The Alpine Advocate Read online

  “How long will you be staying, Chris?” I asked when we finally collected his belongings and had reached the dark green Jaguar that is, next to Adam, the light of my life.

  Chris’s black eyes roamed somewhere in my direction. “I don’t know,” Chris said. “A couple of weeks, maybe.”

  “Oh.” Call me crazy, but I can never figure out how the hotel-motel industry keeps going when nobody I know supports it. My house is small, with two bedrooms and a den. When Adam is home, the only place guests can stay is in sleeping bags on the front porch. Or that’s the way it should be, but I have been known to put up a family of five in the living room, the dining nook, and even the laundry room. Of course that was my cousin, Trina, and her brood, which hardly counts because I figure they usually sleep in trees and eat out of troughs. “Sure,” I conceded, “you can sleep in Adam’s room. He might even have made the bed before he left.”

  “Cool.” Chris’s voice was remote. His gaze was fixed on the passing traffic, now bumper-to-bumper, mostly headed for Boeing—where Don worked until his fatal heart attack and fortuitous insurance policy. I would have felt guilty about the money had he not also taken out a second personal policy in the same amount which covered his wife and three children. As it was, I counted my blessings. I might not have wanted to be Don’s bride, but I never wished him ill. Ironically, the reverse may not have been true. Don was not a happy man when I told him I was carrying Tom’s child. Come to think of it, Tom wasn’t too thrilled about it either. At least he never told his wife.

  “Do you remember much about Alpine?” I asked as we swung onto the Eastside freeway and found ourselves going against traffic for a change.

  Chris gave what I assumed was a shake of his head. “Just the trains going through. And the snow.”

  “It’s grown some,” I offered. “Your uncle Simon has two new partners in his law firm now.”

  “I don’t remember him.” Chris’s voice was uninterested.

  “Your cousins are both still in town.” I was struggling to make conversation, raking up a past that I wasn’t sure meant a rat’s behind to Chris. Except that it must, somehow, or he wouldn’t be coming back. “Jennifer is married to Kent MacDuff. He works at his dad’s used car lot. Mark manages property for your grandfather. He had a girlfriend, but they broke up.”

  “Mark used to lock me in the cellar at Grandpa’s.” He spoke matter-of-factly, but the fact that he mentioned the incident at all spoke volumes.

  The rain was coming down harder; I switched the wind-shield wipers on to high. “Will you see them while you’re in town?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

  I sensed rather than saw Chris shrug. “I don’t know. They’ve never come to see me.” He was silent the whole time I drove past Bellevue.

  Resisting the urge to ask about Deloria, I kept closer to Chris’s home turf. “Your grandfather isn’t too well,” I remarked at last. That was what Vida told me, anyway. She’d run into Neeny Doukas at young Doc Dewey’s office about a week ago. He’d definitely looked poorly to her, but so did Sheriff Dodge’s Siberian husky.

  “Neeny’s old,” Chris replied in a tone that assumed anyone over seventy was expected to be ailing. “He never liked me.”

  I slowed down as the first of the logging trucks pulled onto the highway. “Chris,” I began, a bit surprised at the annoyed note in my voice, “if you don’t think much of your relatives, why are you coming back to Alpine?”

  Chris glanced at me, then looked down at his battered but expensive gym shoes. “That’s my business.” He scuffed one foot against the other and relented a bit. “I’ve got a score to settle with Grandpa. I hate him so much I could kill him.”

  Chapter Two

  NOW BOYS WILL be boys, and all that, but I still found Chris Ramirez’s response disturbing. I hardly knew the kid, but he struck me as too unmotivated to do much of anything, let alone stage a face-off with Neeny Doukas. I laughed, a bit lamely, and gave him a quick sidelong glance.

  “Just wait awhile. Vida Runkel already has him halfway to death’s door.”

  “I don’t know her.” Chris was staring straight ahead through the rain-streaked windshield. The freeway felt vaguely slick, for it hadn’t rained since Labor Day. Indian summer had held sway until this last week of September.

  “Chris …” I began, then stopped. I sensed his seriousness and recalled my description of him, however inaccurate, as a potential poet. But moodiness can beget other things than verse. “Did he and your mother ever write or talk?” I posed the question with less than my usual professional aplomb.

  “Sometimes.” He resettled the baseball cap on his head. “Afterward, my mother would be mad for a week.”

  “Is that why you’re so angry with him?”

  Chris shifted in the leather-covered seat, his feet now pigeon-toed. “He wrecked my mom’s life. She died sad. She lived sad. He sent my dad away. He owes me. And them.”

  This was serious stuff indeed. I recalled the time I’d been sent by The Oregonian to cover a story about a woman who was going to jump off the roof of a down town Portland hotel. The policemen and firemen weren’t having any luck talking her out of it, so they dispatched me, as the only woman on the scene, to give it a try. I hadn’t had the wildest notion what to say to her. I vividly remembered walking out onto the rooftop and wracking my brain for words of wisdom. The first thing that popped out of my mouth was “Where’d you get those green shoes?” She had gone right over the ledge. A decade later, I didn’t have a lot more confidence in my abilities at persuasion.

  I hedged a bit. “You never saw your father again?”

  “Nope. Neither did Mom. Never heard from him either. He just … disappeared.” Chris paused, fidgeting with the baseball cap. “Whatever my grandfather did to him must have been pretty freaking grim.”

  Whatever, according to Vida Runkel, had involved a large amount of money. At least that was what she and her fellow town gossips had figured. But nobody knew for certain.

  “Maybe he went back to his own people,” I suggested, veering further away from the topic of Neeny Doukas.

  “Maybe.” Chris fell silent. We turned off the main freeway, heading toward Monroe, where I hoped this week’s Advocate had arrived an hour ago. If only Carla Steinmetz could screw her head on the right way long enough to get the paper properly routed, I’d have my faith restored in her and, to some extent, in the younger generation in general.

  “Say, Chris,” I said, reverting to more practical—and comfortable—matters. “Have you got enough warm clothes?”

  He shrugged. “I can buy some.”

  “Okay.” I suddenly felt weary. I’d been up for eight hours, and it was only ten A.M. I cursed Adam for sending Chris to me; I cursed myself for being sappy enough to drive all the way to the airport. I wondered why Chris had confided in me. Maybe it was because I, like his mother, had raised an only son on my own. I experienced a familiar pang of regret, not for my sake, but for Adam’s. Chris had had a father for the first six years; Tom had never seen Adam. I wouldn’t let him, and sometimes I was sorry.

  “Hey, this is fresh!” The young man beside me had suddenly metamorphosed into an enthusiastic passenger. He was straining at his seat belt, staring out the window at the dark green hills and the occasional fertile field. “This is like forest! Are there any deer?”

  “Sure. We just went by a deer crossing sign a couple of miles back. Your uncle Simon used to hunt before he got some environmentalists as clients.”

  Chris didn’t react to his uncle’s change of heart. He was still gazing out the window, the faintest hint of a smile touching his wide mouth. In profile under the bill of his Dodgers cap he looked very young. I hoped it was only bravado that was setting him up for a confrontation with his grandfather. Maybe, once we were settled in and I’d fried up some chicken and made milk gravy and mashed potatoes, I could talk some sense into him.

  I shot another swift look at his face. It was set in stone. I’d be better off
talking shoes to would-be suicides.

  To look at Ed Bronsky, you wouldn’t figure he could sell mittens to the three little kittens. Almost as wide as he was tall, Ed had the gloomiest face this side of a basset hound, and his ears were nearly as long. He was the most negative man I ever met, except for my seventh grade math teacher. I’d actually heard Ed try to talk advertisers out of buying space in The Advocate.

  “The town’s too small. There’s no competition. You’ve been around forever. Everybody knows you already.” I still shudder every time I hear Ed chatting with one of the local merchants. After ten years in the job, it’s a wonder the paper isn’t in worse financial trouble than it already is.

  Which, I must confess, is bad enough. Marius Vandeventer, who started out as a raving Socialist in the 1930s, had evolved into a patriarchal capitalist by the time I met him in 1990. At eighty-five, he was still sharp, but he had lost his crusading zeal along with his hair. He was also ready to retire. I thought the asking price of $200,000 cash was a steal. As it turned out, I was the one who got robbed. A kindly newspaper broker told me later I could have acquired The Advocate for $150,000, with one-third down and ten years to pay. I guess it was the Jaguar that gave me away.

  My debut was not auspicious. I was an outsider; worse yet, a City Person. At first, the locals assumed I was divorced or widowed. While I didn’t flaunt my status as an unmarried mother, I didn’t hide it either. There are, as my mother used to tell me when she was especially mad at my father, Worse Things Than Being Married. Some of the Alpiners didn’t agree, and the usual spate of outraged letters ensued. I printed every letter in full. Without rebuttal. The letters stopped. But of course I was still an Outsider.

  So, in fact, were two members of my staff. Carla had been on the job for only three months, but Ed had worked on The Advocate for almost a decade. He was gradually assimilated, but acceptance took time in a small town.

  So we muddled along under my untested managerial skills. We weren’t losing money—yet. But we were teetering, just making ends and the payroll meet, but I was determined to make a go of The Advocate and had actually upped the circulation by almost fifty subscribers, most of them in outlying areas. The same, alas, could not be said for the advertising income.

  “The Grocery Basket wants to cut its ad to a half page,” Ed reported in his rumbling, mournful voice. “No more coupons. They’re losing money on the fifty-cent eggs.”

  “Promotion,” chimed in Carla, whirling around the office like a wind-up doll. “The Grocery Basket needs to promote its specials more. Take squash. It’s the season. Do you know there are twenty-eight varieties of squash available this time of year?” Her long black mane sailed around her slim shoulders.

  Ed looked affronted. “I hate squash.”

  “Pumpkins are a squash,” Carla went on blithely. “They’ll be in next week. The Grocery Basket could sponsor a jack-o’-lantern carving contest.”

  Ed was shaking his head, his heavy jowls undulating. “Halloween is getting dangerous, even in a town like Alpine.”

  “Ed, you’re a ninny,” asserted Vida Runkel, who had just stumbled across the threshold carrying a megaphone. “You think Arbor Day is dangerous.”

  Ed gave a mighty heave of his body and got up from his desk. “It can be, around here. All that controversy with the environmentalists and the loggers. A bunch of nuts want to picket Old Mill Park.”

  I sighed. The park was the site of the original sawmill, complete with a small museum and a half-dozen picnic tables next to the railroad tracks. “How can you picket a memory?”

  “Symbolism.” Carla nodded sagely. She turned to Ed. “Besides, that’s only a rumor, probably started by the loggers. There are too many rumors in this town. It’s impossible to verify everything if you have to make a deadline. Like finding that gold this morning.”

  I frowned at Carla. Ed swiveled slightly, his hand on the coffeepot. “Gold?” I echoed. “What gold?”

  Carla was taking off her suede flats and examining the heels. “These are really worn down. Maybe I should put on my running shoes and go to the shoemaker’s.”

  “Carla …” My voice held a weary warning note. Carla’s attention span was as fragile as her five-foot frame.

  “What?” The big black eyes were wide. “Oh! The gold mine!” She giggled. Carla was a world-class giggler. “I got a call when I came in first thing saying that Mark Doukas had found gold in … some place.”

  “Bunk,” Ed said, sloshing coffee into a Styrofoam cup.

  “Rubbish,” Vida said, tapping the megaphone with her stubby fingers.

  “Who called?” I inquired, feeling that familiar unease I often experience when Carla goes off chasing wild geese.

  “Mmmmmm.” She danced a bit in her stockinged feet. “Kevin MacDuff, I think. He said Mark Doukas was tripping out. Isn’t Kevin the kid with the pet snake?”

  Kevin was. In addition, his eldest brother was Kent, who happened to be married to Mark Doukas’s sister, Jennifer. Despite the snake, Kevin was as easygoing as Kent was touchy. Kevin was also one of our carriers.

  “That snake eats mice,” Vida declared, putting down the megaphone and taking off her ancient velvet cloche which, as usual, she’d been wearing backward. “I don’t care for mice, but I think that’s disgusting.”

  I was bearing down on Carla, which only took about four paces, since our front office is quite small and very crowded. “The gold, Carla. What exactly did Kevin say?”

  Carla turned vague. “Oh—that Mark had been panning or digging or delving and he’d hit pay dirt, or whatever you call it, and he came racing out of the woods looking half nuts. Kevin said Mark must have found gold. You know how he likes to play prospector.”

  Mark did indeed, though playing was the word for it, as he expended no more energy on prospecting than he did on any other endeavor that might qualify as work. Neeny Doukas’s oldest grandchild had never held a steady job in his twenty-six years, despite the family’s efforts to make him a responsible citizen. As far as I could tell, his alleged duties as property manager for his grandfather consisted of harassing tenants he happened to run into in various bars around the county. It was no wonder that Heather Bardeen had dumped him the previous weekend.

  “I doubt it was gold,” I said. “Nobody’s ever found any around here, and not much silver, either, in the last forty years.” I glanced at Vida for confirmation, but she was wiping off the mouthpiece of the megaphone with a tissue soaked in rubbing alcohol. A sudden horrible thought assailed me as I turned my gaze back to Carla. “You didn’t write this up, did you?”

  Carla’s long lashes flapped up and down like spider legs. “Well, of course I did! I made room for it by pulling that two-inch story on the zoning commission meeting. They meet every two weeks and never do anything. Who cares?”

  “Oh, Carla!” I didn’t try to hide my exasperation. It wouldn’t faze Carla anyway. Nothing ever did. “Where is it? Let me see your hard copy.”

  Undismayed, Carla obliged. The short article was fairly innocuous—for Carla:

  Bonanza days may be in store again for Alpine. Mark Doukas hit the jackpot yesterday when he struck gold outside of town near Icicle Creek.

  According to a colleague of Doukas, the local resident was prospecting close to the old silver mine shafts and found a large deposit of gold. An excited Doukas returned to Alpine to report his findings to Sheriff Milo Dodge, but the local law enforcement agency was out to coffee. As of this morning, Doukas was unavailable for comment.

  I handed the story back to Carla. At least Carla hadn’t misspelled Dodge’s first name this time. In her first article involving the sheriff, she’d made a typo, calling him Mildo. Fortunately, I caught it in time, telling myself that it could have been worse. “Okay,” I said to Carla, “this probably isn’t libelous, unlike your piece on Grace Grundle’s bottle cap collection—where you insinuated she stole it from Arthur Trews. You’re very lucky that Arthur died the week after that story came out.�
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  “Not so lucky for Arthur,” remarked Vida.

  I ignored my House & Home editor. “However, you shouldn’t have pulled the zoning commission story. We’ll catch hell from Simon Doukas for that, since he’s the chairman. As for the gold: you have only the word of a fifteen-year-old boy. And you didn’t contact Mark Doukas. Where was he when you called?”

  “I didn’t call.” Carla’s eyes were so wide and innocent that I thought her face might split. At least I hoped it would. “I didn’t have time. I had to get the paper off to Monroe.”

  “Monroe’s getting too big,” said Ed, sitting back down. “You see that new development going up? Thirty houses, at least. They’ll ask an arm and a leg. I couldn’t afford one of those three-car garages.”

  I also ignored my advertising manager. I hadn’t yet finished with Carla. “Look, I appreciate your initiative. But this isn’t the kind of story we need to get in at the last minute, if at all. Next time, wait until Mark runs in here with a ten-pound nugget, shouting—”

  “Eureka!” Vida blasted the word through the megaphone, and both Carla and I jumped.

  “What on earth are you doing with that thing?” I demanded, sounding more cross than I really was.

  Vida shrugged, her rumpled blouse quivering over her big bosom. “I interviewed the high school cheerleaders this morning. They gave it to me as a souvenir. Actually, I stole it. I’ve always wanted one.” She started to give me her smug little smile, but stopped when a car door banged outside her window. Vida glanced through the rain-spattered pane. “Oh, swell, now I’m under arrest. It’s Sheriff Moroni. The old fool.”

  Enrico Moroni was actually the former sheriff, having given up his office on account of his diminishing eyesight, and, according to Vida, his diminishing hold on the electorate. Moroni’s impaired vision didn’t keep him from driving a battered old Cadillac de Ville, but his status as an ex-sheriff kept him out of jail. Nothing else could, since he averaged about one accident per month. No doubt he was now parked on the sidewalk. Moroni and Neeny Doukas had been chums since boyhood, and Enrico was known as Eeeny. Some day I intended to ask Vida what had happened to Miny and Moe.