“Oh, that wasn’t the first time it happened, or the last. We changed our reservation to a hotel in Jackson.”
“And they took you?”
“They didn’t take anyone but Jews. If you had a Christian name, I understand you never got through the front door.” She smiled brightly. “It wasn’t just the WASPS who were particular with whom they associated. But I’m sure you didn’t suggest luncheon to compare ethnic slights.”
“Miss Stone…”
“Florrie. I don’t need to feel older than I am.”
“Florrie, that day in December when I was in the library, there was a man wearing a cowboy hat, do you remember seeing him?”
“Yes I do. We don’t see many hats like it here. Particularly in winter. He had an oddly quiet voice with just a trace of a foreign accent. He and his friend were looking at a display of grade school Christmas drawings. And then they laughed.”
“Laughed? At kid’s drawings?”
“Yes, I thought it was a little uncouth.”
“Foreign accent. What did they say?”
Florence wrinkled her forehead. “Let me see… Oh, I know. The other man, the one not wearing a hat, pointed to a drawing of the three Wise Men and said something about there being three bearing gifts to a field in Bethlehem. And the man in the cowboy hat said, `just change one little word.’ That was when they both laughed.”
“Did they say anything else? Take out any books?”
“No. They went out right after that. I’m sorry, is it important?”
“I don’t know, Florrie. I wish I knew.”
On the Monday evening after the holiday week and a day spent catching up on sleep and laundries, Cilla and Hudson brought after-dinner tea into the living room.
“I’m going down to have a bite with John Krestinski tomorrow,” said Hudson. “Be back late.”
“About our Swedish thugs? I wondered if you’d talk with him about that.”
He nodded. “This’ll be a quiet week. Kurt’s covering for me in the afternoon.”
“It will be quiet if Spit and Polish allows it. I wonder if he’d be this difficult for a man to supervise.”
“Probably. He’s a DI from PI. What’s the latest?”
“My filing system.” She saw his look and went on quickly. “Oh I know, you can barely see my desk. He calls it the landfill. Humor. Yesterday he decided I needed a lecture. The worst part is he’s probably right; I should look more organized, set a better example for the others. But I know where everything is.”
“All on your desk?”
“Don’t you start. Then he went on I don’t have the respect of the crew. The mountain needs more of a leader. Him presumably.”
“Do you think so? He’s a great captain; I can’t see him as general. He can use a hammer, I’m not so sure about a gavel. It’s a toughie, Cill. You’ll have to earn his respect, in the things important to him.”
“My father taught me shooting, but I’m not about to challenge him on the rifle range.”
“He’s cocky about his skiing. Think you can still take him?”
“I can beat any man I know skiing.”
Hudson grinned. It wasn’t said bragging, it was just a statement of fact. One of the many reasons he had fallen in love with this independent, part Abenaki girl nearly seventeen years younger than himself. “I’m sure the Kehi Sogmo will agree.”
“Our Kinjames is a quick learner.” The early Abenaki Indians thought all white rulers were called King James, so the name became attached to all New Hampshire governors.
“So’s his wife, Kinjamesiskva.”
“I had to marry a linguist. I can’t believe you’re spending time studying a dead language.”
“Abenaki has a beautiful sound.”
“Like a tree falling in an empty forest. Who’s ever going to hear it?”
“Maybe you can get New Hampshire’s Kehi Sogmo to make it the official New Hampshire language. He seemed quite impressed with your skiing.”
A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “It’s a good thing for New Hampshire he’s a better governor than skier.” The annual race between the governors of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont had been held at Great Haystack a month earlier, with social skiing before and after, and New Hampshire’s Chief Executive, Norman Ducharme, had fallen several ways for the skiing and personality of the Chief Executive of Great Haystack. Cilla had an open invitation to call on his office anytime. The event had been good PR, Boston newspapers running photos of the governors at Great Haystack.
“He isn’t the only one that’s been taken with you lately,” said Hudson with a mischievous grin.
“Not with me, who I look like.”
“Uh huh.”
Some women might be flattered at a man’s interest. Cilla felt only a deep disgust. Hudson quickly changed the subject.
“You heard Captain Midnight surprised Greg, Karla and Jason on the NASTAR course?”
She nodded. “And that’s typical of Kurt, single minded. He decided that’s where the competition is and made it a point to know the racing hill cold. He’s spent hours practicing on it.”
“So?”
“When we race it will be on my terms.”
Chapter 11
February 28
The opening came sooner than Cilla expected. Hudson left for Boston at three. John Krestinski was the special agent in the FBI’s regional office, whom he’d met the previous October at a time he and Cilla were under attack from an unknown source. There was respect between those two, Cilla thought. She analyzed it. Krestinski had been with the Bureau twenty years, and little impressed him any more. Certainly not a Cambridge small-businessman - Hudson had a modest games and puzzles firm in Massachusetts before selling to his partner - who’d decided to play detective and had suffered the consequences. But Hudson had come through. The FBI man had found in him a chess mind able to solve a three hundred year old puzzle from the arrangement of a few pieces of thread, and the mental and physical strength to overcome superior forces while wounded himself.
Krestinski had earned Hudson’s respect by the job he held and the way he held it - with an open mind that hadn’t been shuttered by twenty years of bureaucracy. He and his wife, Anne, had come up for a ski weekend in January and, if the Rogers, who were most comfortable in each other’s company, could have been said to have close friends, the Krestinskis would have been among them.
So what did the respect these two had for each other tell her about how she should earn the same from Kurt Britton? Only what she already knew. She had to prove herself as something more than the “flower person” Britton saw.
His triple knock at the door. “A sprained knee in the Hayfields, sent her to Memorial. The slope was perfectly clear; she’ll probably sue anyway.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Women feel they should be taken care of. No matter how foolish or unskilled they are, we should arrange it so nothing happens to them.”
“Men don’t?”
“Some do, there’s always a wimp. With most when they crash they know it’s no one’s fault but their own. Besides, they’re tougher, and skiing isn’t an easy sport to learn.”
“That women shouldn’t attempt?”
He saw the glint in her eye and backed off a little. “Of course not. They just shouldn’t ski beyond their capabilities.”
“Which are limited to the easier trails?”
“You know the stuff women have been fed, anything a man can do, they can. Pick up any newspaper or magazine. So they come up here and damn near kill themselves trying to imitate the men.”