by Mary Daheim
“Sure. See you then.”
I hung up, wondering what had taken the sheriff to Everett. The phone rang in my hand before I could set it down.
“Maybe we missed something,” Vida said without preamble. “What could it be?”
She was referring to the rest of the Froland albums and the shoe box that we’d gone through after returning from Judge Marsha’s apartment.
“Like what?” I responded. “There wasn’t anything of significance among the souvenirs or the photos.”
Vida sighed. “Then I’ll have to do some searching of my own when I visit June tomorrow night. They must have other keepsakes in that house. June isn’t what I’d call a fussy housekeeper.”
The Froland home had looked sufficiently tidy as far as I was concerned. But Vida tends to be fastidious, except when it comes to Roger, who could reduce the place to rubble and not upset his grandmother.
“Do what you can,” I said, envisioning Vida wedging her way through crawl spaces in the attic.
“I shall,” she promised.
Possibly goaded by Vida’s comment about housekeeping, I did some of my own domestic chores for the next two hours. Just before six, I put two potatoes in the oven and opened a can of string beans. It would be a simple dinner, the kind Milo liked best.
An hour later, the potato skins were beginning to wrinkle. I switched off the oven and went out on the front porch to see if Milo was arriving. The rain had just started, dappling the viburnum leaves next to the steps. The sheriff wasn’t anywhere in sight.
I wasn’t worried, but I was certainly curious. When it came to dinner, Milo was usually on time. I had to wonder what was holding him up in Everett. Or if he was still there. At seven-fifteen, I considered calling his cell phone number, but decided to try his office first.
Deputy Dwight Gould answered. “Dodge stand you up?” he inquired in his dry manner.
“So it seems,” I said.
“He’s on his way,” Dwight replied. “He left here about three minutes ago.”
“What held him up?” I asked, heading for the front door.
“New developments,” Dwight said. “Ask Dodge.”
I assured the deputy that I would do just that and hung up.
I’d stood on the porch for less than a minute when Milo’s Grand Cherokee pulled into my driveway. He was still in his civvies as he loped toward me in those cowboy boots that added a good three inches to his six-foot-five frame.
“Sorry,” he apologized, giving me a thump on the shoulder and handing over the T-bones. “I had to go to Everett.”
“I’ll find out why by coaxing you with strong drink,” I said. “Luckily, I haven’t put the beans on yet.”
“Scotch rocks,” he said, flopping down into his favorite armchair.
“I know,” I responded, then noticed that he looked weary. “Not a very restful day off, I gather.”
“No,” he said and went silent as I proceeded into the kitchen to make our drinks.
I also put Milo’s steak on to cook. He liked it done medium-well; I preferred rare. That was only one of many differences between us. We’d been ill-matched from the start. And yet we could still be friends.
“I hear there are new developments,” I said, handing Milo his drink.
“What?” He gave me a quizzical look. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Dwight told me.” I perched on the arm of Milo’s chair. “Are you going to tell me or do I have to threaten to burn your steak?”
Milo frowned. “I suppose you’re worrying because Fleetwood might get hold of the story.”
“I always worry about that,” I said, “but I can’t do much about it on a weekend. There is a story then?”
Milo reached for his cigarettes. I slid off the chair and sat down on the sofa.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “There is. There are, maybe I should say. Two stories. One you can’t have, but the other’s official.”
My eyes widened. “Two stories? You’d better give me both of them by Tuesday. What’s the one you can tell me now?”
Milo lit a cigarette, took a deep drink of Scotch, and grimaced.
“Just what I didn’t need to hear,” he said. “Poor old June Froland may have been right. It looks like Jack Froland was poisoned.”
December 1916
The joints in Olga Iversen’s fingers were stiff with cold as she held up the pair of woolen stockings she’d just finished knitting. Not a single dropped stitch, she thought with satisfaction—red with blue and white stripes, like the Norwegian flag. Olga loved her native land’s flag. Her brother had sent her a small replica of it after Norway finally gained its independence from Sweden. Olga wished she had been there for the celebrations.
During the winter, it had been cold and snowy in Trondheim, too. But not so damp as Alpine. The moisture seemed not only to come from the sky, but to ooze out of the ground. And the logging town was so small. . . .
Olga gazed out through the four wavering glass panes that o fered the best view of Alpine. The mill, with its huffing-puffing smokestack. The social hall that reminded her of a barn on one of the many farms outside of Trondheim. The bunkhouses, like army barracks. There were no shops, no grand homes, no factories, no harbor, no shipbuilding yards, no scent of the sea.
Most of all, there was no church. Olga missed the great Nidaros Cathedral that soared above Trondheim. Kings were crowned there, near the tomb of King Olaf II, Norway’s patron saint. It was where King Haakon VII’s coronation had been held eleven years earlier, but Olga hadn’t been there to see it. She’d received letters from home, picture postcards, even a souvenir silver spoon that she kept tucked away in her underwear drawer.
Home. How she missed it. How she missed her family, her friends, the festivals, the familiar gathering places for the university students. She had fallen in love with one of them, Bjorn Bjornsen, but his family had insisted that he marry a richer, prettier wife. Olga had thought she’d die of a broken heart when Bjorn returned home to Levanger.
Then Trygve had come back to Trondheim. She’d known him when she was younger, not well, but in the way that a fourteen-year-old girl and a nineteen-year-old man acknowledge each other’s presence with a smile and a nod, as if to say, “Some day, perhaps, when we are older . . .”
So, to salve her broken heart, she’d found a safe haven in Trygve’s strong arms. Like so many big men, he was gentle with weaker creatures. He had promised a new life in a new world, and at the time, Olga had wanted to flee her shattered dreams.
But that was over twenty years ago, and almost ten since they moved to Alpine. She’d borne four children, three sons and a daughter. That was enough. The youngest, Lars, had been a difficult birth. Olga had almost died. There would be no more babies. There would be no more lying in Trygve’s strong arms.
At first, she’d hated Lars, resented him for taking away a part of her life that she’d come to enjoy. But he had been an outgoing child, cheerful, even clownish. Olga didn’t laugh often, but when she did, it was because of Lars. He was so funny, so endearing.
It was Jonas who hated Lars. Jonas had been the baby until six years later when Lars replaced him. “Act like a big boy, Jonas,” Olga used to admonish him. “You’re not a baby any more.”
Olga looked again at the stockings. She’d knitted them for Jonas as a Christmas present. He’d hate them, hate them the way he hated Lars, the way he hated her.
The way Olga hated Alpine.
Chapter Ten
I STARED AT Milo. “Are you kidding? Jack Froland was poisoned? How?”
“Yep,” Milo replied, taking out a fresh pack of Marlboro Lights. “That’s what the M.E. says.”
I was incredulous, leaning halfway off the sofa. “How?” Milo took the first puff from his cigarette. Automatically, I reached into the drawer of the side table and hauled out an ashtray.
“Mushrooms,” he replied, taking the ashtray from me.
“Mushrooms? You mean, the poisonous kind?” I a
sked stupidly.
Milo made a wry face. “That’s the kind that kills people.”
I knew there were poisonous mushrooms in the woods around Alpine. Carla Steinmetz Talliaferro had done a feature about them several years ago. Only by the grace of God had I realized that she’d misidentified two of them in the cutlines by switching the photos. During her premarriage and premotherhood days with the Advocate, Carla had tended to be somewhat careless.
“What kind?” I asked the sheriff.
“A-ma-ni-tas phall-o-i-des,” Milo replied, slowly and distinctly, obviously having memorized what the M.E. had told him. “You’ve seen them—they grow in the woods, sometimes along the road. They’re the ones with the yellow-orange background and the white dots.”
“Yes.” I had seen them from time to time, once in my backyard just below the tree line. Despite their beguiling appearance, I’d beaten them down with a shovel. “I don’t get it,” I admitted. “I don’t see June Froland preparing exotic meals with mushrooms. Have you spoken with her?”
“Not yet,” Milo replied. “June’s still pretty wiped out. I talked to Max. The news blew him right out of his socks.”
“I should think so,” I remarked. “Did he have any explanation? I mean, about how his father might have eaten the mushrooms?”
Milo’s long face wore an ironic expression. “Yeah, he did. It seems old Jack was a meat-and-potatoes man. His favorite meat was steak—” He paused with a glance in the direction of the kitchen. “—And his favorite thing was to put mushrooms on his steak.”
“Good grief.” I shook my head. “Had Jack been eating a lot of steak lately?”
Milo nodded. “He’d started feeling better, and I guess his appetite picked up. According to Max, June bought steak every time it was on sale at Safeway. When Jack was feeling lousy, she’d buy it anyway, and put it in the freezer. Max didn’t know for sure, but he said his dad had probably eaten steak most nights for the last week or two.”
“With mushrooms,” I noted.
“With mushrooms.”
“Where did they come from?”
“Max wasn’t sure,” Milo responded. “He thought maybe his folks had gathered them in the woods. They picked berries, wildflowers, and, he thought, probably mushrooms. The Frolands were old school. They foraged off the land.”
“School of hard knocks,” I murmured. “Depression-era people, who don’t spend money unless they have to. Still, you’d think they’d know a poisonous mushroom when they saw one.”
“True.” Milo chuckled. “That reminds me, a couple of years ago—maybe you remember it from the log—their neighbors filed a complaint. You know May Beth and Jerry Hedstrom?”
“Sure,” I said. “She teaches at the grade school and he manages Mountain View Gardens.”
“Right.” Briefly, Milo looked away. His most recent broken romance had been with a woman who worked at the local nursery. “Anyway,” he continued after clearing his throat, “May Beth and Jerry grow a lot of their own produce. It seems the Frolands had a bad habit of sneaking into the Hedstrom garden and stealing everything from pears to pumpkins.”
Remembering the report in the police log, I smiled. “Jack and June got off with a warning, right?”
Milo nodded. “They argued that they were old and addled. They thought they were in their own yard, instead of the Hedstroms’. Turns out they’d been swiping stuff for the past couple of years, according to Jerry.”
I smiled at the image of Jack and June Froland lugging away bags of contraband beans and broccoli by the dark of the moon. Milo looked as if he could use a refill for his drink, so I went to the kitchen where I also checked on his steak and put mine into the skillet. When I returned to the living room, I had the obvious question for the sheriff. Two of them, in fact.
“Did someone purposely bring poisonous mushrooms to the house? Or was it an accident?”
Milo shrugged. “That’s a tough one. You’d think they’d have known better if Jack and June picked those mushrooms up in the woods. If they didn’t do it by mistake, who did?”
“June?”
Milo grimaced. “Why? Even if Jack was feeling better, he hadn’t licked the cancer. He wasn’t going to live forever. Why hurry the poor old fart along?”
“Because he was driving her nuts?” I suggested. “It happens. The caregiver sometimes snaps.”
“It’s a thought,” Milo conceded. “Sam and Dwight are looking for evidence at the Froland house.”
I scoured my brain for other options. “Did Max know of anyone else who had been to the house lately?”
“I asked him that,” Milo replied, sniffing at the air as the aroma of steak seeped into the living room. “He said they never entertained much. Jack especially didn’t like drop-in company.”
“They sound like the dullest couple in the world.” Wasted lives, wasted time, wasted energy, I thought. Jack at the tavern, June with her needlework. Had they ever possessed any passion, even for each other?
And yet Jack Froland had been poisoned. “You can’t really say he was murdered, can you?” I asked Milo.
“That’s up to Doc Dewey when he holds the inquest Monday,” Milo replied. “That’s basing his conclusion on the information he gets from Everett, of course.”
In addition to his medical responsibilities, Doc was also the county coroner. But no one expected him to conduct more than a simple autopsy. He had neither the training nor the technical support. Skykomish County couldn’t afford a lab or a medical examiner. We were Snohomish County’s poor relation. Milo was lucky he could make a decent living as the sheriff.
“Said information being what you already know,” I remarked, beckoning for the sheriff to follow me into the kitchen, “what’s your call?”
Milo leaned against the counter by the refrigerator. There was a time when I thought he looked as if he belonged there, but that was long past. My eyes darted to the door of the fridge, and for one split second, I acknowledged its barrenness. No primitive drawings by grandchildren, no first-day-of-school pictures, no shiny magnets declaring I LOVE GRANDMA. Vida was right. I faced the stove and turned the steaks.
“Hell,” Milo said, oblivious to my sudden burst of self-pity, “I don’t know. The M.E. says Jack probably ate the mushrooms for dinner the night he died. I’ll be damned glad when June can talk and make sense again.”
Did she ever? I wanted to say but kept quiet while I turned on the string beans.
The sheriff also grew silent. When he finally spoke, he said something that caught me off-guard.
“Hey—how come you and Judge Marsha are so chummy all of a sudden?”
I kept my back turned. “What do you mean?”
“When I called the office a week or so ago, Ginny told me you’d already left to see Marsha. What I had to say was no big deal, so I didn’t leave a message. Then this morning, Bill Blatt was cruising Alpine Way for speeders and he saw your car pull into The Pines Village. He thought he saw his Aunt Vida’s car, too.”
I kept my eyes on the kettle, waiting for the beans to boil. “Marsha asked us to do some research on her family. So did Max Froland. On his family, I mean. In fact, way back when, their families intertwined. It could make a good feature for the special edition this week.”
Again, the sheriff was silent for a few moments. And again, when he spoke, it was something I didn’t want to hear.
“What did I tell you? You’re a crappy liar, Emma.”
I whirled on Milo, striking the skillet handle with my elbow and almost knocking the steaks onto the floor. “Since when have you been checking on my movements? What if I told you it was none of your damned business?”
“Whoa!” Milo held up his hands as if he thought I were about to attack him. “Hang on. I was just curious. You and Marsha seem like the odd couple.”
I’d steadied the skillet and was now waving the steel spatula at the sheriff. “You’re never curious. It’s not your style. You only ask questions when you’re investigatin
g a case.”
“Hey!” Milo wiped at his face. Apparently, some of the grease from the spatula had splattered on him. He was mad. “Knock it off! I was just trying to make conversation.”
Poor Milo. He was right, I was wrong. I put the spatula down on the counter and held my head. “I’m sorry. Really, I am. It’s just that sometimes . . . sometimes I get . . .” I gave myself a good shake and tried to look Milo in the eye.
“Oh, hell.” Milo sighed, then came over to me and gave me a big hug. “It’s okay. You’re still a mess.”
I’d been on the verge of tears, but his down-to-earth comment made me smile. “I guess I am,” I murmured against his chest.
He kissed the top of my head and released me. But the expression on his face was very serious. “After dinner, do you want to go to bed? I mean, if it’d make you feel any better. . . .” He raised his big hands in a helpless gesture.
“Oh, Milo,” I exclaimed, “what an absolutely dumb idea!” Then, to my horror, I started to cry. He reached out to me again, stopped in his tracks, and looked so stricken that I covered my eyes and said, “Yes.”
In the long catalog of foolish things that I have done in my life, going to bed with Milo that night was actually pretty far down on the list. We were both alone as well as lonely. He’d had nothing but bad luck with women ever since I met him, and that included with me.
And for some reason, we talked after we made love. During our romance of several years ago, the only postcoital topics we ever discussed were the Mariners’ prospects— both during the regular season and the off-season—and whether he was going to stay the night, and if so, what would he like for breakfast?
But on that drizzly September evening we spoke of other, deeper things. He spoke of the women who’d betrayed him, especially his most recent love who’d used him as well. I talked of Tom, and how I should have guessed that there was more to his life than a crazy wife and a string of small newspapers. It only occurred to me after his death that he’d had a void to fill, and he’d done it with the wrong kind of politics.