by Mary Daheim
Along the path to the lower falls, we paused to read the informational panels. No trees in this forest were older than two hundred and eighty years. Somewhere around the beginning of the eighteenth century, a great fire had wiped out everything, including the giants that were said to be over six hundred years old. I gazed upward, awed by the western red cedar, the Douglas and Pacific silver firs, and the western hemlock. These were mighty trees, venerable trees, wearing soft emerald moss and gray-green lichen.
Back at the picnic area, a camper from Burnaby, British Columbia, was being loaded. With friendly smiles, Marilynn and I snagged the Canadians’ table as soon as they removed their plastic cloth. I had selected a modest menu of chicken sandwiches, macaroni salad, potato chips, and lemonade. Marilynn, however, seem delighted.
“I haven’t been on a picnic since I was a Girl Scout,” she exclaimed as we unpacked the hamper. The view was of the highway, not the falls, but we couldn’t complain. “When I lived in Seattle, I hardly ever got outside the city,” she mused, gazing at our fellow nature lovers. “I’ll bet a lot of people in town never come to places like this.”
It was certainly possible. Growing up in the city, I’d been lucky. My family had enjoyed regular outings in the country. By chance, my parents, my brother, and I had picnicked several times at Deception Falls. My happy memories may have played a part in my decision to buy The Advocate. The stopoff hadn’t been so busy in those days. Now, it bustled with car and foot traffic. In vain, I scanned the other tables for an African-American. The only ethnic group represented was a Japanese family, who, judging from their boisterous behavior, probably were three generations removed from the Orient. Two leggy teenaged daughters were hassling their somewhat younger, whining brother; Mom and Dad were arguing over whether the hamburgers were cooked through. It seemed to me that East had met West, and West had won. It also seemed that I was making some ethnic judgments of my own.
We were finishing our lunch when Marilynn broached the subject of the harassment. “I thought I might hear from the sheriff about the letters and that awful crow, but I haven’t so far. I suppose none of it can be traced.”
“It’s the weekend,” I pointed out. “Nothing else has happened, I hope?” I couldn’t help but wonder if the death of a black man might trigger new forms of harassment against Marilynn.
But she shook her head, the big gold hoop earrings swinging. “Nothing in the mail yesterday. Today’s Sunday, though. I suppose some show of racism is inevitable.”
Unfortunately, it was. “Does it bother you?” I asked bluntly.
Marilynn considered, her dark eyes staring at the ground. “Not too much. It was the whispering that bothered me. I know some of those people were trying to connect me with the man who was shot.”
“But there’s no connection?” To my dismay, I couldn’t keep the question out of my voice.
“No.” Marilynn got up from the bench, wandering over to the dormant grill. A sudden silence fell between us. I shifted uneasily on my side of the bench. I’d berated Milo for trying to tie Marilynn Lewis to Kelvin Greene. Yet I realized I was equally guilty. Surely the arrival of a black woman in town and the appearance of a black man was a coincidence. Watching Marilynn’s tall, slim, graceful form, I couldn’t imagine her involvement in anything sordid. But, of course, I’d felt that way about other people—and been quite wrong. Vida wouldn’t be so naive.
“I’ll have to try hiking,” Marilynn announced, facing me again and looking serene. “Skiing, too, next winter. Do you ski?”
“I used to, but I sort of quit.” I gave Marilynn a lame smile. “I wasn’t very good at it. My coordination stinks.”
“I like to swim,” Marilynn said, watching a nutcracker swoop down to forage for picnic leftovers. My father had always called the handsome, noisy birds Camp Robbers. The nutcracker found his snack and flew off into a huge hemlock. “There’s no public pool here, is there?” Marilynn asked, shielding her eyes as she followed the bird’s flight.
“No, there isn’t.” I explained my campaign to build a pool on the former bowling alley site. “Carla’s apartment has a small pool,” I added.
“Carla seems nice,” Marilynn commented, sitting back down at the picnic table. “Is it true she’s dating Dr. Flake?”
Marilynn already seemed tuned into the rumor mill. “They’ve gone out,” I hedged. “I’m not sure it’s a romance. Yet.”
“He’s a wonderful man,” Marilynn said, watching a chipmunk scurry past. “In some ways, I think he’s more upset about the hate mail than I am.”
I didn’t doubt it. Peyton Flake struck me as the type who would take such intimidation personally. In Flake’s case, it was ego as much as righteousness. He had hired Marilynn Lewis; he would be outraged if anyone questioned his judgment.
Our talk turned to more mundane matters, including a comparison between working in hospitals and private practice. Marilynn commented on the differences in treating big-city versus small-town patients. The most unusual case she’d had so far was Ellsworth Overholt who had brought in his guernsey cow to be examined by Doc Dewey. Doc had urged him to see the vet. Ellsworth refused, saying that he and Dr. Medved hadn’t spoken in fifteen years after a dispute at a Grange Hall potluck and dance. The cow was driven off to a less controversial vet in Monroe.
We were loading the picnic hamper into the Jag when Libby Boyd approached us. She was wearing her ranger’s uniform, and I realized that I’d never seen her in the classic wide-brimmed hat. Maybe Vida had stolen it.
“Have you met Marilynn Lewis, Dr. Flake’s nurse?” I inquired, taking Marilynn by the arm.
Libby’s blue eyes shrewdly assessed the other woman. “No. In fact, I’ve only met Dr. Flake a couple of times, when he came to pick up Carla. Hi, you’re working for a fine doctor, I hear. Are you still living with the Campbells?”
A bit stiffly, Marilynn allowed that she was. Libby’s calculating manner retreated. Marilynn’s tension remained. To cover what I sensed as awkwardness, I asked Libby if she had to work through the weekend.
“I sure do, six days in a row,” Libby replied. “I’m the new kid on the block, so I get the last choice on the schedule. Ten hours a day, too, from eight until six. And I’m lucky if I get home before seven. There’s always some little kid who falls in the creek or a tourist who’s lost a camera. But it’s fun, much better than being cooped up in an office.” She gave us a humorous look.
Marilynn, however, wasn’t smiling. “I like being in an office,” she declared, sounding a bit defensive. “It’s a definite improvement over hospital work.”
“Oh?” Libby was cool, yet pleasant. “I suppose it would be. I’ve never been in a hospital in my life.”
“Except when you were born,” I threw out, hoping to lighten the mood.
But Libby turned absolutely frigid. “No. I was born in a converted bus, somewhere between Santa Fe and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. My parents were hippies. They didn’t believe in hospitals—or money—or having a home. The wind blew them all over North America. It finally blew them both away, from me and from each other. Luckily, I landed on my feet in Seattle. This is as far as I care to wander. I’m putting down roots in Alpine.” She gave both Marilynn and me a defiant look, as if we might be about to hustle her onto a passing Greyhound bus.
The moment was saved by a towheaded twelve year old who wanted to know if he could take home a garter snake he’d captured. The snake was trying to crawl out of his shirt pocket. We bade farewell to Libby, the boy, and the snake.
On the way home, I refrained from mentioning the meeting with Libby Boyd. It had not been a comfortable interlude, though I wasn’t sure why. Instead, I told Marilynn she would get used to small-town eccentricities. The bizarre quickly becomes the ordinary. Irrational behavior often goes unquestioned, even by a journalist like me. Marilynn allowed that was probably so, but that she wasn’t quite used to it yet.
“There are similarities, too,” she said as we stopped in front
of the Campbell house. “I think people in Alpine can be just as wicked as people in the city.”
I didn’t argue. But I wondered exactly what she meant.
Vida had delivered her hyacinth bulbs to Wendy Wilson about the same time that I was unpacking the picnic hamper at Deception Falls. Wendy had been very vague about her sister’s encounter with a black stranger at the Icicle Creek Tavern. At first, she had feigned downright ignorance, Vida revealed, then she had admitted—lamely—that Cyndi “ran into some guy” and gave him directions to the ranger station.
“It was the ski lodge in Cyndi’s version to me,” I noted.
Vida harrumphed. “Cyndi—and Wendy—ought to get their stories straight. It was neither, of course. What do you suppose it was?”
“We don’t know it was the same man,” I pointed out as we waited for the coffee to finish brewing.
But Vida gave me her gimlet eye. “Who else? Come, come, Emma, it’s not likely there would be two of them.” Her comment echoed Cyndi Campbell’s. Somehow Vida’s remark didn’t strike me as funny.
Ginny brought the mail around just after ten. She looked worried, and I wondered if she was still stewing over her pairing with Rick Erlandson. I suspected that the double date had probably been Carla’s idea.
But Ginny had reevaluated the evening. “Rick’s really very nice. He’s just sort of quiet.” I kept my face expressionless. Ginny wasn’t exactly a firecracker. “I think that orange hair is his big protest against the world. He won’t speak out, so he dyes his hair a funny color. He’ll grow out of it.”
So, I thought, would his hair.
Ginny, who was usually not loquacious, kept talking. “It’s these letters,” she continued, placing three single sheets of paper in front of me. “They’re all from people who want you to write more about the logging issue. You know, like the editorial you did in December. But I think they’re wrong.” She took a deep breath and stared at me with a very somber expression. “I think you were wrong. I mean, in theory, it’s wonderful to support the timber industry. But it’s not very realistic, is it?”
Ever since the president’s timber summit in Portland the previous winter, I had suffered qualms about my unabashed endorsement of Washington State’s loggers. While I hadn’t leapt on a soap box to demand the resumption of clear-cutting, I had certainly cast my lot with the forest products people. It was, I felt, my duty as a resident of Alpine. Certainly my big-city background had groomed me as a spiritual environmentalist. I’d been converted to a pro-logging stance by living in a small town where so many faces had grown bleak and so many lives had lost hope. People came first. The loggers were proud, so were their families. They were steeped in the tradition of the forest, a vocation handed down from generation to generation. It seemed impossible that they could retrain, regroup, and recant.
But the winds of change were sweeping down the mountainsides. I could see it in Ginny’s level gray-eyed gaze. I could read it in news stories about other logging communities. I could hear it on the evening news, out of Washington, D.C., Seattle, and the state capitol in Olympia.
“I’ve always hoped for a compromise,” I told Ginny, who was looking at me as if I might actually have some real answers. “I prefer biding my time to see what’s going to happen at the federal level.”
Ginny inclined her head, then brushed at a stray strand of auburn hair. “I guess. But what do men like my Uncle Cord do in the meantime? Darrington is going to sponsor a wild-flower festival this summer. Why can’t we do something here that will provide jobs and help the economy?”
Darrington was yet another logging town, some seventy miles north on the Mountain Loop Highway. I had heard rumors of their civic project in the past few weeks. “We’ve got Loggerama,” I pointed out, and immediately realized that our annual celebration could be considered passé, a mere reminder of what had been, rather than what could be.
“We could put on a Scandinavian festival,” Ginny said. “That’s Alpine’s heritage, too. Like for Midsummer Eve, to celebrate the solstice.”
I stared at Ginny, then broke into a smile. I never thought of my office manager as having the slightest amount of imagination. Obviously, I had misjudged her. “That’s not a bad idea,” I said. “I could talk about it at the next Chamber of Commerce meeting. You could come along.”
Ginny looked pleased. Indeed, the hint of a blush touched her fair skin. Shyly, she brought forth yet another letter, which she had been concealing behind her back. “This one isn’t about logging, but you’re not going to like it.”
The single page of typing had the usual share of misspellings, though I had the feeling they might have been intentional. The letter was short and to the point:
“Dear Publicher—It looks to me like we got trubble here in Alpine. You let those city dudes get a foot in the door and the next thing you know, they ruin the whole place. They get innocent people hooked while they make lots of money off suckers, all of which is tipikel of those ignerent crazed savages. I say we pass a law to keep them out of town. Yours truely, A Loyal Reader.”
I pride myself on running every letter sent to The Advocate—as long as it’s signed. I was grateful that this particular imbecile had chosen to remain anonymous. Instead of tossing the missive into the wastebasket, as I usually did with crank mail, I saved it so that Milo could compare it to the letters Marilynn Lewis had received.
Milo had the lab report shortly after eleven that morning. Kelvin Greene had been shot in the head at a distance of no more than four feet, no less than three. The .22-caliber full-metal-jacket slug had been found lodged about an inch from his left ear. It was possible that he could have lived for hours with the bullet in his head. It was also unlikely.
“If you’re thinking Kelvin sat around drinking beer at the Icicle Creek Tavern after he got plugged, forget it,” Milo said in his laconic voice. “Realistically, he was probably shot five to ten minutes before he died in Marlow Whipp’s store.”
“What kind of a gun?” I asked, making notes.
“Probably a handgun,” Milo replied. He paused to blow his nose, not a pleasing sound. “Let’s face it, the killer would have been noticed carrying a rifle around town this time of year. It’s not hunting season.”
“What about the blood up at the cemetery?” I glanced out through my open door at Vida. She was immersed in typing a story, her bowler hat askew.
“It’s a match,” Milo admitted grudgingly. “If that canopy hadn’t been up for Axel Swensen’s funeral, the rain would probably have washed it away.”
“Footprints?” I inquired without much hope.
Milo chuckled. “After a funeral? Sure, about forty sets. The only thing we can pinpoint there is that the Peabody brothers—the grave diggers—finished around five on Friday. The cemetery officially closes at sundown, which means about eight this time of year. But I don’t suppose the killer or the victim came by car. It’s easy enough to crawl through that laurel hedge.”
I had one more question. “Was Kelvin Greene armed?”
Milo was blowing his nose again. I wished the hay fever season would pass. “There was no gun on him. But it’s possible that the killer used it. That would indicate a struggle, though, and there’s no sign of that with Kelvin.”
In the news office, Vida’s instincts were at work. She was coming toward me, the bowler hat now riding on the rims of her glasses. “Say, Milo,” I added as an afterthought, “did you check with the Icicle Creek Tavern to see if the stranger who was drinking beer with Cyndi Campbell matched Kelvin Greene’s description?”
Milo made a disparaging noise, which was an improvement over his sneezing. “Yeah, Dwight Gould talked to Denise and that Rafferty kid with the beard who tends bar during the day shift. They couldn’t be sure. All blacks guys look alike to them.”
I tried not to gnash my teeth. “Do they look alike to Cyndi Campbell?”
Milo sounded impatient. “Do you want me to ask Cyndi to come down and ID the corpse? Come on, Emma,
isn’t that kind of a cruel thing to do to a nice girl like her? From what I hear, all she did was give him directions to Alpine Falls.”
My anger boiled up, but I squashed it and settled for sarcasm. “Very good, Milo. You’ve just won The Advocate’s coveted award for Mutt of the Month. See you in the funny papers.” I hung up, gently.
“We don’t carry the funny papers,” Vida noted tartly. “What did Milo do now?”
I explained. Vida made a face and tipped her hat back on her head. She agreed with me that Milo was “being difficult.” She also agreed that we should go to lunch.
As usual, the Venison Inn was filled with people Vida knew. As time went on, I recognized more and more of the locals, but it was always Vida who was the focus of attention. A salutation for Regis Bartleby, Episcopal rector. A nod to Harvey Adcock, hardware-store owner. A smile for Jeannie Clay, the dental hygienist. A wave to Chaz Phipps, who worked at the ski lodge. We made our way like a royal progress, acknowledging, greeting, smiling en route to the last empty booth at the rear of the restaurant.
“My new diet’s a washout,” Vida announced. “All these fads are worthless. This one calls for nothing solid after four o’clock, just water. Now what do you suppose I do all night?” She nodded before I could hazard a guess. “That’s right: up and down, down and up to the bathroom. Maybe it’s the exercise that takes off the weight. But I need my sleep.” She turned to our waitress and ordered a pastrami melt on rye with a side of fries and potato salad. “Oh—and a strawberry malted milk. No coffee for me after noon.” She gave me a virtuous look.