Welcome to Paths Not Taken, the thirteenth Operation Quickline story. When a sting operation is set up on the resort owned by Lisa Wycherly’s father, she and Sid Hackbirn find themselves revisiting their high school jobs. And hoping their covers don’t get blown. You can read the first chapter here.

Saturdays were my absolutely crazy day. The vast majority of rooms and cabins rented from Saturday to Saturday. With at least eighty percent turnover, we needed a full crew to make sure all the vacated rooms and cabins were cleaned even more thoroughly than normal days. What made it especially tricky was that the guests didn’t always leave early. With check-out time at eleven, some of them took their time. And if they didn’t, they’d often just leave the key in the room or cabin and take off, and we wouldn’t know they were gone until after eleven, which meant we had less than three hours to get enough cabins and rooms ready for all the guests who would be arriving at 2 p.m. to check in.

The front desk was a zoo, with families checking out, paying bills, then trying to get shuttles or taxis to the airport, or packing their cars if they had them. Then around two, it would get just as crazy as families lined up to get checked in.
The morning rush in the restaurant was hectic with families trying to eat so that they could be packed and out of their rooms by eleven. But it slowed down after that, with next to no lunch guests. Dinner time varied. Some guests liked to eat at the resort restaurant their first night because they were still getting settled in. Others wanted to see as much of Tahoe as possible and headed out quickly. Still others had favorite places to eat away from the resort and visited those on their first night.
That Saturday, I was up at first light, ran and showered, and was ready to go by the time the first guests checked out at six-thirty. At seven, Lourdes handed out the room assignments. I wasn’t doing any of the actual cleaning. My job was to do spot checks and to be available for the inevitable disasters.
It was barely eight when I got my first call on the walkie-talkie. A stuffed toy had been found in one of the main lodge rooms, and when I saw it, I knew it wasn’t just any old toy. It was a rabbit that had once been white but was now gray. The plastic painted eyes were still there, but you could barely tell that they’d been blue once. Shredded formerly pink satin almost adorned the feet.
I grabbed the bunny and hurried downstairs.
“Who was in two-twelve?” I asked Irene.
Irene handed a guest a charge slip to sign, then shuddered when she saw what I had.
“The Emersons.” Irene took the charge slip back and handed the card back to the guest.
“Did they drive or fly?”
Irene shrugged. I hurried into the reservation office and dug up the record.
It may not seem like that big a deal. Kids lose toys all the time, even ones as well-loved as that rabbit obviously had been. What is really aggravating is how often the parents blame us for the loss. I looked up the Emersons, found their home address and phone number. They’d entered a car license on their registration form, but they could have rented the car at the airport. I prayed they didn’t have a plane to catch.
There wasn’t much to be done, except note that the bunny was in our reservations office on the form, then call the home phone number. Fortunately, they had an answering machine, so I left the message.
I didn’t get the call, but the family called around eleven and were told that Tina Bunny was in the office. They showed up just after two and were not happy. From the look on Mr. and Mrs. Emerson’s faces, there had probably been a fight over driving back to Tahoe after more than a couple of hours on the road. The little girl, who had to have been around five, was snuffling and looked like she was about to start screaming, probably not for the first time that day.
As I brought the bunny out from the office, I saw another family checking in. Pedro and Lita Delgado both grinned at me, and I quickly shook my head. They got it. Lita got their three kids distracted so that they didn’t say hi to Ms. Wycherly. The Delgado kids are remarkably well-trained, even at their young ages, and do what their parents tell them to do when they tell them to do it.
I restored Tina Bunny to the Emerson girl, who crowed with delight. Mrs. Emerson looked relieved, Mr. Emerson less so. The family left, and I noted that the Delgados had been placed in room two-twelve. I seriously doubted that would make much of a difference, but it was interesting.
From there, I went to the restaurant to warn both Sid and Nick not to acknowledge the Delgado family, and they agreed. They’d also seen Daddy looking at us funny a couple of times. I also called Hattie and warned her off.
Around four, I got a chance to go up to the Delgados’ room and knocked on the door.
“Housekeeping,” I called.
Pedro opened the door and let me in. The kids all gave me a quick hug, then I looked at them severely.
“You guys are going to have to pretend that you don’t know me or Mr. Hackbirn, or Nick,” I told them. “It’s very important.”
“Important means we do it,” Pedro, Jr., age four, said solemnly.
“But why do we have to pretend?” Eight-year-old Teresa asked.
“Because we don’t want anybody to know about the work we’re doing here,” I said. “There are a couple people here who are very bad, and they’ll try to hurt us if they think that we’re trying to find them.”
Teresa nodded and grinned. Yeah, Lita’s kids are very smart, and they get it, even if they don’t know what, exactly, it is that their parents do.
“I’ll take the kids down to the playground,” Pedro, Sr., said.
The children cheered as I gave them directions, and they ran out of the room with their father on their heels.
“So, what’s going on?” Lita asked as the door shut on her family.
I explained what Hattie had told me, and Lita cursed.
“So, that’s what Dale is up to,” she snarled.
She does not like Dale at all.
I shrugged. “At least, with me working housekeeping, it will be fairly easy to search rooms. What Sid and I need from you guys is to help us keep tabs on the target. His name is Dusty. He seems like a nice kid.”
“Except that he’s selling secrets to the Soviets.”
“Who knows how that happened?” I winced. “It could even have been Dale’s idea to get him to do it in the first place.” I looked around the room. “Why don’t I break this lamp? Then I can get Dusty up here to fix it, and you’ll get to meet him.”
“Here. I’ll do it.” Lita reached over and broke the bulb on the table lamp under the window.
The room was like most of the others, only with two beds. The window looked over the back side of the main lodge toward the cabins, the playground and the stables.
“But why pretend we don’t know each other?” Lita asked.
“My dad. He was acting a little weird when Hattie talked to me yesterday.” I made a face. “He knows Hattie is a friend of Sid’s and mine. She has been for years. But with Dale pushing Sid on Daddy to work the restaurant this summer, then Lipplinger being Hattie’s brother and him showing up here, Daddy seems to be wondering a little too much. And he’s really sharp that way. The problem is, we need the extra help on the ground. Dusty doesn’t have a car, thank God, but even with surveillance equipment, the three of us can’t keep eyes on Dusty all the time. Plus, his contact is probably one of our guests, and we staffers can only get so friendly with them.”
“Yeah, but other guests make friends all the time.” Lita nodded. “It sounds pretty straightforward.”
“We can but hope.”
I gave her the frequency for the tracer on Dusty’s pager, and she gave me the frequency for hers and Pedro’s personal transmitters. I helped her put out super thin wires on the windows and room door so that they’d know if someone had broken into the room, and I got the code to disarm the wires if Sid or I had to go in for some reason.
A minute later, I called Ty Larson on the walkie-talkie and had him page Dusty with a light bulb to the room, then left.
The housekeeping staff was done by four, but I was not. Mr. Merle Wrightman had been less than thrilled the week before, when his family had checked in, that they had Cabin Twelve instead of Cabin Ten, which was the one they usually took. We didn’t know what he had against Cabin Twelve – he refused to say why, but even after a week, he still wanted Cabin Ten, or even Cabin Eleven. However, Irene had put a small group of executives and their wives in Cabin Eleven for a corporate retreat that Lyle had neglected to put into the computer system months before and we’d only found the reservation because Irene had double checked everything the Monday before.
The Elizondos had already checked into Cabin Ten and were ecstatic. Well, their family members were getting older and some extra privacy was just the thing. The elder Mrs. Wrightman let her husband know that Cabin Twelve was just as good as their usual one. In fact, being just a hair larger, was better, as their family was also growing. Apparently, there were two new grandchildren that year. Mr. Wrightman was not entirely mollified, but went along with his wife.
I smiled and thanked her, but inside, I shuddered. I had no idea how well screaming infants were going to go over with the executives. Then again, I was praying that the executives wouldn’t get too rowdy.
By dinnertime, I was pooped and working on a headache. Worse yet, Sid was still in the restaurant. Lee Whitney, the dinner manager, had called in sick. Janine Fuentes, the assistant manager, was already there, but it was one of those weekends when everyone had decided to eat at the resort. Daddy took one look at me as I staggered into my parents’ house and called the local pizza place.
Sid staggered into the house around eight-thirty.
“I’m letting Janine close tonight,” he said. “It’s been a day.”
It was generally agreed that it had been.
The next day, I got up early enough to go to nine o’clock mass, riding to the church with Daddy, Janey, and Nick. Sid had other plans and had left a couple of hours earlier. Well, he wasn’t going to church with us that summer, anyway. Sid is an atheist. He plays the organ for our choir back home, but that has more to do with our good friend Frank Lonnergan, who is the choir director.
After mass, I took Daddy, Janey and Nick to one of the casinos just over the state line to have brunch at one of the hotel buffets. We took our time and didn’t get back to the house until just after noon. At twelve-thirty, Mama called from Florida. She and Daddy were talking almost every day, but on Sundays, Mama wanted to talk to the rest of us, too. So did my Grandma.
Now, I love Grandma Caulfield. We’ve always gotten along and ever since I married a man with money (Sid and I are wealthy), I’ve been her golden girl. But by that point, she was getting to be the last person on earth that I wanted to talk to.
I understand why she wanted to see me pregnant. She loved the idea of having yet another great-grandbaby. And she was brought up to believe that getting married and having children is what being a woman is all about. What we could not get her to understand is that Sid and I can’t get pregnant.
Sid used to sleep around a lot. He was taught free love when he was a kid and saw no reason not to until he and I made our commitment to each other. But when he was 22, he couldn’t imagine wanting to get married, let alone procreate (never mind that he had – he just didn’t know he had until Nick was eleven). So, he’d gotten a vasectomy. Between how much time had passed by the time we got married and that fact that he’d had a few bouts with social disease, there was no hope of a reversal being successful.
Now, most of the time, I don’t care that Sid and I can’t have babies. Heck, that summer, I was getting out and out glad we couldn’t, thanks to some of the kids I’d seen at the resort. But I do feel it sometimes, and Grandma being determined to see me reproduce, was not helping.
“Well?” Grandma demanded the second I got on the phone.
“Grandma, we’ve told you. The doctors say we can’t.”
“What do doctors know? Have you been drinking your mixture?”
“It’s not going to help. Sid can’t produce sperm—”
“I do not want to hear such filthy talk!”
“Well, if we’re going to talk about having babies, Grandma, we’re going to touch on some of how it happens.”
Grandma humphed. “Be that as it may.” She humphed. “You say it’s Sid.”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“Maybe I’d better mix something up for him.”
“It’s not going to help, Grandma.” My gut clenched, worried that it somehow could.
Yeah, I wouldn’t mind having a baby with Sid and it does sometimes hurt that I can’t. But if I’m honest, I’m perfectly happy that Nick is my only child.
Grandma finally left off, and we said goodbye. I hung up only to find out that Daddy and Nick were headed off to the local high school parking lot for Nick’s first driving lesson. My gut clenched. I’d had that nightmare about Nick driving off a cliff the night before again, and it all came rushing back to me.
Sid’s Voice –
When I was growing up, it was just Stella and me. My birth mother died when I was two and I had no father. It literally says “Unknown” on my birth certificate.
Raising a kid really made me appreciate my aunt in ways I would never have thought. Stella was a pretty darned good parent, for the most part. If things got rocky during my adolescence, a lot of that was the times. It was the 1960s, and not only was rebellion in style, that’s what Stella had taught me. She just never expected me to rebel against her, and even then, it was more about me developing into my own person than butting up against her.
The bigger problem was that I often wondered if she’d really wanted me. She was not a very affectionate person. She did teach me kindness and respect for all human beings, and while she would snipe at me occasionally, she also made a point of praising me. But when she’d get annoyed with me, I kept getting the sense that I was a problem for her, a mess that she needed to clean up.
I later learned that it was a reflection of her own unhappy childhood and not me. But that was after we’d been estranged for sixteen years over me going into the Army when I’d gotten drafted, then my own terrible response when she’d tried to contact me after I got back from Vietnam.
I started thinking about Stella and my adolescence as I pulled away from the resort that Sunday morning, mostly because I was feeling guilty about taking off and leaving Lisa to deal with the craziness of working there. I don’t feel guilty very often, and that morning I realized why. Stella had never played the guilt game with me.
Of course, the meeting I was going to also played a role in my thoughts as I drove toward San Francisco that morning. I was raised in The City, in Haight Ashbury, by a bunch of communists, beatniks, and later, hippies, which explains why I was so into sleeping around. It was just normal behavior among the people I grew up with. That there was any specific context for it was foreign to me until high school, and even then, I believed that was a crock.
I wasn’t sure why Liz Warner had called my best buddy Tom Freeman and me, but the three of us had agreed that we wanted to meet at the same time. Liz and I were probably two of the most sexually active kids in our graduating class. That I was the stud and Liz was the slut was an incredibly gross injustice, but given the culture at the time, not surprising. Tom had slept with Liz, too, and we’d even done three-ways every so often.
The other thing about Liz was that Tom and I had considered her as much a friend as our other four buddies, possibly even more of one. Most of the other girls we jumped on (and, yeah, it was all about getting ourselves off) didn’t really fall into that category. Still, Liz lost touch with me shortly after we graduated. Tom was better at hanging onto relationships, but had lost touch with her by the time I got back from Vietnam in ‘71.
Tom moved to L.A. in 1986. The weekend we met with Liz, he’d driven up to the Bay Area because it was cheaper than flying. That also meant he came up on Saturday and spent the night with his parents, who had moved out to Livermore sometime in 1972.
I called Tom on my car phone from the highway near Tracy. That way, he’d get to the BART station where we were meeting at about the same time. As I pulled into the parking lot of the Dublin/Pleasanton BART station, Tom was there.
“Thanks for calling me,” Tom said as we quickly embraced, then headed up to the train into downtown San Francisco. “God, I needed to get out of there.”
“Bad, huh?”
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” Tom shuddered. “How’s it going at your father-in-law’s?”
We chit-chatted on the train, got off at Powell and dodged the tourists in line for the cable cars, then walked to the restaurant where we were meeting. Liz had chosen the place and was waiting for us when we got there.
She was about average size and wearing a full-skirted blue shirtwaist dress with big padded shoulders. Her dark brown hair had been cut short and feathered. In fact, everything about her screamed money, and we’d all been dirt poor as kids.
“Hey, guys,” she said, her smile just a touch wary. “I’m so glad you made it.”
“I am, too,” I said and grinned. “You look great, Liz.”
Her smiled got tight. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” said Tom. “You look terrific.”
Suddenly, I realized why she was hesitating and laughed.
“You got a boob reduction,” I said.
“Holy crap, you did.” Tom grinned. “It looks wonderful on you.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “You’re not disappointed?”
I shook my head. “I was never into over-large boobs, even then.”
Which I wasn’t.
“I was.” Tom chuckled and rolled his eyes. “But I’d forgotten you had them. And I like to think I’ve outgrown that kind of thinking.”
Liz suddenly relaxed and grinned. “I knew I was right to call you guys.”
A minute later, we got settled at a table, perused the menus, and finally ordered. Liz asked Tom and me about our lives. I told her I’d gotten married two years before and that we had a 15-year-old kid, pointing out that Lisa is Nick’s second mom.
“Second mom?” Liz asked.
“It’s not a rating,” I said. “It’s when Lisa came into Nick’s life. Nick’s first mother passed three years ago, and Lisa adopted him.”
Liz looked at Tom. “What about you?”
“Got married in seventy-two, got sober in nineteen-eighty and promptly got divorced,” Tom shrugged. “I’d been teaching at our old school since I got out of college.”
“You know, I’d heard that,” Liz said with a smile. “Are you still there?”
Tom shook his head. “I’m down in L.A., now. Two years ago, I came down to go to Sid and Lisa’s wedding, and at the rehearsal dinner, met their friend Angelique Carter, and Ange and I have been together ever since. What about you?”
Liz took a deep breath. “Well, it took Tom to get me into college.” She smiled at him. “I still can’t thank you enough for that. And, Sid, I know I didn’t believe you when you kept saying that I was the smartest girl in school.”
“Well, you were.”
“It helped, though, more than you know.” She blinked a little. “There was a reason I was so hyper-sexualized as a teen, and it wasn’t just the boobs.” She swallowed. “I was sexually abused by my father.”
“Oh, Liz,” Tom sighed. “I’m so sorry.”
“I had no idea,” I said. “That’s terrible.”
She shrugged lightly. “It’s what happened. The good news is that you two believed in me, and that made a difference. I got my bachelors, got into protecting women’s rights, and from there got a full ride to Berkeley Law.”
Tom and I cheered.
“That is such good news,” I said.
“Liz, I am so proud of you,” Tom added.
She nodded. “I’ve been practicing law for the past twelve years. Started out with a major firm, then got my ass into trouble when I scored a major settlement for a client suing for sexual harassment.”
“Wouldn’t that have been a good thing for the firm?” Tom asked.
“Not when the CEO of the corporate defendant turned out to be a good buddy of one of our partners.” Liz grinned. “And I may have put some pressure on by checking with other female employees of the company to try and build a class-action suit.”
Tom and I laughed. Liz may have been easy in high school, but she could be a real ball-buster when provoked. One of the reasons why Tom and I had liked her so much. {Ball-buster? Seriously, darling, you know better than that. – LJW}
“Anyway,” Liz continued. “The upshot is that I was able to feather my nest sufficiently to focus on more harassment cases, then offer pro-bono work to a couple shelters for domestic violence victims. Which is my real passion, I’ve discovered. I am very good at hiding women from their abusers.”
I couldn’t help grinning. “Liz, I always knew that you had way more on the ball than people were willing to give you credit for. But this is above and beyond. I, too, am so proud of you.”
“Well, I am insanely lucky that I got the right kind of support,” she said. “But you guys both played into that.” She paused and swallowed. “Which is why when I got the invite to our twenty-year reunion, I decided to try and call you.”
Tom and I looked at each other.
“I’m glad you did,” Tom said, finally. “The committee was seriously after me to work with them since I’d worked there for so long. But I said no.”
“Why?” Liz asked.
Tom shrugged. “Too many jokes from them about what a stoner and boozer I was. Which I was back then, and even for our ten-year reunion. I’d like to think that I’ve grown up since then. That I’ve actually achieved some real maturity. And I work with high school kids all day. I don’t want to go back to my time in high school.”
“What about you, Sid?” she asked. “Did you go to the ten-year?”
“Oh, hell no.” I winced. “There were a few guys from our class who probably knew what I’d been through. But no one that I knew. Well, except Loser Renfrew, and he didn’t make it back.”
Liz gasped. “You got drafted.”
I nodded. “Two of the worst years of my life and I do not talk about it.”
“He really doesn’t,” said Tom, who also knew what I’d been like when I’d first gotten back.
What Tom didn’t know – and couldn’t – was that was also when I’d gotten pulled into intelligence work, and then not released from it when I’d finally gotten home.
I sighed. “Liz, you and I and Tom have been through some serious shit. The bottom line is, we all survived and somehow, I hope, came out of it as better people. That’s what I hang onto. But at the same time, I do not see a lot of benefit in re-visiting that kind of hurt. Which is why I have zero interest in going to our high school reunion. According to Tom, Stan is doing his damnedest to totally fuck up his life.”
“You can say that again,” Tom grumbled.
“Loser is dead,” I continued. “Bob and Wallace were never that close, anyway. In fact, the two people I would most want to see are already sitting at this table. I have nothing to gain by going.”
Liz smiled. “Which is exactly how I feel.”
We spent the rest of lunch talking about all sorts of stuff. Some reminiscing, such as the time Stella caught me and Liz doing it in our apartment, and I kept going while bitching at Stella about not having my own room. But most of it was about life, in general. The sorts of things real friends talk about when they get together because they have other stuff in common besides a past.
As we finished, I invited Liz down to mine and Lisa’s place in Beverly Hills.
“I’d love for you to have a chance to meet Lisa,” I told her.
“She’s not going to be upset that you and I were lovers?” Liz frowned.
“She shouldn’t be.” I thought about it. “As long as you don’t mind being a former lover, she’s fine. Ange and I slept together fairly regularly, and Lisa’s friends with her and always has been.”
Tom suddenly groaned. Liz and I looked at him.
He sighed. “It has suddenly occurred to me that any woman I have had any significant interest in, Sid has slept with first.”
“What?” My eyebrows rose. “I never slept with Beth.”
His ex-wife.
“And look at how well that one worked out.” Tom shook his head. “You beat me to Liz. Remember Diane? You got to her first. Cheryl Nunes. You and Ange almost had something.”
I laughed. “That was never going to happen.”
We went on in that vein for some minutes more, then it was time to leave. On the train back to where we’d left our cars, Tom belabored our shared women for some time, only to conclude that it really didn’t make any difference, which it didn’t.
I got back to Tahoe in time for dinner, but just barely. Lisa had gotten it from the resort restaurant – she can cook but prefers not to. Nick was full of chatter about his driving lesson, and even Lisa smiled at him.
There wasn’t much to be said about the case. Hattie was worried that the disks for her brother’s computer did not have the plans for the guidance system on them. They had to be somewhere on the resort.
I didn’t care and, later, focused on how much making my darling Lisa happy meant to me. And by that, I mean sex.
Thank you for reading. For more information about the Operation Quickline series, click here.
Please check out the Fiction page for the latest on all my novels. Or look me up at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Vroman’s, in Pasadena, California.