The Alpine Decoy

by Mary Daheim

  Startled, the young man stopped in the act of locking the rear doors of the van. He said nothing, but gazed at me while two cars and a pickup truck passed between us on Third Street.

  I crossed to meet him and identified myself. “I thought there might be a crisis at the hospital,” I explained. “You know—electricity, heat, water. That’s news in a small town.”

  “It is?” The young man obviously didn’t think so. “No, nothing like that. Mrs. Whipp just checked in and insisted on renting a VCR. I dropped it off on my way home.” He gave me a halfhearted smile and headed for the driver’s side of the van.

  “Are you Shane?” I called after him.

  Turning to look over his shoulder, he nodded. “Right. Do you need something? We’ve got a sale on gas barbecues this week.”

  I gaped. “You do? How come your dad didn’t take out an ad?”

  Shane lifted his broad shoulders, which were covered by a brown jacket with ALPINE APPLIANCE emblazoned in crimson letters. “I thought he did. Come to think of it, I didn’t see it in the paper yesterday.”

  I hadn’t seen it, either. Inwardly, I cursed Ed Bronsky. Had he forgotten to run the ad? Had he discouraged Lloyd Campbell from placing it in the first place? Had Ed made it so small that he could have mounted it on the head of a pin? I vowed to call Ed as soon as I got home.

  My original intentions had been sabotaged by my ad manager’s apparent dereliction of duty. Whatever tactful approach I had devised flew right out of my head. I considered offering my sympathy to the Campbell family’s boarder, but held back. If Shane had been out delivering appliances all afternoon, he might not have heard about Marilynn Lewis and the dead crow. My feigned innocence hadn’t fooled Nancy Dewey, so I tried acting dumb with Shane Campbell. Having had more practice at the latter than the former over the years, I was sure of success.

  “How’s Marilynn Lewis doing? I still haven’t met her. Is she settling in okay?”

  My queries seemed innocuous, but Shane Campbell’s fair skin flushed. “She’s doing all right,” he mumbled, suddenly absorbed in the clipboard he was carrying. “She’s anxious to get her own place. That’s not easy in a little town like Alpine.”

  It wasn’t. Carla had roomed in two different private homes before finally getting an apartment in a new, but pricey complex. Ginny Burmeister had given up trying to find affordable housing, but as a native, she had the option of living at home with her parents. I was aware that it might be more difficult for Marilynn Lewis to find a permanent niche. While it would be illegal for anyone in Alpine to discriminate, it wouldn’t be impossible. It never was.

  “You must be kind of crowded,” I remarked, edging away from the curb and closer to Shane. “Your sister still lives with your folks, doesn’t she?”

  The flush faded. Shane apparently felt he was on safer ground discussing his sister. “Cyndi? Yeah, she’s the only one of us who’s never left the nest. Our older sister, Wendy, got married five or six years ago. She teaches at the high school.”

  Quickly, I made the connection. Wendy Campbell must be Wendy Wilson: English, lit, speech, and debate. Her husband, Todd, was the local Public Utilities District manager. Cyndi obviously worked for her brother-in-law as the PUD receptionist. I’d met Wendy at several high school functions and talked to Todd on many occasions. I had also seen Cyndi at the PUD office. The Campbell family portrait was coming into focus.

  It was apparent that Shane was anxious to shove off. It was also evident that he wasn’t entirely comfortable discussing his family’s boarder. I felt sad about that. Stupid me, I keep hoping that each upcoming generation will be more tolerant. If the sixtyish senior Campbells were broad-minded enough to invite an African-American woman to share their roof, I would have thought their son would be even more progressive. But children often take the opposite course, if only to be perverse.

  Shane Campbell drove off, and so did I. The afternoon sun was low over the evergreens that surround my cozy log house high on the hill above Alpine. I found no surprises in either my mail or on my answering machine. Ed Bronsky, however, sounded flabbergasted when I called to ask him about the ad for Alpine Appliance.

  “Now that’s the darnedest thing, Emma,” he said, in an uneasy voice. “I had that dummy all laid out and looking spiffy. But there was this typo—well, not a typo, really, a mistake—something about the price. I put it down as $29.99, but it was $299.99. When Lloyd Campbell told me to fix it, I said, ‘Gee, Lloyd, what kind of a sale is that? Three hundred bucks to cook something you could do on your stove? What happens if it rains? Which it will, because it always does.’ Then he got mad and said to forget it. So I did.”

  I groaned. Ed was impossible. I would have to call Lloyd Campbell first thing in the morning and try to talk him into running another ad, probably at a drastic discount, just to keep him happy. Better yet, I’d go over to Alpine Appliance in person.

  “The next time that happens, tell me right away,” I snarled into the phone. “I mean it, Ed. We can’t afford to upset our advertisers. If you keep this up, I can’t afford you.” I slammed down the phone and fumed for almost two minutes.

  I was trying to settle my nerves with a stiff bourbon and my recipe for Caesar salad when Ed’s wife, Shirley, called.

  “Ed’s in tears,” she announced in her squeaky voice, which always reminded me of one of the Three Little Pigs. In fact, Ed and Shirley looked like two of the pigs; their children looked like five more. “I hate to interfere, Emma, but you’ve been coming down awfully hard on him lately.”

  Shirley was right—it was only in recent weeks that Ed had begun to wear away my patience. But she was wrong if she thought I was going to relent. Ed had a responsibility not just to me, but to the rest of the staff—and to the community. If The Advocate didn’t carry the message from local retailers, there was a very real danger that a weekly shopper could move into the area. Shoppers, with their glossy ads and neglect of news, were the journalist’s nightmare. I had seen them in my dreams, resting on front porches, stuffed in mail boxes, lying on sidewalks, covering the earth like a toxic blanket.

  But there was no arguing with Shirley, who always met reason with a whine. “Look,” I said, keeping control of my temper, “Ed and I will sort this out at work. Go dry his tears, and while you’re at it, put some starch in his backbone. I’ve got to get dinner.”

  “So do I,” Shirley replied, the whine now in place. “Seven mouths to feed. Do you know how it feels to get threats?”

  I sure did. As an editor and publisher, they were part of the job description. But for once, I didn’t dwell on myself. Rather, I thought of Marilynn Lewis and the ugly letters and the dead crow. There was real menace in those kinds of threats.

  I, however, was a paper tiger, and Shirley Bronsky knew it.

  Milo Dodge ate everything but the plates. While his lanky frame didn’t look it, he could have given the porcine Bronskys a run for their money when it came to forking up food. Still, I wasn’t displeased. Sometimes I get bored cooking for only myself.

  It was over coffee that I finally broached the subject of Marilynn Lewis. I would have done it sooner, but Milo had undergone a more recent crisis, caused by our local loony, Crazy Eights Neffel, who had poured kerosene all over the statue of town founder Carl Clemans and attempted to ignite it with an empty cigarette lighter. The lighter wasn’t the only thing that didn’t work; Crazy Eights’s brain had been haywire for years. At seventysomething he refused to retire from mischief-making. Some said he was simple-minded; others, that he was a genius gone awry. Vida would say no more than that he was a nut, but always added in a protective tone that he was “Alpine’s nut.” She had taken a picture, passing by on her way to the ski lodge. Milo had taken Crazy Eights to jail and locked him up for the night.

  “Nancy Dewey’s right,” Milo said as we sat in the living room, with the front door open to allow the mild spring breeze inside the house. “No return address, mailed through a corner box, postmarked yesterday.”r />
  “Did the handwriting match any of the letters Marilynn received earlier?”

  “Hard to tell. We’d have to get a handwriting expert to figure that out.” Milo sipped his coffee.

  “Will you?” I had a feeling Milo might be inclined to let the entire episode off the hook.

  The sheriff considered, his long legs propped up on my coffee table. “That depends. On Marilynn, mainly.”

  I was quiet for a moment, wondering if Milo were wishing Marilynn and her dead crow and her threatening letters out of his life. Crazy Eights Neffel might be mad as a hatter, but Milo was used to him. And Crazy Eights was white.

  “What’s the connection?” I finally asked. Seeing Milo’s justifiably baffled look, I elucidated: “Between Marilynn and the Campbells. Their appliance store does fine, so they don’t need the money. They aren’t in the rooming house business. In fact, they must be all jammed up with Shane back home.”

  Milo rubbed the back of his neck. “Not really. I suppose Marilynn has Wendy’s old room. The Campbell house is pretty big. You know the place? It’s in that block with the cemetery on one side and the high school on the other.”

  1 recognized the street, which featured a half-dozen large frame homes, at least two stories tall, with spacious yards. The bank president lived there, as did the owner of Barton’s Bootery and the local optometrist.

  “Still,” I argued, “why the Campbells? They’ve never taken in boarders before.”

  Judging from the blank look on Milo’s face, the thought had never occurred to him. “Maybe Dr. Flake asked them. The woman has to live somewhere.” He continued to look blank, so I dropped the subject. It was apparent that Milo wasn’t overly concerned with Marilynn Lewis’s place of residence.

  The sheriff and I had our usual evening, which, as usual, did not include a sexual orgy. He talked of steelheading, which was—as usual—poor. I regaled him with my tales of Ed Bronsky’s ineptitude. He countered with a sloughing off on the part of his deputies. I pointed out that Carla wasn’t improving as fast as I wished. We agreed that people in general don’t take pride in their work. Then Milo went home.

  Keeping true to my own work ethic, the next morning I went straight to Alpine Appliance. Although the store doesn’t open until ten o’clock, Lloyd Campbell shows up at eight. When I arrived, he was in his small office drinking coffee and leafing through a television manufacturer’s manual.

  “Emma,” he said, getting up and offering his hand. “I haven’t seen you since the high school band concert last month at Old Mill Park. How’s it going?”

  Fine, I told him, sitting down and accepting his offer of coffee. Lloyd’s hair had faded to silver, but may have once been the same straw color as his son’s. His blue eyes crinkled at the comers, and his stocky figure showed only the slightest signs of flab. He was a genial man, as befitted a salesman who had gotten his start selling Fuller Brush products door-to-door in neighboring Snohomish County. We exchanged general pleasantries before we got down to the specifics of Ed Bronsky. Lloyd accepted my apologies, but refused to deal further with Ed.

  “The sale ends Tuesday,” Lloyd pointed out. “I couldn’t change the date—the manufacturer helped pay for the ad. It was a co-op deal, part of a national campaign. I shouldn’t have let Ed get me so riled up—I guess I shot myself in the foot, but he can be pretty aggravating.”

  Unfortunately, I understood. Ed certainly could aggravate a body. I coaxed, I soothed, I sucked up. Lloyd listened patiently, occasionally making a pertinent comment or complaining about the local economy.

  “People aren’t buying unless it’s something they absolutely have to have,” he informed me. “A stove, a water heater, a washer. In all these years, I’ve stayed open from ten until five-thirty, five days a week. You know the motto around here: if you can’t make it in five, you won’t make it in six. But so many wives are working, even in Alpine. I’m thinking about opening up on Saturdays, at least until one o’clock.”

  Lloyd Campbell’s philosophy about the workweek wasn’t new to me. I’d heard it from most of the local merchants. Indeed, before I’d arrived in Alpine, there had been a titanic battle over whether the Alpine Mall would be open on Sundays. It wasn’t for the first six months, and the radical change occurred only after the Christmas season when the store owners discovered that they could actually sell merchandise to paying customers on the Sabbath.

  After ten minutes, Lloyd and I had hammered out an advertising compromise, which involved a free quarter page in the bowling alley special and putting Ginny Burmeister on the Alpine Appliance account. Ginny should be pleased, and Ed would be relieved. I supposed I was getting off cheap.

  “Now when Marius Vandeventer owned the paper …” Lloyd had leaned back in his chair and was gazing up at the tube lighting in the ceiling.

  I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard that phrase. Since Marius Vandeventer sold The Alpine Advocate to me three years ago and retired to Santa Fe, he’s achieved sainthood. It was not always so. In his early years, Marius’s left-wing leanings were despised by people of a more conservative nature; as a senior citizen, his rampant Republicanism had choked most of Alpine’s more liberal thinkers. And throughout his reign over The Advocate, it was said that an editorial endorsement of any local candidate, regardless of party affiliation, was tantamount to the kiss of death.

  But now that Marius was gone, local attitudes had changed. I might not be able to fill his shoes, but I was wearing them. It wasn’t much consolation to know that when I retired or left town or died, I, too, would become sanctified.

  So I let Lloyd Campbell ramble on, my mind wandering to other ideas for the bowling alley special, to the School’s Out edition, even to the Fourth of July promotions. I came up short when I heard Lloyd mention Marilynn Lewis’s name.

  “… wouldn’t have put up with treating Marilynn like that for a minute.” Lloyd smacked his fist on the desk for emphasis. “What do you think, Emma?”

  I could hardly tell Lloyd what I was thinking. What I surmised was that he had been talking about Marius Vandeventer’s policy on prejudice. To cover my lapse of attention, I hedged:

  “I think these things have to be weighed carefully. I’d have to speak with Marilynn first. I haven’t met her yet, you know.” I sat back in the captain’s chair and tried to look pensive.

  Lloyd squinted at the calendar on the near wall. It showed a picture of Mount Baldy, covered with snow. The calendar was sponsored by Alpine Appliance. “What’s today? Friday? How about coming over for dinner? You can meet Marilynn. Let me call Jean and see if she can rustle up something edible.”

  I started to protest, but Lloyd was already punching in his home phone number. Or so I assumed. As it turned out, he had called the Presbyterian church. Jean Campbell didn’t answer, but whoever did managed to put her on the line almost at once.

  Lloyd’s conversation was brief and to the point. Replacing the receiver, he beamed at me. “There. You’re on for seven o’clock. Don’t worry, I didn’t have to twist Jean’s arm. I forgot, Wendy and Todd are coming over tonight. Jean says it’s no trouble to toss another spud in the pot.”

  I started to convey my appreciation when the phone rang under Lloyd’s hand. Never taking his eyes off me, he listened, smiled, and nodded. “Good idea,” he said. Then he hung up.

  “That was Jean. She wants to know if you’ll invite Vida, too. Jean and Vida are quite the chums at church,” he explained.

  While I knew that my House & Home editor was a staunch Presbyterian, I wasn’t aware that she and Jean Campbell were particularly close friends. But that was typical of Vida—she knew everyone, people told her everything, she went everywhere. Yet she was basically a very private person. Those closest to her were virtually all family members. Given the vast number of Runkel-Blatt kin-folk, there was hardly room for outsiders in Vida’s crowded world.

  Vida, however, was perfectly willing to join the Campbells for dinner. “Jean got new Oriental rugs after Christma
s,” she said, circling photos on a sheet of contact prints. “I haven’t seen them yet. Grace Grandle said the Campbells paid more for the rugs than they did for their house when they bought it in ’fifty-nine. Of course, we were in a recession that year.” She licked at the end of her grease pencil.

  “You’ll also get to see Marilynn Lewis up close,” I pointed out.

  Vida looked at me over the rims of her glasses. Her face was impassive. “So will you.”

  I spent the next half hour with Ed and Ginny. Ed professed to be still upset, but judging from the number of jelly doughnuts he devoured, I doubted it. Ginny was mildly pleased by being assigned to the Alpine Appliance account. I wondered if she realized she was building quite a little empire in addition to her front office duties. I also wondered when she’d get around to asking for a raise.

  I was halfway through my public swimming pool editorial for next week when Carla sauntered into my office and announced that she was feeling much better.

  “I even went jogging this morning,” she said, draping herself over the back of one of my visitors’ chairs. “Libby tells me that I’m not in good shape. Guess what I saw.”

  “Milo let Crazy Eights Neffel out of jail?”

  After almost three years in Alpine, Crazy Eights was old news to Carla. “He’s always in jail or some place like that,” she sniffed. “What’s so funny about an old man wearing his underwear outside of his clothes? Or walking around with a live duck on his head? I don’t think he should be allowed to ride a tricycle down the middle of Front Street. It isn’t safe.”

  “It sure isn’t,” I agreed, “especially with drivers like Durwood Parker driving everywhere but in the legal lane.” In his own way, Durwood was as great a menace as Crazy Eights. But Durwood wasn’t crazy; he was merely the worst driver I’d ever had the misfortune to run into—or almost, having made a quick left turn to avoid him in the Alpine Mall parking lot.

  Our digression had steered me away from Carla’s morning run. But since the topic was herself, Carla picked up where we’d left off. “So there I was, going around the track up at the high school field, and he came out from behind the scoreboard. He saw me and hurried away. Weird, huh?”