Buffalo Bill's Defunct (9781564747112)

by Simonson, Sheila

  A nicer house, probably, than a divorced woman could afford in Portland on a librarian’s salary. She didn’t say that but it was obvious.

  Marybeth sighed. “You asked about your house. It belonged to a man named Strohmeyer who had grown children. He left it to his daughter when he died last year.”

  “Charlotte Tichnor.”

  “That’s the name. Her son’s an oncologist in Vancouver, always contributes to Friends of the Library. So does his mother.”

  The server brought the check and took Meg’s Visa card.

  “I think there’s a daughter, and another son in Portland, something to do with insurance or real estate. I bought a sideboard at the estate sale.” She took a last sip of herbal tea and set her cup down. “If you want to know more about local families you could go to the historical society. Mrs. Wirkkala knows everybody. I think she’s there on Fridays.”

  “Thanks.” Meg signed the requisite form as Marybeth rose and shrugged into her raincoat.

  “Can’t think of anything else,” she said. “We’ll see you next week at the library.”

  “A week from Monday,” Meg corrected, smiling. “Don’t rush me. I have a lot of unpacking yet to do. Thanks, Marybeth.” She rescued her own damp raingear from the coat rack but almost forgot her umbrella.

  Marybeth gave her a small, chilly smile as they headed out into the storm.

  MRS. Wirkkala—call me Helmi—was a fountain of information. A seventyish dumpling with fierce blue eyes, she was delighted to meet the new librarian, and Meg suspected, to hear of Meg’s ordeal firsthand.

  They sat drinking coffee in Helmi’s office in the old Carnegie Library, a sturdy red-brick building like thousands the philanthropist had scattered across the country. In the late ‘Fifties, Helmi told Meg, when the book collection and the population had outgrown it, the current library had been erected and the old one turned over to the Latouche County Historical Society. Helmi, a retired high school history teacher, was the unpaid director.

  Meg couldn’t imagine a better use for the old building. It reeked of history—dark wood, dim lighting, leather-bound tomes. She was glad she wouldn’t have to work there.

  She obliged Helmi with her well-rehearsed narrative. It was beginning to feel like the ritual retelling of an ancient myth. When the telling was over and Helmi had made appropriate exclamations, Meg explained why she’d sought out someone with a historical perspective.

  “I need to know about the people who owned my house, the Strohmeyers.”

  Helmi gave an impish grin. “A fine old family. Charlotte Tich-nor’s grandfather was a bootlegger.”

  “My goodness.”

  Helmi poured coffee. “I went to high school with Charlotte. She was a real queen bee. You know the type—head cheerleader, homecoming queen, president of the honor society. She was a good student but an awful snob.”

  “Stuck up?”

  “She smiled graciously on the peasants. If you wanted to Be Somebody, though, you had to wear the right clothes, date the jerks on the basketball team, and hang out at the right drugstore after school. Charlotte made sure of that. Finnish girls in homemade skirts didn’t cut the mustard.” The twinkle reappeared. “I used to remind myself that our Char was the moonshiner’s grandbaby.”

  “Prohibition.” Meg slapped her forehead. “The compartment in the garage. I should have thought of that as a possibility at least. The garage is more recent than the house.” The house had been built in 1904. “Did Old Strohmeyer get away with it?”

  “My dear, he was a local hero. What do you know about Temperance?”

  “Uh, Carry Nation?”

  Helmi looked at her with pity. “I did my thesis on the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. It was the first great women’s movement.”

  “Wait a minute, what about suffrage?”

  “That appealed to women with an education. Temperance was popular.”

  “With women.”

  “Exactly. The Volstead Amendment—Prohibition—was the great triumph of the WCTU.”

  “Some triumph.”

  Helmi took a judicious sip of coffee. “Prohibition was a direct consequence of women getting the vote in 1920.”

  “Why does that make me cringe?”

  “Because it was a very bad thing for this country. Organized crime is the spawn of Prohibition, on the one hand. On the other, you have our obsession with other people’s vices—drinking and smoking and having sex in the backseat of a car, blasphemy, doing drugs and dancing and reading books about witches, listening to rock music with the volume turned up. Our first impulse is prohibition.”

  Meg had to laugh. “Do you write pop history?”

  “Sometimes I squeeze out an article for our quarterly. Mostly I just watch.”

  “So it’s all women’s fault?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. A lot of the blame lies with Baptist and Methodist preachers, and all of them were men.”

  “And all of them opposed woman suffrage.” Meg knew a lot about the suffrage movement.

  “There were exceptions.”

  “The Quakers,” Meg conceded. “Other than the Quakers, every single Christian church organization in this country opposed giving women the vote.”

  “They certainly did to begin with. At any rate, preachers played an important role in the Temperance Movement. I studied the WCTU of Clark County. It was never big here in Latouche County. Too many Catholics.”

  “Catholics?”

  Helmi pushed a plate of gingersnaps at Meg. “Think about it. Myself, I was raised by parents who departed from the Evangelical Lutheran tradition, which may be even more puritanical than the Methodists but was ethnic Scandinavian. The Catholics around here are ethnic German like the Strohmeyers, and nowadays Hispanic. Elsewhere they were Italian or Irish, for the most part. In Clark County, right next door, they were French Canadian. All ethnic.”

  “Ethnics were excluded from the WCTU?”

  “Socially excluded. Catholics were excluded. By and large, black people were excluded. Indians weren’t even considered. It was an all-white Protestant movement, like the Know-Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan.”

  Meg stared. “You’re not saying the membership overlapped, I hope.”

  “Not at all. Separate spheres. The women put on their best hats and went out to ice cream socials.”

  “And the men took a fortifying sip of White Lightning, and rode out to lynch rabbis, priests, and black men?”

  Helmi smiled. “Some of the men. It’s not accidental that the Klan was big in that period, especially in Oregon. Washington is less WAS Pish. Always has been.”

  “I’m getting dizzy.”

  Helmi laughed. “It’s complicated. I’m just trying to explain why a nice law-abiding German Catholic man like Otto Stroh-meyer took to bootlegging alcohol. Gin, in his case.”

  “His culture was under attack by women and WASPs. I see that.”

  “You do but our Charlotte didn’t. Charlotte thirsted after respectability.”

  “She wanted to be a Methodist lady?”

  Helmi dipped a gingersnap into her coffee. “A WASP.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Meg said through a mouthful of cookie. The homemade gingersnaps were delicious.

  “World War Two did something for Charlotte’s character, too. Her father, Emil, had trouble finding work in the ‘Thirties. He’d trained as a carpenter, but the Depression hit this town hard. When the Kaiser Shipyard started up in Vancouver, he moved the whole family there. Charlotte went to grade school and junior high in Vancouver, and it gave her larger social ideas.”

  “I guess the war changed a lot of people.”

  Helmi nodded. “And helped secularize society. The preachers lost influence. For a while.”

  “But the Strohmeyers were Catholics.”

  “Not when they came back to Klalo. By that time they were Episcopalians, very respectable, very WASP.”

  Meg turned over what she knew of the population shifts duri
ng World War II. Long Beach had had a shipyard, and there were the big aircraft factories. “The Strohmeyers wouldn’t have been respectable in Vancouver. It’s an old town. They would have been considered migrant workers.”

  Helmi beamed at her as if she were a bright first grader. “In Vancouver, Charlotte baby-sat for an Old Family. She internalized their notions.”

  “What then?”

  Helmi shrugged. “The war ended. Otto died. When people started building houses again, Emil brought his wife and kids home. He built a lot of the ranch-style houses in town, so he was pretty well fixed. He sent Peter, his oldest boy, to college. The second son, Jimmy, went into the army out of high school and never amounted to much.” Her round face clouded. “I had a crush on Jimmy.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Oh, nothing dramatic. He died in Las Vegas ten years ago. Three marriages, no kids. He had a drinking problem, which is a nice irony. Charlotte was the baby and got whatever she wanted. What she wanted was out.”

  “The real estate agent said she lives in Seattle.”

  Helmi nodded. “The big time. She went to nursing school at one of the hospitals up there and snared a surgeon. I don’t think she ever worked as a nurse after she married Ethan Tichnor. Devoted herself to charities and social climbing.”

  “Did she succeed?”

  Helmi smiled. “Pretty much. She’s on the board of half a dozen worthy causes. She belongs to the best clubs. Her husband’s dead now, but her children turned out well. They managed to survive going to the best schools.”

  “And her father left her his house?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I guess I don’t see what all that has to do with bootlegging.”

  “As long as she lived here, someone like me would remind her that her grandfather was a moonshiner. Charlotte left Klalo. She never came home.”

  “Ever?”

  “I’m exaggerating for dramatic effect. She made brief ritual appearances. She sent her kids to their grandparents every summer for a month. And she wasn’t stingy. Her mother had a long, lingering bout with cancer that must have soaked up a lot of Emil’s savings. Charlotte was generous with her checkbook.”

  “But not with her time. I see.”

  Helmi toyed with a gingersnap. “I hope I’m not indulging in spite. I liked Emil Strohmeyer. He used to drop in and swap stories. He was proud of Charlotte, proud of the boys, too.”

  “Why didn’t they come home to take care of him?”

  Helmi’s eyes widened. She even blushed. “That’s a very good question. Maybe I’m too hard on Charlotte.”

  Meg said tactfully, “What about grandchildren, do they live around here?”

  “Peter has two married daughters in Montana. He taught in Montana, retired to Arizona.”

  “And the Tichnors?”

  “There are two of them in the area. Vance in Portland and Ethan, Junior in Vancouver. Ethan’s a big wheel in the medical society. Vance has a real estate agency in Clackamas County.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “South of Portland, southeast. I think the boys did visit Emil— they went fly fishing with him when he could still get around. Carol runs an antiques shop in Port Townsend up on Puget Sound. She oversaw the prep work when Charlotte sold the house, so she was down here more than usual this spring and summer.”

  “Then I probably ought to talk to her.”

  “I expect Rob Neill will do that.”

  “You’re right,” Meg murmured. It crossed her mind to ask about Hazel Guthrie, too, but she didn’t have a good reason to dig, so she suppressed the impulse. “It’s just that I’m curious.” She rose. “Thanks, Helmi. May I come back for a look at your collection?”

  “Any time.”

  Meg had promised herself she would not enter the Latouche County Regional Library until the day she was scheduled to take over. Still, it couldn’t hurt to drive past now and then. She chugged up the main drag and turned onto the tree-lined street, a cul-de-sac, that led to the Klalo branch library. Her headquarters. She’d forgotten how ugly it was.

  A symphony of aluminum and concrete, the structure that replaced Carnegie’s sturdy red-brick building had been erected at the nadir of public architecture. Prince Charles would see it and abdicate. Thinking, with affection, of Rob’s grandmother, Meg parked a moment across from her new workplace and contemplated its sheer hideousness. Hazel Guthrie and her library board had probably found it wonderfully modern. Well, it was a blot on the landscape, but it looked cared-for—scrubbed and polished, embraced by mature rhododendrons that would show a riot of color in May.

  A native dogwood three stories high shaded the curved entrance drive. Meg had been told the blossoms were white, not pink, and that Hazel had made the demented architect site the building so as not to damage the tree. Meg wished she had known her predecessor.

  She drove home through the wet streets in a thoughtful mood. Helmi Wirkkala’s revelations made her uneasy. There had been real malice in the historian’s comments on Charlotte Tichnor, so the question was whether Helmi’s hostility was justified. The Tichnors hardly seemed the sort to loot artifacts—or to commit murder. Who did that leave? The looters had had to know about the storage space in the garage. That left the neighbors.

  Rob Neill’s pickup sat in the driveway that led up to the gingerbread house. On impulse, Meg hoisted her umbrella and dashed up to the handsome front door. The beveled glass window in the door was obscured by a lace curtain. The rain-lashed porch was wide and generous. She knocked and rang the doorbell but nobody answered.

  So she trudged down the drive to her own house and went back to unpacking. Helmi’s take on the WCTU and the KKK bothered Meg. She wasn’t sure she agreed with the historian’s assessment, but it did make her wonder whether small-town life was going to be all that wonderful.

  WHILE he waited for Todd Welch to show up, Rob started calling Strohmeyer heirs. Carol Tichnor was still incommunicado, but he got through to Peter Strohmeyer on the first ring.

  Thayer had brought Rob a photocopy of Emil Strohmeyer’s obituary and half a dozen uninteresting clippings of “Social News Notes” from the newspaper. A quick foray on the Internet produced a telephone number for a Peter Strohmeyer in Flagstaff, Arizona. Rob dialed. How many Peter Strohmeyers could there be? Dozens, he thought gloomily, but an elderly female voice said hello.

  He identified himself and asked to speak to her husband. “Pete,” she called, not bothering to cover the receiver. “It’s for you, Pete.” Shuffling, murmuring.

  “This is Pete Strohmeyer.” The voice was a vigorous tenor. “What can I do for you? Is it about the murder?”

  “You heard.” It was the right Strohmeyer.

  “My niece called yesterday. She was pretty upset. I figured you’d get in touch some time. How can I help?”

  Rob rolled his eyes. “Tell your niece to return her phone calls.”

  Peter Strohmeyer laughed. “I expect she’s just trying to get her mother to face reality. Charlotte is difficult sometimes. Carol can’t very well act without permission.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, Lieutenant, she’s dependent on her mother to maintain her lifestyle. I like that word, lifestyle. Carol is used to the best of everything, but her shop in Port Townsend isn’t a gold mine. So Charlotte calls the tune.”

  “I see.” Rob pulled his notepad closer. “I’d like some background information, Mr. Strohmeyer. I have a copy of your father’s will. He left everything to Mrs. Tichnor. Were you estranged from him?”

  Strohmeyer laughed again. “No, not at all. He was a great old guy, my dad. We got along just fine.”

  Rob waited.

  “About ten years before he died, Dad deeded over his property on Tyee Lake to me. He said he might as well save me the inheritance tax. That was after my brother, Jim, died. I got the land, and Charlotte was going to get the house in town. It was a fair division of property.”

  “Okay, I can see
that. So you’re a Latouche County property holder?” He wasn’t on the tax rolls.

  “Nope. When Dad died, I sold the property to my nephews. I’m settled down here in Arizona, I’ve got some medical problems, and I don’t travel much. I didn’t feel right selling that trout stream, though, while Dad was still alive. He was some kind of fisherman. I gave the boys a good price because I wanted the land to stay in the family.”

  Rob considered the Strohmeyer legend. “Where on Tyee?” He had a cabin on the lake. He stood up and turned to the large county map that occupied pride of place on the wall behind his desk.

  Strohmeyer gave him details of the sale and the plat numbers. Not on the lake itself. Fifteen acres on the banks of Beaver Creek, prime steelhead country. Rob went back to the desk and looked at his notes. “So Dr. Tichnor bought ten acres and his brother took what was left?”

  Strohmeyer chuckled. “I figure Vance got the best place for a lodge—right where Grandpa built the old still. Ethan took the timbered hillside, wants to conserve the old growth. He’s a vocal opponent of clear-cutting.”

  “I see. Thank you, sir. Now what can you tell me about the storage cavity in the garage floor?”

  Strohmeyer launched into an account of his grandfather’s antics, punctuated by chuckles, that coincided with what Carol Tichnor had said. He sounded like a happy man. Rob wished him well and eventually hung up.

  He logged back onto the phone directory and found numbers for Dr. Tichnor and his brother, Vance. He had left a message for the oncologist and was about to dial Vance Tichnor’s business number when Todd Welch knocked at the door and stuck his head in.

  Rob waved him in and hung up.

  “You want me to drive you to Two Falls, sir?”

  “Sit down,” Rob said. “We need to talk first.”

  Todd sat and twiddled his thumbs. His uniform looked as if it had just been removed from a dry cleaner’s bag.

  There was no point beating around the bush. Rob described Chief Thomas’s phone call. “So she knew about the petroglyph. When I suggested she might have heard about it from you, she didn’t deny it.”