The Alpine Nemesis Read online

  Snatching up a doughnut, I headed for my office cubbyhole. We had two days until deadline. The thought of getting scooped rankled particularly on this newsless Monday morning. The last big story in the county had been the unfortunate Brian Conley. He had been reported missing on a Tuesday afternoon, and whoever leaked the item had given it not to us—we'd easily have made our five o'clock deadline—but to KSKY. Our lead articles since then had featured the usual traffic accidents, wrangling at the county commissioners' meetings, and the April start-up date of a new bridge over Burl Creek by the college. I wished no one ill, but I could have used something juicy.

  Frankly, this week's issue was painfully dull. We had a big school-end section to fill, and except for the related stories, nothing much of interest. The front page would carry the main articles on the high school and community college commencements, along with the announcement of Oscar Nyquist's death. But there was no lead, nothing to grab the reader. I felt as if I were publishing a shopper, not a newspaper.

  I scanned the wire services to see if there were any items with a local tie-in. A fatality accident had occurred this morning outside of Monroe on the dangerous stretch of road known as the Highway to Heaven. Too far from Alpine, and the victim was from Yakima. There was talk of resuming logging operations in central Oregon. Right industry, wrong state. A break-in had occurred at the naval station in Everett. No one from town currently worked there; the commute was too difficult in the winter. I was reminded of my former reporter, Carla Steinmetz Talliaferro, who had once solved the problem of a slow Tuesday by filling up three inches on the front page with a piece that began, “There was no news to report this week from the Snoqualmie National Forest ranger station….” And then proceeded to try to explain why.

  Half an hour later, Mayor Fuzzy Baugh showed up, looking pleased with himself.

  “Emma, how about a big front-page story?” he asked with the faint Louisiana drawl that still lingered in his voice.

  My heart leaped. “Really? What's going on?”

  Fuzzy, who has been Alpine's mayor since before I moved to town, eased himself into one of the visitor's chairs. “Tell me, darlin', what's the thing you'd most like to see as a civic improvement in this fine city?”

  “Well …” I considered the dozens of editorials I'd written over the years, calling for more street repairs, sewer improvements, funding for the library, a bigger budget for the sheriff, trying to get the three old farts who made up the county commissioners to stay awake at the monthly meetings and actually accomplish something. “Schools,” I finally said. “I think it's time we tried to pass another levy. The K-12 teachers haven't had a real raise in four years.”

  Fuzzy nodded slowly. “My, yes, that's an outstanding plan. But I'm thinking of an even more pressing need. Now, Emma, you've heard the complaints about Alpine's great lack.”

  “Lack of what?” I had no idea what Fuzzy was talking about.

  Fuzzy put both freckled hands on my desk and leaned forward in the chair. “A public toilet, that's what.”

  “A … public toilet?” I repeated stupidly.

  Fuzzy nodded some more. “I can see your headline now: ‘Mayor Brings Relief to Alpine Voters.’ I mean Alpine residents,” he hastily corrected himself.

  To be fair, there had been criticism over the years because the town didn't provide public toilets, not even in Old Mill Park. Originally there had been two privies in the park, but they'd had to be moved every autumn and new holes had needed to be dug. Some four or five years earlier, there had been an early frost, right after Labor Day. Since Alpine is three thousand feet above sea level, the ground had remained solid until April. The city council got into a squabble over the placement of the new privies, and didn't resolve the matter until late September, when it was again too late to dig. Somehow, the whole issue got tabled, leaving the public stranded.

  Milo and his deputies were forced to cite individuals who relieved themselves in public. And, because of my policy of printing the names and charges of everyone on the police blotter, I became the butt, so to speak, of the irate citizens who had not enjoyed seeing themselves charged with PIP, or Peeing/Pooping in Public.

  “You see, Emma,” Fuzzy went on, “Granite Falls is putting in a public toilet. If they can do it, so can we.”

  Granite Falls was another former logging town, north of us on the Mountain Loop Highway. Whatever was good for Granite Falls apparently was good for Alpine. Fuzzy wasn't going to be outdone.

  “When?” I inquired. “It's already June.”

  “Before the summer solstice parade, June twenty-first,” the mayor replied, looking pleased with himself. “There's enough money in the parks department budget to put in two toilets. Nothing fancy, of course, just the basics.”

  “That's great, Fuzzy,” I said, trying to show enthusiasm. “Can you give me the details?”

  “I'll have somebody from city hall drop off that information this afternoon,” Fuzzy said, getting to his feet and brushing at the temples of his dyed auburn hair. “Work should start in a few days. You'll want some pictures in progress, I imagine.”

  “Definitely,” I replied, keeping a straight face.

  “Wonderful.” Fuzzy rapped on my desk, an apparent sign of jubilation. “I kind of thought that since this was my idea it would be nice to name the rest rooms after me. What do you think of running a contest to see who can come up with the best name? The winner could have the privilege of inaugurating the toilets.”

  After more than ten years in Alpine, I know there is no such thing as a really terrible idea. “Why not?” I said. “Make up the rules, send them along with the other information.”

  “I've got a really good photo of the toilets in a catalog,” Fuzzy said. “Can you scan them into the newspaper?”

  “Why not?” I repeated. Why not have a contest for the biggest hind end in Skykomish County? The candidates were too numerous to mention. I felt as if I were drowning in a sea of… something or other.

  A proposed toilet was not a lead story, not even for the Advocate. I cudgeled my brain for other ideas. Maybe I could use the phone call to Al Driggers from Brian Conley's parents:

  CLOSURE SOUGHT BY MISSING SNOWBOARDER's FAMILY

  I sighed, even as I jotted down the possible headline. To refresh my memory, I pulled out the binder that contained the issues for the first quarter of the year. There was the first snowboarder story, telling our readers— after they'd already been informed by KSKY—that a twenty-five-year-old Seattle man named Brian Conley had been missing for four days on the north slope of Tonga Ridge. A week later, the follow-up story reported that Brian still hadn't been found. We had received a black-and-white photo of him from his girlfriend, and I'd run it on the front page just below the fold. I stared at the one-column cut. Brian looked younger than twenty-five, but perhaps the picture had been taken a couple of years earlier. He had a pleasant if undistinguished face. The description that had been given to the authorities listed Brian as five-ten, a hundred and sixty-five pounds, with blue eyes, dark brown hair worn short, and a small scar on the back of his right hand. I stared some more at the photo. He looked like the kind of person I'd inferred from the way his girlfriend had talked about him: ordinary, average, nice. Not the sort of person whose life should be cut off by a tragic accident. I shook my head and closed the bound volume.

  If I planned to write another story I'd have to call the Conleys back in Penn Yan. Without much enthusiasm, I dialed Al's number at the funeral home. His gusty, lusty wife, Janet, answered.

  “I'm filling in this morning,” she announced. “Cammy Olson is in bed with a bad case of postcoital sex.”

  “The result or the cause thereof?” I inquired, laughing at Janet's typically ribald remark.

  “Actually,” Janet replied, “she's got chicken pox. At twenty-two, isn't she a little old for that?”

  “Not really,” I said. “The problem is, the older you are, the harder the case. I expect she's miserable.” Maybe this
was my lead story:

  SPOTTED WOMAN STALKS ALPINE

  Maybe not.

  “The younger generation,” Janet said scornfully. “She'll be out for at least a week. Between her and Al's new assistant, Dan Peebles, I should quit at Sky Travel and work at the mortuary full time. The only problem is, I get free trips at the travel agency. At the funeral home, people go, but they don't come back. Until this morning, they haven't even been going. It's all these hardy Scandinavians—they live forever.”

  Janet had found the Conleys' number, and two minutes later I was speaking to Mrs. Conley. She seemed a bit confused about who I was and why I was calling, but finally she figured it out.

  “It's a terrible thing, not knowing,” Mrs. Conley declared. “My husband and I should have come out when we learned that Brian was missing. But we kept waiting and hoping…” Her voice trailed away. I felt like a ghoul, knowing that I had upset her, aware that I had made dozens of such calls to bereaved relatives and friends. I hated this part of the job, but it was necessary.

  I spoke up in an attempt to rescue her from the awkward moment. “A friend reported him missing, as I recall.”

  “Yes.” There was an audible sniff at the other end of the line. “Gina, his girlfriend. We met her once, they came to visit last summer. She's very sweet. But by the time she notified the authorities, Brian had been gone overnight. Still, we thought maybe he'd just been hurt or gotten lost or …” Again Mrs. Conley's voice faded.

  “Brian was alone, as I recall,” I said, racing to the rescue one more time.

  “Yes.” Another sniff. “I guess so. Though we'd spoken with him a few days earlier, and I thought he mentioned something about going with a friend. But Gina wasn't sure, so maybe he changed his mind. Oh, Ms. Lord, you can't imagine what it's like to lose a son!”

  I could, but I didn't want to. “I have a son about the same age as Brian,” I said. “He's my only child. Do you have other children?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Conley said, her voice somewhat stronger. “Two girls and two boys besides Brian. They're a comfort, but they can't make up for losing him. He was the baby of the family, and very special. Brian was such a passionate young man, always caught up in this cause and that. Do you think we're foolish to want to conduct some sort of service on that mountain where he was lost?”

  “No,” I answered slowly. “If it would help you deal with your loss, it isn't foolishness.”

  “That's so,” Mrs. Conley said vaguely. “You have a priest in Alpine?”

  “Yes, Father Dennis Kelly,” I said. “He's very spiritual, very intelligent.” And his sermons are about as inspiring as legal notices. “Did you plan to come out soon?”

  Mrs. Conley said that she and her husband hadn't made up their minds, they'd just come up with the idea of a mountainside service a couple of days ago. Their pastor in Penn Yan had celebrated a memorial Mass just two weeks earlier. Maybe they shouldn't spend the money on travel. Maybe they really were being foolish. Maybe Brian wasn't dead after all.

  I pounced on that remark. “What do you mean?” Besides the hope of the hopeless, I thought.

  Mrs. Conley didn't respond right away. When she did, her voice had taken on a wary note. “You never know. About disappearances, I mean.” She began speaking more Mary Daheim

  rapidly. “Amnesia, for instance. Someone here in Penn Yan had amnesia and went missing for over two years. His son-in-law ran into him at a service station in Albany where he was pumping gas. Imagine—the poor man was an attorney with a very profitable practice.”

  I made encouraging noises, then politely extricated myself from the conversation. There was no news here, and even if the Conleys did come to Alpine, the story wouldn't rate more than four inches. The missing snow-boarder was a dead end.

  How could I have been so wrong?

  WHEN I ARRIVED at my little log house, I was still lacking a decent front-page story. I'd spent two hours on the phone, checking with the city, county, state, and federal agencies to see if any of them had generated a smidgen of local news other than toilets. They hadn't. Fiscal reports, that was the thing, they said, coming July first. Wow.

  The mail was all catalogs and circulars and a couple of bills. There were no messages on the answering machine. I wished I were back in St. Paul with Adam. I'd visited him in February and we'd spent some wonderful hours together, walking the snow-covered grounds of the seminary where he was studying to be a priest. Leaving winter behind on the return trip, I took a detour to Arizona to see my brother, Ben. I enjoyed the sun in Tuba City for two days before I started griping about the heat. My brother had laughed at me. At his mission church in Mississippi and now tending his flock in Arizona, he had grown accustomed to hot weather, both humid and dry. I preferred the cold damp of Alpine. Ben thought I was nuts.

  Then Tom Cavanaugh showed up the week before Easter. He'd been promising to come for over a year, and I'd almost given up on him. It wouldn't have been the first time that the father of my son had broken a promise. Our entire off-and-on-again relationship of almost thirty years had been full of them.

  But he finally arrived, and he spent over a week with me in the log house that now felt empty and desolate. Ironically, I'd used up most of my vacation time visiting Ben and Adam. I suppose that, deep down, I didn't believe Tom would ever come to Alpine. But he had, and he'd talked of marriage. His mentally unbalanced wife, Sandra, had been dead for over three years, and his daughter, who—like me—had given birth to a child out of wedlock, was finally capable of taking care of the baby and herself. It helped, of course, that Tom could afford a nanny, a maid, a gardener, and for all I knew a clutch of liveried footmen in his San Francisco mansion.

  So now I was pondering the possibility of finally marrying The Love of My Life. Vida was all for it. She became unwontedly starry-eyed whenever I mentioned Tom—or Tommy, as she insisted on calling him. Vida hadn't carried the scenario through to its logical conclusion: I'd have to sell the Advocate and move to San Francisco. It was not a prospect that thrilled me, though that of being Tom's wife did.

  Thus, I poured a hefty bourbon and water—and pondered. For a month now, pondering had taken up most of my spare time. Tom had even offered to buy the Advocate from me and add it to his string of small dailies and weeklies. But I hated abandoning the paper; maybe I hated more the idea of surrendering my hard-won independence.

  Half an hour later, I was pondering what to cook for dinner. Nothing that I had on hand appealed to me. Risking frostbite, I reached far back into the freezer compartment, hoping to find some hidden shrimp. Curry seemed tempting, and Alpine was short of ethnic restaurants.

  There was no shrimp, so I took out a chicken breast and was defrosting it in the microwave when I heard a series of distant cracking sounds. One, two. I hesitated with my finger on the timer and listened again. Sometimes the power lines that marched down through the Skykomish River valley made that kind of sound. Three, four. The noise was muffled. I waited for a full minute, but all was quiet. My faint hope dwindled; apparently, nothing had exploded to give me a lead story.

  I was frying the chicken when I heard a far-off siren. Experience has taught me to differentiate among the various emergency vehicles. This was Milo Dodge's British police horn, a rare bit of whimsy for the usually practical sheriff. A little over a year ago, he had found the item in a catalog and ordered it through Harvey's Hardware and Sporting Goods. I guess he wanted to pretend he worked for Scotland Yard. The siren was used on his private vehicle, a red Grand Cherokee Chief. Now my interest was piqued. What had brought the sheriff out after his official shift was over?

  I dialed Vida's number. “Did you hear those noises a few minutes ago?” I asked.

  “No,” Vida replied. “Roger has the TV on. It's a trifle loud.”

  Roger was Vida's odious grandson. His parents had taken an off-season vacation trip to Hawaii and he was staying with Vida. Roger was sixteen, and learning to drive. I was certain that he'd soon replace Durwood Parker as A
lpine's worst menace behind the wheel.

  “Did you hear Milo's siren?” I inquired further.

  “No.” Vida sounded vexed. “Roger, dear, could you lower the volume just a teensy bit?” she asked, away from the phone. There was a pause. The volume remained at full decibel. “Roger? Roger!”

  At last the little creep responded, though not without complaint. Vida spoke again into the receiver. “What is it? I didn't hear anything.”

  “I'm not sure,” I replied. “I thought it came from over your way.”

  “I'm sorry,” Vida said. “I've no idea. Should I call Billy?”

  Bill Blatt was Vida's nephew and one of Milo's deputies. “Yes, if you get a chance. It may have been the power lines. You know how they snap sometimes.”

  “Yes, that could be it,” Vida agreed, “though it usually happens in the winter cold. I must dash, Emma. I'm making Roger some lovely pudding.”

  The description was dubious, I thought. Vida's collection of House and Home-page recipes over the years overflowed from the bottom drawer of her desk. They were, as is said, enough to choke a horse—which is also an apt description of her cooking. But pudding from a box might not be ruined: I envisioned a huge vat of it, with Roger plunged facedown, only his feet showing above the creamy chocolate rim.

  For once, Vida had proved a washout as the source of all knowledge. I still wondered what Milo was up to. The siren had definitely been off to the east, no doubt starting from the sheriff's home in the Icicle Creek development. After dinner, I'd call him to see if there was any news, even the slightest of stories to put on page one.

  It was exactly seven o'clock when I finished my meager dinner and dialed the sheriff's number. He answered on the fourth ring, out of breath.

  “Dodge here,” he said, sounding official.

  “Lord here,” I said. “Were you running to catch the phone or chasing a perp?”

  “I was in the can,” Milo growled. “Why does the phone always ring when I'm in the can?”