The Alpine Obituary

by Mary Daheim

  “Tsk, tsk.” Vida shook her head. But when she spoke again, it was not of me, but of Marsha. “I’ll have to search my memory. But there may be something there. . . . Would you like a cookie?”

  “No, thanks, Vida.” Whatever the cookie, it came from the grocery store. For all the recipes that Vida ran on her page, she could barely operate a stove. Vida was one of the worst cooks I’d ever met, but you’d never know it from her trumpeting of exotic fare in the Advocate . A month ago, when the various wild berries had ripened on Tonga Ridge, she had run at least a half-dozen recipes featuring huckleberries. Someone—I was never sure who but guessed it was her sister-in-law, Mary Lou Blatt—dared Vida to bake a huckleberry pie for a family function. Vida accepted the challenge and baked two, bringing one to the office. The berry filling reminded me of blue library paste, except that as I recall from my grade-school days, the paste was much better. Ginny told me later that it was wonderful—for stopping a run in her pantyhose.

  “We should do as Marsha asks,” Vida finally announced. “We owe it to her.”

  “We do?”

  “Of course. Look how fairly she conducted Tommy’s murder trial.”

  I winced, not just at the memory, but because Vida was the only person in the world who’d ever called Tom “Tommy.” “I wasn’t interested in fairness,” I retorted. “Or even justice. I wanted revenge.”

  “Never mind all that now,” Vida said brusquely. “We need to help poor Marsha.”

  I resented Vida’s sudden transfer of sympathy from me to a woman she hardly knew. “Then you help her,” I huffed. “You know everything and everybody.”

  “So I shall,” she replied, her tone now blithe as she rose to put a white cloth over Cupcake’s cage.

  I stood up, preparing to leave. “Are you the one who’s going to tell Marsha you’re doing the investigating instead of me?”

  “If you like,” Vida replied, tut-tut-tutting at Cupcake in a game of peekaboo with the white cloth.

  “Good luck,” I said, starting for the door. “Thanks for the tea.”

  “Any time. Tut-tut-tutty-too-too.”

  I couldn’t ever recall Vida not seeing me out. Annoyed, and not quite sure why, I got into the Lexus that Tom had given me and drove off down Tyee Street.

  But instead of turning left on Sixth and heading for my little log house, I turned right. Even though there isn’t a great deal of traffic at night in Alpine, I drove more slowly than usual. I wasn’t sure where I was going in more ways than one. But of course I pulled into my usual parking spot at the Advocate.

  The lights were on in the backshop. I found Kip slaving away, putting the paper together.

  “What’s up?” he inquired, surprised to see me.

  “I’m doing a bit of research,” I replied. “Is everything going okay?”

  “Sure,” Kip answered, looking up from his computer monitor. “Ginny got the classifieds screwed up, though. They’re out of numerical order. That’s not like her.”

  “Now that Ginny has two children, she gets muddled,” I said. “But it’s rare.”

  “True.” He returned to the monitor. “We could use a new layout program. This one is old and slow. Can we afford it?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Find out what it’d cost and let me know.”

  “Will do.” He moved the cursor around the screen with great aplomb. “By the way, I’m getting married.”

  “What?” I had started to head back to the newsroom and stumbled over the threshold.

  My reaction apparently caught Kip off-guard. “What’s wrong? Didn’t you think anyone would have me?”

  “Of course not,” I assured him. “It’s just that . . . How could I not have known?”

  Kip looked at me with a sheepish grin. “The wedding’s set for late November, right after Thanksgiving.”

  “Who?” I asked, still dumbfounded. Kip was in his late twenties, and though he dated occasionally, I had no idea that there was a steady girlfriend in his life.

  “Bev Iverson,” Kip replied, now beaming widely. “You know her, she works at kIds cOrNEr for Ione Erdahl.”

  “Of course,” I said, trying to overcome my astonishment. “She’s very sweet. Pretty, too.” The truth was, I hadn’t been in the local children’s store in three years. But I’d seen Beverly Iverson around town, and Vida had pointed her out to me. A petite blonde with a pigeon-toed gait, she was the daughter of Fred and Opal Iverson who owned the Venison Inn along with Fred’s uncle, Jack Iverson. Thus, I realized, Beverly was also somehow related to Jack Froland and to Judge Marsha. Typical. Sometimes it seemed that Alpine was so inbred that it was a wonder local residents didn’t have eleven toes and ears on their elbows.

  “Does Vida know?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Kip replied. His ruddy face darkened. “That is, doesn’t Vida always know everything?”

  I offered Kip an understanding smile. “Never mind. I suppose you didn’t want to tell me about the wedding because you thought it might . . . raise too many painful memories.”

  Kip hung his head. “That’s right. We decided—that is, I thought it’d be better to wait for the right moment. You know, like . . . ah . . .”

  “Like when I forget Tom Cavanaugh’s name?” I patted Kip’s arm. “It’s okay. I can’t live in a cocoon. Life does go on.” But at what a price, I thought.

  We chatted some more, then I went into the newsroom. It wouldn’t hurt to check out the names of Foster and Klein in our files. Ginny had reorganized us recently, which meant I could never find anything. She, however, could present a birth notice from 1946 within thirty seconds.

  It had cost too much to put the precomputer era editions on microfiche, so all the issues up until the early Nineties were in bound volumes. I stared at the well-worn spines and wondered where to begin. We also had a file of names, cross-referenced by families. Even—or because of—Ginny’s thoroughness and penchant for detail, they were a nightmare to decipher.

  I looked up Klein in search of Marsha’s ancestry. There was no one by that name. There was a Foster, Alvin, but he’d worked at one of the mills in the late Thirties and apparently left town to join the military when World War II broke out. He had no family in Alpine, and I guessed that he’d come to town in search of work during the Depression.

  Finally, I checked the Iversons, to whom Vida believed Marsha had some tenuous connection. There were two early references, to an Iversen and an Iverson. I had sat down at Leo’s desk to peruse the names when I was startled by a noise in the outer office. I could have sworn I’d locked the door behind me.

  I was barely out of the chair when Milo Dodge loped into the room.

  “Emma,” he said in mild surprise, doffing his regulation sheriff’s hat. “What are you doing here this time of night?”

  “Research,” I replied, settling back down in the chair. “You startled me.”

  Milo gave me his lopsided grin. “Sorry. I didn’t notice your car outside. This place is usually dark Monday nights. It wasn’t, so I thought I’d better check it out. I used my master key. What’s up?”

  “For one thing,” I said dryly, “it’s not Monday, it’s Tuesday. Our pub date.”

  “Sheesh.” Milo clapped a big hand to his forehead. “I keep forgetting. These three-day weekends throw me.” He put a booted foot up on Leo’s visitor chair. “I knew it was Tuesday. I mean, I really did. I had to keep reminding myself all day, and just now, I forgot.”

  Ordinarily, Milo isn’t what I’d call a chatterbox. But in recent months, I’ve noticed that when we’re alone together— which isn’t all that often—he jabbers away. I suspect he doesn’t know what to say to me. The tragedy that killed Tom also robbed Milo of a woman with whom he’d been keeping serious company. Since Milo and I had once been lovers as well as friends, I figured that he assumed there was an awkwardness between us because our love lives had both been scuttled. Milo is not an introspective type of person.

  But he was a native Alpiner. “Let m
e show you something,” I said, reaching into my purse. I fumbled a bit as I detached the old photograph from the back of the letter that had been sent to Judge Marsha. “Do you recognize this trestle?”

  Milo’s hazel eyes squinted at the picture. Holding it in the palm of his hand, he studied the scene for a long time. “Is it supposed to be some place around here?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly.

  “Where’d you get it?” His gaze was still fixed on the photo.

  “From a friend,” I said. “She wants to know where it was taken.”

  Shrugging, Milo handed the snapshot back to me. “No idea. It probably dates back at least seventy years. Those brown tinted pictures—they stopped doing that in the Twenties, I think.”

  “That’s so,” I said, studying the photo once more. “You’re sure you don’t recognize the background?”

  Milo started to shake his head, then took the picture back from me. He was silent for some time. “Well . . . those boulders in the background—they do look kind of familiar. See that cleft in the one at the left? It looks like some fat guy’s rear end. It could be the old trestle that used to run over Burl Creek just before it got to the river. But the trees have all been cut, and by now this whole scene would be second- or even third-growth timber. The boulders might all be gone from a slide. Anyway, I’d have to think about it.”

  Again, I palmed the photo. Milo was a hunter and a fisherman. It didn’t surprise me that he knew every rock, creek, and other formation in Skykomish County. Besides, it was his job to know the local turf.

  “If you think of anything,” I said, “let me know.”

  “Sure.” Milo reached into his jacket pocket for a pack of cigarettes and offered one to me.

  I accepted. I’d started smoking—again—after Tom was killed. As of September first, I’d quit—again. But it wasn’t official. I’d decided that the long weekend had given me a grace period.

  “Who wants to know?” Milo asked.

  It wasn’t his professional inquiry tone, but I didn’t like lying to Milo. “A woman in Everett,” I replied, hedging my bets.

  “Oh.” Milo shrugged. Like other natives, he wasn’t interested in outsiders.

  “Why are you working tonight?” The sheriff pulled night duty only during the investigation of a serious crime.

  He gave me a sheepish grin. “Because of the holiday.” Which he’d forgotten. “Jack Mullins took last week and most of this one as his vacation, and Dustin Fong took an extra day to visit his folks in Seattle. Believe it or not, we were shorthanded over the weekend.”

  My reaction was to speak sharply to the sheriff. “You didn’t tell me that? It’s a story, dammit.”

  Milo looked surprised. “It is?”

  “Of course it is,” I said, glaring at him. I turned in the direction of the door to the back-shop. “It beats the hell out of Ethel Pike’s crappy lottery ticket.”

  “Hunh.” Milo gazed at me through a puff of smoke. “Well, I wouldn’t want it all over the county that we were at half-speed during a major holiday.”

  “But it’s over,” I countered. “The news is that you got through it without any problems. It makes you look like a . . .” I winced at the next word. “Genius.”

  “Hunh,” Milo repeated.

  “I’m going to run the damned thing, front page,” I declared. “Give me a quote.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like . . .” I booted up Leo’s computer, then started typing. “It speaks well of the community and our law enforcement agency in Skykomish County that even though we operated at less than full manpower over the Labor Day weekend, our deputies and staff members were able to meet all the challenges that a national holiday presents.”

  Milo frowned. “That doesn’t sound like me. I’d never say that.”

  “How about if I put in a couple of ‘duhs’ and an ‘awschucks’?”

  Milo glowered down at me from his impressive height of six-foot-five. “You’re making fun of me, Emma. Don’t piss me off.”

  “I’m making fun of you,” I said in a cross tone, “because you and the rest of population don’t understand what’s news around here. For one thing, names make news. After we get the law enforcement information out of the way, we can get personal. Dustin’s visit to his parents. You, having to work an extra shift. And where did Jack go on his vacation?”

  “Salmon fishing, up at Glacier Bay,” Milo replied, looking only slightly assuaged. “The run’s still on, from what we hear.”

  “Ah.” I gave Milo a bogus smile. “That, too, is news in these parts. All of it. Now go away and let me finish the damned story.”

  With a shake of his head, Milo started to lope out of the newsroom. But at the door to the front office, he turned around. “By the way, Nina Mullins went with Jack. She bought the Alaska trip at some Catholic auction in Seattle last spring, but she kept it a secret from Jack until now. Sunday was their fifteenth anniversary.”

  I gave Milo a bleak look. “Thanks,” I said with a straight face. “I can use that, too.”

  I didn’t add that I could also use more sources who could figure out a news story from a nail file.

  I abandoned my research project that night, having been required to help Kip redo the front page. Ethel Pike was now below the fold, which was just as well, since the photo showing her holding up the twenty-seven-dollar lottery ticket bonanza also revealed that one of her front teeth was missing. Scott had begged her not to smile, but happy old Ethel couldn’t resist.

  By the time Kip and I finished, it was going on nine o’clock. I was tired, so I went home. Alone. As usual.

  Since it was two hours earlier in the part of Alaska where Adam was now residing, I thought about calling him. But phoning to such a remote site as Mary’s Igloo involved many obstacles, including the call itself, which was transmitted on some kind of radio relay and caused frustrating delays at both ends of the conversation.

  Instead, I dialed Marsha Foster-Klein’s number. When she answered, she sounded worse than she had a few hours earlier.

  “I took to my bed,” she announced, “but I can’t sleep, even propped up on pillows. I cough more when I’m recumbent.”

  I offered sympathy, then posed the question that Vida had asked: “Which is your family name, Marsha? Foster or Klein?”

  “Both,” Marsha replied. “It was my mother who hyphenated her name—which was Klein—and my father’s name of Foster. Why? Have you changed your mind about helping me?”

  I hesitated. “I don’t feel right about turning you down.” “That’s up to you.” Marsha coughed three times in a row, taking some of the sting out of her remark.

  “What puzzled me,” I went on, “is that I thought one of those names might have belonged to your husband.”

  “I never took his name,” Marsha said. “I’d already started practicing law when we were married. Anyway, he died a year later, right after our son was born. Phil had a brain tumor.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. Marsha and I had something else in common besides Tom’s murder trial.

  “You don’t need to apologize,” Marsha responded. “You didn’t cause the tumor.” She coughed steadily for almost a minute. “I’m hanging up now,” she gasped.

  I heard the click at the other end of the line. After a few minor domestic chores, I took a long bath, went to bed, and tried to read myself to sleep. But sleep didn’t come easily these days, even when I was dead tired. Shortly after eleven-thirty, I put my book aside and reached for my handbag, which I kept next to the bed.

  I didn’t re-read the letter to Marsha, but instead, stared at the old snapshot. What was important about it? Why had it been taken in the first place? Was it because of the trestle— or the rope?

  I must have hypnotized myself with that long stare. Five minutes later I went to sleep with the light still on and the photo having slipped onto the floor.

  Buddy Bayard’s Picture Perfect Photo Studio has always been
our version of a photography lab. The next morning I told Vida I was going to show him the snapshot to see if he could identify it. Buddy and his wife Roseanna have an extensive collection of old Alpine pictures.

  “An excellent idea,” Vida declared. “So you’ve changed your mind. That’s wonderful.”

  “Marsha’s a widow.” I almost added, “too.” Somehow I thought of myself as a widow. “She has a son, you know.”

  “Yes, he’s college age,” Vida remarked. “I’m glad you’re doing this. It’s good for you.”

  “It is?” I was dubious.

  “Of course,” Vida said. “That’s why I didn’t call Marsha last night to tell her I was stepping in for you. I was sure you’d come ’round.”

  Which, I assumed, was also why Vida hadn’t shown me to her door. She was giving me time to think things through. Darn her hide. She was rarely wrong about people.

  “I was thinking of checking the Blabber files,” she said, ignoring my bemused expression.

  The Alpine Blabber was the precursor of the Advocate. It was more newsletter than newspaper, published on an irregular basis from the end of World War I to the closure of the original mill in 1929. A gap in local news coverage had existed for almost three years before Marius Vandeventer’s father founded the Advocate.

  “Good idea,” I told Vida. “By the way, last night I looked at the index cards on the Iversons. There were two spellings. I take it there must have been two different families in the early days.”

  Vida was sitting at her desk and wearing one of the more bizarre hats from her collection, a black high-crowned affair with a small gilt-edged picture of a Victorian lady stuck in the satin band. It was reminiscent of the Mad Hatter’s headgear from Alice in Wonderland.

  “No,” she said slowly, “that’s not the case. The original spelling of Iverson was -sen, but they changed it to - son years ago. Now let me think why.” She rested her cheek on her hand and appeared to concentrate. “It wasn’t a family feud. I believe it was because of some scandal. Alas, it was well before my time, and I can’t recall it offhand.”