The Alpine Christmas Read online

  Oscar set aside his pipe and pouch, reached for my notepad, and picked up a ballpoint pen. His handwriting was large and overblown, like the man himself: Someone is trying to kill my grandson’s wife. Help us.

  I blinked at the message, then stared at Oscar. He motioned for me not to speak out loud. Who? I scribbled.

  Don’t know, he scribbled in reply.

  With a sigh I leaned back in my swivel chair. It would do me no good to urge Oscar or any other Nyquist to go to the sheriff. Rapidly, I considered the previous problems the family had encountered. All of them were petty, probably pranks. Young people in Alpine didn’t have enough to do, especially in the winter. My initial reaction was to dismiss Oscar’s fears as part of a persecution complex.

  Except that we already had two dead young women. Was it possible Bridget Nyquist might become number three?

  By Mary Daheim

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group:

  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

  Books published by The Random House Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1993 by Mary Daheim

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by The Random House Publishing Group, 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.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-90512

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76011-1

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  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

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter One

  FATHER FITZ HAD lost it. That didn’t come as a surprise to those of us who were his regular parishioners, but it knocked the socks off my brother, Ben. Luckily, Ben has enough poise as a person and experience as a priest that he didn’t fall off the altar.

  On holy days of obligation, Father Kiernan Fitzgerald always managed to keep mass under forty minutes. Since December 8 commemorates the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, I attended the eight o’clock service on my way to work at The Alpine Advocate. Ben was concelebrating the liturgy while on vacation from his job as pastor to the Navajos in Tuba City, Arizona.

  It is always with a sense of pride that I watch Ben say mass. Like me, he is dark and brown-eyed; he has the same round face (but more nose), and an extra six inches of height. He is not handsome and I am not beautiful, yet—as our late parents used to say—we make a very presentable pair. When we try. Certainly Ben looks most impressive in the vestments that some of his female parishioners made for him, complete with Navajo symbols of sun, earth, and sky.

  The fifty parishioners and one hundred schoolchildren from St. Mildred’s sat huddled together in winter coats and heavy-duty footgear. At the left of the altar, two purple candles burned in an Advent wreath fashioned from fir, cedar, and pine. The remaining candles, one pink and the other purple, would be lighted on the last two Sundays before Christmas.

  Outside, three feet of snow covered the ground. As usual, winter had arrived early in Alpine. At over two thousand feet above sea level, we were not only in the mountains, we were part of them. I turned my attention to Father Fitz as he stood to give the final blessing.

  “I have some announcements,” he said in his low, mellifluous voice with its trace of County Cork. Father Fitz’s legs might be crippled by arthritis, his hearing may be poor, but there is nothing wrong with the way he speaks. “Last week’s Christmas bazaar brought in $1,185.37. Half we’ll be giving to the school, the other half to the families of unemployed loggers. God bless you for your generosity and hard work.” He paused, peering at his notes through thick trifocals. “The school Nativity pageant, Elvis Meets the Three Wise Men, will take place Thursday, December 17th, in the school hall at seven P.M.” He gave the principal, Mrs. Monica Vancich, a glance of disapproval. Mrs. Vancich smiled serenely, then tweaked the white shirt collar of Joey Bronsky, a notorious fidgeter and my ad manager’s son. Joey snapped to.

  Father Fitz continued: “Finally, we ask you all to pray for the repose of the souls of the thousands of brave Americans who died in yesterday’s attack on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. Monstrous cruel it was, and our president will be needing your prayers as well. May Almighty God keep Mr. Roosevelt.” Father Fitz turned to his breviary. “The Lord be with you.”

  “And also with you.” The congregation’s response was a little wobbly. I caught Ben’s eye. He was staring stonily ahead, his face tight. It was a sure sign that he was trying not to laugh.

  Father Fitz bestowed the last blessing and dismissed us. Annie Jeanne Dupré pumped away at the old organ as the congregation launched into an off-key rendition of “Immaculate Mary.” Father Fitz and Ben left the altar, the schoolchildren began to file out in a disorderly fashion, and little clutches of worshippers buzzed in the aisles, presumably about Father Fitz’s unfortunate lapse. I edged off to a side altar where the statue of St. Joseph seemed to wear a bemused air. I was waiting for Ben and didn’t want to get caught up in controversy just yet. I faced enough of that every day in my job as editor and publisher of The Advocate.

  It wasn’t unusual for our officially retired pastor to operate in a time warp. His sermons often reflected an era of bootleg liquor, creeping Communism, or family life lived only by Andy Hardy. This, however, was the first time he’d enlisted his parishioners’ prayers for a event long past.

  Except for Mrs. Patricelli, who was lighting enough votive candles to bake a ham, the church had grown empty. I could feel the cold come through the stained glass windows and hear the wind stir in the belfry. It was going on nine in the morning and very gloomy outside. The heavy gray clouds had been hanging over Alpine since early November. We might glimpse the sun before May, but we wouldn’t see the ground. Only seven miles from the summit of Stevens Pass in the Cascade Mountains, the four thousand residents of Alpine knew winter far better than most Pacific Northwesterners. Eighty miles away in Seattle, I suspected it was fifty degrees with a seventy percent chance of rain.

  Ben came from the sacristy just as Mrs. Patricelli ran out of matches. On her way out, she beamed at my brother, a gap-toothed, maternal smile, befitting the mother of nine and grandmother of eighteen. Maybe they were the reason for all the candles. The last I’d hea
rd, her oldest was president of a bank in Yakima and her youngest was doing time for embezzling. Not, I guessed, from his brother’s bank.

  Ben had planned on taking himself to breakfast at the Venison Eat Inn and Take Out after mass. “I’d better skip the ride downtown,” he said in his crackling voice that could keep even the sleepiest parishioner awake during a sermon. “Father Fitz is pretty shaky and the housekeeper is upset.”

  “Mrs. McHale? Really?” Teresa McHale had been the housekeeper at the rectory for a little over a year, but she struck me as having a cast-iron disposition. “Is Father Fitz sick or just daffy?”

  “He went through his usual routine this morning: up at six, got dressed and showered, devotions in his room, heard confessions at seven-thirty for the holy day, then readied for mass. He seemed fine, but Mrs. McHale wants to call Doc Dewey.” Ben steered me down the aisle toward the main entrance. “She thinks Father may have had a little stroke.”

  “Oh, dear.” I pulled on my driving gloves as we stood in the vestibule. At eighty-nine, a stroke couldn’t be a surprise. Still, in the second week of Advent, Father Fitz’s timing was lousy. Or, I thought, glancing up at Ben, maybe not. “Could you take over?”

  Ben rolled his eyes. He was back in his street clothes, thick navy sweater, blue jeans, and knee-high boots. He was very tan from his assignment in the desert. “So there goes twenty days of my twenty-one day vacation? Hell, Emma, I just got here day before yesterday.”

  “Ben …” I sounded reproachful. “You’re a priest, after all.…”

  “A tired priest,” he put in, looking unwontedly grim. “After twenty years, I finally got things halfway organized down on the Mississippi Delta, then I get shipped to the Navajo reservation a year ago and have to start all over. To make matters worse, the Mormons got to Tuba City first—over a hundred years ago. And the Hopis have been plucked right down in the middle of the Navajos. No wonder they hate each other. The federal government’s relocation in the Seventies still causes hard feelings. Now D.C.’s got a new plan, but who knows if it’ll work. It’s rough out there on the fringes of the Painted Desert. I’m almost forty-five, Emma.I have this dream of a well-heeled, well-oiled parish in the suburbs. Alpine ain’t it, Sluggly.”

  I grinned at the old nickname, a cross between Sluggo and Ugly. “You’d last about two weeks in the suburbs, Stench,” I asserted, retaliating with my childhood moniker for him. “You thrive on adversity and you know it. Besides, it may be only a few days. Think not of your vacation, but of your vocation.”

  “The parishioners might resent my stepping in.” Ben rubbed the thatch of brown hair that he combed off a side part. “On the other hand, I am here.…” One of Ben’s flaws is his indecisiveness. He always sees six sides of any issue. I have a similar tendency, which I regard as journalistic objectivity. But with deadlines to meet, I can’t often indulge myself. Conversely, Ben’s propensity for equivocation has grown more pronounced over the years, perhaps as a result of two decades spent in the slow lane along the Mississippi Delta.

  We argued briefly, and at last he gave in as I knew he would. “I’ll have to check with the arch,” he said, referring to the archbishop in Seattle. “But first we’d better see how bad Father Fitz really is. I don’t want to usurp his authority. You know how proprietary these old pastors can be, especially the ones from Ireland.”

  I was about to concur when Teresa McHale entered the vestibule from the church proper. She gave me the briefest of nods, murmured “Mrs. Lord,” and then addressed Ben: “I called young Doc Dewey. He’s in surgery, but that new man, Peyton Flake, will be over as soon as he finishes cleaning his guns.”

  Teresa McHale had replaced Edna McPhail, who had served in the rectory for over thirty years. Edna had died the previous year, suffering a heart attack while cleaning the bathtub. Since Edna was some ten years younger than Father Fitz, he had presumed she would outlive him. When she didn’t, he had a tizzy and put an ad not only in the church bulletin but The Advocate as well. Except for a well-known alcoholic and a woman whose wits could be most kindly described as lacking, there were no takers.

  Alpine is predominantly Scandinavian, and there are only about seven hundred registered Catholic parishioners in the vicinity. Since half of these are either too young or too old, and half of the rest are men, that doesn’t leave a large labor pool of would-be housekeepers on which to draw. Father Fitz had called the Chancery in Seattle for help. He got it, in the form of Teresa McHale. I suspected he viewed the replacement of McPhail by McHale as a minor miracle.

  Teresa did not look like a typical parish housekeeper, being rather chic, at least for Alpine, sporting dyed red hair, considerable makeup, and a plump, unbridled figure. She had strong features and shrewd green eyes adorned with long false lashes. Yet from all accounts, she was very efficient, and Father Fitz had not been heard to complain, though naturally some of the parishioners did.

  “I’ll go sit with Father,” said Ben, giving me a punch in the upper arm. “Later, Sluggly.”

  I took my cue and headed out into a world of white. My green Jaguar was the only car in the lot between the church and the school. St. Mildred’s had been built shortly after World War I, a white frame structure that would have been right at home in New England. The rectory, which was connected to the church by a covered walk, was of the same vintage, a one-story frame house with a basement, and enough room for two priests as well as a housekeeper. The parochial school was much newer, from the early Fifties, with a beige brick facade, an even newer gymnasium, and a school hall that also served as a lunchroom. The convent had stood behind the church, approximately where my car was now parked. About twenty years ago, when the shortage of nuns forced the school to hire lay teachers, vexed parishioners refused to pay for renovation of the convent. The archbishop had gotten a bit vexed as well, and had ordered the convent razed. Any nuns who taught at St. Mildred’s were forced to live elsewhere. At present, there were two, Sister Clare and Sister Mary Joan, who shared an apartment in a three-story building across the street.

  The Jag started immediately, and I drove carefully into the drifting flakes, hearing my chains grind and crunch. Alpine is built on a mountainside, which makes for very dicey driving in the winter. I eased my way down Fourth Street, past the Baptist Church, Mugs Ahoy, the local bank, and finally, the intersection at Front Street. The newspaper office was across the street, repainted a tasteful light blue after its brief passage of egg-yolk yellow during a film crew’s location shoot the previous summer.

  Ed Bronsky’s station wagon was pulled up to the curb, as was the white Buick sedan that belonged to my House & Home editor, Vida Runkel. My sole reporter, Carla Steinmetz, had probably walked to work, as had our office manager, Ginny Burmeister. Carla had owned a car of sorts when she first arrived in Alpine after graduating from the University of Washington a year and a half ago, but she had turned it in last September for a motor scooter. Naturally, it didn’t work very well in the snow, but neither did Carla. In fact, Carla didn’t work very well under any conditions, but at least she was enthusiastic.

  Vida was playing the trombone. Badly. I winced and put my gloved hands over my ears. “Stop!” I shrieked. “Why are you doing that?”

  Vida gave one last toot and put the trombone down on the empty chair next to her desk. “It was stolen from the high school last night. Somebody broke into the band room. My nephew Billy found it this morning at the base of Carl Clemans’s statue in Old Mill Park.” She rummaged under her desk. “There’s a piccolo, too. And a pair of drumsticks.”

  Bill Blatt was not only Vida’s nephew—as I sometimes thought half of Alpine was—but also a deputy sheriff. “So why didn’t Billy take the instruments back to the high school?”

  Vida, who is in her early sixties, and exudes an aura of rumpled majesty, shrugged her wide, multilayered shoulders. “He intended to, but he got a call from the sheriff, so he left them here. For the time being.”

  “Milo was having a cow,” said
Carla, bouncing up from her chair and looking like a Christmas elf in her red parka. “He raised his voice on the phone. I actually heard him.”

  I gazed at Carla. Excitement did not become Sheriff Dodge. Caria, I felt, must be exaggerating. “I thought Milo was taking the morning off to go steelheading.”

  Ed looked up from a dummy ad for Barton’s Bootery. He was wearing an old overcoat that was two sizes too small for his ever-expanding girth. “Why bother? Fishing’s terrible around here these days. I haven’t gone out in five years.”

  An eternal pessimist, Ed probably wouldn’t have hit the Skykomish River if a twenty-pound steelhead had flopped onto his desk. “Milo caught two last winter,” I remarked, taking off my purple car coat and discovering that the news office was freezing. “What happened to our heat?”

  Ed gave me a doleful look. “It broke. The Public Utility District’s having problems. They’re going to try to fix it by this afternoon.”

  “Great.” I gazed down at the baseboard that ordinarily would be emitting comfortable waves of warmth. Stubbornly, I refused to put my car coat back on. I might not be a native Alpiner, but I wasn’t going to give in to a spate of twenty-degree weather. “Okay, so what’s with Milo?” I inquired, getting back to the sheriff’s uncustomary state of excitement.

  But Ed was picking up the phone, Carla was rocketing off to the front office, and Vida was typing sixty-to-the-dozen on her battered old upright. Vida, however, had the courtesy to eye me over the rims of her tortoiseshell glasses. “Milo was disturbed. He didn’t tell Billy why.” She kept right on typing.

  A car wreck, I decided, and no wonder, what with the compact ice under the fresh snow. Even with four-wheel drive or chains, there were plenty of accidents not only in town, but out on the pass. I went into my office, which felt like a deep freezer. Trying not to let my teeth chatter, I wished for once that I didn’t have a fear of portable heating units. But my career as a reporter on The Oregonian had included too many gruesome stories about people who had died in fires caused by plug-in heaters. I’d rather watch my breath come and go in little puffs while my knees knocked together under my desk.