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.
“Order up!” Felix Arias called, sliding a plate onto the stainless-steel shelf between the waiters and himself and the other line cook.
Sid looked at the small group of filled plates, checked the ticket with them, then looked around.
It was Monday afternoon, near the end of the lunch rush. It tended to be the slowest period in the restaurant because if guests were exploring the sights, going to the beach at the lake, or doing other things away from the resort, they generally went during the day. Sid had tucked into his khaki slacks a light blue polo shirt with the resort logo on the chest. Actually, all the staff wore the same polo shirts in varying colors. I had on a green one tucked into khaki shorts and running shoes.
Daddy had bought the resort when I was around two years old, and I don’t remember living anywhere else but in South Lake Tahoe. Over the years, he had expanded the number of rooms in the main lodge, fixed up the cabins, added a play and crafts room to the lodge, plus an indoor swimming pool, and completely re-did the playground.
One of the first things he’d done was add the restaurant space in the main lodge. However, he’d always leased that part of the business to various other people so that he could offer meals without having to run a restaurant himself.
Only that winter, the man who’d most recently been leasing the space decided that he’d had enough, which is when Daddy had hired Bracha Solomon. Bracha was an Israeli woman who had gotten her start as a cook in the Israeli army, then moved to the U.S. where she’d worked at several different restaurants all over the country. She also wanted to start her own place, but didn’t have the capital to do it. Daddy had no interest in running a restaurant, so it was a good fit.
“Nick,” Sid called. “Have you seen Marina?”
“She’s trying to take an order from that kid who won’t make up her mind.” Nick slid a tub of dirty dishes onto the wash station and waved at Jorge, one of the two dishwashers working that shift. Nick had on a dark purple resort polo shirt and the same khaki slacks his father wore.
Sid cursed. “All right. I need you to deliver her order.”
Nick’s eyes rolled.
“Son,” I growled. “It’s not a good idea to roll your eyes at your boss.”
Nick heaved a sigh. Sid had the dishes on the tray, having chosen to ignore Nick’s behavior.
“It’s going to table eleven,” he told his son.
Nick’s eyes suddenly lit up. “Sure!”
He hoisted the tray, grabbed the dish stand, and headed out to the dining room.
“Another one?” I asked.
Sid shrugged. Being the utterly charming kid he is (not unlike his father), Nick had scraped up a girlfriend a week from the various guests at the resort. I was glad to see it, too. I’d done the same thing when I’d been in high school. Nick’s flirtations had mitigated not going to science camp, where, as Sid had pointed out, the boys outnumbered the girls twice over. I was pretty sure the little romances were no more than flirtations.
Sid grew up sleeping around. He’d been raised to believe in free love and lost his virginity when he was thirteen. So far, Nick did not seem to be emulating his father, which relieved Sid and me. We were both worried about him picking up AIDS, and did not want our teen-age son getting into the kind of trouble kids get into when they get sexually active too young. [How I escaped that, I do not know, but am profoundly grateful I did. – SEH]
I stood in the doorway between the restaurant kitchen and the employees’ break room. The break room had been placed there so that the employees could order lunch for free during their breaks. It was only one of many reasons why so many of my daddy’s staff had been at the resort for a lot of years.
Sid had sunk some of his own money into the new restaurant. We’d told the staff, however, that he was there as a consultant. There had been enough grumbling among the wait staff about all the changes happening during the busy summer season. Sid needed and wanted to get their cooperation as quickly as possible. Being a co-owner that had only waited tables some years ago would not have gotten him much respect. A consultant was bad enough.
However, Sid really did know what he was doing. Yes, there had been a lapse in time since he’d waited. [Almost nine years, and that was that case that I worked in San Diego at Marge Benson’s restaurant. – SEH] But as a freelance writer, he wrote a lot about the restaurant business, mostly for trade magazines. Which meant he also read the magazines. Between that and his own experience, he knew what needed to be done.
Bracha had already gotten the kitchen staff up to speed. Sid had worked with her first and the two were very much on the same page about how to run things. Sid’s focus was on the front of the house (or dining room).
He’d been working with the management team so that they could train and supervise the rest of the wait staff, especially the dinner crew since they suddenly needed to know how to flambé, toss salads table-side, serve alcoholic beverages, and just generally be more formal. In fact, Sid had started with the dinner crew. However, it was time to focus on the daytime staff. He’d gotten the respect of the dinner staff by working several shifts with them first to get a feel for what they were doing. He was doing the same with the daytime crew.
Marina Jones, tall with skin the color of light coffee and black hair she wore in braids, stormed into the kitchen. Her polo shirt was white that day, and she’d chosen to wear shorts.
“I repeated the order back. I waited!” She pounded the keys on the newly installed computerized order machine. “And her parents have, like, no clue what that little brat is doing.”
“Or don’t want to know,” Sid sighed, as the printer whirred and spit a ticket out for the line cooks.
That was one interesting thing about working at the resort. Sid was exposed to the entire range of parenting practices and was not impressed.
“They’d better not send it back,” Marina grumbled, going through her other tickets. “What happened to table eleven’s order?”
“Nick’s delivering it.”
Marina scurried off to check the front.
My walkie-talkie squawked, although Sid couldn’t hear it. It wasn’t for me, anyway.
“Anyway,” I said. “Guess who I saw checking in a little bit ago?”
“No idea.” Sid looked over the kitchen, then smiled at me.
“Dr. Miles Lipplinger.”
Sid frowned, then remembered. “Didn’t they ship him off to Europe?”
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t come back.”
“Housekeeping One, are you there?” said a voice in my ear, where I had the earpiece for the walkie-talkie. It sounded like Irene on the front desk.
I removed the mike. “I’m here. What’s up?”
“I have a guest in Room 305, Dr. Lipplinger. Says he wants to know where there’s a desk for his computer.”
“I’m on my way.” I held up the mike for Sid. “And it sounds like Lipplinger hasn’t changed either.”
Sid shook his head and laughed. I hurried out of the restaurant and upstairs to the third floor, feeling rather nettled. I had no idea what Sid thought was so funny about Lipplinger, but I suspect it had to do with the reality that I was going to be dealing with the royal jerk and Sid wasn’t.
Back in the fall of 1982, I’d been out of work for a year and had gone on a blind date just for the meal. I had to ditch the date, and Sid rescued me. Being into sleeping around at the time, Sid put the moves on me but backed off when I made it clear I did not sleep around. Instead, he was impressed, and a few days later, offered me a job as his secretary. There were two catches, of course. The first was that I had to move into his house, but that wasn’t a big deal because I had my own bedroom, from which Sid was barred. The second was that Sid was actually recruiting me into his spy business.
A couple of months after I’d been hired and started my training, Sid and I were given the job of protecting Dr. Miles Lipplinger, which ended up meaning that we kept him at Sid’s house. The man was a demanding, whiny, sexist, rude jackass. [As usual, my darling, you’re being too kind. That doesn’t come close to how god-awful he was. – SEH] Which is the long way of saying that I was not at all happy about him turning up at the resort and had to believe that he was there as part of Dale O’Connor’s grand plan to catch the person selling U.S. technology to the Russians.
I took the back stairs to the third floor of the main lodge, then blinked as I went from the bright, utilitarian stairwell into the muted light of the third-floor corridor. There’s a heavy emphasis on log cabin style across the whole resort, so there are lots of exposed posts and beams of dark wood in between the lathe and plaster walls covered in calming tan paint. The third floor tends to be the quietest, with twelve rooms evenly split between single beds and doubles.
The door to 305 was open as I walked up, and I could see Lipplinger, a stooped man with white hair and glasses, pacing and grumbling.
“Good afternoon,” I said, smiling in spite of how I felt.
He looked up and glared at me. “They told me they were going to send a manager.”
“That’s me,” I said slowly. “How can I help you?”
He didn’t seem to recognize me at all, which was odd, since he spent several weeks at Sid’s house. He had kept mostly to himself, and he probably hadn’t paid too much attention to me since I was only Sid’s secretary at the time.
“I need a desk,” he snarled. “How am I supposed to work without a desk?”
The room was a single, with one king-sized bed, covered in a dark brown satiny bedspread. The bathroom was near the room’s door, and a large window looked out over the front of the lodge. Along the wall across from the bed was a low chest of drawers, in the middle of which was a good-sized TV. Under the window, a small table sat with two chairs and a table lamp nearby.
I pointed at the table. “Won’t that table work?”
“The outlet is too far away,” Lipplinger shook his head as if it were perfectly obvious. “And it’s too small and rickety. I don’t want the computer falling off.”
I looked at the unit he mentioned. It was considerably smaller than most computers I’d seen, but somewhat bigger than a nine by twelve manila envelope and at least a couple inches tall, if not taller. Which meant that Lipplinger had a point.
“Well, I’m sorry, Professor, but this resort is mostly a vacation destination.” I shrugged. “We don’t get much call for outlets to plug-in computers. We have a small office center downstairs. You can use the printer there for ten cents a sheet, which can be charged to your room. We can also get you an extension cord as a courtesy.”
“I need space!” He glared at the TV set. “You’ve got to get this thing moved off this dresser.”
“I can remove it entirely, if you prefer.”
“No! I want to watch it at night.” He pointed to a corner by the bedside table. “Just put it over there during the day, then move it back while I’m at dinner.”
As annoying as his demand was, I had to be grateful that he wasn’t going to move the TV himself. All the room and cabin televisions were hooked up to Cable TV. It was a limited package offered by the cable company, but it meant that we could have HBO, the Disney Channel, and a few similar channels in the rooms. It also meant that the televisions were hooked up with a special cable in the back. It wasn’t that hard to undo, but it was better when someone who knew what they were doing disconnected everything.
I stepped into the hall and got on my walkie-talkie and called the facilities head, Ty Larson. Ty paged one of the college kids who were there to work for the summer.
Some minutes later, Dusty Simpson came out of the stairwell, his brown hair tousled, his green eyes blinking behind his perpetually dirty glasses, and wearing a yellow logo polo shirt over jeans. He didn’t look like he had much on the ball, but he was a wiz at fixing things. I figured he and Lipplinger would get along just fine, what with Dusty being smart but quiet and, well, a young man rather than a young woman.
“I’ll let our guest tell you what he needs,” I told Dusty.
He nodded and shrugged. “Sure.”
“Professor,” I called into the room. “This is Mr. Simpson. He’ll help you with your television set.”
“It’s about time,” Lipplinger growled as Dusty went into the room.
The door to room 304 opened at that moment, and a man in his middle forties, with dark hair, dark eyes and a deeply lined face, stepped out.
“Good afternoon,” I said, smiling, as I tried to remember his name. It’s a small detail, but Daddy always says it makes a world of difference. “Mr. Lane, right?”
“Yeah.” He smiled briefly. “Um, I hate to ask, but could I get an extra blanket tonight, please?”
“Of course.” I nodded. “I’ll get it myself right now.”
Mr. Lane looked briefly at Lipplinger’s room where we could hear Lipplinger telling Dusty how to unscrew the cable, never mind that Dusty probably had a better idea of how to do it than Lipplinger did.
“Thank you,” Mr. Lane said quietly.
I went off to find the blanket from the upstairs linen closet and returned with it promptly. Mr. Lane was standing just inside his door. Lipplinger was loudly going over exactly how he wanted Dusty to deal with the TV and when. Mr. Lane thanked me again and went into his room.
He was a pleasant fellow who had been taking a room every couple of weeks. Given that the resort caters to families primarily, most of the people in single rooms are young couples, usually with one or two small children. But there were those folks, like Mr. Lane, who liked the atmosphere and came to relax. Ms. Sanchez was another and was currently in 306.
My walkie-talkie squawked again, this time with a request from the ground floor. My friend Judy Osbourne was there. Judy had the contract for maintaining our TVs and VCRs, along with providing the stock for our small library of videotapes. We’d known each other in high school and hadn’t been close or anything. But since I’d been back at the resort, we’d gotten friendlier and had gone to lunch together a couple times.
She was a tall, blond woman with glasses and an athletic build. That day, however, she seemed nervous.
“I’ve got the invoice for this month’s service,” she muttered, showing me the paper.
“Thanks.” I looked at her as I took it. “You okay?”
She winced. “I was just re-stocking your library a little while ago when I saw something.” She shook her head. “It’s okay.”
“Alright.” I watched her leave, wondering what was up.
That was the worst of Dale’s big plan. Sid and I knew that Dusty Simpson was the kid we were there to keep an eye on. Dale didn’t entirely trust him to sell the plans to the submarine missile guidance system to the KGB agent at a time when Dale or the other agent he had here could bust the KBG agent. However, we had not been told who the other agent was. Or who the suspected KGB agent was. Or anything else, for that matter.
Which meant that I spent a lot of time suspecting just about everyone and everything that I came across.
I took Judy’s invoice to the business office where Irene Wu was glaring at the reservations print-out and a rack of paper slips with other reservations printed on them. That meant only one thing: Lyle Weaver, our chief front desk clerk, had messed up once more.
“Oh, dear,” I said as I slid the invoice into the accounts payable inbox. “Did he overbook us again?”
“For the fifth time this summer.” Irene shook her head, her short black hair swishing gently. “I keep telling him not to make reservations, but he does, anyway. I think we can squeeze it. But this can’t go on.”
“I know.” I plopped down at a nearby desk. “Daddy’s trying to figure something out. The problem is the guests love him. And he’s been here since…” I frowned. “I think he may have been here when Daddy bought the place.”
Irene, who was in her forties and had a couple rolls on her shortish frame, glared again at the reservations print-out.
“That’s exactly my point,” Irene grumbled. “He’s got to be in his seventies by now.” She winced. “I know Lyle is thinking your father will let him work until he dies at the desk, like he did with Neff.”
“Yeah, but Neff kept his marbles together,” I said with a sigh.
“And Lyle hasn’t.” Irene waved her hands in frustration. “I hate to say it, but it’s true. We haven’t been able to book cabin ten all summer, thanks to him. I almost turned away the Wrightmans, for crying out loud, and we can’t afford to lose customers like them.”
“I know.” I rubbed my forehead.
“Let’s just hope that the Elizondos are going to be more forgiving that the Wrightmans.” Irene shuddered. “The good news is that we’ll be clearing cabin ten this weekend after all, so the Elizondos should be happy, even if the Wrightmans are in twelve.”
“They should be,” I said.
The Elizondo clan had been spending a week at the resort every year since I was a teenager. I’d even had a brief flirtation with the youngest son, who I’d heard had gotten married and now had two kids. We had twelve cabins on the resort, most of which could sleep up to eight people. Cabins ten through twelve were the really big ones, though. They each slept up to twenty people, and cabin ten was considered the overflow because along with a large open area, the four rooms each had two queen-sized beds and locks on the doors, as if the cabin was a mini-hotel.
The Elizondos, whose family had expanded several times over, usually booked cabin twelve. But the Wrightmans had not been able to check into ten because Lyle had double-booked a couple rooms, and we’d put the extra families in ten. The Wrightmans had not been happy, but accepted cabin twelve for their two weeks with us.
“Do we have any more double bookings?” I asked Irene.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Unless Lyle checks in somebody without a reservation.”
“Let’s pray he doesn’t.” I got up and checked my watch. “I’ll be on the radio for a while yet, if you need me.”
“Thanks,” Irene said.
Besides being the reservations manager, Irene was angling to take over as manager of the resort. That position had been Neff’s since I’d been in college. Daddy had taken up the day-to-day management since Neff’s death. Rumor had it that since I was there, he was hoping to get me to be manager. I knew it would make him happy if I did, but I was pretty sure he knew that I wasn’t likely to.
I wandered over to the activities center, which was basically a crafts room and mini-library. My niece Janey was there, as usual, helping Ms. Wanamaker, who was the summer activities director. Ms. Wanamaker taught at the local elementary school and since we only needed activities directed during the busy summer season, she was happy to work when school was not in session.
Janey, just shy of her twelfth birthday, had decided to help out at the resort that summer. She looked up at me with a grin, her hazel eyes sparkling and her long brown hair in a ponytail. She wore a pink polo shirt over her shorts.
“Hey, Aunt Lisa! Are you off work yet?”
“Not really.” I couldn’t help but smile back at her.
“Uncle Sid told me this morning that when he and Nick are done for the day that they’d meet me here,” Janey said. “We have to figure out dinner.”
I tried not to make a face. I hate cooking. I hate keeping house. I am possibly the least domesticated person I know. Mama usually takes care of the house I grew up in at the back of the resort. But she was in Florida. Fortunately, Daddy and Sid were paying to have a couple of the college kids who were there working for the summer to clean both the family house, where Nick, Janey, and my father were sleeping, and the staff lodge. The staff lodge was a large house on the edge of the resort, near the horse barn. Most of the college kids who worked the busy summer season stayed there. Mary and Neff’s apartment had been there, as well, and that was where Sid and I were staying.
I’d been cooking while Sid was working the dinner shift. Sid had announced the night before that he would take over getting dinner cooked to the general appreciation of the rest of the family. I’m not a bad cook, but I’m not a good one, either.
Sid walked into the small room filled with craft supplies, tables, chairs, and shelves of books and videos. Ms. Wannamaker’s eyes lit up as she saw him. I couldn’t entirely blame her for her crush on my husband. Sid is one gorgeous, sexy man.
“So, how did it go?” Sid asked me after giving Janey a warm hug.
I tried not to roll my eyes as my walkie-talkie squawked. I picked up the mike, waving Sid off. Sure enough, it was Lipplinger again.
“Room 305 and you-know-who,” I told Sid softly, turning for the door. “He wants to know why the restaurant is closed.”
Which it was so that the dinner crew could set up, there not being any business to speak of around three in the afternoons.
Sid smiled at me. “Did he talk to you?”
“He didn’t even recognize me.” I rolled my eyes.
“Tell you what.” Sid glanced upstairs. “The restaurant is my bailiwick, and if he won’t talk to you, then I probably should.”
“Okay. What do you want to do about dinner?”
Sid sighed. “I’m beat. If your dad’s okay with it, why don’t you get takeout from that Mexican restaurant we like?”
“Sure.” I looked over at my niece. “Janey, you want to come with me to get dinner for everyone tonight? I mean, if Grandpa doesn’t mind getting it to go.”
“He won’t,” Janey said.
Which he didn’t. Mondays at the resort are more like Fridays in normal life because the weekends are so busy and we’re all off on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Daddy, having taken over active management, was pretty tired on Mondays.
Janey double-checked with me, Sid, Daddy, and Nick to see what they wanted and called in the order. The second I could get away, we took off with me driving Sid’s BMW, which we’d driven up in, figuring we’d probably need at least one set of wheels at our disposal.
It was a pleasant but quiet meal that evening. Sid and I headed back to what we still referred to as Neff and Mary’s place even before it was fully dark, at nine-thirty. Neff and Mary’s place had been cleared by their son and his wife after Mary had been moved to the care facility. Mama had added a few pieces of furniture, such as a bed and sofa, but not much else.
Sid went first to the bathroom and got his contacts out, then came into the tiny bedroom and sank onto the bed without getting undressed first.
“I can’t believe it, but days are even more exhausting than dinner service,” he grumbled.
“Well, you’re working two meals and longer hours,” I said.
“True.”
“Did you talk to Lipplinger?”
Sid called Lipplinger something truly foul. “I have no idea how, but he’s even more of a jackass than he was.”
[I did not say jackass. – SEH]
“I know, but did he say anything about why he’s here?” I stretched and sat down to get my running shoes off.
“He’s got the plans to the guidance system, and he’s going to use them to set up the sting with Simpson.” Sid took his shoes off. “Beyond that, all we need to do is stay out of his way.”
“I’m happy to do that,” I said. I went over and pulled Sid’s shirt over his head.
Sid’s grin got enticingly lecherous. “So am I.”
And that would have been it, except that three days later, Lipplinger was dead.
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.