The Alpine Escape

by Mary Daheim

  I groaned, but Jackie clapped. “You see! It was meant to be! I should call Mom and tell her you’re here. Except that she and Dad are in Santa Fe.”

  We left the house shortly after nine. I wondered if Vida had arrived in Monroe yet. I wondered if Carla was recovering. I wondered if Ed was still doing nothing except humming.

  On the short drive to the museum Jackie asked me what I thought of Mike Randall. I told her that he seemed nice. The comment was, I hoped, ambivalent.

  “Good,” Jackie responded, angling her Honda into a parking place on Lincoln Street. “Sexy, too, huh?”

  Jackie ran one wheel up onto the curb, which was lucky for me because she became distracted. She also had to feed the parking meter and needed to borrow a dime. I didn’t want to tell her that despite Mike’s good looks and obvious intelligence, I hadn’t found him sexy. He struck me as utterly humorless, a sin far worse than blowing broccoli out one’s nose. But maybe I hadn’t given him a fair chance.

  The museum was housed in the old redbrick courthouse. The lobby was finished in classic marble, with a sweeping staircase at each side of the rotunda. Since Jackie seemed as confused as I was, I guessed she hadn’t been inside before.

  “We’ll get somebody to help us,” she whispered, then marched up to the main desk. A plump woman with graying red hair offered us a pleasant smile.

  A few minutes later we were trudging through the standing exhibits, which depicted the history of Port Angeles. I knew that the area had been staked out some four hundred years ago by Juan de Fuca, a Greek pilot sailing under the Spanish flag and a Spanish name. Two centuries later Spain had been joined by England and the United States in making claims along the strait named for de Fuca. By the mid-nineteenth century the Americans had persevered. But the English and Spanish place-names endured. Captain George Vancouver had gone on a spree: Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, Whidbey Island, Bainbridge Island, Vashon Island, Puget Sound—they were but a few of the places Vancouver had named for crew and friends. Port Angeles, however, had originally been called Puerto de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles. The natives couldn’t pronounce it and neither could the early settlers who started arriving at the outbreak of the Civil War. It was easier to call the fledgling town Port Angeles.

  And for a brief period during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had designated the frontier settlement as the second national city. Had the Confederacy captured Washington, D.C., President Lincoln planned to move the capital to this tiny, rugged outpost. The concept caused me to smile. But it wasn’t much help in solving the Melchers’ mystery.

  We quickly moved through the conflict between Native Americans and white pioneers. We scarcely paused at the mock-up of the failed Puget Sound Co-operative Colony, which had stood on the site of ITT Rayonier. We merely smiled at the account of how vigilantes stole the county records from Dungeness and moved them to Port Angeles to change the seat of Clallam County. We skipped over the squatters who had jump-claimed government reserve lands in the 1890s. It was only when we reached the turn of the century that we began to slow down and study the past.

  On the edge of the Olympic Peninsula, Port Angeles was isolated, more so than Alpine. The Great Northern Railroad had helped give birth to the mining town on Stevens Pass. It had linked Seattle and Minneapolis in 1893, though in the beginning the name had been Nippon and the inhabitants had been either railroad men or Japanese miners. The real settlement hadn’t begun until 1910 when Carl Clemans came up from Snohomish, built a sawmill, and renamed the town Alpine.

  But Port Angeles had no such early bond with larger cities. Except for rough overland travel or going by ship, the struggling county seat had been cut off from the rest of the world. During the last decade of the nineteenth century the town had not only failed to thrive but had actually shriveled. The future had looked bleak.

  The West had been built by men of vision, also known as gamblers. Port Angeles had had its share, from Judge George Venable Smith and his Utopian colony to banker Thomas T. Aldwell, who brought hydroelectric power to the Olympic Peninsula. They, along with a number of other expansionists, had also hopped on those homesteads. So had Cornelius Rowley, Michigan timber cruiser, whose claim had included a tract of virgin timber on Lincoln Hill.

  “Here he is!” Jackie cried, though she tried to lower her voice while pointing to a mounted photograph of a bearded, burly man in a three-piece suit and a derby hat. According to the lengthy cutline, Rowley had come to Port Angeles in 1892 and worked for the Filion brothers, who had also hailed from Michigan. Eventually, Rowley had bought up some five thousand acres of his own in the Little River Valley outside of town. In 1896 he had brought his family west to homestead.

  Sure enough, there was the Rowley house in a photograph that had been blown up and mounted on posterboard. The graininess of the enlargement made it impossible to identify the four people who stood under the Moorish arches of the front porch.

  “Two men and two women,” I noted, squinting at the exhibit. “Cornelius and Mrs. Rowley and the two grown kids?”

  Jackie ran a hand through her taffy-colored hair. “Carrie and Eddie? Maybe. Isn’t one of the women holding something?”

  Trying for a closer look, I practically fell into the display. At least no one else was going through the museum this early in the day. “A baby, I think.” My eyes traveled down to the fifth and last of the arches that fronted the big house. “There’s someone else, almost hidden behind the comer pillar. A man or a woman? I can’t tell.”

  Jackie frowned. “I can’t, either.” She gazed at the wide expanse of front lawn that ran all the way down to the unpaved street. “Hey, look! They hadn’t put the rockery in yet. I could have sworn it was a million years old!”

  It didn’t take long to finish our tour. Jackie suggested we try the genealogy room, but I figured it was more for general-interest ancestor seekers than for those looking for historical specifics. If Paul’s memory had served him well, we had a firm grip on the family tree. Thus, we polished off the rest of the museum, quickly passing by the arrival of the railroad, the opening of the Elwha River Dam, the introduction of electricity, and the patriotic fervor of World War I. We lingered, however, at the tribute to Lena Stillman Melcher Rowley, who looked as if she could have eaten steel girders for lunch. Lena’s accomplishments were many, including a hatchet job on a couple of local taverns, one of which still stood on East First Street. Her husband, Edmund Rowley, was mentioned in a footnote. In 1898 he had served under Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War and been wounded in the charge up San Juan Hill.

  “Eddie,” murmured Jackie as we moved through Port Angeles’s bootlegging days in the Roaring Twenties and on up through the doleful Great Depression. “That’s Paul’s stepgreat-grandfather, isn’t it?”

  “It is if he was Sanford Melcher’s stepdad,” I replied. “And Eddie was Carrie’s brother.”

  We had reached World War II. “Weird,” Jackie remarked. “Eddie’s sister may be in the basement under a plastic drop cloth. I wonder if we should put her in a box.”

  I concentrated on the bunkers that had been built outside of town to help protect Port Angeles from a possible Japanese invasion. “I think it’s called a coffin,” I said lightly.

  Jackie didn’t see the humor in my remark. “We’ll do that after we make sure it’s Carrie. And find out what happened to her. Paul was going to phone the prosecutor’s office from work this morning. I hope he doesn’t press them to act. We need time to solve this on our own. Officials tend to meddle and muddle.”

  I glanced at the mock-up of Peninsula College, then moved on past Modern Fishing Methods and Global Industry for Tomorrow. Port Angeles and Alpine had many things in common, including their semi-isolation. But my present hometown wasn’t as diversified. We had no window on the sea. Timber and tourism were the mainstays of Alpine’s economy. The logging business was as endangered as the spotted owl, and due to the cool summer the tourists weren’t flocking through town. I foresaw a winter wi
th no snow, thus ruining business at the ski lodge. A vague sense of depression began to envelop me again.

  Jackie was enveloped by another hunger attack. It so happened that Gordy’s had a second restaurant on Lincoln Street, two blocks from the museum and a stone’s throw from the public library. While Jackie ordered three slices of green pepper, black olives, and pineapple on double cheese, I browsed through the collection of memorabilia housed at the rear of the restaurant. Among the items on display was a woman’s tan felt hat faced with emerald velvet and decorated with a bright green bird. It was said to be from Paris, circa 1905. I was charmed, and also curious. If Cornelius Rowley’s second wife was French, had the chic chapeau belonged to her? But the busy waitress who was putting Jackie’s pizza in a cardboard box had no idea where or how the exhibits had been acquired.

  “You can’t eat that in the library,” I cautioned Jackie as we emerged back on the street.

  “I know,” she mumbled, gulping down the pizza. “You go ahead without me.”

  I started to demur, then shrugged and went into the library. At the rate Jackie was devouring her eleven A.M. snack, she wouldn’t be far behind. I headed for the periodical section to go through old newspapers. I expected them to be on microfiche, but some were still in bound volumes. Almost immediately I became confused.

  Before the turn of the century it seemed that newspapers had broken out all over the Olympic Peninsula like an epidemic. The simplest method would be to trace the history of the current paper, The Peninsula Daily News, but its origins only went back to 1916. I was running an agitated hand through my short brown hair when Jackie wandered up to the table where I was seated.

  “Do you ever worry about women who live alone?” she asked in a whisper. Her chair scraped on the floor. “Especially when they get old. They’re so vulnerable, and often frail and handicapped. What happens when it snows?”

  Trying to sort out The Democrat-Leader from The People from The Herald from The Beacon from The Daily Pop from The Simoon, I wasn’t ready to cope with lonely elderly women. At the rate I was going, I would become one of them. I couldn’t even figure out what the hell a simoon was.

  “I live alone,” I said in a voice that made a middle-aged man at the next table jump.

  Jackie brushed pizza-crust crumbs off her oversized Reebok T-shirt. “I remember how the old men used to come into the downtown library in Portland and sit all day and read the papers.… It was so sad. But I hardly ever saw old women there. Where were they? Afraid to go outside? Shut in, needing food and medical attention, waiting for a neighbor to come …”

  “Jackie.” I smiled kindly and patted her arm. “Why don’t you volunteer? As long as you’re not working and you’re feeling good, check in with some of the service centers. They’re crying for helpers, I’ll bet.”

  Her heart-shaped face was bewildered. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  Neither did I, but a sudden inspiration struck. I got out of my chair and went over to a computer terminal. Keying in ROWLEY, CORNELIUS under subject heading, the screen showed me a list of four articles. One was entitled “Tireless Tycoon Ushers in Gracious New Era—The House That Rowley Built.” A second appeared to be about a hunting trip in eastern Washington, a third featured Mrs. Rowley, and the fourth—and final—was an obituary. I started to rejoin Jackie when the middle-aged man at the next table swiveled around and gave me a cockeyed grin.

  “I can’t imagine why you’re living alone,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “You’re too damned cute.”

  With that, he fell facedown on the front page of The New York Times.

  Chapter Five

  ONE OF THE librarians called for the medics, but I could tell from the reek of whiskey that the man was drunk. With a mixture of pity and revulsion I studied his profile, which rested on a story about Croatia. The features were regular except for the nose, which probably had been broken in a fight. The dark red hair was plentiful but graying. In repose, the man looked pale, almost ashen, but I suspected his complexion was usually flushed with broken capillaries caused by boozing. He wore tan pants, a denim shirt, and loafers that looked as if they had originally cost a bundle.

  Jackie was shivering beside me, clutching at my arm. “Is he dead?”

  I shook my head. “He’s drunk. He’ll probably end up in jail.” I sighed. “Maybe we should check his pockets and get some ID. He’s probably got a wife someplace who’s tearing her hair.”

  The man didn’t stir as I reached into the back pocket of his slacks. The wallet, like the loafers, was well worn, but made of real leather. I flipped through it, finding a California driver’s license issued to Leo Fulton Walsh of Culver City.

  “He’s a tourist,” I said in a low voice. Jackie and I had been joined by three librarians, four patrons, and the mailman.

  “There’s an old beat-up car from California parked a couple of places down the street,” volunteered the mailman. He was young, with fuzzy side whiskers and a rabbitlike expression. “I keep track of out-of-state cars. I’ve got thirty-nine states, five Canadian provinces, and the Canal Zone so far this summer.”

  “Wonderful,” I responded. One of the librarians asked the postman if he thought the people from the Canal Zone had driven all the way to Port Angeles. Before he could answer, the medics arrived. Leaving the open wallet on the table next to the man’s outstretched hand, Jackie and I backed off.

  “Now what do we do?” Jackie asked in a worried voice.

  I shrugged. “Go about our business. We’ve got four articles on Cornelius Rowley. You can start with the one about the building of the house. You might get some decorating tips.”

  But Jackie seemed fascinated by Leo Fulton Walsh. The medics were not. Mr. Walsh was just another boozer who had interrupted their gin rummy game. Still unconscious, the man from Culver City was whisked away. I could have sworn that his mouth curved into a smile.

  The hunting-trip story, dated September 2, 1906, wasn’t very enlightening. Presented in the fulsome style of the early 1900s, the writer waxed on about Cornelius Rowley’s prowess as a hunter, particularly with moose. Mr. Rowley, “one of this city’s most prominent and successful businessmen, has used his manly skills and native cunning to triumph over all manner of game, from the lowly chukar to the fierce black bear. His palatial home on Lincoln Hill is filled with trophies.…”

  I rolled my eyes. Ninety years ago there had been enough wildlife in the Pacific Northwest that a hunter could have herded it into his dining room with a broom. Cornelius Rowley hadn’t needed a gun to bag those trophies. I sensed that his expertise had been highly exaggerated.

  “Hey,” I said, giving Jackie a poke, “what happened to the mounted heads and stuffed birds?”

  Jackie’s expression was blank. “Huh? Like antlers, you mean?”

  I showed her the hunting piece. “Somebody must have redecorated since Cornelius Rowley died. Lena, maybe? Or Grandma Rose?”

  Jackie shook her head. “Don’t ask me. I never saw the house until this winter. Emma, look.” She pointed to a paragraph midway down in the Rowley house story. “It says here that Cornelius hired an architect from Seattle to design the house. Two architects, I should say—Kerr and Rogers. Then he had his own mill build the place. Mrs. Rowley added her special decorative touches. Listen to this: ‘Like all Frenchwomen, Simone Dupre Rowley possesses an inherent ability to make her home a tasteful showcase for entertaining. Mr. and Mrs. Rowley expect to launch many gala evenings for the city’s social elite.’ ”

  I gaped. “In Port Angeles? I mean, then, in Port Angeles? The town sounds too rough-and-ready for top hats and diamond tiaras.” But Mike had mentioned an opera house. Port Angeles hadn’t been as primitive as I’d envisioned it.”

  Jackie was wearing a dreamy expression. “Think of it! A small orchestra, servants with silver trays, women wearing jewels and long white gloves and gowns with tiers of lace! It must have been wonderful!” She swayed on the stiff wooden chair as if she could hear the
strains of a Strauss waltz.

  I confiscated the article. Jackie’s quote was accurate and perhaps the glowing prophecy had come true. But I wanted to see the rest of the story for myself. The writer was obviously impressed by the grandeur of Rowley House, calling it the “finest residence yet in Port Angeles, surpassing even the Van Kuren, Filion, and Grable homes. Construction is expected to take a full two years, with yet another year to finish the interior craftsmanship.” Several paragraphs were lavished on the architecture and embellishments; more were devoted to the sheer number of rooms. “When completed, the basement will be no dreary dungeon for laundry, storage, and furnace, but will include a sewing room, furnished with all the latest dressmaking accessories from Paris, and the first private billiards room in the city, with a hand-carved table made of teak from Ceylon.”

  The article was accompanied by sketches of the house and a plan of the main floor. Except for the recent enlargement of the kitchen, it appeared that the architects had stuck by their original renderings.

  I moved on to Cornelius Rowley’s obit, which had rated a full fourteen-column inches. Born in Saginaw, he had served under Major General John Sedgwick at Antietam and Chancellorsville. His postwar exploits were condensed until he moved west. Upon arriving in Port Angeles, Rowley had been a comet of activity. His job as a timber cruiser had encouraged him to strike out on his own, to build a mill, to purchase more and more tracts of virgin forest. At last he moved his family to the farthest comer of the country and erected his gracious home. His success was lauded by his peers and his hearty manner “was an uplifting source to all who knew him. Ever a generous man, Mr. Rowley’s employees revered him for his many kindnesses, particularly to those in need.”

  Funeral services were held on May 14, 1908, at the parlors of the Lyden Company, with burial in Ocean View Cemetery. His survivors were listed as his widow, Simone; his son, Edmund; his daughter, Caroline; and three grandchildren, all of Port Angeles.