The Alpine Advocate Page 4

  Chris seemed even less interested in the Norwegians than in Heather. Still, I thought he’d shown a spark of life when Heather had put on her pout. I congratulated myself on my puckishness. What irony, I told myself, if Chris and Heather should fall into each other’s arms. What goofy ideas I could get, I reminded myself as Kimberly resurfaced with an order pad.

  Making small talk over burgers, fries, and shakes wasn’t easy with Chris Ramirez. He evaded any queries about calling on his relatives. He never mentioned trying to buy a handgun. He didn’t say where he’d been in the past two hours, except cruising around town. And, like ninety-nine percent of the people I meet, he never asked me anything at all.

  “My treat,” I said when the bill arrived. Chris didn’t argue. I calculated the tip for Kimberly and said hello to the rector and his wife as they went out. “What are your plans for this afternoon?” I asked without much hope of getting a direct answer.

  Chris put his baseball cap and his denim jacket back on. “I’m going to see Neeny.”

  My heart gave a little lurch. “Chris—why don’t you wait? He’s sick, really he is.” Vida might be right. Certainly the rest of the town seemed to agree with her. “Why don’t you talk to your uncle Simon first? His office is just down the street, in the Clemans Building.”

  “I didn’t come here to see my uncle.” His jaw was set, his eyes staring straight past my shoulder.

  I leaned across the table. I wondered if I should ask him why he wanted to buy a handgun, but since he hadn’t been able to get one, I decided to let that question slide. Instead, I urged caution. “Damn it, Chris, you’re staying with me. You’re my son’s friend. Don’t you dare do something foolish! At least take time to think things through.”

  “I’ve been thinking for fourteen years.” He barely moved his lips when he spoke.

  “Then keep thinking for another fourteen hours. Please talk to your uncle. If you don’t go see him, you can bet he’ll come see you.” I sat back, my own lower lip thrust out.

  Chris seemed to waver ever so slightly. “Maybe not.”

  “No maybes about it.” I was gaining confidence. “You don’t know small towns. You don’t know your family. I’m surprised Simon Doukas isn’t combing the streets for you right now.”

  Except that was precisely what Simon Doukas was doing. He stood in the door of the Burger Barn, and there were tears in his eyes.

  The tactful maneuver was to leave uncle and nephew alone. For once, I gave in to my better nature as a human being, rather than my professional voyeurism as a journalist. I made my exit as discreetly as possible.

  The office was in its usual midweek hiatus. Ginny hailed me on the way in, repeating her frequent argument that we ought to insist on prepayment for household items in the classifieds. “If they don’t sell the stuff, they think they don’t have to pay for the ad,” she asserted, pulling back her curly auburn hair with an elastic band. “I’ve already talked to four deadbeats this morning.” It was an old argument in the newspaper business, but I was sticking to Marius Vandeventer’s policy of publish first, collect later. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be working. I tried consoling Ginny, but she remained adamant. Not for the first time, I considered her as Ed’s replacement.

  Carla was fretting over her story on the ski lodge renovations. Ed was complaining that the Hutchins Interiors and Decor ad was too big. Vida was singing the Alpine High School fight song as she pounded out her cheerleading article.

  “Fight on, ye Buckers;

  Chop down their trees!

  Turn them into suckers;

  Bring them to their knees!

  Saw off their …”

  Miraculously, she stopped. “My grandfather wrote that,” Vida announced, using the keys of her typewriter to tap out the rest of the melody. “Back in 1916. There were six pupils in the school, four of them were Blatts.”

  Vida had been a Blatt before she became a Runkel. It was her father-in-law who was responsible for the original brainstorm about building the ski lodge, but he’d sold out to the Norwegians just before World War II. Ernest, Vida’s husband, and the fourth of the Runkels’ six children, had been in real estate, working first for his father, and later for Neeny Doukas. Ernie, as he was known, might never have been a Peeping Tom, but he’d had some other curious hobbies, including going over waterfalls in a barrel. It was on one such excursion ten years ago that Ernie had met his demise on Deception Creek. The falls weren’t that treacherous, but the truck that had driven off the road and run over his barrel was.

  Vida had been left a widow at forty-four, with three children to raise. A natural font of information about everybody and everything in town, she asked Marius Vandeventer for a job. Marius had complied, and Vida had been a fixture at The Advocate ever since. She wasn’t much of a writer, but she worked hard and had a genuine nose for news. Her only vices, as far as I could tell, were chocolate truffles, her sharp tongue, and the propensity for wearing her endless variety of outdated hats backward.

  In the beginning, Vida and I had only one problem: she despised Democrats more than anything else in the world—except Catholics. I was both. Having been forewarned by Marius Vandeventer, I predicted that when Vida learned I’d borne a child out of wedlock, she would be the first to pin a scarlet letter on my raincoat. But Vida had surprised me. On a snowy afternoon last January when the subject came up and I’d casually remarked that Adam’s father and I had never been married, Vida had taken off her glasses, rubbed her eyes like mad, and said, “Good for you. You’ve got spunk.” We had been forging a tentative friendship ever since.

  “Hey,” I asked, as Ed hung up on his latest advertising victim, “what’s with Phoebe Pratt? Harvey Adcock said she left town—but I saw her Monday.”

  “Phoebe!” Vida gave one of her magnificently eloquent shudders, her bosom heaving. “She probably went to Seattle on a shopping spree. With Neeny’s credit cards. I still can’t believe she convinced him to take her to Las Vegas last month. Neeny hasn’t left Alpine in four years. The old fool. He dotes on that brainless hussy. I always said I should have married Clinton Pratt. He asked me first, you know. Even then, Phoebe was fast. She got caught with boys in the boiler room at the high school at least four times before we graduated. Poor Clint, it’s no wonder he died young. He’d have been better off with me.”

  Ed looked up from the classified section he was working on. “And you’d have been Vida Blatt Pratt. You wouldn’t have liked that, Vida. I sure wouldn’t.”

  Easily diverted as usual, Carla turned away from her ski lodge article. “I thought your own husband died young, Mrs. Runkel.”

  Vida lifted her sharp chin. “He didn’t die,” she said with dignity. “He was killed. It’s not the same.”

  Ginny Burmeister had noiselessly entered the editorial office, bringing with her a couple of legal notices for the next edition. “My father worked for Mr. Pratt’s plumbing company,” Ginny said in her nasal voice. “Dad thought Clint Pratt was really nice, but a wimp.”

  Vida harrumphed. “He certainly couldn’t stand up to Phoebe. She wouldn’t give the poor man children, either. I hoped that when she went away after he died, she’d keep out of Alpine for good. But oh, no, back she came not even a year later, looking like the Queen of Sheba, and ready to sink her claws into Neeny Doukas. In fact,” Vida added darkly, slamming the carriage of her typewriter for emphasis, “I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d been carrying on with Neeny even before Clint died.”

  “I don’t know why our generation is always being criticized,” Ginny said, exchanging glances with her peer, Carla. “Think of people acting like that back then. That was twenty years or so ago, when I was a baby. Dad had to get another job after Mr. Pratt died and my folks were really broke. Mrs. Doukas was still alive. Wasn’t she heartbroken?”

  “About forty times,” retorted Vida. “Poor Hazel didn’t have the gumption to make a fuss about how Neeny couldn’t behave himself. She just sat at home and baked apple pan dow
dy.”

  Gibb Frazier stood in the doorway, thumbs hooked in his suspenders, plaid flannel shirt not quite meeting over his paunch. “Damned post office,” he muttered, letting the wind rattle the door. “They’re talking about raising the rates again. They’ll put you out of business, Emma.”

  I gave Gibb a wry smile. “Me and The Christian Science Monitor.”

  Gibb banged the door shut and stumped over to Vida. He had lost a leg ten years ago in a logging accident. At not yet fifty, he’d been too young to retire, so after acquiring an artificial limb, he’d traded in his logging rig for a pickup truck and hired himself out as a Jack-of-All-Hauling-Trades. One of his jobs was to take The Advocate to and from Monroe every week.

  “What’s this I hear over at the post office about the Doukas kid coming back to Alpine?” He addressed his question to Vida, who was commonly known as the source of all vital information.

  “Ramirez kid,” I corrected, but neither Vida nor Gibb paid me any heed.

  Vida took off her glasses with the tortoise-shell rims and rubbed her eyes with both fists in a typically vigorous manner. “How should I know?” she replied crossly. Above all else, Vida hated not knowing. “Ask Emma. He’s staying with her.”

  I gave a little shrug. “He quit school. You know how kids are these days. I suppose he figured it was time to get reacquainted with his family, now that Margaret’s dead.” The fib slipped easily off my tongue; sometimes you have to be glib to protect your sources.

  Gibb’s wide faced creased into a frown. “If I were Chris Doukas or Ramirez or whatever his name is, I wouldn’t bother myself. That arrogant sonovabitch Neeny will give him a bad time. And Simon’s a stuffed shirt. As for your Mark—” Gibb stopped and spat into his hand. “That’s for Mark, the dirty little creep. He may be rich, but he’s still a bum.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard Gibb Frazier cast aspersions on the Doukas clan in general, and Mark in particular. Before Gibb could further revile Mark Doukas, the phone rang in my inner office. I left my staff and hurried to take the call. It was Chris. He wanted to know if he could leave my car at the Burger Barn. He was going to have dinner with Uncle Simon and Aunt Cece and his cousin, Mark, at their house on Stump Hill.

  “Sure,” I replied, a sense of relief flooding over me. “That’s great, Chris. Do you remember Cece? She’s very sweet.” She was, too, so much so that she frequently made me gag.

  “Kind of. Doesn’t she have moles?”

  “One mole, on her cheek. People find it charming.” That was true, too. People found everything about Cecelia Caldwell Doukas charming, especially her enthusiasm for Good Works. “Will you be back later tonight?” I hoped not—I didn’t mind having Chris stay with me, but I’d much prefer that he made peace with his family. Spending the night on Stump Hill might very well lay the foundation for a new relationship.

  “I guess,” said Chris. “Uncle Simon or Mark will probably bring me to your place.”

  “Okay.” My euphoria over the happy Doukas family re union slipped a notch. “Have a good time. I’ll wait up to let you in.”

  “You don’t have to,” said Chris in his taciturn manner. “I’ve got a key.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t bother to ask how.

  For the next hour, the phone never stopped ringing, which isn’t unusual at The Advocate. I fended off the president of the Burl Creek Thimble Club, who was threatening to disband the organization; listened patiently to a long-winded diatribe from the Chamber of Commerce’s executive secretary; took complaints from two members of the zoning commission abut the deletion of their story; explained why Vida’s account of a recent wedding had not included the fact that the bride had set her wedding vows to rap music (Vida had been adamant about leaving it out); and jumped in my chair when I heard Neeny Doukas’s deep, gravelly voice at the other end of the line.

  “What kind of an outfit are you running there, Emma? What’s this bullcrap about my grandson?”

  I wasn’t sure which of his grandsons he meant, so I hedged. “You know me, Neeny. I just try to do my best.”

  Neeny snorted into the receiver. “There’s no gold around here. That’s the trouble with you newcomers. You don’t know siccum about Alpine. Mark wasn’t prospecting. He was digging up maidenhair ferns for Cece’s rock garden.”

  The resonant growl of Neeny’s voice suggested he wasn’t as feeble as Vida had reported. I could picture him at the phone, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, a shock of white-streaked hair with a big mustache, full beard, and black eyes that could bore holes in tree trunks.

  I don’t like admitting I’m wrong, especially in print. But Carla’s flighty reporting had put me in a tight corner. “Look, Neeny, we went off the deep end, I’m afraid. The story should have been verified. It wasn’t, because we were right against deadline. I’ve already spoken to Mark about it. He blames Kevin MacDuff for calling it in, but we take responsibility for running it. We’ll do a retraction next week, okay?” A faint smile twitched on my lips. On metropolitan dailies, editors and reporters worried about war and rumors of war, with statements checked out through the White House, the Kremlin, and Vatican City. In small towns, we sink into turmoil over maidenhair ferns and teenaged paper boys.

  Neeny was grumbling over the line. “Oh … hell, I suppose. What else can you do, unless you rerun the whole damned thing. Could you do that?”

  “No.” I was emphatic. It wasn’t just the expense of printing another three thousand copies of The Advocate. It was the principle. Neeny’s request was tantamount to asking God to start the day all over again. It occurred to me that he’d probably done just that somewhere along the line.

  “You gotta understand,” he was saying, apparently for once taking no for an answer, “that it isn’t just because of Mark that I’m upset. Do you wanna bunch of half-assed gold seekers tramping all over the woods and tearing the place up? It’d be worse than all them damned hikers and bikers.”

  I hadn’t considered the wider implications, but Neeny was right. Every week, at least three hundred copies of The Advocate were mailed to former residents who liked to keep up with the doings in their old hometown. We had subscribers in twenty-seven states of the Union, as well as in Canada, Mexico, Japan, England, Belgium, and Sri Lanka. I had a sudden vision of all of them descending on Alpine with pickaxes and gold pans.

  “You’re right, Neeny,” I said, resorting to a phrase that he’d no doubt heard ten thousand times in his seventy-two years. I felt obsequious and vaguely ashamed of myself. “I apologize.” Hearing a rumble of assent, I broached an even more delicate subject. “Are you going to have dinner at Simon’s tonight?”

  “Paaah!” Neeny seemed to be fumbling for words. “How the hell did you get mixed up with that kid? As far as I’m concerned, he don’t exist. Let Simon and that lamebrained wife of his feed the little punk. I’ll bet he looks like Hector.”

  “He looks like Mark.”

  “Bullcrap. He looked just like his old man when he was a kid. God help him if he acts like him, too. I don’t want any part of that Ramirez tribe.”

  Obviously, the antipathy was mutual. I marveled that Margaret Doukas Ramirez had maintained any contact at all with her father. No wonder she got a case of the glums whenever she heard from him. Still, my conscience was needling me. I decided to put Neeny on the alert. It was the least I could do.

  “Chris has a chip on his shoulder, I’ll say that. He was very fond of his mother.” I spoke carefully, hoping Neeny wasn’t in one of his purposely obtuse moods.

  “Kids should like their mothers,” he said with a grunt. “How old is he? Twenty? They all got chips on their shoulders at that age. Don’t worry. He’ll get it knocked off soon enough.” He paused, and I heard a sound in the background. “Listen, Emma, I got company. Let me see what you’re gonna do to fix up your dumb-assed story.”

  Ordinarily, I never clear copy with anyone, but I decided it wouldn’t hurt to make an exception. “I’ll do it right now and read it to
you over the phone later, okay?”

  “Huh?” Neeny was obviously distracted. “Yeah, sure, fine. Goodbye.”

  Before he hung up, I heard a female voice in the distance. I was almost sure it belonged to Phoebe Pratt.

  Ed Bronsky was about to go home to his long-suffering wife and hyperactive children. “Another day, another half-dollar,” he said, putting on his wrinkled raincoat. “I haven’t had a raise on this job in three years.”

  I gave him my brightest smile. “If we took in more money, we could pay more. It’s that simple, Ed. Why not bring in some new accounts?” Instead of losing our old ones, you dumbbell, I thought in secret annoyance.

  Ed was searching in his pockets for his driving gloves. He didn’t find them. He never did. Frankly I didn’t think he owned a pair. “Now who would I get? A lot of the stores at the mall would rather advertise in the shopper that comes out of Monroe. Those other new places are too far out of town. Some of these merchants want to do inserts, and stuff The Advocate full of four-color tripe that just falls out on the sidewalk.” He gave a forsaken shake of his head. “You wouldn’t believe what advertisers can come up with.”

  I could, and wished I had the nerve to get rid of Ed and hire an ad manager who shared my imagination. Like Ginny Burmeister. But I was too good-hearted—and weak-willed—to fire Ed Bronsky. “What about Driggers Funeral Home?” I asked, hoping for the best but fearing the worst.

  Ed was shuffling toward the door. “I talked them out of running that weekly ad. Once a month—that’ll hold them.” He tugged at the doorknob, which needed fixing. “Heck, it’s the only funeral home in thirty miles. Besides, nobody has died here since July.”

  It was funny that Ed should mention that. No, it wasn’t funny at all. Within twenty-four hours, it would be quite sad.

  Chapter Four