The Alpine Christmas

by Mary Daheim

  But Ben was close by, and Adam was coming home in less than forty-eight hours. No doubt my son was within driving distance, somewhere in Kirkland, snug in the bosom of Erin Kowalski’s family. As for Tom, he was probably in San Francisco, surrounded by his unstable wife and insecure children. I could imagine their beautiful home, their lavish decorations, their expensive presents. Graciousness and good taste would flow from their holiday festivities. Mr. and Mrs. Tom Cavanaugh’s photographs would grace the pages of the Bay Area newspapers as they attended a whirlwind of parties, galas, and candlelight suppers. To the casual observer, it would look like a fairy tale—until Sandra Cavanaugh got hauled off for trying to eat the plastic grapes in an I. Magnin display window.

  Poor Sandra.

  Poor Tom.

  Poor me.

  Chapter Eleven

  BEN GAVE A terrific sermon Sunday morning, transforming St. Luke’s account of the barren fig tree into a clear-cut forest on Mount Baldy. Patience, my brother urged; it takes time to grow a stand of Douglas fir, but even longer to live a fruitful life. Logger or lawyer, don’t just stand there, but reach, stretch, grow. Ben’s words could be taken on a couple of levels, which may have been lost on some of the parishioners, but they seemed appreciative all the same. At least they weren’t being called upon to drive out bad thoughts or avoid suggestive entertainment.

  Ben was going to entertain himself by joining Peyton Flake on an excursion to Surprise Lake. I didn’t ask if they would be armed. It was scary enough to think that it might snow before they got back.

  I spent the day wrapping presents and catching up on Christmas cards. I’d had mine ready to go the previous weekend, but had held off mailing them. As usual, I’d already heard from several people who weren’t on my list. I’d ship the whole batch off in the morning on my way to work.

  By late afternoon, the snow began to drift down again. I baked spritz cookies, squeezing camels, dogs, trees, wreaths, flowers, and every other imaginable shape out of my copper pastry tube. Adam loved spritz. So did I. By the time I’d finished, I’d already eaten about a quarter of the dough. My original intention to take a couple of dozen cookies to the office went by the board.

  I was beginning to worry about Ben when he called just before seven o’clock to say that he and Dr. Flake had returned. I asked my brother if he’d like to pick up something and eat with me. But Ben had been invited to join the ecumenical celebration of St. Lucy’s Day at the Lutheran Church. I had attended the previous year, enjoying the Scandinavian custom of crowning a young girl with a wreath of candles and serving strong hot coffee and piles of pastry. Carla was covering the event which would star a thirteen-year-old Gustavson, yet another shirttail relation of Vida’s. I’ve always secretly questioned the wisdom of allowing an awkward teenager to waltz around with burning tapers in her hair while pouring out quantities of steaming liquid, but, I must admit, I’ve yet to hear of a St. Lucy Wannabe incinerating herself or scalding her family to death. Still, I decided to conserve my resources and stay home.

  Monday would be a busy day. We were publishing twenty-four pages, to capitalize on holiday advertising. Naturally, Ed Bronsky was in despair. He had scarcely recovered from the thirty-six pager the previous week. Gleefully, I warned him that we wouldn’t get back to sixteen pages until the second week of January. Promotion had been Tom Cavanaugh’s key advice when I’d consulted with him about making The Advocate more profitable. While he’d insisted that a special edition could be published almost every week, I’d been too timid to try. Once, maybe twice a month was the extent of my ambition—except for wonderful, lucrative, dazzling December. Of course it would have helped if my advertising manager hadn’t preferred to sit around on his dead butt and drink coffee.

  Twenty-four pages, however, doesn’t require more work only from Ed. It also means that Vida, Carla, and I have to produce enough news copy to carry the non-advertising part of the paper. Consequently, we were all busy banging out stories first thing Monday morning. I polished the Evan Singer piece, Vida pried information about the Marmot from Oscar Nyquist, and Carla concentrated on a Russian Christmas customs feature. Although she’d plagiarized most of it from a library book, she’d taken the trouble to interview a family who had recently moved to Alpine from Minsk via Vancouver, British Columbia, and Bellingham.

  I was getting back to my editorial when Milo called. He’d heard from his contact in the King County sheriff’s office. Stefan Horthy said that Kathy Francich worked as a cocktail waitress in a bar near the Kingdome. Carol Neal was a table dancer at a seedy nightclub on the Aurora Avenue strip. They’d moved into the Villa Apartments in July. He had never met Carol or Kathy, so he wouldn’t be coming to Alpine to identify bodies. Horthy also managed the Riviera Apartments two blocks away, which was where he lived. He would certainly like to know if his tenants were dead or alive.

  So, of course, would Milo. I was about to ask if he intended to send someone to talk to neighbors in the Villa Apartments who might know Carol and Kathy, but Ginny Burmeister rushed up to my office door, signaling that I had another call, long distance. Reluctantly, I hung up on Milo and pressed line two. Adam’s voice sailed into my ear.

  “Mom! I missed the bus! Can you come get me?”

  “What bus?” There was no bus service from Seattle to Alpine, only to Everett, with a change for Monroe.

  “Huh?” Adam sounded amazed. “Hey, I remember a bus. You know, last summer. It came right up Front Street and stopped at Old Mill Park.”

  I gritted my teeth. “That was a tour bus. Where are you?”

  “Kirkland.” Adam had regained his aplomb. I envied and despised the resiliency of youth. “You need directions?”

  I did. Like the rest of Seattle’s Eastside, Kirkland is a suburban maze. Indeed, my son’s proposed route so confused me that we finally settled on a landmark, rather than the Kowalski residence. At one P.M., I would meet Adam at the carillon bell tower by the lake in downtown Kirkland.

  My day was virtually shot. It was now after ten, and the round trip would consume almost four hours. What had I been thinking of? That Erin or her parents would drive Adam to Alpine? That Ben would volunteer to collect his nephew? That Durwood Parker and Crazy Eights Neffel would zip down Stevens Pass on the snowmobile?

  As usual, the burden fell on good of Mom. I abandoned the editorial, not wanting to rush through the conclusion, and instead devoted what remained of the next hour to a few local news briefs and reading proofs. As usual, Carla had made several typos, including the fact that Alpine had been blanketed with four feet of snot and a reference to the Episcopal rectom. If necessary, I could start working on the layout in the evening. Meanwhile, it occurred to me that as long as I was going to be in the Seattle area, I might do a bit of sleuthing on my own. As ever, Milo seemed set on going through channels. That could take forever. Or at least until our deadline had passed. I very much wanted to get an ID on one of the nameless victims before we went to press.

  It was snowing fitfully as far as Sultan, but the trees along the highway were bare and the ground was visible. I was in a green world again, with the temperature climbing into the forties. I actually rolled the window down an inch or two. The rain pattered steadily on the windshield, but I didn’t mind. As a native Seattleite, I was used to it. The snow was another matter. When I was growing up, there were winters when we never saw a snowflake or even a hard frost. The same was true in Portland. Yet after almost three years in Alpine, I thought I was growing accustomed to a seemingly endless world of white. Twenty miles down Stevens Pass told me otherwise. I definitely preferred rain to snow.

  I arrived at the appointed spot almost ten minutes early. The wind was coming off Lake Washington, and its sharp damp chill cut to the bone. I didn’t mind too much. Unlike a lot of people who can’t wait to spend part of winter on a sun-soaked beach, I prefer clouds to sun. Gray days invigorate my mental processes; heat smothers them. I sat on a bench, admiring the modernistic cluster of bells in the carill
on and the whitecaps on the lake. A few hardy souls hovered about, sipping lattes and nibbling on muffins. As the bells chimed one o’clock, Adam crossed the square, a pair of skis slung over one shoulder and his hands clutching three large vinyl bags.

  We hugged—briefly, since Adam is still young enough to be put off by excessive displays of affection. Indeed, our latest parting had been of a remarkably short duration. Adam had been home for Thanksgiving, just two weeks earlier. Tom’s generosity had guaranteed the airfare for frequent trips between Fairbanks and Alpine.

  After the requisite questions about Erin, her family, and the Sunday ski trip to Crystal Mountain, I informed my son that we were heading into Seattle. I half-expected him to be excited at the prospect of detecting, but he was surprisingly indifferent.

  “As long as we’re going up to Capitol Hill, could we stop at REI? I need to get some new ski bindings.”

  “You could do that in Alpine,” I replied as we headed for the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge across Lake Washington.

  But Adam shook his head. He was a confirmed believer in REI, the sporting goods co-op that serves not only as a provisioner of outdoor gear but as a fashion guru. Seattleites are known not for their tailored three-piece suits, but for plaid flannel shirts, all-weather pants, and Gore-Tex jackets. In fact, most big city inhabitants would, in terms of apparel, fit nicely into Alpine’s woodsy milieu. And that goes for men and women. REI may be the mecca of unisex clothing. Seattleites wouldn’t have it any other way.

  I, however, am an anomaly. I prefer fitting rooms with classic covers of Vogue and sales clerks who tell monstrous lies to bolster the customer’s ego and pad their commissions. In Alpine, Francine Wells suits me fine. And in Seattle, I still lament the demise of Frederick & Nelson, one of the world’s great department stores until greed and mismanagement got the better of it.

  Consequently, I dropped my son off to wander in the wilds of REI while I drove north on Broadway to the Villa Apartments. Located above downtown Seattle, Capitol Hill is only eighty miles from Alpine, but demographically it’s a world away. The land that climbs above the city center reaches to the ship canal on the north and the fringes of the International District to the south. The neighborhood is made up of large, stately homes and bunker-like condos, legendary watering holes and trendy boutiques, old money and new drugs, college students, artists, panhandlers, lawyers, punk rockers, homosexuals, chiropractors, philanthropists, and every hue of the ethnic rainbow. It’s the big city in a nutshell—crazy, colorful, vibrant, and depressing. I love it and yet fear it. But after almost three years in Alpine, my first spotting of a transvestite startled me as much as the sight of a black man and a white woman pushing a baby stroller made me smile.

  The Villa Apartments, a block off Broadway, wore a tawdry air. The four-story brick facade had none of the charm of its English Tudor neighbors, and the once-sweeping view of Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains had been obliterated by a block of new town houses.

  I pressed the buzzer for number 116, next to a strip of paper that read K. FRANCICH/C. NEAL. As I expected, there was no response. I tried R. Littleriver in 115, then D. Calhoun in 119, and finally, V. Fields/T. Booth in 117. Nothing. I got back in the Jag and drove over to the Riviera Apartments, two blocks away. The building was about the same vintage as the Villa, but larger and better maintained. I found s. HORTHY—MGR. at 101 and buzzed some more. To my relief, a woman answered, her voice heavily accented.

  After identifying myself, I launched into fiction, stating that I was a friend of Carol Neal, over at the Villa Apartments. I had lent Carol some photographs of my family reunion. They were the only copies I had and they meant much to me. My tone hinted that though I knew Carol, I realized she was irresponsible. I, however, was an honest, if sentimental, fool. “I understand Mr. Horthy plans to confiscate Carol’s belongings. Could I please get my pictures back?”

  There was no immediate reply. I wondered if the woman had understood what I was saying. A scratchy sound emanated from the small wire speaker; then I heard muffled voices in the background. They weren’t speaking in English. Hungarian, maybe, judging from the manager’s name.

  The woman spoke again into the intercom: “Wait,” she commanded, and the speaker shut off.

  A moment later, the front door with its wrought-iron grille swung open. A gaunt man of middle age and medium height eyed me warily. He introduced himself as Stefan Horthy but didn’t offer his hand. He, too, had an accent, but not as pronounced.

  “You know where are these pictures?”

  “No.” I had trouble meeting his stern gaze. I was a lousy liar. “But they shouldn’t be hard to find. They were in a big manila envelope.”

  Stefan Horthy shifted from one foot to the other, scowling into the rain. Traffic moved cautiously up and down the hill. A trio of black teenagers in Starter jackets walked by, drinking pop out of big plastic cups and eating onion rings from a small cardboard container. Across the street, an elderly woman hunched under a drab wool coat pushed an empty grocery cart into an alley. Nervously, I waited for Stefan Horthy’s response.

  “Come on.” Horthy stalked off in the direction of the other apartment building. I wondered if he would mention being contacted by the sheriff’s office.

  Stefan Horthy, in fact, didn’t mention anything. I hurried to catch up, deciding not to mention my car. He unlocked the Villa’s front door, led me up a short flight of stairs past an ungainly Douglas fir that was adorned with bubble lights, and down a stale-smelling hallway. Horthy opened number 116, and stepped aside.

  Whoever and whatever Kathleen Francich and Carol Neal were, they would not have qualified as conscientious housekeepers. My initial reaction was that the place had been ransacked. But I’d had some experience covering crime scenes for The Oregonian and I could recognize the aftermath of an intruder. There is a certain method to such madness. Unit 116 was merely a slovenly dump.

  Even if I’d really been looking for something specific, such as the nonexistent family reunion pictures, I wouldn’t have known where to start. Dirty clothes, fast food cartons, wine bottles, magazines, pop cans, grocery sacks, and even a rotting jack-o’-lantern were strewn about the room. My eyes fastened on a bunch of unopened mail lying helter-skelter on the shabby carpet. It all seemed to be addressed to Kathleen Francich.

  Stefan Horthy was watching me like a hawk. Casually, I picked up one of the empty grocery bags. “Do you mind if I take this mail? I understand they didn’t leave a forwarding address. Is there any more downstairs?”

  “Maybe.” His ambivalent answer could have referred to either my request or my question. Horthy scowled at the litter of brochures, bills, and mail order catalogues. He might have been considering the legal implications, but I suspected he was calculating monetary value. “Go, take that much. But all else is mine.”

  I gave him a flinty smile. “Except my photos. Let me check the bedrooms.” I was already heading for the hallway, staving off Horthy’s anticipated protests. He said nothing, however, but followed me as far as the first bedroom door.

  I tried to overlook the chaos, zeroing in on the dressing table with a framed picture that was almost obscured by cologne bottles, cosmetic jars, and underwear. A young, pretty face gazed out at me from under dirty glass. Curly dark brown hair, brown eyes, a disarmingly self-conscious smile. The subject was posed in a high-backed rattan chair. A typical Blanchet High School senior photo. Was it Carol? I didn’t know what the victim looked like. I grabbed the picture and put it in the grocery bag.

  “Hey!” Stefan Horthy growled. “You’re not taking that!”

  I gave him a steely look. “Yes, I am. I’m sure you know something terrible may have happened to Carol. I’d like a memento.”

  Horthy made a face, but didn’t argue. I opened drawers, perused the closet, even looked under the bed. I didn’t know what I expected to find, but if Milo Dodge could ID our victim from the photo, he could get a search warrant for the apartment. I brushed past Horthy
and went into the other bedroom. It was only slightly less of a shambles. There was no graduation picture, but a dozen snapshots had been tucked around the mirror on the dresser. They featured a fair-haired young woman with dancing eyes and a dimpled smile. I selected three of the pictures and put them in the grocery sack, too.

  “No luck,” I called to Horthy, who was standing in the hallway, hands jammed into his pants pockets. He turned away just as I tripped over a tennis shoe. On impulse, I snatched it up, then followed Stefan Horthy back into the living room. Next to the battered, tattered sofa was a small table where the telephone stood. The table had a little drawer. I opened it and sucked in my breath. A square, blue spiral address book was too much to resist. My back was turned to Horthy.

  “Here are the pictures,” I said in triumph, allowing him to hear but not see the address book join my little collection. Inspired, I picked up the phone, grateful to get a dial tone. I’d half-expected it to be disconnected.

  “Hey—what you doing now?” Stefan Horthy leaped across the room, no mean feat, considering the obstacle course he had to overcome.

  Waving Horthy off, I hit the redial button. A female voice answered on the second ring. “History Department. This is Rachel Rosen. How may I help you?”

  “Oh!” I made flabbergasted noises. “What number is this?”

  Rachel told me. I recognized the prefix as belonging to the University of Washington campus. “I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I misdialed.”

  Stefan Horthy’s patience, which I judged to be chronically on the thin side, finally snapped. “Hey, you—get out of here now. You got your pictures. You waste my day.”

  I smiled, this time more amiably. “You’re right. I just wish I knew what happened to Carol.”