Mary Ellen Hughes - Maggie Olenski 01 - Resort to Murder Read online

  RESORT TO MURDER

  by Mary Ellen Hughes

  Book 1 in the Maggie Olenski series

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2000 Mary Ellen Hughes

  All Rights reserved

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  CHAPTER 1

  July 22, 1974

  Merle pulled into the parking lot of the brightly lit diner, tires crunching gravel, and turned off the ignition. The car shuddered to a stop. Got to get that fixed sometime. A neon sign in the window blinked at him, hypnotically whispering “Alma’s” over and over, promising “good food.” He looked over at his young passenger, a kid he had picked up a couple hours ago in West Virginia. A boy, barely nineteen, who needed a ride to Maryland, looking for the job he couldn’t find back home.

  “Well, kid, this is where we part ways. You should be able to catch another ride easy here. C’mon in and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  They pushed through the door and eased onto two stools in front of the near-empty counter. The aroma of freshly made coffee and doughnuts filled the air, and Karen Carpenter’s mellow voice crooned through the radio. A young, heavy-set waitress in a blue and white checked uniform came up to them, pulling a pencil from her hair, ready to take their order.

  “Two coffees.”

  She nodded, and pulled up crockery and spoons from a lower shelf, and set them down with a soft clatter. As she poured from a glass coffee pot, the music changed to news, and a brisk male voice reported the latest developments in the Patty Hearst kidnapping case: she had been identified as one of a group of bank robbers, members of the SLA.

  “Ain’t that something?” the man asked. “A girl as rich as her, gettin’ into all that. Looks like that kidnapping thing was one big joke on everybody.”

  The waitress barely raised her eyes from what she was doing. “Mmm,” she said. She put the pot back on the burner and began to turn away.

  “Hey,” he said. “I remember you. From Madison High. Class of ‘63.” He struggled to think of her name and gave up. “Remember me? Merle Haisler?”

  The young woman’s eyes widened, then showed recognition. “Yeah, sure. How’re you doing, Merle?”

  “Doin’ pretty good. Got me a job as district salesman for Hirsch and Eland. You got a tractor? I’ll sell you some parts for it.”

  The woman grinned. “That’s great, Merle.”

  “So what’s new with you?”

  “Oh, nothing much.” She glanced over her shoulder, as though there was something she had to do.

  “You hear from any of the old group?” he asked. “Go to reunions or anything?” As he said it, he remembered she hadn’t been part of his old group, or part of any group, for that matter. She had been a quiet loner—nice enough he supposed, but not someone he ever spent more than a fleeting thought on.

  She shook her head.

  “Yeah, me neither. But I read about what happened to Jim and Cherilynn, about their baby, you know? Who woulda thought somethin’ like that could happen back there? I mean, it’s not like they’re rich or anything. I might go see them when I’m in town,” Merle said, aware of a stiffening in the woman as she stood before him, thinking she must feel as bad for them as he did. “But, heck, what do you say? I mean, they got another kid, but still…”

  An older woman with blonde hair piled high came up and nudged the waitress. “You got a call,” she said, her voice kept low. “Your babysitter again. You gotta do something about all these calls, you know. Alma’s gettin’ sick of it.”

  “Hey, you got a kid?” Merle asked.

  The waitress just looked at him, then turned and hurried into the kitchen.

  Merle watched her, noticing for the first time the thin gold band on her left hand. He turned to the teen next to him. “It’s a small world, kid. Who’d a thought I’d run into someone like her after more’n ten years. And who’d a guessed that she… well, it just shows you never know.” He shrugged and sipped his coffee, which wasn’t bad at all. He’d had worse, with all the places he had to drive through.

  He looked up as she suddenly reappeared, holding two plates of chocolate cream pie that she set down in front of them.

  “On the house for an old school buddy,” she said, with a wide, pleased smile.

  The boy’s face lit up as he reached for his. Merle realized the kid must have been hungry and felt a twinge of guilt for not asking him. He grinned at her though, and said, “Well, ain’t that nice. Thanks, hon’.”

  “And I put extra whipped cream on yours, Merle,” she said. “I remember you liked that.”

  Merle nodded, wondered how in hell she happened to remember that, and dug into it. The boy was easing the cream off his, and Merle reached over with his fork and scooped it up. “No use wasting it,” he said, laughing. She waited a few moments, said, “Enjoy,” then moved down the counter to wait on a new customer.

  Merle finished his pie and sat for a while, smoking a cigarette, chatting to the boy and to people nearby about the weather, the latest game. Finally he drained his cup, and pushed it away from him.

  “Well, I gotta get on the road.” He stood up, hiking up his pants, tucking in his shirt. He stifled a yawn. “Nice seein’ you, hon’,” he called to the waitress. What the heck was her name? “And thanks again.” He turned to the boy, pulled a ten out of his pocket and slid it over to him. “Good luck, kid.”

  As he climbed into his car, Merle thought about the boy. Just nineteen and scrambling for work. It’s a tough life sometimes. Merle felt lucky to have his steady job, a job with a future, he hoped, but at least a job with a regular paycheck. Things weren’t too bad. With what Jeanine was making, maybe they could afford… he yawned again. Better get on to Fredrick, find a cheap room quick and get some sleep.

  He pulled onto 70, eased into traffic. Not too busy this time of night. The headlights in his rear view mirror bothered his eyes, though. He looked away, rubbed at them. Yeah, maybe they could start looking at houses, small ones. His eyes still felt raw, kinda blurry. Should he pull over? Nah, he wasn’t that tired. Shouldn’t be. He just had coffee. He’d perk up in a minute. The radio. He needed something to listen to.

  Merle reached for the radio knob. A horn blared. What the heck! Had he wandered to the next lane? Better concentrate. Blurry. Things looked blurry. He blinked, tried to clear it away. Eyes heavy. So heavy. He opened his window to get a little cool air on his face.

  Take some deep breaths. Wake up. Tired. So damn tired. What’s that up there? That big shape. Can’t see. A truck? It doesn’t have its lights on. It’s not moving. My God. It’s parked on the shoulder and I’m on the shoulder! Pull out! Pull out! Too late! No!

  ***

  CHAPTER 2

  June 19, 1999

  LeAnn Rimes’ song on the small portable radio ended, and the news reporter began talking about the latest backup on the outer loop of the Baltimore beltway. Maggie reached for the off
button but stopped in dismay as she saw her red, wet fingertips.

  “You’ll have to hurry, Maggie!” Agnes called from the doorway.

  “I know, I know,” Maggie answered, grabbing for a wad of tissues, the exasperation in her voice aimed as much at her inky fingers as at the school secretary. Maggie grumbled about cheap, leaky pens.

  “Mr. Braun wants those grades in by noon, dear. He wants to be out of here and on his way to Ocean City.”

  Maggie held in the aggravation she felt, as she had often controlled it when dealing with Agnes during the last three years, Maggie’s entire teaching career to date. The woman was a relentless nagger on behalf of her boss, Principal Braun. She obviously thought it was more important to get her esteemed boss on his way to the beach on time than to have carefully calculated grades. Or possibly Agnes thought grades were produced by wiggling one’s nose?

  “He’ll have them,” Maggie said with a tight smile, “just as soon as I’ve done them.”

  Agnes’ pale, wrinkled face puckered disapproval. “Well, I certainly hope that will be by noon,” she said. She jerked her head out the doorway and clicked her stubby heels down the hall, searching, Maggie was sure, for other recalcitrant teachers to badger.

  Maggie threw the red stained wad of tissues into the waste basket and grumbled aloud about unreasonable deadlines, certain high school principals and the school system in general. Since she was alone, she felt free to vent her opinions freely, although Mac, her office mate, had suffered through some of her complaints in the past. She could guess pretty well how he would have commented if he were there, with his dry wit given to quotations from his beloved field of English literature.

  Just the other day, after Maggie had spent hours grading geometry exams and felt more than a little exasperated with the faulty logic of a few of her students, she had leaned back in her chair and groaned. “Mac, I need a vacation. A change of scene to recharge my batteries. I’m feeling burned out.”

  Mac had looked over in his heavy-lidded way from his side of the room and replied, “Get thee to a nunnery, Maggie.”

  “I’d love to,” she said. “As soon as I find a nice, peaceful one. Do cloistered convents have tennis courts?”

  It was then that he told her about the Highview, a mountain resort somewhere in western Maryland. He and his wife, Ali, had spent a pleasant weekend there a couple years ago, he said. He even located a phone number for her, printed on one of the many cards tucked into his bulging wallet. Mac was a saver, a fact evident with a glance at his messy half of the office.

  Maggie wrote it down, and promptly made a reservation. Now there was a room waiting for her, and she would be heading for it as soon as she had finished grading. Carefully. At her own pace. And to her own satisfaction. If she could only find a pen that didn’t leak.

  ***

  CHAPTER 3

  Lori felt the hot June sun bring prickles of sweat to her face as she moved quickly over the grass, away from the Highview’s kitchen. She wiped at the moisture and turned to look back at the side door she had had to prop open because of its automatic lock. She saw a flash of sunlight, a reflection off the metal trim of the door. The brick must have slipped, she thought. Or did someone move the door?

  She shook off the thought and glanced at her watch. No one saw her leave, she was sure. And there was time. They shouldn’t miss her for a few minutes, and she would be back before the lunch rush. She picked up her pace as she came closer to the cool shade of the trees ahead, clutching the book in her hand.

  Lori stepped carefully onto the mulched path with the white sneakers that formed part of her summer waitress uniform. “Clean white sneakers,” the manager, Ms. Crawford, had warned her that first day of work, and she watched where she set them on the path which wound through the trees. After a few minutes she was deep into the woods. She slowed down and looked around. Now where…?

  “Lori! Over here!”

  Lori spun around and smiled.

  “Oh, there you are.” She walked to the small clearing and ducked under a low-hanging poplar branch, her pony tail brushing against the bark. “I was afraid…. It’s getting late. I’ll have to hurry.”

  Lori didn’t see the rock as it came crashing onto her skull. She didn’t feel the blood seep through her light brown hair, and she never heard the words spoken above her limp and lifeless body.

  “No hurry.”

  ***

  CHAPTER 4

  It was two P.M. when Maggie finally took off in her ‘95, burgundy Dodge Shadow, the red ink scrubbed off her fingers. Agnes’ relentless urgings to hurry had only made her tense, but gradually, as the miles ticked by, she felt the pressures of the last few days slip away - all, that is, except one big one.

  “Maggie, you’re not coming with us to Bethany Beach?” Her mother’s shocked, hurt voice still sounded in her head.

  “Mom, I’ve gone with all of you to Bethany for every summer of my life. I want to do something on my own for a change.”

  Maggie still saw her mother’s face, non-understanding, misunderstanding. The family had always vacationed together, including grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. They had loved it as kids, hadn’t they, she and her brother Joe? Why should that stop? What was wrong?

  What was wrong was Maggie now felt smothered by it all, but she couldn’t tell her mother that. Or her dad. She knew he was hurt too, and neither of them would understand. Which added to her frustration. But at least Joe would go, her easy-going, younger brother Joe, in graduate school now and perfectly content to come and go as the family dictated on his days off.

  Part of the problem was that Maggie had exactly one week of free time. She had signed up to work at a summer math camp for middle-school kids. It ran in three-week segments, beginning a week after school, and she would be working up to the start of the next school year.

  She would have loved to be able to take the whole summer off, but she needed the money to finish paying off lingering college debts. So this was her only time to relax, seven days to do exactly what she wanted to do, for a change. And she didn’t particularly want to spend it tagging after relatives at the beach like a twelve year old, listening to the same old stories that came up over and over. She loved her family, of course, and she always would. But they would just have to face it. She had grown up.

  Maggie frowned at the road ahead of her, her muscles tight, and she realized this was no way to start a vacation. She shook off all the negative thoughts that had been causing her tension and switched from replay to fast forward. She thought of the Highview, and wondered what it would be like.

  She was excited about going there, but an uneasy worry crept in. Maybe she had made a mistake, rushing with her plans. Besides, what did Mac and Ali consider a pleasant get-away place, anyway? It wasn’t as if she knew them all that well. For all she knew they might be week-end nudists. At the thought of this Maggie laughed out loud.

  She toyed with the idea that the Highview might be a sunny, mountain nudist resort. She then tried to picture her dignified co-worker at a nudist colony, but her mind kept wrapping a modest sheet around his portly shape, toga-style, and he spouted verses from “Julius Caesar” to his equally modest wife as they lounged beside a pool.

  Maggie reached for a sourball from a small bag on the passenger seat, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth. Tangy Cherry. Well, she knew some things about the place. It had a pool. And tennis courts. And judging from the name, a great view, which was all she required for now. Having checked the map carefully before taking off, she knew too that it wasn’t far from the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, and the farmhouse where John Brown had stayed as he planned his raid on nearby Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. If the Highview got too quiet, she could always sightsee.

  Small towns whizzed by, and she began to amuse herself with math games to pass the time. Let’s see, if I left Baltimore at one o’clock, driving up Route 70 at 50 miles an hour…. No, let’s make it harder, 47 miles an hour, an
d someone left Hagerstown, Maryland, which is what – 60 miles away? – at one forty-five, driving at 42 miles an hour, where would we meet and at what time?

  She grinned as she recalled groans from the rest of the class when this kind of question came up in what - fifth grade? sixth? But she’d always loved it, because she could come up with the answer, eventually, with a little scribbling with pencil and paper. And now she could do it in her head, while driving, to pass the time. Well, some people can sing, or paint pictures. She happened to be good with numbers. To each his/her own. She continued her mental calculating.

  She exited Interstate 70 West and took the smaller and narrower roads that wound their way high into the mountains. Towns gave way to farmlands, and fields of corn or soybeans gave way to dense forests. Soon she found herself skirting a sharply-rising slope up a mountain, with a guard rail on the opposite side edging a steep drop while the road took several sharp turns. Maggie slowed to a comfortable speed, grateful that no one was behind her, and watched carefully for a sign that said Highview.

  Ah, there it was - a large, white-painted board, weather-beaten enough to have been there from the Civil War itself. Maggie turned, and heard the crunch of her tires on a white, graveled driveway.

  The driveway wound its own twisted way through dense trees, and Maggie had to watch the road so closely that she was startled when the trees suddenly ended. Before her stood the Highview. She took a deep breath and smiled.

  The Inn was a beautiful, modern lodge-hotel tucked into the side of the mountain. The blending of stone and natural-finished wood, along with large windows that reflected the world outside, made it a part of its environment. Maggie noted too, the understated landscaping as she drove up. Attractive but unobtrusive, almost as if the plants and shrubs growing there had sprung up from seeds that had dropped naturally in particularly convenient and pleasing spots. A vision of peace and tranquility. Just what she wanted.