by Mary Daheim
As it would turn out, I had a lot more to worry about before the weekend was over.
Chapter 6
By five forty-five, Milo still wasn’t home. That wasn’t surprising, since he had a murder investigation on his hands. But when the digital clock on the countertop stove showed 6:10, I started getting antsy. Dinner was simple enough—I’d started a rack of spare ribs almost an hour ago, and put potatoes on to boil a few minutes later. The fresh broccoli would take only a few minutes to cook.
A glance out the big front window revealed that the earlier change of snow to rain had now reversed itself with the evening’s drop in temperature. The flakes weren’t heavy, but they were starting to stick to some of the shrubs next to our log cabin. I saw a couple of cars go by, but no sign of the Yukon. I was heading for my landline phone next to the sofa when my cell rang. It was still in my purse, which was on the floor by the end table. I groped for it and heard my husband’s voice at the other end.
“I’m leaving headquarters in about five minutes,” he said rather brusquely. “Don’t throw the grub into the backyard. Build me a stiff Scotch, okay?” He didn’t wait for an answer.
I turned down everything in the kitchen. It’d be at least twenty minutes after Milo got here before he’d be ready to eat. I poured myself a bourbon over ice and added some 7-Up before I went back into the living room and sat down on the sofa. I opened my laptop and dashed off an email to Adam, asking if he’d settled the controversy between Helga Johannesen and Margaret Whitebear over which of them had made the quilt they’d given my son for Christmas. The controversy had been the talk of St. Mary’s Igloo for the past two weeks.
It was almost six-thirty before I saw the Yukon’s blurry headlights turn into the drive. The snow was coming down much harder. I went out to the kitchen and opened the door to the garage. Milo unfolded all six feet five inches of himself, not including his regulation hat, which added another three inches. He snatched it from the seat next to him and stalked up the four steps that led to the kitchen.
“Bastard,” he muttered under his breath before kissing me soundly, if briefly. “Why can’t I find a reason to send Blackwell away for twenty years?”
I gave my husband a big doe-eyed stare. “Because he hasn’t done anything really illegal lately?”
“I thought maybe we’d finally nailed him last September when Kay Burns filed charges for him eating her up,” Milo said, obviously looking around for his drink. I pointed to the refrigerator. He paused long enough to get out both cocktails and handed me mine. “Let’s sit down. It’s been a long day. Kay should never have dropped those charges.”
Once settled in the easy chair, he lighted a cigarette and proffered the pack to me, but I shook my head. “You know why she did. She’d had his baby years ago and gave it away for adoption.”
Milo’s hazel eyes sparked. “What if that’s who came looking for Jack and got herself killed?”
That had never entered my mind. I almost choked on my bourbon. Then I unloaded about Grace Grundle’s call. “Not that Grace and Marlowe are always reliable sources,” I concluded. “But if she confronted him, would Jack kill her?”
Milo leaned his head back against the chair and gazed up at the beamed ceiling. “No. Blackwell’s a lot of things, but he’s not a killer.” Pausing, he looked at me. “He might hire someone to do it, though he’d be sure to keep his hands clean.”
“That sounds right. What did he have to say about the murder victim?”
“He swore he never heard of her and was pissed off when I asked him why she’d be trying to find him.” Milo took a sip of his drink. “We sent the body to Everett and I considered telling him he had to go over there to make sure he didn’t recognize her; but even if he did, he’d lie. We’ve got a photo of her, of course. I showed it to him, but he insisted he didn’t know her. Of course, she probably looked a lot better when she was still alive.”
“Do you believe Jack?”
Milo grimaced and scratched behind his left ear. “I hate to say it, but I think I do. I can usually tell when someone is lying.”
I knew that from experience. The few times I’d tried to deceive the sheriff over the years, I’d always failed. Having been in law enforcement for more than thirty years, he’d gone one-on-one with about every kind of liar imaginable, from teenage speeders to hardened killers.
I thought back to what I knew of Kay Burns’s background. She was an Alpine native whose first husband had been the dour Dwight Gould, a deputy under Milo’s predecessor, the wily Eeny Moroni. But Blackwell had swept her off her feet and into a second marriage that was equally ill-fated. Still in her early twenties, she had fled Alpine and didn’t return until over a year ago, when RestHaven opened in Ed Bronsky’s former mansion. Kay came back to town as their PR maven. Until then, I had only known of her as the ex-wife of both Gould and Blackwell.
I had a question for Milo. “Is Kay still getting it on with Dwight?”
Milo shrugged. “Could be. I still can’t believe it. Gould’s about as romantic as a fire hydrant. He kind of looks like one, too. I think you told me she was interested in one of RestHaven’s nut doctors.”
“She alluded to that a while ago,” I replied. Unlike Vida, I really never pry unless it’s for a news item. “It was Iain Farrell, who’s always struck me as a world-class jerk. When I interviewed him for the special edition we put out for RestHaven’s opening, he was extremely rude.”
My husband chuckled. “Yeah, I remember you bitching that he was a horse’s ass. Didn’t you walk out on him?”
I admitted that I had. “It wasn’t one of my more successful interviews.” Since then, my infrequent and accidental encounters with Farrell could be described in terms usually reserved for opposing heads of state: contentious, but not openly antagonistic. Milo had run him through the system and discovered that after a seemingly successful career as a shrink at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Farrell had spent several years working in Montana for the state’s penal system. The comedown had been triggered by beating up his then-girlfriend. She’d later dropped the charges, but Farrell decided his reputation was sufficiently sullied that he should move on.
“Speaking of jerks and other weirdos,” I said, “what happened to the guy from Colville who ended up in the ER? Mitch got his name off your log, but I forget what it was.”
“Hell, I don’t remember,” Milo admitted. “For all I know, he ended up in the hospital. He needed time to come down from his pretty pink cloud. He’s probably left town by now, though he’d have to find a way to get back over the mountains. Colville is way up in the northeastern part of the state near the Canadian border. I went hunting there once a long time ago.”
“I assume he hasn’t paid his fine?”
“No, but he’d better do it or we’ll have to put out a warrant on him.” Milo frowned and tugged at his right earlobe. “What was the jerk’s name? Damnit,” he muttered, taking out his cell. “Fong’s on the desk tonight. He’ll know. Dustman is detail-oriented.”
I got up to check on dinner. As soon as my husband got off the phone, we’d eat before everything dried up. He could change his clothes when we were finished.
“Well?” I said when he joined me in the kitchen.
Milo sighed. “The dink was taken into one of the ER’s exam rooms, but by the time the new paramedic got around to him, he was gone. I don’t know how he managed to do that, but he did.”
I narrowed my eyes. “I think you forgot to tell me his name.”
“Oh. Janos Kadar. He calls himself ‘Yan,’ as if it were spelled with a Y.”
“That’s the new paramedic!” I yelped. “We had the story in the paper. Don’t you ever read the Advocate? I meant the driver of the…”
Milo waved an impatient hand. “Right, okay, the goofball driver’s name is Nathan Rodolf, twenty-four. Satisfied? Laskey took it off the
log the next day. Don’t you read your own paper? Can we eat now? It’s almost seven.”
“I guess I forgot his name,” I mumbled, and refrained from reminding my not-always-better half that it had been his idea to have a drink first. We always did, but I usually had dinner on the table by six.
It was seven by the time we started eating. He asked me why I was smiling. I told him I was remembering how low-key he’d been when we first met. “Sometimes I couldn’t even hear you on the phone. Now I swear I can hear you from almost two blocks away without the phone.”
Milo nodded. “I was still recovering from the divorce. I missed my kids. Between Mulehide hauling them off to Bellevue and the demands of the job, I was lucky to see them once a month. I remember one winter when we had a lot of snow and I didn’t see them even at Christmas. I think over three months went by before I got down to Bellevue. Mulehide’s excuse for them not coming up here was that the roads were too dangerous. That was always bullshit after early February.”
“You hadn’t lost your sense of humor,” I reminded him. “When I came to your office to introduce myself, you bought me drinks and we laughed a lot.”
“You were so damned cute, especially when you almost tripped over your own feet coming through the door.”
“I was nervous. I’ve told you that. I’d seen you on the street and you looked intimidating.”
Milo set down his fork and put his hand on mine. “You’re still damned cute.”
“And clumsy.”
“But in a cute way.” He squeezed my fingers before taking his hand away. “Is there any pie left?”
“I think you ate it for breakfast.”
“Oh. Maybe I did.”
So much for a romantic moment. That was fine with me. Romance had brought me great grief when Tom Cavanaugh was killed. Tom, in fact, had brought me plenty of grief in the almost thirty years I’d waited to marry him. Looking back, I realized that the grieving had been not only for him, but also for not recognizing how much I loved the big guy who was looking mildly disappointed because he couldn’t find any more pie in the fridge.
By morning, there was at least five inches of snow on the ground. I smiled when I looked out the front window. It was still coming down, but in a fitful manner. In the past few years, there had been very little snow in the western half of Washington state, even at Alpine’s three-thousand-foot level. Unlike most of the town’s residents, Milo could get one of his deputies to mount the county-owned snowplow that was used to clear the streets—and our driveway. Not that I had any plans for the day, but I knew the sheriff might want to check in at headquarters.
He confirmed my belief after I’d finished breakfast. Milo always got up before I did, even on Saturdays. Since it was the only day I could really sleep in, I’d almost overdone it by not waking up until just before ten.
I’d just put my cereal bowl and spoon in the dishwasher when Milo asked if we’d ever done a story on Will Pace at the time he opened his motel almost ten years ago.
I had to think back. “I know we did one on the opening of the motel itself, but as I recall, it was when Scott Chamoud was working for the paper and he told me that Will didn’t want to be interviewed. All Pace told Scott was that he had come here from another part of the state.”
“He’s a weird guy,” Milo remarked. “Not exactly the gracious innkeeper type. But he and his guests have kept out of serious trouble over the years. Until now.”
“You did run a background check on him, right?”
“Sure, but he came up relatively clean.” Milo paused to pour himself a coffee refill. “Frankly, the information we got was sketchy, but he had no criminal record. Driving violations, a couple of misdemeanor citations for getting into fights. But it did say he’d recently moved from Alaska. Ketchikan, I think. My reaction was to wait and see how he went about setting up business here. He got all the permits, passed the inspection, and there were only the usual complaints about ruckuses at the motel, which mostly involved couples. That can happen at any motel or hotel.” He took a sip of coffee and then grinned at me. “And no, I didn’t slug Mulehide at that fancy San Francisco hotel when she announced she was dumping me.”
“She was an idiot,” I declared staunchly.
Milo shrugged. “She had her reasons, and I don’t mean just the dink she ran off with. We had a smaller staff back then, so I had to put in a lot of long days and weekend overtime. Mulehide had to carry the load for most of the kids’ school and other activities.”
I knew the rest of the story. When their children were older and she got her teaching certificate, Tricia wanted to get out of the house. Milo had hired Frieda Wunderlich to clean their house once a week. But the teaching job was where she met Jake the Snake, who had moved his family from the Tri-Cities to take a job at Alpine High. Tricia’s affair with him ended both marriages. Jake and Tricia—along with the three Dodge children—had moved to Bellevue. Luckily, Jake’s house in the Tri-Cities hadn’t yet been sold. The first Mrs. Sellers and their children retreated to their former home in Pasco.
I finished cleaning up the kitchen while Milo settled into the easy chair to read the rest of The Seattle Times. Saturday’s edition had grown thin in recent years, though the Sunday edition was still robust. But like everyone in the print media, I worried about the future of newspapers in general. A small-town weekly had one advantage, however. There was really no other source for local news except Spencer Fleetwood’s radio station, KSKY—and, of course, Vida.
By the time I went into the living room, Milo was on his cell, frowning. “Have you seen Doc?” he asked, and paused. “Then check yourself into the clinic and find out if you really have pneumonia. I can’t diagnose you over the damned phone.” Another pause. “No, I won’t send De Groote on patrol in this much snow. She stays on the desk today. I’ll call in Doe Jamison. Just get yourself checked out, okay? You probably came back to work too soon.” Milo ended the call.
“Dwight?” I inquired.
“Yeah.” He frowned. “I told the dumbass he should have taken more than two days off. Gould was still coughing his head off like a damned seal when he came back to work. It’s a wonder he didn’t infect all of us. I’ll get Doe to fill in for him. Mullins had to take off for the weekend to attend a funeral for his wife’s uncle in Longview.” He tapped in Doe’s number while I went to change our bed and start a load of laundry.
By the time I finished my chores, Milo was on his feet. “I’ve got to check in at headquarters. Some new information came in from Alameda County about the vic. Whatever she did in Oakland was some kind of liaison job with the county.”
“PR, maybe?” I suggested.
Milo shrugged into his heavy parka. “I’ll find out when I get to the office.” He glanced out the front window before heading to the kitchen and the garage. “Damn! Now I can’t tell Gould to get out the snowplow. Maybe Heppner can handle it. It’s a good thing the Yukon can deal with snow even without chains.”
I sat down on the sofa and had just opened my laptop to write to Mavis Marley Fulkerston, my old friend and former co-worker on The Oregonian in Portland, when the doorbell rang. I looked out to see Alison’s Nissan parked on Fir Street’s verge. Obviously, she had avoided the unplowed driveway.
When I opened the door, I noticed her cheeks were quite pink. “Did you have to push your car partway?” I asked with a smile.
Alison practically hurled herself into the living room before collapsing in Milo’s easy chair. “No, but I just saw Boyd. He remembered meeting me at the office, and he talked to me! He’s really a nice guy.”
I settled back on the sofa. “Was he moving in?”
“Yes, his stuff arrived last night. He didn’t think it would because of a lot more snow on the other side of Stevens Pass.” Alison was still smiling. “I offered to help him, but he told me his roommate was due to show up any minute. Bo
yd really seems like a nice guy.”
“He probably is,” I said. “Did he grow up on a farm around Wenatchee? An orchard, I suppose, in that part of the state.”
“I don’t know,” Alison replied, the smile fading. “We didn’t talk that long. I guess he was anxious to get back to moving in.”
“Of course. That’s a big job. Would you like some coffee?”
Alison shook her head. “I’m already hyper. From seeing Boyd, I mean.” She looked around the living room. “Where’s your superstud?”
I flinched at her terminology. “On the job. We had a murder here in town, you know.”
“Oh. Right. A woman at that crappy motel.” She looked down at her black leather boots. “I hope Boyd didn’t notice how I’ve scuffed up these things. Maybe I should go to Barton’s Bootery before I go home. Do you know if they’re having a sale?”
“Ask your neighbor and co-worker, Leo,” I suggested. “I didn’t notice their ad this week. But a lot of stores are having sales now before they take inventory.”
“I’ll swing by on my way home,” Alison said, getting to her feet. “I wish Lori could find a new man. She hasn’t heard from Cole since just before Christmas. I don’t think they’ve gotten together in the last two months. He’s always in some weird place traveling for Microsoft. Lori turned thirty in October. Her time’s running out.”
“I didn’t get married until I was fifty-two,” I reminded Alison. “I survived fairly well on my own.”
Alison’s expression grew glum. “I told you, that was different. You already had a kid, you had a solid career, you’d been to Europe, you probably even had some kind of social life in a city like Portland. Lori’s never been farther than Chilliwack, British Columbia. Her favorite aunt married a Canadian and moved up there. That Alaskan cruise I took last year was the farthest away I’ve ever been outside of this state. My parents never traveled much except in the Pacific Northwest.”