The Alpine Journey Read online

  I gave her the map. “Where did you say you were going?” I asked.

  “I didn't.” She turned on her heel and walked out in her typical splayfooted manner.

  Twenty minutes later I was sitting across from Ed Bronsky in a booth at the Burger Barn. He twitched, he fidgeted, he scooted around on the plastic-encased seat until I thought he'd slip off and fall under the table.

  “What's wrong, Ed?” I asked after we'd put in our orders. “You seem upset.”

  “It's Mr. Ed,” he replied, not looking at me. “I haven't had one nibble from a publisher.”

  Mr. Ed was his autobiography, which, amid high hopes and unrealistic expectations, he'd started sending to major publishing houses the previous autumn. I'd tried to warn him not to expect too much too soon, but as usual, Ed hadn't listened. Nor had he taken my suggestion that he should try to obtain an agent first.

  “I don't get it,” Ed said, finally raising his fleshy beagle's face to meet my gaze. “All these so-called celebrities get big bucks for their life stories. What have they ever done that we don't know already? Blab-blab-blab—they're on TV all the time, shooting off their faces. But my story is different—it could be anybody's story—a small-town guy who suddenly finds himself rich. Now that's human interest. Can't those bigshot New York publishers see that? Or are they so caught up in city life that they've lost touch with the real world?”

  “I take it you got another rejection,” I said, trying not to look like I-told-you-so.

  “Knopf.” Ed hung his head. “That makes three. I'm at the end of my rope.”

  “But not tiie end of the publishers' listings,” I pointed out, trying to be kind.

  “That's not the point,” he asserted, settling his jowls onto his hands. “It's the way these East Coast bozos have dealt with me. All three of them have sent letters saying the same thing, and I have a sneaky feeling they're some kind of form. Nothing personal, nothing to show they like the writing or the idea or that they even read the manuscript.”

  “I don't think you need to give up so soon,” I said as our waitress approached with Ed's double cheeseburger and my standard burger basket. I was lying, of course; in my opinion, Ed should have given up before he started. But then I had read the manuscript.

  Ed waited until we had been served before he responded. “No, I'm taking a new tack. You've got the back shop up and running. I want you to publish the book.”

  I'd been afraid of that. “We're not set up for big runs like that,” I said, a bit too quickly. “You know what we do—wedding invitations, posters, brochures, handouts. A book—a four-hundred-and-fifty-seven-page book—is way beyond our capabilities.”

  But Ed shook his head, somehow managing to dislodge mustard from his chin in the process. “You could do it. It's just a matter of gearing up. I'll talk to Kip. We'll go fifty-fifty on the profits.”

  “Whoa.” I practically choked on a french fry. “It doesn't work that way. From what I've heard in talking to some of my former colleagues who've had books published, authors get ten percent at most. We couldn't do a hardcover, we don't have a bindery. You'd have to pay us to print the book and absorb the other out-of-pocket costs.”

  “Such as?” Ed interrupted.

  “Cover design, copy editing, photos—whatever.” I was speaking off the top of my head. I really didn't know what was involved except that I wished it wouldn't be me. “Then you'd have to figure out how to distribute it. Your profit would come out of the actual copies sold. Once we printed Mr. Ed, we'd be out of it.”

  Ed chewed on his pudgy thumb. “How much?”

  I shrugged. “Ask Kip. As I said, I'm not sure we could do it at all. He'd have to figure our cost and then calculate a reasonable profit. It'd get pretty complicated,” I added in a dark tone. I was well aware that Ed had problems with complications.

  “Hunh.” Ed took a big bite of cheeseburger and chewed noisily. “Is Kip around this afternoon?”

  “No. He's delivering the papers. Once he's done, he usually doesn't come back on Wednesdays.”

  Ed chewed some more. “Okay, I'll drop by tomorrow, around ten. Be sure and tell him that.”

  “I will.” Suddenly I felt for Kip, who was young, naive, and probably putty in Ed's beefy hands.

  But most of all, I felt for me. Disaster lurked around the corner, and its name was Mr. Ed.

  At four-thirty on Thursday I was ready to leave. Just as I was about to tell Vida, the phone rang. It was Sheriff Milo Dodge, my longtime friend and current lover.

  “Did you say you were going out of town this weekend?” Milo asked in his laconic voice.

  “Yes, about six times,” I replied a trifle testily. “I'm leaving immediately.”

  “Oh.” Milo sounded disappointed. Worse yet, from my perspective, he sounded surprised. “I was going to come over tonight. I guess not, huh?”

  “Not.” I tried to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “I'll be back Sunday night.”

  “That's not good for me,” Milo said, and I could see him shaking his head and stretching his long legs out on his desk and cradling his coffee mug in his big hands. “I've got to go to Bellevue to see my son. I might be late getting back.”

  When Milo and his wife had divorced several years ago, Old Mulehide, as he called his ex, had been granted custody of their three children. All were now grown, and Old Mulehide was remarried. One of the two daughters had also married, but the other girl and her brother were still in college, if on an irregular, desultory basis.

  “I might be late, too,” I said. “Call me Monday.”

  “Why do you have to leave so early?” Milo asked in a slightly irked tone. “You'll get into rush-hour traffic on 1-5.”

  I knew what Milo was thinking, and it annoyed me: our physical relationship, which had begun some eighteen months earlier, was predicated on Milo's masculine whims. When he felt like making love, I was supposed to be available. When I felt like making love, he went fishing. Or so it seemed to me. Our friendship, which had been deep and true and real, seemed to have deteriorated from the moment we had fallen into each other's arms.

  “It's a long drive, and we'll be going against traffic,” I countered.

  “We'll?” The word sounded strained. “I thought you were going by yourself.”

  At least Milo had remembered that much, if not the departure time. “Vida's driving. She has to go to Oregon, too, and she's dropping me off in Portland.”

  “Vida's going to Oregon?” Milo sounded flabbergasted, for which I didn't quite blame him. “Why?”

  “I don't know,” I answered truthfully. “She hasn't said. Look, she's waiting for me. We have to stop at my house so I can drop off the Jag and grab my luggage. I'll talk to you Monday.”

  “Okay.” There was a heavy sigh. “Have fun.” The sheriff sounded as if he were wishing I'd catch plague.

  Vida and I were on the road in her big Buick by five o'clock. We planned to stop for dinner at the Country Cousin in Centralia. I had made up my mind not to ask any more questions until we were seated in the restaurant. Thus we engaged in chitchat for the first leg of the trip, mostly about Ed and his awful book. Kip was supposed to spend part of his weekend figuring out if the project was feasible. Vida provided dire warnings, all of which I already understood.

  When at last we pulled off 1-5 around seven-thirty, I waited until we were served before I delicately probed into the reason for her journey. Vida, who was wearing the most god-awful green felt hat with what looked like turkey feathers, gave me her gimlet eye.

  “Ernest has family in Cannon Beach,” she said after a long pause.

  Ernest was her husband who had been dead for almost twenty years. There were many Runkels in Alpine, as well as Blatts, who were Vida's own blood kin. My House & Home editor discussed them freely and often. Indeed, I knew most of them by now, though I was still occasionally surprised when a shirttail relation surfaced.

  “I didn't realize that,” I said in what I hoped was an innocent tone. �
�Have I heard you speak of them before?”

  “No,” Vida said, and speared a leaf of iceberg lettuce from her salad.

  “Are they close?” I inquired.

  “No.” Vida nibbled on a bread stick.

  I tried a slightly different approach. “Cannon Beach is a lovely little resort town.”

  “Is it?” Vida seemed disinterested. “Do you think,” she continued after an awkward pause, “that Carla is seeing that Talliaferro person from the college?”

  I didn't know and, for the moment, didn't care. But for the rest of the journey, I got absolutely nothing more out of Vida about the Runkels who dwelled in Cannon Beach. It was unlike her, and I was worried.

  Chapter Two

  MAVIS'S WELCOME WAS warm if flippant, typical of her exuberant, irreverent personality. She was almost ten years older than I, and her husband, Ray, had recently retired from the advertising department at Jantzen. Their newly acquired condo was situated on the Willamette River, with the Broadway and Steel bridges on either side, rather like bookends. With their three children grown and on their own, the Fulkerstons had shed themselves of all but their most cherished furnishings from the old split-level, and acquired some tasteful antiques.

  “Our original stuff was almost antique,” Mavis said as we sipped cognac in the comfortable living room with its splendid view of the river traffic. “Officially, that is. But who needs a bunch of Sixties crap that looks like it came off a bad mushroom trip?”

  I admired a rewoven Turkish carpet, a Queen Anne breakfront, a Japanese screen, and a small but enchanting Etruscan carving of a stag. “I envy you. I'm lucky to have the basics. Weekly newspapering is no way to get rich.”

  “It is if you own a string of them,” Mavis said. “I'll bet Tom Cavanaugh isn't complaining. How is he, anyway?”

  The mention of my onetime lover and the father of my son made me flinch. I hadn't spoken to Tom in almost two years. The brief resumption of our affair had come to a dead end when he reneged on his promise to divorce his rich but nutty wife, Sandra.

  “I don't know,” I said, trying to sound casual, and failing. “I suppose he suffers losses like anybody else in the business these days. But at least he has Sandra's family fortune to keep him in Brooks Brothers suits and Beluga caviar.”

  “Well.” Unlike some people, Mavis wasn't embarrassed by her question or my response. “It sounds like you two aren't an item anymore. But then you never were when we worked together at The Oregonian.” She laughed, and turned to her husband, who was looking bemused. “Emma kept Mr. Cavanaugh a deep, dark secret until one night after work I got her gassed at Trader Vic's.”

  “Devious,” Ray remarked with good humor. He's a man of few but measured words who prefers to let his wife do most of the talking. Or maybe he has no choice. “I always figured that was how you got your interviews for the paper.”

  “Sometimes.” Mavis shrugged. She is a small, athletic brunette with gold highlights in her shoulder-length hair. “I wasn't devious enough to get a deal on this condo, though. Last winter when the river rose as high as we'd ever seen it, some of these places were flooded. We'd already had our eye on them, so Ray and I figured the prices might come down. They didn't.”

  Ray's lean, homely face wore an ironic expression. “In some cases, the prices went up. But that was mostly the rentals. These units aren't all condos.”

  “But what a great setting,” I said enthusiastically, grateful that the conversation had veered away from Tom. “You're close to everything, and the view is terrific.”

  Mavis nodded, one hand gesturing toward the window, where we could see the lights of a small freighter moving against the backdrop of the new Rose Garden sports arena and the older Portland Coliseum, which had been dubbed the Glass Palace. “It constantly changes. We watch the ebb and flow of the city. And then there are the trains behind us and all the traffic that goes over the bridges.”

  “In Alpine, I see trees and an RV parked across the street,” I said in mock self-pity. It wasn't quite true. On a clear day, I could also see Mount Baldy and the surrounding foothills from my cozy log house.

  “Alpine must be pretty,” Ray put in.

  “It's a pretty setting,” I admitted. The town itself was another matter. There were too many storefronts boarded up in the small commercial district, too many ramshackle frame houses with tin roofs, too much junk left lying on overgrown lawns, too much rural blight, which shriveled the souls of local residents and made hope as elusive as the spotted owl that had helped bring about Alpine's hard times.

  Mavis was offering the brandy bottle, but Ray and I both refused. “I wanted to meet Veda—or is it Vida?” She paused for the correction before continuing. “You should have brought her in for a drink.”

  “Vida still had that long drive out to Cannon Beach,” I said, avoiding Mavis's cat's eyes gaze. “She was anxious to get going.” It wouldn't do to mention that Vida had practically thrown me out of the Buick in her haste to head for the coast.

  Ray was on his feet, stretching and yawning. “Golf tomorrow. I'm heading to bed. Good to see you again, Emma.” He gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder and kissed Mavis. “Don't talk all night.”

  After he had left the room, Mavis laughed in her throaty manner. “He's the world's worst golfer. In thirty-five years he hasn't broken ninety. But he likes to pretend.” The green-and-gold-and-brown cat's eyes glimmered at me. “So do you. What's up with Cavanaugh? I thought you'd gotten back together, if briefly.”

  “We did, but it's been a while.” Mavis knew all about how I'd excised Tom from my life when I discovered I was pregnant with Adam some twenty-four years ago. Tom had resurfaced a year or so after I bought The Advocate, and finally met our son. Despite Tom's avowals of unceasing love for me, he couldn't quite cut the deformed bonds that tied him to Sandra. He called it honor, I called it cowardice, and the truth was probably somewhere in between. I knew Tom and Adam kept in touch, which was a good thing. I'd been wrong to turn father and son into strangers. But after a quarter of a century I'd finally stopped loving Tom. I had, I really had. I'd said it so often that it must be true.

  I said it again to Mavis, who, typically, did not comment. My old friend is quick to speak her mind, unless the matter at hand is serious. Then she mulls and waits and eventually pounces. “So how's Adam?” she inquired. “Is he still thinking of becoming a priest?”

  “Yes, he is,” I answered, trying not to notice the skepticism on Mavis's face. “He's finally finishing his degree at Arizona State. After the first of the year he expects to enroll in a seminary somewhere in California. He and Ben are working on it.”

  “And you resent that,” Mavis said with her usual acuity. “Your brother has confiscated your son.”

  “I don't know squat about seminaries,” I retorted. “Ben does. He's a priest.”

  “It's too bad he's a Catholic priest.” The cat's eyes danced. “Now, if you were all sensible Episcopalians like us, Adam could be a priest and still get married.”

  Over the years Mavis and I had engaged in good-natured banter about each other's religious preferences. But when it came to Adam's decision to enter the priesthood, I seemed to have lost my sense of humor.

  “It could still happen,” I said defensively. “A married Catholic priesthood may be down the road.”

  “A long, bumpy road,” said Mavis, polishing off her brandy. “You should live so long. So should Adam.”

  “I just hope he's sure,” I said. “He's changed majors and colleges so often that I can't really believe he's got a vocation.”

  “Once he's in the seminary, he'll find out.” Mavis uttered a small laugh. “We never think our children know what they're doing. Look at our three—just because Jeff liked to scuba dive, he decided to become an oceanogra-pher. Ray and I thought he was nuts. But he's down there in San Diego, loving it. And Brent wanted to make movies, which really struck us as harebrained. He'll never get to Hollywood, but he's happy as a clam producing films fo
r the City of Portland.”

  I smiled, recalling the Fulkerston boys as little kids who couldn't have been more different: Jeff was an obstreperous, fidgety child who, if the condition had had a name in the Seventies, probably suffered from Attention Deficit Syndrome. Brent was shy, withdrawn, almost introverted, yet gifted with tremendous imagination. But it was Mavis and Ray's daughter, Jackie, who I knew best. I had stayed with her and her husband, Paul Melcher, in Port Angeles three years ago. The baby that Jackie had been carrying that summer was now working his way through the Terrible Twos.

  “They're all fine,” Mavis responded in answer to my question about the Melcher menage. “Little Rowley is a terror, but he'll get over it. Maybe. It's a good thing Jackie has so much energy. When she isn't down in the dumps, that is.” Mavis made a face.

  Jackie was a combination of her brothers, exuberant one minute, morose the next. I'd hoped that motherhood would put her on a more even keel, but apparently it hadn't. “I'm sorry they may have to move,” I remarked. “They had such wonderful plans for that old house Paul inherited in Port Angeles.”

  Mavis shrugged. “You know all about timber towns. ITT Rayonier is closing the pulp mill, and Paul's probably out of a job, along with three hundred and sixty-five other people. He's hoping that with his engineering degree, he can find something else in the area, especially if the site is converted into some kind of similar, downsized operation. But right now everything's up in the air.”

  “That's rough,” I said with feeling, and leaned back against the peach-and-plum-striped sofa. “We never stop worrying about our kids, do we?”

  “Nope.” Mavis stared out through the big picture window, where a sleek pleasure craft passed close to the riverbank. The city sparkled around us, lights like fireflies dancing among the gentle hills. Even after dark, Portland seemed alive. In Alpine, the clouds come down over the mountains, and sometimes the only sound is the lonely whistle of a freight train, crying like an abandoned child. The lights of logging towns are going out in many ways.