The Alpine Decoy

by Mary Daheim

  “You don’t think those letters have anything to do with the murders?” I asked, coincidentally sorting through the mail that I’d just collected from my streetside box.

  “No,” Milo replied firmly. “To be sure, I’m sending them over to an expert in Snohomish County. It’d be nice if we could afford our own nut wizard. This county doesn’t even have a shrink.”

  It was true. There were no practicing psychologists or psychiatrists in Skykomish County. The closest thing we had was a part-time counselor at the high school. Rumor had it that she also read palms and tea leaves.

  “I don’t think the correct term is nut wizard,” I chided Milo. Before he could retort, I went on in a more serious vein: “What about my letters? Any ideas?”

  “I let Dwight Gould go through all of them,” Milo said. “He’s kind of shrewd when it comes to figuring out people. In his way,” Milo added hastily, lest I get the wrong idea. “He doesn’t think your letter writer has written any of the stuff to Marilynn. Your guy—or gal—is sort of incoherent. Not that I’d hold up some of the ones to Marilynn as models of composition. But it’s different—yours don’t seem to be fueled by the same kind of hate and fear. Dwight can’t explain it, so neither can I. Call it intuition.”

  “More personal?” I ventured.

  “Personal? I don’t know about that. I’m not sure what you mean.”

  Neither was I. Furthermore, I was distracted. The WNPA had mailed me my confirmation, as well as the official program for the weekend at Lake Chelan. On Friday, June 18, from ten-fifteen to noon, the scheduled presentation was “Where are we headed?—What will community newspapers be like in the future, and what will they expect from the WNPA?” The featured speaker was Tom Cavanaugh.

  “Say, Milo,” I said in an overly bright voice, “why don’t you drop by for a beer? I should tell you about my most recent chat with Winola Prince.” It would be a more stimulating way to pass the time than cleaning the oven, which had been my original Saturday plan.

  Milo evinced interest, but said he was driving down to Startup to see Honoria. They might go to Wallace Falls for a picnic. Or maybe drive into Seattle for dinner and a movie. Or up to LaConner to see some of the local crafts. Or just have a long talk. Milo’s voice dropped a notch with each option.

  My initial reaction was that Milo’s priority should be his murder investigation. Or, I asked myself, did I mean that I should be his priority? That was nonsense. Milo and Honoria had reached a turning point. It was vital that he spend his time with her and try to resolve the crisis.

  “Good luck,” I said, amazed that I sounded sulky.

  “Hey—Emma. Haven’t you noticed something about me the past couple of days?”

  “Huh?” Was Milo being cute? “Extra ears? You grew a beard? A new nose?”

  “That’s it! My allergies went away. You noticed!” Milo was elated.

  “Oh! Oh, right, you’re cured. Good. I wonder what set you off?”

  “Pollen, I suppose. Plenty of it around here this time of year. Hey, I’ve got to get changed. See you.”

  Milo. He was impossible, as Vida would say. I looked again at the WNPA program. Tom. He, too, was impossible. What was he getting out of his marriage to Sandra, other than hassles, heartaches, medical bills, bail postings, complaints from irate merchants, and bad publicity? Sandra’s money? Early on, yes. But Tom had established himself as one of the West’s leading newspaper entrepreneurs. With Sandra’s money. Tom was grateful; he had a strange sense of loyalty. Honor, he’d call it. I called it fear. Tom was afraid to face a different future. Most of us are like that. Milo was. I was. Milo was afraid a second marriage would turn out as badly as his first. I was afraid of marriage, period. That must be the reason I clung to Tom. As long as I could file him away in the back drawer of my emotional life, I had an excuse to stay out of other entanglements. Most of all, I could keep my independence. I’d fought hard for it. Why surrender it now when Adam was grown and I was on my own as a newspaper editor-publisher? Being lonely wasn’t a good enough reason. As Vida said, “There are worse things than not being married.”

  And Vida said into my ear five minutes after I finished talking to Milo, “There aren’t any funerals this week. Would you like to join me at the cemetery?”

  “What for?” It seemed to me that Vida wasn’t making sense.

  “See here,” she said earnestly. “The two murdered men were shot with different caliber bullets. That could mean two killers—or two guns. Wouldn’t a man like Kelvin Greene be armed? Yet no gun was found on him or in his car. Now where would his gun be? With his killer? Wouldn’t that be too dangerous? I suggest we go dig around up at the cemetery. If we don’t do it now, there will be oodles of folks coming around for Memorial Day. And if anybody sees us, we’ll just say we’re remembering our beloved dead a bit early. I’ll bring some foxgloves and poppies. Oh—and a shovel. You bring one, too.”

  As far as I was concerned, Vida still wasn’t making sense. “Vida—even if you’re right, that gun could be six feet deep. Wouldn’t it be smarter to ask Milo to have the regular grave diggers search for the weapon?”

  “Of course it would,” Vida agreed. “But Milo won’t do it. He’ll think it’s a waste of time—and money. I’m sure the county would have to pay the grave diggers. It’s the Peabody brothers, and they do it part-time, when they’re out of work in the woods. They charge the world.”

  If I thought Vida was on a wild-goose chase, Milo certainly would, too. But the lure of cleaning my oven wasn’t that strong. Shortly before noon, I picked up Vida and her bouquet. She’d stuck one of the poppies in the band of her straw hat. Along with the flowers and the shovel, she’d brought a metal detector.

  “It’s Roger’s,” she explained. “He hunts treasure with it. Isn’t that darling? You should have seen my brother, Ennis, pitch a fit when Roger found the steel plate in his head! Honestly! You’d think it was some sort of state secret!”

  Fortunately, it was only a three-minute ride from Vida’s house to the cemetery entrance. Thus, I didn’t have to listen to more adorable tales about Roger the Terrible. Vida, however, was wrong about the cemetery being deserted on this particular Saturday. There were several cars parked along the winding roadway, and I guessed that they were mourners who had come early to pay their Memorial Day respects.

  “Out-of-towners,” Vida grumbled. “Ex-Alpiners. They flee to the city and come back once a year with a piddling plant. I’ll bet they don’t even bother to call on the living.”

  I didn’t argue. I hadn’t visited my parents’ grave site at Holyrood in North Seattle for almost two years. I felt remiss. They had been dead for two decades, taken too soon in a car accident returning from my brother’s ordination. Ben, who hadn’t lived in the vicinity since, had a better track record than I did—he offered a memorial Mass every time he came to town. I’d been absent from all but three of them.

  Fortunately, there were no other cars parked near Axel Swensen’s grave. That, I assumed, was because Axel had outlived any mourners. While the funeral flowers had been removed, the marker hadn’t yet been set in the ground, nor had new sod been laid. Apparently the Peabody brothers had other fish to fry. They certainly didn’t have many trees to cut during the present logging hiatus.

  Vida was working with the metal detector. At first, I’d thought it was a mere toy, but now that I took a good look, I saw it was fairly sophisticated. Roger, naturally, must have the best, the little spoiled wretch.

  “We don’t want to get confused by the casket,” Vida remarked, moving slowly around the bare earth that delineated Axel’s grave. “We should have brought sandwiches. My father-in-law, Rufus Runkel, loved to have family picnics in cemeteries. He always found them so quiet. And the flat markers were very convenient for spreading out a lunch. We’d go from here to Skykomish to Gold Bar to Sultan to … Well!” The detector let off a couple of beeps.

  “Are you sure it’s not the casket?” I asked, shielding my eyes from the m
idday sun.

  Vida shook her head. “Too far to the left.” She stomped on the ground in her sensible shoes. “Axel’s right under me. Let’s get the shovels.”

  It was too late to protest. Still, I didn’t much like what we were about to do, for various reasons. First, it was ghoulish. Second, it was probably illegal. Third, I was certain we would come up empty-handed.

  Vida, however, had no such qualms. She dug vigorously, dirt flying in all directions. I relieved her at intervals, during which she put her foxgloves and poppies in a vase and then stuck the bouquet at the head of the grave.

  “Nice,” she remarked. “How are you doing?”

  We had dug straight down, about three feet. “Okay, but I don’t see anything.”

  Vida tried the metal detector again. This time it beeped more loudly. She took over with the shovel. The sun was growing warmer, and so was I. Another foot, then she let me have a turn. Luckily, the ground was fairly soft, no doubt from the numerous springs that trickled through the mountainside. At the five-foot level, Vida relieved me. She dug more efficiently than I did, probably because of her vast gardening experience. Now standing in the narrow hole, Vida seemed oblivious to the dirt she was getting on her gray slacks and print blouse.

  “Hand me that detector,” she commanded.

  I obeyed. The detector made loud, insistent noises. Vida kept digging. A minute later, she was rewarded with the sound of metal on metal. Looking up out of the hole with a triumphant grin, she handed me her shovel.

  “I don’t suppose we should worry about prints,” she called in a muffled voice as she bent down to retrieve whatever she had hit.

  “Probably not,” I replied as a car drove by slowly. The driver stared, but passed on. I wished we hadn’t brought the Jag. It was too easily identifiable in Alpine.

  In the hole, Vida was chuckling. “I told you so—one gun.” She held up a pistol, waving it like a trophy. “Yoo-hoo, take this, Emma.”

  Gingerly, I complied. The weapon wasn’t particularly heavy. I peered at the lettering. “It’s a Beretta, Model 87,” I informed Vida.

  “Yes, yes, I could see that.” Her voice was still muffled as she remained bending over in the hole. “Here, I found another souvenir. Give me that metal detector.”

  Along with the gun, I was now holding a watch. It was a Timex with a round face and a black band. The band had worn through. I retrieved the rest of the imitation leather. To its credit, the watch was still going: The hands showed that it was twenty-seven minutes after twelve.

  From the hole, I could hear the metal detector sending off low little beeps. “It must be the casket,” said Vida. “Or the fillings in Axel’s teeth.”

  I winced, but Vida seemed unperturbed. Her efforts were now concentrated on getting out of the hole. This was not an easy task. Vida clambered up the side while I held onto her arms. She was no featherweight, and I practically threw out my back trying to hoist her. In the end, she created a couple of footholds and heaved herself on top of the grave site.

  “Oooooh! That was a job!” Vida leaned on her shovel, shaking off dirt like a pup and rubbing her eyes. “Let’s fill in the hole and get out of here.”

  This time, we could work together. The job went swiftly, if a bit slapdash. Somehow, we ended up with too much dirt. Vida spread it around, then tamped it down with her feet. If anyone had driven by, they would have thought she was dancing on Axel Swensen’s grave.

  Hot, tired, and dirty, we headed back to her house, which was closer to the cemetery than mine. Vida immediately put the teakettle on.

  “I’ve got some casserole left from last night,” she called to me from the kitchen while I washed up in the bathroom. “Would you like a bit of lunch?”

  I declined. “I had a huge breakfast,” I lied, coming out to sit at the dinette table. Behind me, Cupcake was singing his head off. “Let’s have a look at the gun and the watch.”

  Vida had placed both items on a towel. “I doubt that at this point Milo can tell if this gun has been fired recently,” she mused. “But he should be able to match the gun with the bullet they got out of Kelvin Greene.”

  I was no ballistics expert. “Maybe,” I allowed. “What you’re saying is that this is Kelvin’s gun, and somehow the killer got hold of it, shot him, and dumped it in the open grave, right?”

  Vida stared at the gun. “I guess so. That would indicate a struggle. Yet Milo made no mention of it. But how else would the killer have gotten hold of Kelvin’s weapon? We must assume a person of strength.” Over the rims of her glasses, she raised her eyebrows. “A man.”

  “We don’t know for sure that this was Kelvin’s gun,” I objected. “The killer may have had two guns—if the same person actually shot both Kelvin and Wesley. If you meet someone in a cemetery and end up shooting him, it’s probably premeditated, right?”

  Slowly, Vida nodded. “A cemetery isn’t the usual place for a rendezvous.”

  I was stymied; so was Vida. “The watch,” I said, pointing to the round face. “Somebody lost it. That backs up the theory of a struggle.”

  Vida had picked up the watch and was patching it together, broken strap and all. She held the timepiece in the palm of her hand. “I fastened it in the hole that was most worn. Small, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Try it on,” I suggested.

  Vida did. Holding the broken band next to the crystal, we could see that it would be too tight. She handed the watch to me. It was too loose. I was beginning to feel like Goldilocks. “A woman,” I conjectured. “Or a small-boned man.”

  “Which makes no sense.” Vida sounded irritated. “Could a woman—or a rather slight man—overcome an armed Kelvin Greene? That’s what we’re saying.”

  “Maybe the watch belongs to one of the Peabody brothers. Or one of the mourners at the funeral.”

  Vida gave a shake of her gray curls. “Have you ever seen the Peabody brothers? They’re great hulking things. At the interment, nobody got close enough to the grave to lose a watch except the pallbearers, and they were all big rawboned Scandinavians.”

  For several moments, we sat gazing at our find. “We’ll have to turn these things over to the sheriff,” I said.

  “You told me Milo was gone.” Vida stood up as the teakettle boiled. “I’ll call my nephew, Billy. He’s on duty this weekend.”

  Vida served our tea in bone-china cups. It refreshed, but didn’t inspire. The best I could come up with was the suggestion that there were indeed two killers. Perhaps both of them had met Kelvin Greene in the cemetery.

  “Then who?” Vida asked. “We’re having enough trouble figuring out the identity of one.”

  “The key is Wesley Charles, not Kelvin Greene.” I spoke with a conviction I didn’t really understand. “Both men were linked with the Jerome Cole killing. Bear in mind that Jerome wasn’t shot. He was bludgeoned, and it could have been an accident. Wesley Charles could have claimed self-defense, and maybe been acquitted. But he didn’t. He insisted he was innocent. Was his attorney an idiot, or was Wesley a man of principle?”

  Vida sat hunched forward, one hand resting on the other. “A public defender, wasn’t it? You’d think he—it was a man, as I recall from the newspaper articles—would have plea-bargained. Do you remember the name?”

  “Zerbil,” I answered, off the top of my head. “It reminded me of gerbil.”

  Vida made a face. “As in having the brains of. Let me get my Seattle phone book.”

  There was only one Zerbil listed in the directory, on Phinney Ridge. The first name was Stanley. Vida dialed, but got an answering machine. She didn’t leave a message.

  “Drat,” she said, replacing the phone. “He may be gone for the weekend.”

  Another silence fell between us. I was getting hungry, but didn’t dare admit it for fear of being force-fed the leftover casserole. Vida sipped her tea, staring with unseeing eyes at Cupcake’s cage.

  “What you’re trying to articulate, Emma,” she finally said in a careful voice, �
��is that Wesley Charles did not kill Jerome Cole. Someone else did, and Kelvin Greene knew it. Perhaps Kelvin was paid to testify against Wesley. Bribed, if you will. Kelvin then … oh!” She looked startled.

  “What?” I leaned forward, setting my cup and saucer aside.

  Vida had grown excited. “Kelvin was blackmailing the real murderer. His demands became too great. That’s why he was killed.” She folded her hands and sat up straight, looking very pleased with herself.

  Vida’s theory fit in with the vague ideas I’d been forming on my own. “And Wesley Charles?”

  “Wesley knew the truth. He may have been bribed to take the rap or whatever they used to call it in crime fiction. A twenty-year sentence? He might not serve ten.”

  Vida’s hypothesis didn’t convince me. “It’d take big money to make up for Wesley Charles’s loss of freedom, then to pay off Kelvin Greene as well.”

  “True.” Vida frowned, concentrating on our puzzle. “Who has oodles of money? The Wilsons?”

  I disparaged the idea. “What have they got to do with Jerome Cole? Shane and Cyndi may have known the whole cast of characters from Seattle, but not Todd and Wendy. I can’t see any connection there.”

  “The drugs.” Vida refused to give up her pet theory. However, she saw the skepticism on my face and made an impatient gesture. “All right, let’s skip that for now. Let’s go back to Wesley Charles. At least he knew he wasn’t the killer. Maybe he knew who the real murderer was and maybe he didn’t. But as long as he was still alive, he was a danger to whoever killed Jerome Cole.”

  I was still bothered by Vida’s deductions. “Wait—we’ve already said Jerome’s death could have been an accident, or the result of a fight. Why would the real killer be so upset about getting caught?”

  Vida grimaced. Then her eyes scanned the ceiling, which, like the rest of her house, was free of dust and grime. “Because it wasn’t an accident,” she declared. “Or if it was, the killer is a coward.”