The Alpine Menace

by Mary Daheim

  I did neither. The other car stopped two doors down and turned in to a garage. Letting out a big breath of relief, I started the engine and crept away.

  Somewhat to my surprise, Vida was waiting for me on the first pass. “Did she throw you out?” I asked.

  “Certainly not,” Vida said, adjusting her hat, where the birds seemed to droop in exhaustion. I didn't much blame them. It had been a very long day. “I just got here,” she went on. “We had a pleasant visit until Kathy was interrupted by a phone call she had to take in private.”

  I was taken aback. “So you left?”

  “I really had no choice, but,” she added with a sly glance, “I may have heard enough.”

  “Such as?” I braked at the arterial before heading onto Green Lake Way.

  “She took the call in the living room,” Vida explained, swerving around to look behind us. I was sure she hoped we were being followed again, but the side street was empty. “Kathy seemed rather astonished,” she continued, giving up and facing front. “There was a long pause on her end, and then she said in a rather strained voice, and I quote, ‘Excuse me, Darryl. I'm just saying goodbye to a visitor.’ ”

  “Darryl?” My foot slipped off the brake and we almost collided with a fast-moving sports car. “As in Darryl Lindholm?”

  “I think it's likely. Kathy seemed puzzled at first, then agitated. That was when she turned her back to me and finally got a word in edgewise with Darryl. Then she put her hand over the receiver, looked at me to apologize, and said goodbye. Kathy had turned quite pale.”

  “Darryl, huh?” I mused, finally getting an opportunity to enter traffic on the busy street. “Why would he call Kathy Addison?”

  “It must have to do with Kendra,” Vida said.

  I thought about that for a minute or so, then told Vida to reach into my pocket. Somewhat clumsily, she retrieved the empty envelope.

  “My, my!” she exclaimed. “Where did you get this?”

  I told her how I'd spotted it by the recycling baskets. “It must have fallen out when the recycling gang threw the stuff into their Dumpster. The envelope ended up under the basket. Can you read the postmark?”

  “Not in the semidark,” Vida admitted. “Should I?” She gestured to the overhead light.

  “Go ahead.” We had crossed the Aurora Bridge and were heading for our motel by Seattle Center. “I can manage.”

  “It's either March fifteenth or eighteenth,” Vida said. “Let me think—the fifteenth was Billy Blatt's birthday, which was a Sunday. Do they postmark on Sundays in Seattle? They don't in Alpine.”

  I didn't know. “Either way, it was before the murder. Now, why would Maybeth Swafford write to the Addisons?”

  “It wasn't good news,” Vida responded, after a momentary lull. “What do you do when you get an ordinary letter or note? You answer it, if necessary, and then discard the whole thing. I suspect that Kathy—or Sam— ripped up the letter, then threw out the envelope later.”

  “Maybe,” I allowed. “But that doesn't tell us much about what was in it.”

  “Perhaps Maybeth was getting even with Carol by telling the Addisons that her birth mother wasn't fit company for Kendra,” Vida suggested.

  “That's possible,” I said, pulling off Aurora at the sign for the center. “But maybe it was more self-serving than that.”

  “Such as what?” Vida asked.

  I turned as we stopped for a red light. “How about blackmail?”

  “To what purpose?” Vida asked.

  “I don't know,” I admitted, easing the car into a parking stall. The motel was beginning to feel like home in some weird, impersonal kind of way.

  I waited until we were inside the room to get the details of the visit with Kathy. Vida removed her hat and coat, plopped down on the bed, and tipped her head to one side.

  “I'm not sure I learned much except for some family history,” Vida said. “Kathy and Sam met at the University of Washington. She was from Seattle, but he grew up in Port Orchard. Sam was in engineering school, and Kathy was a domestic-sciences major. I believe they used to call it home economics. Anyway, they didn't meet in the classroom but at a sorority-fraternity party. Sam was a year older, but it took him an extra year or two to finish the engineering program. They married a few months after he finished school.”

  “You're right,” I put in. “So far, no help.”

  “It gets marginally better,” Vida said without enthusiasm. “Sam got a job with a security alarm company. Kathy worked at Frederick & Nelson in the home-furnishings department. She hoped to move up into interior decorating, but she got pregnant. They decided to buy a small house in the Fremont district. They'd just gotten the loan approved when Kathy miscarried, but they went ahead with the move anyway. It's not uncommon, of course, for first pregnancies to end in a miscarriage.”

  “True,” I allowed. Mine hadn't, thank God.

  “Less than a year later Kathy had another miscarriage, then a third,” Vida continued. “Sam had gotten on with Boeing by then and was making decent money. They felt that if Kathy quit her job, she'd have a better chance of carrying a baby to term. Kathy agreed, but she thought the house in Fremont was bad luck. That's when they bought their present home by Green Lake.”

  “Her present home,” I remarked. “I wonder where Sam is staying.”

  Vida shrugged before taking up her tale. “The next pregnancy also ended in a miscarriage. The Addisons went to a specialist, who told them that she could never carry a baby to term, though Kathy didn't explain the medical reasons, and I never pry. Anyway, that's when they decided to adopt.”

  I'd sat down in one of the motel room's two wooden chairs. “How did they go about it?”

  “Privately,” Vida responded, then made an impatient gesture. “I should have asked Olive when we called on her. The Nerstads used the family OB-GYN who was treating Carol after she moved from Alpine. A Dr. Mc-Farland in Ballard. He retired some years ago, however. In fact, Kathy thought he'd died recently.”

  “So everything was on the up-and-up?” I asked.

  “It seems that way,” Vida said. “Private adoptions are expensive, but highly respectable. Both young Doc Dewey and old Doc Dewey have done them over the years.”

  “What else did Kathy say?”

  Vida made a face. “Not much. She'd gone on at length about the sorrow and disappointment and frustration of miscarrying four times. Then, after the Addisons got Kendra—the name means knowledge and understanding, which may or may not fit her—Kathy expressed great joy. Endlessly. She'd just begun to discuss Kendra's move into the apartment—in a rather defensive manner, as you might guess—when the phone rang.”

  “Kathy didn't talk about Carol?” Frankly, I was disappointed in Vida.

  Apparently, she sensed my reaction. Drawing herself up on the bed, Vida scowled. “There wasn't time. You might know I was going in that direction.”

  I smiled weakly. “Yes, of course.” I got out of the chair and began pacing around the small room. “The problem is, we seem to be going off in all directions and not getting anywhere.”

  Vida was very solemn. “We cannot fail.”

  I gave her a droll look. “Yes, we can.”

  I was beginning to think we already had.

  YEARS AGO I'D read in a classic murder mystery that no so-called clue could be overlooked. Every piece of evidence, no matter how small, had to fit in order to solve the puzzle. It made sense at the time, because the author had plotted the story so craftily that by the last page, everything had come together in perfect, homicidal harmony.

  But that was fiction, and I was living in reality. While Vida was in the shower I made a list of our meager shards of evidence before we headed to the nearby Denny's for breakfast.

  “Very sensible,” Vida said after we'd checked out of the motel and given our orders at the restaurant. “What's number one?”

  “The drapery cord,” I said, studying my notebook. “We still don't know where it came from.�
��

  “Most mystifying,” Vida allowed as a rather shabby-looking middle-aged man in the next booth asked if we had extra sugar. I handed him a half-dozen packets before Vida continued: “The cord was introduced, perhaps solely for the purpose of strangling Carol.”

  “Possibly,” I said, moving on to the second item. “Ken-dra's missing graduation picture. Who took it off the fridge?”

  “That indicates a definite relationship between Kendra and whoever did it,” Vida noted. “Which could mean the Addisons or Darryl.”

  I frowned. Were they the only ones who might have strong feelings toward Kendra? Or more precisely, toward the relationship between Kendra and Carol? I omitted Maybeth. She didn't strike me as a frustrated Mama Wannabe who'd resent Carol's reunion with her daughter. Roy was out, too. I couldn't picture him as wanting much of anything except to keep the beer cans rolling and get laid on a regular basis.

  The shabby man asked if we had extra cream, so I passed on a couple of tiny containers before moving on to the broken acrylic nail. “Maybeth, maybe,” I said. “But when? Carol was a lousy housekeeper. It might have been there forever.”

  “I don't know much about false nails,” Vida admitted. “If one comes off, could you reapply it?”

  Unable to answer the question, I asked Vida if she meant that Maybeth could have lost it without noticing while she was strangling Carol.

  “Something like that,” Vida replied. “Carol and May-beth might not fight over Kendra, but they'd certainly quarrel over men. Have you listed the piece of fabric? Women's suiting material, that's what Kendra said.”

  I checked off the cloth scrap. “Again, we have to take Carol's poor housekeeping into account. Who knows when it got on the floor?”

  “That's so,” Vida said, “but this is intriguing. A professional woman calls on Carol, a woman who would wear a suit. Why?”

  “I can't begin to guess,” I said. “What does she do when she gets there, start shredding her clothes?”

  Vida sighed. “That's the problem. We have so little to go on with any of this.”

  The shabby man had gotten up from his booth and was shuffling off toward the exit. I glanced at the table to see if he'd used up the extra sugar and cream. There were no signs of empty containers or packets; only several empty plates, a mug, and a glass remained. The man must have been hoarding the extras.

  “We're missing somebody, maybe even the woman in the wool suit,” I said, flipping the pen onto the table. “That's where we're at a disadvantage. If the police hadn't been so quick to arrest Ronnie, other suspects might have surfaced.”

  Vida, however, shook her head. “We'd have heard something by now. Not everyone believed that Ronnie killed Carol. Look at Henrietta Altdorf. And Mr. Rapp.”

  “True,” I admitted, “but still…” I sighed. “Okay, we'll drop it for now. It's too bad that Mr. Stokes moved to California or wherever.”

  “The circle is rather small,” Vida acknowledged. “Let's go back to our clues.”

  I shot her an ironic glance. “Both of them? Okay, there's the phone call last night to Kathy Addison from— we presume—Darryl Lindholm. What was that about? Is Darryl trying to get some sort of legal right to Kendra? She's eighteen, it doesn't matter.”

  Vida opened her mouth to say something, shut it, and pressed her fingertips together. “That may be the point,” she said. “At eighteen, parents are no longer legally obligated to support their children. What if—now, this is a big if, mind you—Kathy and perhaps Sam were so angry about Kendra's moving out that they decided to stop helping her financially?”

  “And Darryl wants to leap into the breach because his other children are dead?” I considered the idea. “That's possible. What else would he do with his money? He's all alone now.”

  “That's a plausible idea,” Vida asserted. “Make a note.”

  A commotion at the door distracted us. A young man in a shirt and tie had collared the shabby man and was pulling him back inside the restaurant.

  “Dine and dash,” I said to Vida. “He must have tried to leave without paying.”

  The young man gave the errant customer a good shake. Sugar packets, cream and syrup containers, butter pats, and pieces of silverware tumbled onto the floor.

  “Really,” Vida said in disgust, “I haven't seen anything like this in Alpine since Arthur Trews tried to leave the Venison Inn without paying. Arthur had the money, of course, but he was so forgetful in his later years. That was the same day he'd shown up at Harvey's Hardware not wearing any pants.”

  Another man, about the same age as the would-be dasher, approached the door. He had his bill and his wallet in his hand. The discussion was brief. Apparently the third man was offering to pay for the shabby man's meal. The younger man, who I assumed was the manager, agreed. The little drama concluded with the two customers exiting together.

  “Very generous,” Vida said in approval. “Still, such tawdry little scenes must be played out all over the city. Tsk, tsk.”

  I didn't contradict Vida, because I knew she was right. Instead, I asked her to explain the envelope from May-beth to the Addisons.

  “I can't,” she confessed. “We already made those conjectures. I've nothing new to add.”

  I glanced over at the serving area, where what looked like our orders were being placed under heat lamps. “Let me call The Advocate before we get served,” I said, digging for the cell phone in my capacious—and cluttered— handbag. “I want to make sure everything went off all right by deadline.”

  Since it was barely eight o'clock, I wasn't surprised to find that only Ginny Erlandson was at work. In her accurate, if phlegmatic way, she informed me that there had been no big problems. Nor had there been further developments in the O'Neill-Harquist matter, except that everyone involved was threatening to sue everyone else.

  “All systems are go,” I informed Vida as our breakfasts arrived, “and the rest is status quo. Where were we?”

  “I believe,” she said dryly, “we'd finished studying our clues. I suggest we now discuss the suspects themselves and their possible whereabouts the night of the murder.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, drizzling syrup on my pancakes. “We don't know where Kathy and Sam Addison were, but even if they're estranged, I'd guess they'd alibi each other.”

  “Probably,” Vida said, diving into her eggs, sausage, hash browns, and toast. “Maybeth was home, Roy wasn't. Now, if he's living with her, where did he go that night? Do we know?”

  I tried to remember. “Playing poker? A night out with the boys? It might be true. Let's leave Roy hanging. Figuratively speaking, of course.”

  “And Maybeth as well,” Vida put in.

  “Which leaves Darryl,” I continued, “who we know was in the vicinity because he met Ronnie at the Satellite Room.”

  “Darryl's arrival at the apartment house would have been noted,” Vida said, daintily sipping her orange juice. “He has a motorcycle.”

  “He probably has a car, too,” I said.

  Vida, however, shook her head. “He managed to kill his entire family while driving a car. It's quite likely that he has only a motorcycle. They can be even more dangerous. Darryl may have a death wish.”

  I thought that was stretching it, but not by much. “Okay, so maybe we can rule out Darryl, but only because he wouldn't have been offering Ronnie money to leave Carol. By ten-thirty that night, if Darryl had been the killer, he would have known that Carol was already dead.”

  “Unless he wanted to establish that sort of alibi,” Vida said. “It would be very clever. Let's say he'd set up the meeting with Ronnie, but went first to see Carol. He told her what he planned to do. Or perhaps he asked her to marry him then. She refused his proposal. Darryl strangled Carol in a fit of rejection, but realized he must still keep his rendezvous with Ronnie.”

  I grinned at Vida. “If you ever kill someone, I swear you'll get away with it. You have a very cunning mind.”

  Vida shrugged. “Not at all. I c
onsider myself extremely straightforward. But I'm trying to think like a murderer.”

  “And doing it very well,” I insisted. “But that doesn't explain the lack of motorcycle noise at the apartment complex.”

  “He could have parked down the street and walked,” Vida argued.

  “No. If your theory is correct, then he wouldn't have known he'd be rejected by Carol. It wouldn't matter if anyone heard him approach. He didn't know that the encounter would lead to violence.”

  Vida grimaced, not an easy thing to do considering that she'd just forked in a massive load of hash browns. “Do motorcyclists travel with drapery cord wrapped around the handlebars?” she inquired.

  “Good point,” I admitted. “We're back to that stupid murder weapon.”

  Vida nibbled sausage, then spoke again. “We're leaving Kendra out.”

  I winced. “I hate to put her in. She seems to have been genuinely fond of her birth mother.”

  “Yes, yes,” Vida said a bit impatiently. “But how much of that was rebellion? She's still a teenager. What if her relationship with Carol was a fraud, to get back at Sam and Kathy? And by the way, what was the issue that sent Sam Addison flying out of the house after over twenty years of marriage?”

  “Money,” I said. “Kathy's extravagant expenditures for the house.”

  Vida gave me her gimlet eye. “Do you believe that?”

  I thought about it. “No,” I confessed. “It may have been the last straw, but it wasn't the real reason. Maybe Sam and Kathy had stuck together for Kendra's sake. Then, when she moved out, he split. I suspect it was a cumulative situation that festered over many years. That's usually what happens when couples with long marriages separate. Some event finally spurs them to break up. Usually, it's when the children are grown. They've stayed together for the sake of the kids.”

  Vida's expression was wry. “Spoken like a true single woman. Even if you've never married, you have at least observed.”

  “Thanks, Vida,” I said sarcastically. “But you know I'm right.”