The Alpine Advocate Read online

  Praise for Mary Daheim and

  her Emma Lord mysteries

  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

  THE ALPINE DECOY

  “[A] fabulous series…Fine examples of the traditional, domestic mystery.”

  —Mystery Lovers Bookshop News

  By Mary Daheim

  Published by Ballantine Boots:

  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

  THE ALPINE PURSUIT

  THE ALPINE QUILT

  THE ALPINE RECLUSE

  THE ALPINE SCANDAL

  THE ALPINE TRAITOR

  Table of Contents

  Other Books by this Author

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  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

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To all those who lived the real Alpine story, and in the process, created a legend. These courageous men and women embodied the spirit of the Pacific Northwest.

  Author’s Note

  THE TOWN OF Alpine no longer exists. But from the early part of the century until the late 1920s, it was a small but thriving mill center off Stevens Pass in western Washington. The mill’s owner, Carl Clemans, was a relative of Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain), though a discrepancy in spelling the family name had arisen between the two branches early in the nineteenth century.

  Alpine, which saw the doughboys pass through during World War I, was consumed by such patriotic fervor that sales of victory bonds far exceeded the quota for any other community in the state. Old Alpiners still take pride in their contribution to Over There.

  My mother grew up in Alpine and returned as a bride when my father took a job with the mill. When the logging operation was shut down, the town was intentionally burned to the ground so that transients off the freight trains wouldn’t start forest fires. In over sixty years, the second stand of timber has obliterated all signs of the town.

  But since Alpine anecdotes have played a large part in my life, I felt this rustic, picturesque place deserved to be revived. Thus, the background is genuine Pacific Northwest history, and now the town lives again in more than just the memories of those hardy souls who embodied the spirit of Alpine.

  Chapter One

  IN MY DREAM, Vida Runkel had her clothes on backward. In real life, Vida only wore her hat the wrong way to. Obviously, the poor woman had regressed in my subconscious. Maybe people who spend a lifetime working on small-town newspapers tend to deteriorate in every possible way. Maybe, I thought hazily, as the phone rang, that will happen to me. …

  “Emma Lord here,” I mumbled, trying to make sure I wasn’t talking into the earpiece. “Who died?” A call at two A.M. had to be bad news. Unless it was my son.

  It was. “Nobody’s dead, Mom,” replied Adam, his usually strong young voice sounding a bit reedy over the five-thousand-mile cable between the shining sands of Honolulu and the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. “What are you talking about? You working on a story for the paper?”

  I sat up, fumbling for the light switch on the lamp next to my bed. “Why else would you be phoning in the middle of the night unless there was a disaster? Are you in jail?”

  Adam laughed, and I relaxed a little. “Hey, everything’s fresh. It’s not the middle of the night. It’s only eleven o’clock. How come you’re asleep so early?”

  Single mothers, married mothers, even stepmothers are basically a patient lot. They have to be or they would devour their offspring early on, like guppies. I repressed a sigh. “Gee, Adam, you’ve only been going to the University of Hawaii for two years. When are they planning to teach you about time differences? The earth is round, remember? You’re three hours behind us, you nitwit. Are you broke again?”

  “No.” The incredulity in Adam’s response struck me as incredible. This was the kid who could lose money as fast as he could spend it. He could lose just about anything, if it came to that, having once misplaced his baby-sitter when he was eight. She thought it was the other way around, but it wasn’t. So if Adam wasn’t broke, he must have robbed a bank. Ergo, he was probably in jail after all. I finally managed to locate the light switch. “It’s Chris Ramirez,” Adam was saying, as I blinked against the brightness of my cozy little bedroom. “He’s coming home. Can you put him up at our house?”

  “Chris?” I sank back against the pillows. A cool breeze blew in through the two-inch span of open window. I could smell the evergreens and the damp earth. As always, they gave me strength, like an elixir. “Why on earth is he coming back to Alpine after all these years?”

  “He’s quitting school.” Adam made it sound simple. He also made me sound as if I were simple, too. “He wanted to quit even before his mom died. He registered, but he didn’t go to any of the classes. He can get his money back, but it’s a big hassle.”

  My son’s attitude toward extra effort rankled, as usual, but I decided not to run up the phone bill by saying so. Undoubtedly, Adam had charged the call to my credit card. “Okay, when will he be in?”

  “Let me see …” Obviously, Adam was consulting an airline schedule. I marveled that he’d bothered to pick one up. “It’s a six-hour flight. He’ll be there in about … uh … five hours. But you don’t have to pick him up at the airport. He’ll hitch a ride up to Alpine.”

  I bolted upright, clutching at the phone. “What? You mean he’s on his way? Hell, Adam, it’s over a two-hour drive to the airport! I’ve got a paper to put out! It’s Wednesday!”

  It was Adam’s turn to exhibit patience, a virtue he seemed to reserve only for parts on his ’82 Rabbit and his considerably older, if more reliable, mother. “Yeah, I know. That’s why I called now, to give you some advance notice. But you don’t have to go clear into Sea-Tac. I told him it’d be a cinch to find somebody driving over the Pass.”

  Visions of various serial murderers danced through my mind. In my opinion, hitchhiking should be outlawed not only on the freeway, but everywhere. “Never mind,” I said grimly. “I’ll go get him.”

  “That’s up to you,” my son said, and I could see him shrug. “Hey, I gotta run. I got some dudes with a half-rack waiting for me, okay? I’ll write this weekend an
d tell you about Deloria.”

  “Deloria?” But Adam had hung up.

  I put the phone back and ran a hand through my short brown hair that somehow had not yet turned gray, despite a conspiracy by the rest of the world. Instead, my teeth kept trying to fall out. Thank God for Dr. Starr and giggle gas, I thought as I reset the alarm for four-thirty. The Seattle-Tacoma Airport was over ninety miles from Alpine, but at least I shouldn’t run into much traffic.

  Unfortunately, I was now wide awake. Even if Chris’s plane was on time, I wouldn’t get back to Alpine until ten. As for Chris himself, I had seen him twice, on trips to Honolulu to get Adam settled in at the university. He was dark, spare, handsome, and more moody than most young men his age. A bit of the poet about him, or would have been, if he, like the rest of his generation, didn’t seem to be semiliterate. But then I was prejudiced. You get that way when you spend a lifetime in journalism and watch the circulation figures drop. I keep waiting for The New York Times to make the endangered species list.

  Or at least The Alpine Advocate. Granted, except for the fact that both are printed in English and appear on newsprint, there isn’t much of a comparison. But then Alpine isn’t New York. Originally, the town where I live and work was called Nippon because of the Orientals who helped build the railroad. Later, a sawmill was opened by a relative of Mark Twain’s, one Carl Clemans, whose father had changed the spelling of the family name back to its Welsh origins. Carl, in turn, had rechristened the scattering of buildings along the railroad tracks as Alpine. The town thrived, if that’s the word, from the pre-World War I era until the Depression when it should have folded and disappeared, like other railroad semaphore spots along the old Great Northern route, such as Tonga and Korea. But a farsighted entrepreneur named Rufus Runkel joined forces with a Norwegian immigrant called Olav the Obese, who decided that putting boards on people’s feet and letting them fall down steep hills could be fun—and profitable. They built a lodge in the early 1930s and saved the town from extinction. The mill had closed in 1929. Logging had continued in the vicinity but was jeopardized in the last two years by the controversy over the spotted owl.

  Sixty years ago, when both owls and trees had still seemed plentiful, the former mill workers who didn’t want to log found other jobs, first in building the ski resort, and then in staffing it. Meanwhile, the silver mines that had originally lured Mark Twain’s relative continued to draw visitors who were more curious than greedy. A good thing, since nobody I know has found any silver worth having assayed since 1942.

  I turned the alarm off, got up, and got dressed. The Advocate office is less than a mile from my house, and I often walk. But, since I’d need the car for the trip to Sea-Tac, I drove. Many of the four-thousand souls who live in Alpine are now commuters to Everett and Seattle. The spectacular beauty of the Cascades, the sharp, fresh mountain air, and the comparatively cheap real estate prices have kept Alpine—well, thriving. During ski season, the town is full of visitors, but in late September, we can still call our souls—and our grocery store—our own. The first snows weren’t due for another two weeks, at least.

  The Advocate office is small but up-to-date. We have three word processors, though Vida Runkel insists on banging out her House & Home section on an old Royal upright. Every Wednesday at nine in the morning, we ship the finished layout off to a printer in Monroe, some forty miles away. It comes back around three, ready for our carriers to deliver and the post office to mail. Then we sit back and wait for the irate phone calls to the publisher and incensed letters to the editor, both of whom happen to be me. I love it. Usually.

  My desk is always a mess. At three A.M. it looked even worse, like Adam’s room. Fortunately, I had almost everything in hand before I’d gone home last night about seven. I checked over my editorial on the need for a public swimming pool adjacent to the public tennis courts and the public park, and then revised the layout. Twenty-four pages, which was the usual, except during holiday season. For the next hour and a half, I proofed the ads that Ed Bronsky, our one-man business staff, had solicited; tried to make sense out of Vida’s column on recycling potato peelings; and corrected the numerous spelling errors on all the copy supplied by my young, eager, and dizzy reporter, Carla Steinmetz. Carla is straight out of the University of Washington, and so zealous that she makes me tired. Maybe I was like that once, too, before the world caught up with me. Maybe that was before I fell in love and got pregnant and had Adam and neglected to acquire a husband in the process. Maybe that was how it was in that brief springtime of my life when I still thought all things were possible, and then discovered that even probable usually didn’t mean anything good.

  Except for Adam and the half-million dollars. They were both better than good. After nine months, Adam didn’t exactly come as a surprise, but the five hundred thousand did. I never dreamed that my ex-fiancé, Don Cummings, would forget to remove me as the beneficiary of his life insurance policy with The Boeing Company. But then I didn’t expect him to die at forty-five, either. When he did both, I ended up with a windfall—and the cash to buy The Advocate.

  I left a detailed memo for Carla, a brief note for Vida, and a question for Ed on the Harvey’s Hardware and Sporting Goods Store ad. I headed for the car, finding Front Street as deserted and dark as should be expected so early in the day. Alpine is set a mile off Stevens Pass, twenty miles below the summit where the Tye River joins the Skykomish, and smack on the Burlington Northern railroad line. The town founders built compactly on both sides of the train tracks, there being a dearth of level ground and a tendency for residents to walk a bit like mountain goats. Hills surround us, and mountains tower over the hills. In winter, Alpine is cold and dark and often isolated, with the tang of sawdust and woodsmoke carried on the wind. In summer, the town is fragrant with wild flowers, and the sharp, clean air is intoxicating. I love the place, though it’s not Eden. Small towns have vices, too. When you run the local newspaper, you know every one of them by name.

  I crossed the bridge over the South Fork of the Skykomish River and found first light about ten miles down the highway. I loved this part of the drive, where the road was still narrow and the tall second-stand evergreens framed the asphalt like stalwart sentries. Seventy years ago the original inhabitants of Alpine had hacked down the Douglas fir and the red cedar and the Western hemlock and the white spruce, but their heirs had done more than inherit the earth—they’d reforested it. I blessed them every time I drove this stretch of road.

  One of those farsighted Alpiners had been Constantine Doukas, known for reasons I’ve never heard as Neeny. His parents had come from Greece at the turn of the century, and his father had gone to work in the mill. The family was prone to saving and scrimping; by the time the mill was shut down, Grandpa Doukas was able to buy up most of the town. Neeny had been selling it off by bits and pieces ever since. His grandson was Chris Ramirez, and if Neeny was as rich as everybody said, it was no wonder Chris wasn’t worried about getting his tuition money back from the state of Hawaii. Neeny could probably afford to buy Waikiki.

  But I wasn’t sure that Chris would ever see any of that money. His mother, Margaret, had married “beneath her,” as Vida Runkel and half the town were fond of saying. A handsome Mexican laborer had passed through Alpine twenty years ago to help put in a new sewer system. He had swept Margaret off her feet—and Neeny Doukas had tried to sweep the romance under the carpet. Failing that, he had threatened to disinherit his daughter if she married Hector. She did—but, as far as I knew, Neeny didn’t carry out his threat.

  That, however, resulted from Hector’s abandonment of Margaret when Chris was about six. Or so the story went. I rely on Vida for Alpine’s history, since I arrived in town only a little over a year ago. A small town’s past is very important, I’ve discovered, since its inhabitants seem less concerned about the future than their city counterparts. Maybe that’s because they figure their towns don’t have a future. Or else their lives have become so intertwined that a local
history is more like a family album than a textbook. Whatever the case, Vida Runkel was the current Keeper of the Archives.

  According to Vida, Margaret was overcome by grief. Furthermore, she had never liked the rain. Or her father. So she bundled up young Chris, left Alpine, and moved to Hawaii. About a year ago, she died of cancer.

  Adam had made friends with Chris Ramirez at school, the two of them having the common bond of an association with Alpine and growing up virtually fatherless. Later they discovered a mutual fondness for basketball, surfing, girls, and half-racks, though not necessarily in that order. Now Chris was coming home after fourteen years. I wondered how much he’d remember. I also wondered what his grandfather would think of him after all this time.

  The fragile silver sky of the past few mornings was dimmed, promising rain later in the day. Over the mountains and above the trees, the sun came up behind me, looking wan in the early mist.

  It was beginning to drizzle when I reached the freeway. I turned on the windshield wipers and realized I was not the only driver on the road. It was after five A.M., and the commute had begun, a thin trickle of cars headed for Everett to the west and Seattle to the south. I’d avoid city traffic by taking the Eastside route through Bellevue.

  Or so I thought, always forgetting that Bellevue was a city. In my youth, it had been a sleepy little suburb. But that was almost forty years ago, and time and invading Californians had changed all that. I kept driving in traffic that grew more dense and aggravating. A year in Alpine had spoiled me; twenty years in Portland had been dismissed as if they had never existed.

  The flight from Hawaii was a mere fifteen minutes late. Chris emerged into the terminal wearing a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt, a Dodgers baseball cap, and a sullen expression. He registered no surprise at seeing me in the role of his personal chauffeur but at least had the grace to mumble something that passed for thanks. His luggage, he told me glumly, consisted of one suitcase and a gym bag.