotta run. Have to see what the big deal about the church is. Thanks again.” He held his toupee up like a prized fish and posed in front of his camcorder for a final shot.

  “Dick’s hair,” narrated Dick Teig. “Reunited with Dick’s head.”

  “Sacre bleu,” I muttered as I peered down at the ruined watch that was costing me the equivalent of ten years’ worth of curly fries. Sacre bleu is a common expression among non-Norwegians in Iowa. From what I can figure, it means, Uff da.