The Alpine Escape Read online

  Praise for Mary Daheim and her Emma Lord mysteries

  THE ALPINE ADVOCATE

  “In THE ALPINE ADVOCATE the lively ferment of a life in a small Pacific Northwest town, with its convoluted genealogies and loyalties [and] its authentically quirky characters, combines with a baffling murder for an intriguing mystery novel.”

  —M. K. WREN

  THE ALPINE BETRAYAL

  “Editor-publisher Emma Lord finds out that running a small-town newspaper is worse than nutty—it’s downright dangerous. Readers will take great pleasure in Mary Daheim’s new mystery.”

  —CAROLYN G. HART

  THE ALPINE CHRISTMAS

  “If you like cozy mysteries, you need to try Daheim’s Alpine series.… Recommended.”

  —The Snooper

  By Mary Daheim

  Published by Ballantine Books:

  THE ALPINE ADVOCATE

  THE ALPINE BETRAYAL

  THE ALPINE CHRISTMAS

  THE ALPINE DECOY

  THE ALPINE ESCAPE

  THE ALPINE FURY

  THE ALPINE GAMBLE

  THE ALPINE HERO

  THE ALPINE ICON

  THE ALPINE JOURNEY

  THE ALPINE KINDRED

  THE ALPINE LEGACY

  THE ALPINE MENACE

  THE ALPINE NEMESIS

  THE ALPINE OBITUARY

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1995 by Mary Daheim

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-96482

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76013-5

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  I HAD BEEN warned. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. My beautiful secondhand Jaguar would develop mechanical problems. Apparently, it finally had. It wouldn’t start. To me, that’s a mechanical problem.

  I’d parked the Jag at the end of a long row of cars in the lot reserved for the Three Crabs Restaurant & Lounge near Dungeness Spit. On an overcast July day the Strait of Juan de Fuca looked gray and dull, as if it were bored with its endless passage between the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island.

  I, however, was not bored but agitated. And confused.

  My car wasn’t my only problem. With great reluctance I’d abandoned my duties as editor and publisher of The Alpine Advocate in an attempt to reassess my life. Maybe it’s naive to think that forty-two years of eluding reality can be rectified in three days, but I had to start somewhere. The Olympic Peninsula seemed like a good place for soul-searching.

  Now my priority was a tow truck. I marched back inside the restaurant, found the pay phone, and scanned the local directory. The towing service in Sequim would be out in an hour. Where did I want to go?

  That was a good question. I had no idea who could handle Jaguar XJ6 repairs on the Olympic Peninsula. I was just off Highway 101, so I wasn’t exactly stranded in the middle of nowhere. The town of Sequim was a bustling place, chock-full of dissatisfied and retired Californians who had found an authentic Sunbelt in the Pacific Northwest. A few miles to the west lay Port Angeles, with a population of 18,000. Surely one or two of these people owned a Jaguar. Surely someone could do the repairs.

  “Gee,” said the friendly voice at the other end of the line, “I don’t know who fixes those things around here. There used to be a bunch of hippies at Happy Valley who worked on foreign cars. Good mechanics, too.”

  “It might be something simple,” I said, sensing the onslaught of a panic attack. “The Jag’s green. My name is Emma Lord. How about taking me to a Chevron or a BP station here in Sequim?” I had plastic for the two oil companies. My budget for the three-day trip was two hundred and fifty dollars. If the repair was over fifty bucks—and when was it ever under?—I’d have to charge it.

  “We’d better haul you into Port Angeles,” said the man at the other end. “You’ll have better luck there with that Jag. See you around two. More or less.”

  Back outside, I prowled the sands, feeling a cool breeze on my face and hearing the tide slap against the shore. Dungeness Spit snakes five miles out into the strait, with one of the last two manned lighthouses in the continental United States. Recently, I’d heard it was scheduled for conversion to a computerized operation. So much for romance. But I, too, was trying to convert. Outmoded romantic notions were impeding my personal progress as well.

  Some seventeen miles across the strait, I could make out the cluster of buildings that was Victoria, British Columbia. I hadn’t been to Victoria in twenty years. Indeed, I hadn’t been on the Olympic Peninsula since then, either. My plan to drive around the loop was hitting a snag. Trying to avoid added pressure on myself, I’d resolved not to make reservations. I dealt with deadlines every day on the job in Alpine. But the ferry from Edmonds to Kingston had been full; traffic heading across the Hood Canal Floating Bridge had been heavy. Maybe I should go back to the restaurant and call ahead to book a motel room. If nothing else, it would help kill time while I waited for the tow truck.

  With my short brown hair tousled by the wind—and sand in my open-toed shoes—I trudged the long, narrow spit, my eyes straying to the rugged bulk of the Olympic Mountains that seemed to rise almost directly above the highway. I was accustomed to mountains. In Alpine I live among them, eight miles west of the Cascade summit, in a town built into the rocky face of Tonga Ridge. Fleetingly, I thought of my little log house. Already I missed it. But, as my House & Home editor, Vida Runkel, had advised, I needed to get away. Alone. I went back into the restaurant, which was still busy. Judging from the license plates in the parking lot, most of the lunch crowd were tourists like me.

  The motels were also doing a brisk business. They were all booked except for the ones that were out of my price range. The bed and breakfast establishments were full, too. Discouraged, I went into the bar and ordered a Pepsi, then felt my mouth twist with irony. Here I was, Emma Lord, forty-two years old, mother of a twenty-one-year-old son, never married, university graduate, newspaper owner, fairly bright, reasonably attractive, and sitting alone at a bar on a Tuesday afternoon drinking soda pop. No wonder I needed time to reflect. I felt like a real loser.

  The woman tending bar was younger than I, but not by much. She was pretty, her makeup carefully if generously applied to hide a sallow complexion. At the moment I was her only customer.

  “Where you from?” she asked after giving me my Pepsi.

  I told her. She looked vague. “Idaho?”

  “No.” I explained where Alpine was located. It didn’t surprise me that she hadn’t heard of my hometown. With only four thousand residents living in relative isolation off the Stevens Pass highway, Alpine isn’t exactly a Washington Sta
te hub.

  “Traveling alone?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

  I nodded.

  She looked vaguely shocked. “That takes guts these days. Too many creeps out there.” Using her white ceramic coffee mug, she gestured in the general direction of the entrance. “You’re not camping, I hope?”

  It was my turn to look shocked. “Oh, no!” I’ve always felt that if I had a sudden urge to sleep outdoors, I’d join the army and get paid for it. On the off chance that the bartender might have a brother or a friend in the hostelry business, I told her of my dilemma.

  The best she could do was suggest places I’d already called. Frowning into her coffee mug, she shook her head. “You don’t know anybody around here?” Apparently, it seemed inconceivable that a stranger should have no local connections. As a small-town dweller I understood her thinking. Everyone knows everyone else, and half of them are somehow related. It was no different in Clallam County than it was in Skykomish County.

  The bartender’s question jolted my memory. “As a matter of fact, I do. Sort of,” I added lamely. Before buying The Advocate and moving to Alpine, I had toiled for seventeen years on The Oregonian in Portland. My best friend on the paper was Mavis Marley Fulkerston, now retired and living in Tigard, Oregon. But Mavis’s daughter, Jackie, had gotten married on St. Valentine’s Day and moved to Port Angeles. I hadn’t attended the wedding, but I’d received an invitation. I racked my brain trying to remember her husband’s name. With a dawning sense of doom I decided that I could hardly barge in on someone whose last name I didn’t know. On the other hand, I’d sent Jackie and her groom a toaster oven.

  The tow truck arrived just as I was finishing my drink. Overtipping the sympathetic bartender, I hurried outside. After checking the battery and finding it wasn’t the cause of my trouble, we hit the road to Port Angeles. My gloomy mood persisted all the way past Morse Creek and into town. Things weren’t looking up half an hour later when the mechanic at the Chevron station announced that he couldn’t find the trouble. Could I wait for Jake? He knew a little something about foreign cars.

  I didn’t have any choice, but since Jake and his knowledge were off somewhere in the mysterious West End, I resumed cudgeling my brain for Jackie Fulkerston’s married name. I went halfway through the alphabet in my mind and stopped at M. With my eyes locked on the Jag, which was up on the hoist, I snapped my fingers. One of the mechanics darted me a curious look.

  “Melcher,” I said firmly. “Do you know a young couple named Melcher? They moved here late last winter.”

  The mechanic, who was young and needed a shave, closed one eye and wrinkled his thin nose. “Melcher. ’Ninety-two Wrangler. ’Eighty-nine Honda Accord. Yeah, they come in here. She had a lube job on the Honda last week.”

  Figuring that the newlywed Melchers wouldn’t have made it into the current Port Angeles phone book, I trotted over to the comer booth and dialed directory assistance. Jackie’s husband was named Paul. Their phone was answered on the second ring.

  “Emma!” shrieked Jackie Fulkerston Melcher. “How funny!” To my dismay she began to sob.

  “Jackie, what’s wrong?” I asked, alarmed.

  Two gulps later she replied, “I’m pregnant! Isn’t it wonderful?” She sobbed some more.

  “Well … it sure is.” I frowned into the stainless-steel pay-phone panel. “I … uh … just thought I’d call and say hi since I’m passing through.”

  Jackie sniffed loudly before speaking again. “You’ve got to stop in and have a drink or something. Where are you?”

  I told her, then added that my car was temporarily out of commission. I was beginning to feel embarrassed.

  Jackie, however, was a font of sympathy. “Oh, how awful when you’re on a trip! I hate it when that happens! Remember the time Mom had to drive down to Coos Bay and her wheels fell off?”

  I did, but my version wasn’t quite the same. Mavis had hit a deep rut while trying to turn around off the highway and had jarred her axle. I’d forgotten that Jackie was inclined to dramatic exaggeration.

  “Cars are such a pain,” Jackie was saying, and I could envision her wide mouth turning down at the corners and her gray eyes rolling heavenward. “Listen, I’ll be down to get you in five minutes. We’re right up here on Lincoln Hill. Oh, I’m so glad you called! It’s like the answer to a prayer!”

  I was properly surprised. “It is?” Not having seen Jackie since her mother’s retirement party two years ago, I couldn’t imagine why she’d been invoking divine intervention to hear my voice.

  “Yes! It’s incredible, the next best thing to having Mom show up. Paul and I need an inquiring mind.”

  I was beginning to think that Jackie could use any kind of a mind that operated on a more even keel than her own. “Oh? How come?” My tone was neutral.

  Jackie lowered her voice, and instead of a tearful vibrato, she giggled. “It’s so weird, Emma. You won’t believe this!” She tittered, she gasped, she let out an odd howling sound. “We found a body! In our basement! Isn’t that great?” Jackie burst into fresh sobs.

  There was a bit of comfort in finding someone whose mental state was more unstable than my own. Or so I mused as I leaned against a lamppost at the comer of Ninth and Lincoln, waiting for Jackie Melcher to pick me up.

  I wasn’t alarmed. The alleged body could be anything, including a dog, a squirrel, or a gopher. Jackie’s sense of high drama was probably exacerbated by pregnancy. She’d always been a volatile girl, full of energy one minute, given to morose moodiness the next. She would often exasperate her mother but never her father, who doted on his daughter.

  Fortunately for the Fulkerstons, their two sons were rock-solid specimens. One was an oceanographer in California; the other produced films for the city of Portland. Jackie, as I recalled, had majored in French at the University of Oregon, where I’d finished my senior year.

  But, I reminded myself, while Jackie was young and pregnant, I had no such excuses for capricious behavior. After twenty-two years of waiting for the father of my son to get up the nerve to leave his wife, I’d come to the realization that while Tom Cavanaugh might care for me as much as I cared for him, he put duty above love. Of course he’d call it honor, as men often do, but it boiled down to the same thing. Sandra Cavanaugh was the mother of his other two children, and when it came to mental instability, I couldn’t hold a candle to her. But then neither could Napoleon. Sandra suffered from a variety of emotional problems, all no doubt caused by the fact that she was born rich. Or so I’d always told myself.

  Tom and I had met when I interned on The Seattle Times. Sandra’s mental disorders were only beginning to surface then, but living with her had become sufficiently difficult that Tom had sought comfort in my arms. He’d also apparently sought something in Sandra’s because we both got pregnant about the same time. Not without regret, Tom had chosen to stay with his wife. I had chosen to leave Seattle and have my baby in Mississippi, where my brother, Ben, was serving as a priest in the home missions. I had also chosen—fiercely and proudly—to raise Adam alone. If Tom wouldn’t give me his name, he wasn’t going to give me any help, by God. For almost twenty years I had shut him out of my life. And out of Adam’s, which wasn’t entirely fair to either of them.

  In the past two years I’d relented. Tom had shown up in Alpine, and I’d succumbed to his entreaties to let him meet Adam. Father and son had gotten along very well. Father and Mother had, too, so much so that when I’d attended a weekly newspaper conference at Lake Chelan in June, Tom and I had ended up in bed.

  For three days and three nights we pretended it was forever. We knew better, though. Tom no longer needed Sandra’s fortune as a base for his newspaper ventures, but Sandra needed Tom. He wouldn’t forsake her, and I would have loved him less if he had. Tom neither loved nor lived lightly, which I suppose is why I could never quite let go. We are too much alike.

  But there was no future in it. If I wanted to marry, maybe even have another child, I had to
put the past aside. “Keep your options open,” Vida Runkel had counseled. “You’ve put up a barrier to everyone but Tommy.”

  Only Vida could get away with calling Tom Tommy. And only Vida could speak so frankly to me. Even my brother, in his kind but indecisive manner, wouldn’t take such a resolute stand. Ben not only sees both sides of every issue, he considers all the angles and contours. I am prone to do the same. Ben vacillates; I’m objective. Either way, the result is that it’s very hard for both of us to make crucial decisions.

  Thus Vida was right. I needed a shove in order to get going. Over the years there had been a few other men in my life, but never one I really loved. I wouldn’t let myself love them, asserted Vida. I had built a dream house on sand and the tide was coming in fast.

  Watching traffic pass by, half of which bore out-of-county license plates, I thought of Sheriff Milo Dodge. Like me, Milo was afraid of letting go. Divorced for the past six years, Milo refused to commit himself to his current ladylove, Honoria Whitman. Honoria was getting impatient. I didn’t blame her. But I didn’t blame Milo, either. Like me, he was afraid. Sometimes I wondered if Milo and I were afraid of each other. We spent quite a bit of time together but had only kissed once, which had been sort of an accident. Or so I had thought in the heat of the moment.

  A white Honda Accord pulled up to the curb. Behind the wheel Jackie Melcher waved frantically, her heart-shaped face wreathed in smiles. I jumped in and we shot across the intersection before I could fasten my seat belt.

  “Emma, you look great! You got your hair cut!”

  I laughed, patting the gamine style I’d acquired not long before going off to Chelan. “It’s nice and cool for summer,” I said noncommittally.

  Jackie was heading through the main part of town, past the handsome old redbrick courthouse I remembered from my last visit. A large, new modem building stood next door. Apparently it now housed the county offices.

  “The old courthouse is a museum,” Jackie said, following my gaze as she stopped at a traffic light.