The Alpine Obituary

by Mary Daheim

  “You might say that.” I dialed the Advocate’s number on my cell phone. Apparently, Ginny had gone out to eat; the call went straight through to Vida’s extension. Naturally, she would come right over. The hardboiled egg and cottage cheese, along with the celery and carrot sticks, could wait.

  Marsha had ordered without consulting the menu. “A secret’s not a secret if it’s been published in the newspapers, right?”

  “Of course it’s not,” I agreed. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” she replied, allowing her coffee mug to be filled by the latest in a long series of young blonde waitresses. “What if the letter doesn’t refer directly to me, but somebody else in my family?”

  “You have a candidate in mind?” I inquired as Vida flew in through the door.

  “Maybe,” Marsha said as Vida marched up to our booth.

  “Ladies,” she said with a nod of the black turban. “Would you mind, Emma?” Before I could budge, she sat down next to me. I edged over a few inches to accommodate her.

  I recounted what Marsha had just told me. Behind her big glasses with their bright orange frames, Vida’s eyes widened. “A family member? Who?”

  Marsha sighed. “My grandfather on my mother’s side. His name was Yitzhak Klein. He was a Jewish immigrant who settled in New York where he married my grandmother, Esther. They moved west around 1915.”

  Vida’s face was blank. “I’ve never heard the name.”

  “Probably not,” Marsha conceded. “Grandpa Klein was a Communist and a labor agitator. During the big Red Scare back in 1920, he was arrested in Seattle and went to prison for three years. Maybe that’s the secret I’m supposed to have.”

  Vida considered. “Dubious,” she finally said, then turned to pinion me between the wall and the back of the booth. “What do you think, Emma?”

  I agreed. “I assume he never lived in Alpine?”

  “Not that I know of,” Marsha said. “My mother was also politically active, but she never got arrested. She was a born rebel. When she decided to marry my father, Grandma and Grandpa Klein had a fit. Dad wasn’t Jewish. It wasn’t that Mom gave up her religion—though I wouldn’t call her devout—but she hyphenated her name with Dad’s. It was pretty unusual to do that back in the late Forties. Anyway, that’s how I got to be Marsha Foster-Klein. I kept my maiden name for professional reasons. My husband’s surname was Barr. Marsha Barr sounded frivolous for an attorney.”

  “A little,” I remarked. “Are your parents still alive?”

  Marsha shook her head. “Dad’s been dead for fifteen years. Mom died two years ago this coming November.”

  “It’s possible,” Vida said, seemingly out of the blue.

  Marsha and I both stared at her. “What is?”

  “The arrest. The prison term. Being a Communist,” Vida replied as Marsha’s order arrived. “That is . . .” Vida leaned out of the booth and called to the waitress. “Toby? It is Toby, isn’t it?” The young blonde nodded and smiled. “Toby dear, could you bring me a small salad? With ranch dressing?” Toby nodded again. “And perhaps a fishwich with those lovely chips. Now don’t be stingy on the tartar sauce.” Vida wagged a finger in a jocular manner. Once again, her calorie count had been abandoned.

  “Nobody cares these days about someone being a Communist way back when,” I pointed out.

  But Vida disagreed. “Some do, particularly the old-timers. See here, Marsha, you don’t know who wrote that letter. It could be some pigheaded person with a long memory, someone who holds a grudge against radicals. Or it could simply be some fool who might think you’d be embarrassed by your grandfather’s shenanigans.”

  Marsha absorbed Vida’s ideas. “You could be right.” She grimaced. “Of course, there’s always anti-Semitism.”

  “Dear me,” Vida said, “I suppose there is. Really, except for the Middle East, isn’t that out of vogue these days?”

  Somewhat to my surprise, Marsha uttered a small laugh. “You’d like to think so,” she said. “But unfortunately, it’s one of those awful things that never goes away.”

  “Have you received anti-Semitic hate mail before this?” I inquired.

  “Oh, yes,” Marsha replied. “I’ve also been called a nigger-lover, anti-Catholic, a Jap-basher, a lesbian, too liberal, too conservative, and a lapdog of modern science. I could go on, but you get the picture.”

  I nodded in sympathy. “I’ve been tabbed many of those things, too. My favorite was ‘Popish running-dog left-wing Finn-hating whore.’ I’m still trying to figure out what it meant.”

  Marsha gave a shake of her head. “That’s pretty wild. Do you know who wrote that?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “I usually do even when the letters are anonymous.”

  “The post office,” Vida said suddenly. “Marsha, have you inquired at the post office to see if anyone there or on the mail routes knows who sent the letter?”

  “No,” Marsha admitted. “Why would they?”

  Before Vida could respond, Toby delivered the salad with a generous covering of ranch dressing. In fact, the lettuce was barely visible, with only an occasional hint of green poking through, like treetops after a heavy snowfall.

  “Thank you, Toby,” Vida said with a toothy smile. “Just the way I like it.”

  “What Vida’s saying,” I put in, “is that in a small town like Alpine, the postal workers pay more attention to the mail than in a city like Seattle or even Everett. They, too, are curious about their friends and neighbors.” I ignored Vida’s owlish stare. “How many people mail handwritten letters within the town every day? Frankly, we should have thought of this before now.”

  “Yes, we’ve been remiss,” Vida acknowledged between munches and crunches of salad. “I shall go to the post office as soon as I finish lunch.”

  I’d finished my meal and Marsha had put the remnants of her turkey sandwich aside. She was due at the courthouse to talk to the opposing attorneys in an insurance case.

  “I’m going back to the office, too,” I announced, waiting for Vida to move so that I could get out of the booth.

  “You can’t,” she asserted. “Here comes Toby with my fishwich. You know how I hate to eat alone.”

  Marsha, who was on her feet, leaned down to Vida. “Then eat fast. I’m running out of time.” Heaving her handbag over her shoulder as if it were a rifle, the judge marched out of the Burger Barn just as Milo Dodge came in.

  “Milo,” I murmured to Vida. “You can interrogate him.” I swiveled around as best I could and waved at the sheriff.

  Vida harumphed, but she slid out of the booth so I could escape. I encountered Milo halfway to the cash register.

  “You’re leaving?” The sheriff looked disappointed.

  “I have work to do,” I replied. “I called earlier to ask you to have lunch with me, but you weren’t in.”

  “I’d gone to the funeral at Faith Lutheran,” Milo said, “but they’d all left for the cemetery. I was hoping I could stop everything before they got to the burial site.”

  “You caused quite a stir,” I remarked.

  “It’s probably a bunch of bull,” the sheriff said. “I talked to Doc Dewey this morning. He hadn’t seen any sign of trauma on Jack Froland’s body. The only way he could have been killed was if he was poisoned. We’re shipping him over to Everett where they can run the toxicology tests, but it’ll take time. Maybe before they get the results, June will have gotten over her nutty idea.”

  “You don’t think Jack was murdered?” I stepped aside as the local GM dealership owners Skunk and Trout Nordby came down the aisle.

  Skunk stopped to speak to the sheriff. “You been out lately?”

  Milo shook his head. “No time.”

  “You should take a couple of days, go down to the mouth of the Columbia,” said his brother, Trout. “We’d go but the new cars are in.”

  “I might try the Peninsula later,” Milo said. “Maybe the Humptulips and the Bogachiel.”

  �
��We’re thinking Cowlitz in November,” said Skunk. “See you.”

  The brothers moved away. Only a local would know they were talking about rivers and fish.

  Milo saw Vida, who was leaning out of the booth and making wild motions. “I’d better go suck up to your House & Home editor,” the sheriff said.

  “So do you really think it’s murder?” I persisted.

  “Hell, no,” Milo said over his shoulder. “But I have to go by the book.”

  Of course. Milo always did.

  There were still tongues of flame visible in the hills a mile to the north, but the smoke had drifted away from the commercial district. We’d been lucky so far. The terrible wildfires that had devastated eastern Washington hadn’t yet struck Skykomish County.

  I glanced down the street at the post office. It was almost one-thirty, and about the time that my home mail was delivered. Vida could handle the other postal workers, but I decided to track down our mailman, Marlow Whipp.

  Sure enough, as I cruised along Alpine Way, I saw his little truck parked at the corner of my street. On pleasant days, Marlow preferred to walk some of his route. Driving slowly, I passed the RV park and the modest condos that had been converted from apartments years ago. In another two blocks, I came to my house. The flag was up on the mailbox. Marlow had already passed this way.

  I spotted him by the cul-de-sac and caught his attention with one beep of the horn. He stopped at the curb, eyeing me curiously.

  “What’s up, Emma?” he asked. “Did I give you the wrong mail?”

  “I haven’t even looked,” I said. “Hold on while I pull into the cul-de-sac. I’ve got a question for you.”

  Marlow, who had recently sprouted a goatee, waited patiently until I got out of the Lexus. “What kind of question?” He was a very literal man, no doubt from years of matching names to addresses, of sorting each delivery, of walking the same streets day after day after day.

  “Think back to last Friday,” I said. “Did you work that day?” I felt obliged to be literal, too.

  “Last Friday?” Marlow reflected. “No. It was the Labor Day weekend. I had four days off. Seniority has its perks.”

  “Who took your route around town?”

  “That new kid, Sean Corson. You know—Delphine’s son.”

  I knew Delphine, who was the local florist. I hadn’t realized that her son was old enough to have a job. The last I remembered of Sean Corson was when he made the news by crashing his skateboard into a tree on First Hill and broke his leg. He’d been about fourteen at the time.

  “What about Thursday?” I asked. Even though the letter had been postmarked Saturday, September third, it might have been mailed earlier. The postal employees in Alpine didn’t always rush, especially with a holiday on the horizon.

  “Oh, sure. I worked Thursday,” Marlow replied. “I hate Thursdays. That’s magazine day for me. Then there’s all those darned catalogs this time of year. Would you believe I’ve already delivered a bunch aimed at Christmas?”

  Having received at least two holiday catalogs, I nodded in sympathy. “Most of them end up in the recycling bin,” I said.

  “Crazy,” Marlow declared. “What do people in Alpine want with catalogs from all over the country? Don’t we have stores right here? It’s not fair to the local merchants. Not to mention the post office. There ought to be a law.”

  “I thought there was,” I said. “I mean, regarding bulk mail.”

  “You’re talking media mailings if you mean the newspaper. Check out regulation 3.0 under parcel post where you’ll . . .”

  “I meant the catalogs,” I interrupted. “But that’s not my question.”

  “Oh.” Marlow looked surprised.

  “Last Thursday,” I began, “do you recall picking up any handwritten letters along your route?”

  Marlow bowed his head. His back was already bowed from carrying heavy mailbags for the past twenty years. “Let me think. You mean, letters that were left out in the boxes for me to pick up, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s been over a week,” Marlow said, sounding apologetic. “Handwritten, huh?”

  “Yes. Stationery-sized envelope.”

  “A number three,” Marlow mused, finally looking up. “White?”

  “Off-white,” I said. I’d have called it ecru, but maybe that was too literal even for Marlow.

  “Eggshell or ecru?” inquired Marlow.

  I tried not to smile. “Ecru, actually.”

  “How thick?”

  I frowned. “The envelope?”

  “The letter, the whole thing.”

  “A single sheet, with a small photo attached.”

  “Gosh.” Marlow was thinking again. When he finally spoke, it was with a shake of his head. “Nope, I don’t remember anything like that. Check with Sean Corson. Gotta run, Emma. The Thorstensens across from you complain like crazy when their mail’s late.”

  “Hey!” I called after Marlow who was already across the street. “Where will I find Sean?”

  “He’s doing the rural routes today,” Marlow shouted. “He won’t get back until after five.”

  I surrendered and went back to work. Vida didn’t return from the post office until two o’clock, and when she showed up, she was frustrated.

  “Honestly,” she exclaimed, sitting down with a thud, “people simply don’t pay attention any more. They’re all wrapped up in their own little worlds. Why can’t they be more interested in their surroundings?”

  “No luck?” I inquired.

  “None.” Vida removed her glasses and rubbed vigorously at her eyes. “Ooooh! Roy Everson has become an absolute robot. If I didn’t know he was only fifty-one, I’d say it was time for him to retire as the local supervisor. There he is, at the very nerve center of the town’s communications, and he acts as if it’s just another job. Wouldn’t you think he’d take a more personal interest?”

  “The others weren’t any help, either, I take it.”

  “Certainly not,” Vida retorted. “Hopeless, just hopeless.”

  I told her about my equally fruitless encounter with Marlow Whipp. “It seems that Sean Corson is our last resort,” I said as Leo came through the door.

  “Sean Corson’s a half-wit,” Leo declared.

  I didn’t take the statement seriously. Leo had dated Sean’s mother, Delphine. After they broke up, my ad manager had griped that her son was partially to blame. Sean was a teenager then and jealous of any man who made a claim on his mother’s affections.

  Vida also ignored Leo’s comment. “I stopped at Posies Unlimited on my way back from the post office. I had Delphine send flowers to June Froland,” Vida said as she regained her calm. “It was the least I could do.”

  Leo was unwrapping a double-truck ad layout for the Grocery Basket. “I hear June’s gone over the edge. If Jack Froland was murdered, she’d be my prime suspect. I got the impression those two didn’t live together, they coexisted. And not always in peace.”

  “There’s some truth to that,” Vida allowed. “In their later years, after the children were raised, Jack and June had very little in common. The death of their daughter, Lynn, only seemed to widen the gulf between them.”

  “Was that a car accident?” Leo asked.

  “Yes. Up at the summit. Lynn had been skiing.” Vida hesitated. “There were rumors, of course.”

  “What kind?” I inquired. I’d known almost nothing about Lynn Froland until the last few days.

  “Well.” Vida put her glasses back on. “Lynn was very young, about twenty, as I recall. She’d gone up to the summit to ski, but I heard there was more going on off the slopes than on them. Drinking, you know. So foolish, so unnecessary. The tragedy occurred on that terrible curve where the Cascade railroad tunnel begins.”

  “Was there an investigation?” I asked.

  Vida sniffed. “Cursory. That incompetent fool, Eeeny Moroni, was sheriff then. You’d hardly expect thoroughness from his sort.”

&n
bsp; Milo’s predecessor had a tainted reputation in Skykomish County. Vida, of course, had always insisted Eeeny was no good. As is often the case, she’d been right.

  “I really should visit June,” she went on, “but I understand Max is staying through the weekend at least. He teaches at the University of Washington. Classes don’t start until the end of the month.”

  “Duchess!” Leo exclaimed in mock surprise. “I didn’t know you were so self-effacing. How does a mere grieving son prevent you from cross-examining the bereaved widow?”

  “Don’t be so exasperating,” Vida shot back. “And don’t call me Duchess. You know I despise that nickname.”

  “But it’s so fitting,” Leo asserted, all mock innocence. “Look at that turban. You remind me of pictures I’ve seen of Queen Mary.”

  “Queen Mary wore a toque,” Vida snapped. “That’s not the same as a . . .”

  Mercifully, we were interrupted by the arrival of Scott Chamoud. “I’ve got the fire photos,” he announced, waving a manila envelope. “They’re pretty spectacular, if I do say so myself.”

  Scott was right. He’d taken both color and black-and-white. He had several excellent frames of the firefighters in action, but what caught my eye was a wide-angled shot above the trees at Embro Lake with the glowing orange sky so bright that I could almost feel the heat.

  “Great, Scott,” I enthused, passing the photos on to Vida and Leo. “We can do a whole spread with these and not run text, just cutlines.” I turned to my ad manager. “Do you think we’ve got enough advertising to support twenty-four pages next week?”

  Leo punched numbers into his calculator. “Not yet, but we’ll make it. I’m going on a road trip this afternoon, to ply my trade with the merchants of Highway 2.”

  “Brilliant,” I said. There were several businesses between Alpine and Monroe that could provide autumnal goods and services.

  “I’ve got an idea for a feature on the firefighters,” Scott said. “Especially those they call the pounders.” He pointed at some shots of dirty, gritty men and women braving smoke and flames. “They’re the ones who work on the ground. Their gripe is that all the glory goes to the smoke jumpers. No glamour in their job, they say, but it’s really tough. They’re the grunts.”