The Alpine Escape

by Mary Daheim

  I settled for another Pepsi. It crossed my mind that I could replace Ed with Ginny on a full-time basis. But while Ginny was eager and hardworking, she was too young and inexperienced. The older, conservative business men and women of Skykomish County wouldn’t be keen on a twenty-three-year-old advertising manager. Nor did I know if Ginny wanted the job. She seemed perfectly happy running the front office and occasionally pitching in with the ad side.

  The other nagging question was why Ed had quit in the first place. His wife, Shirley, worked part-time at St. Mildred’s Parochial School as a teacher’s helper. I didn’t know if she got paid for her efforts. The Bronskys had five children, three requiring monthly payments at St. Mildred’s and one freeloading in the public high school. Maybe Shirley was reimbursed with tuition credits. Whatever the situation, Ed and Shirley still had to live. I was mystified by Ed’s sudden resignation. Ginny had promised to have Vida call as soon as she returned from Old Mill Park.

  Though Paul sympathized with my plight over the Jag, he seemed pleased that I was staying on. When he arrived home from work around four, Jackie couldn’t wait to tell him about what we’d deduced from our newly acquired information. I listened with half an ear while she rattled on. Paul’s reaction was not unlike my own—he found our theory plausible but not conclusive.

  “What about Simone?” he asked, fondling a can of cold beer he’d managed to snatch out of the fridge before Jackie hauled him off to the den. “Even if we think that’s Carrie down in the basement and that Jimmy Malone killed her, what happened to Cornelius’s rich widow?”

  That line of inquiry seemed as cold as Paul’s beer. “We may never know,” I said. “I still wish we’d found Carrie’s rings down there.”

  Next to me, Jackie leaped off the sofa. “The Bullards! I forgot to call them back!”

  I’d forgotten who the Bullards were altogether. I started to ask, then recalled that they were the Melchers’ next-door neighbors. Jackie raced off to get the cordless phone.

  Paul was stacking more magazines and old newspapers. “I really should put these in the recycling bin. Jackie always forgets.” He gave me a sheepish smile.

  For a few minutes we spoke of matters other than murder. I asked Paul if there was any truth to the rumor that ITT Rayonier might close its local plant. He admitted to being edgy about the company’s future in the area but confided that his dream was to set up his own consulting engineer’s business. If his job disappeared down the road, he and Jackie would stay in Port Angeles. A free house was too good to pass up.

  “You could sell it,” I pointed out. “Once you’ve got it fixed up, it’ll be worth quite a bit of money.”

  Paul presented me with his most earnest face. “We like it here. We’re out of the big-city rat race. It’ll be a great place to raise a family. The house is wonderful, really. Even with the skeleton.”

  I admired Paul’s practical approach. I was saying so when Jackie returned to the den carrying her purse. “Let’s go. Flint Bullard’s in the nursing home by the college. I called Mike again and he’ll meet us there.”

  “Whoa!” Paul raised his hands. “I don’t do nursing homes. They depress me. And who’s Flint Bullard?”

  Jackie stamped her foot. “Mr. Bullard’s father. He’s ninety-eight and he used to be the sheriff. Or something like that. Come on, Mike will be waiting.”

  But Paul was obstinate. He’d worked all day; he needed to unwind; he had to shower before we went to dinner; he couldn’t stand the way nursing homes smelled. At last, Jackie and I started off by ourselves. We got as far as the door when Vida called.

  “Ed!” she shrieked into the phone. “Ed’s a ninny! I’ve always said so!”

  “Yes,” I agreed, trying to keep calm, “you’re right, but why did he quit?”

  Vida made some grumbling noises, then settled into her response. “I told you he had an appointment Monday afternoon. It turns out it was with an attorney in the Doukas firm, that new fellow, Sibley. They’ve expanded, you know. We did a small story last May. Two new attorneys, Sibley and a woman named Foxx. Two x’es.”

  “I remember,” I interrupted, waiting for Vida to stop refreshing my memory and get to the point. “What about Ed? Remember Ed?”

  “Of course I remember Ed! Though I’d like to forget.” Vida was being testy again. “As I was saying before you broke in, Ed had a four o’clock appointment in the Clemans Building with this Sibley. He—Ed, not Sibley—was notified that his aunt Hilda—Ed’s aunt, not Sibley’s—had died in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and left him two million dollars! In hog stock! Imagine! It figures, the hog part! Ed looks like such a pig! So does Shirley! I’m wild!”

  I leaned on the kitchen counter, as dismayed as Vida. Or almost. “Two million. My word!” I could hear Vida panting at the other end of the line. “So Ed took early retirement?”

  Vida snorted. “If you can call it that. The man’s not yet fifty. Besides, as far as I’m concerned, except for his brief flurry of activity these past few weeks, Ed retired years ago.”

  There was some truth to Vida’s allegations. I looked up to see Jackie leaning against the back door, an impatient expression on her face. “So that’s why Ed was humming?”

  “It certainly was,” Vida replied. “I don’t know why he didn’t tell me straight off. I don’t know why I didn’t hear about it sooner. Three days, and Ed has to tell me himself! My niece Stacey is seeing the young man who drives the Federal Express truck that makes deliveries at the law office. She’s a dud!” Vida’s scorn for her niece almost curdled my ear.

  “Well,” I said, trying to ignore Jackie’s mounting impatience, “we need a new ad manager. I’ll call the Washington Newspaper Association first thing tomorrow and see if they have anyone looking for a job.”

  Vida’s tone turned conspiratorial. “Where are you, Emma? All Ginny gave me was this phone number with a Port Angeles prefix. Are you in a love nest?”

  I laughed. “No, Vida, I’m staying with friends while my car gets fixed. I’ll explain it all when I get back, which will probably be tomorrow. I know I was supposed to come home tonight, but there’ve been some complications, mainly due to the Jag. It broke.”

  “Oh.” Vida turned vague. She knew little about cars and cared less. Her big white Buick owed its reliability to Cal Vickers’s Texaco station. “I suppose you’ve wasted your money. I hope you haven’t wasted your time, too.”

  This wasn’t the moment to contradict Vida. Jackie was collapsing in the doorway, her eyes rolled back and her figure limp. Either her patience was at the end of its tether or she was fainting. Knowing Jackie, I suspected the former.

  “I’ve got to run, Vida,” I said, making an encouraging motion to Jackie. I had a final question for my House & Home editor. “Did Crazy Eights come down from the tree?”

  “No,” Vida retorted. “He won’t until Milo gets a warrant for the bear.”

  I laughed, somewhat feebly. “I’ll see you tomorrow. I hope. Give Milo my love.”

  “I certainly will not. You don’t mean it. And if you do,” Vida went on with fire in her voice, “you haven’t been thinking properly, if at all. You were supposed to go to the ocean and watch the waves roll in. It sounds as if you’ve been gallivanting around the peninsula. You’d better spend the evening in solitude and do some soul-searching. Otherwise, you’ve wasted your days off and I’ve wasted my breath.”

  My smile was rueful as I replaced the phone. The Alpine Advocate had suffered in my absence and would require a large dose of editorial medicine upon my return. But Vida sounded like herself. Maybe the world wasn’t coming to an end after all.

  The receptionist at the nursing home informed us that Mike Randall had left a message. He was sorry, but he’d gotten tied up in an emergency faculty meeting. If he finished before five, he’d show up in Flint Bullard’s room; if not, he’d meet us at Downriggers.

  The corridor of the nursing home was lined with frail residents leaning on walkers. Wrinkled faces with vacant ex
pressions stared up at us from wheelchairs. A few of the oldsters offered vague, hopeful smiles. I smiled back. On the rare occasions when I visit nursing homes, I always vow I’ll come back soon. But I never do. I go away and close the door, shutting out the old folks who are left behind, waiting to die. I forget about them, like everybody else, including their children. They remind me of my future, and they shove mortality in my face.

  Flint Bullard was propped up in a narrow bed under an artificial light that mocked the summer sunshine. Unlike the others, he didn’t seem to welcome company. His watery eyes were suspicious as Jackie breezed over to his bed. I envisioned her wringing his hand and sending him into paroxysms of arthritic pain. But for once she reined in her enthusiasm and merely introduced us.

  “You see,” she said, pulling up a chair and sitting down, “Ms. Lord and I are researching the house that my husband inherited. It’s next door to where you used to live.”

  Relieved that Jackie was telling the truth for once, more or less, I borrowed the visitor’s chair from the next bed. There was no occupant at present, though a name tag reading “Hansen, George” was pinned on the wall. There was also a schedule, showing that Mr. Hansen was due in occupational therapy from four-thirty to five-thirty.

  “The Rowley house,” growled Flint Bullard. His deep bass voice belied his thin frame. His feet reached almost to the end of the bed, and despite the sunken cheeks and cavernous chest, I felt that he had once been a hulk of a man. “Then the Melchers. You’re one of ’em, huh?” He didn’t seem to approve.

  Jackie wasn’t discouraged. “Do you remember any of them? The early-day Rowleys and Melchers, I mean.”

  Swiftly, I calculated Flint Bullard’s age in terms of Cornelius Rowley and his family. If Flint was ninety-eight, he’d been born in 1897. He would have been ten or eleven when Cornelius died, when the Malones allegedly left Port Angeles, and when Simone disappeared.

  “Cornelius was a big shot,” Flint declared with disgust. “His wife was a looker, though. But snooty. I don’t know why—she couldn’t even speak English so good. Hey,” he said, gesturing at a water carafe on the nightstand, “hand me that thing. Just stick a straw in it.”

  Jackie complied, and Flint Bullard slurped up what seemed like a large amount of water. “The livery stable was in back of the house, up above, on the bluff. Still there, I guess, falling down. Good view property, too. Don’t know why somebody doesn’t buy it up and build a couple of houses. Make a mint.” Flint handed the carafe back to Jackie.

  “They probably would,” Jackie said agreeably. “Now when you lived next door …”

  Flint was shaking his head. “It wasn’t the same house. Our first one burned down back in Oh-eight. We rebuilt, bigger, better. I moved out in 1917 to get married. I was working for the sheriff then, but thought I’d join the army and go over to fight the Huns. Never did. Had enough excitement right here to keep me down on the farm, as they used to say. You hear of the big windstorm of Twenty-one?”

  Jackie started to shake her head, but Flint ran right over her. “Blew down five billion board-feet of overripe timber in Clallam and Jefferson Counties. Hell of a mess. There were big fights between the loggers trying to haul that blow-down out of the woods.” He gave me a hard-eyed look, and I wondered if that was how he’d gotten to be known as Flint. “You say you’re from Alpine? We had some of those numskulls come all the way over to the peninsula trying to horn in on the deal. Sonsabitches. They ran like Billy-Be-Damned when I waved my forty-five at ’em.”

  “Actually,” I began in a mild voice, “we were more interested in the years before the war.…”

  Flint was chuckling. “Same year that the Zellerbachs came to town. Decent people, in their way. Tom Aldwell was trying to sell that parcel of land where Ediz Hook starts. Good man, Tom. Not a blowhard like Rowley and some of the rest. The Zellerbachs weren’t sure there was enough good timber to make it worth their while to build a mill. Some jackasses from Snohomish barged in and almost queered the deal. But the mill got built, and it was here for a long time. Now we got the Japs there. What’s it called? Dish Chow? Dog Show? To hell with them!” Again his tone conveyed disgust.

  The impatience that Jackie had displayed before we left the house resurfaced. “Just a minute, Mr. Bullard. We didn’t come here to listen to you spout off about local history. No offense, but we want to find out about the Rowleys and the Melchers.”

  Flint Bullard bristled. He wagged a gnarled finger at Jackie. “You’re missing all the good stuff. Bank robbers. Rumrunners. Bodies in Lake Crescent. You know it’s bottomless? Sooner or later everything, including the stiffs, rises to the top.”

  “Yes,” Jackie replied briskly. “All that’s fascinating. But it doesn’t help Paul and me with the history of our house. Tell us about Jimmy Malone.”

  Flint Bullard frowned, then his murky eyes lit up. “Smooth-Bore Malone? Hell of a guy. Those old-time loggers were quite a crew. Weather never bothered ’em. Didn’t know pain. And how they could eat! And drink! Bull Sling Bill, Box Car Pete, Seattle Red, Haywire Tom Newton. Now those were real men.” After taking another drink, Flint fell back against the pillow, a hand on his chest.

  I had been quiet for quite a while. I decided it was time to jump-start this seemingly unproductive interview. “Was Smooth-Bore Malone crazy about the Rowley girl?” I inquired, trying to speak Flint’s language.

  He tipped his head to one side. “Oh—I suppose so. Crazy about her daddy’s money, anyway. Jimmy’d come a-courting in his Sunday best, which wasn’t much. I saw him one time show up in his logging boots and tin pants. We—my pals and I—would call him Paddy and serenade him when he’d show up to call on Miss Carrie. We’d sing ‘My Wild Irish Nose.’ It was a takeoff. You know, a joke. Some of the bigger kids thought it up.”

  “Right.” I forced a smile. “That’s cute. How did Cornelius feel about Jimmy wooing his daughter?”

  “Hell if I know.” Flint Bullard was looking up at the big clock on the opposite wall. “It’s almost five. They’ll be bringing supper around pretty quick. You two almost finished?”

  Jackie and I exchanged quick glances. “Minnie Burke,” Jackie said. “Do you remember her?”

  Flint made a face. “The parlormaid? Cook? No … she was a what-dya-call-it. Nurserymaid? She watched the Malone kids. Or was she the hoity-toity missus’s lady’s maid? I forget.”

  Jackie proffered more water. “Was Minnie pretty?”

  Flint waved the carafe away. He was growing restless and seemed to have his gaze fixed on the doorway. “Pretty? Yeah, pretty enough. Saw her knickers once. Red-gold curls and an itty-bitty waist.” A dreamy expression crossed Flint’s seamed face. “Or was her hair dark red? I think she got fat. Most women did, in those days. My wife was six axe-handles across before she was forty.”

  Jackie was beginning to twitch, too. “What happened to her?”

  “My wife? Got cancer and died twenty years ago. I tried to teach myself to cook, but it wasn’t any good. I ate out all the time till I came to this godforsaken place.” Flint’s gaunt features were etched with aggravation.

  Jackie gritted her teeth before she spoke. “I meant Minnie Burke. You must have been around when she … went away.”

  The watery eyes glared at Jackie. “She went away? Probably did. I don’t recall. After the fire we moved over to Ennis Creek while the new place was being built. When we got back, everything had changed.”

  I inched forward on my chair. “Everything? Like what?”

  Flint gave an indifferent shrug. His face was masked with boredom. “What I said. Old Cornelius was dead, Smooth-Bore and his family had moved, the Frenchie was gone, too. I suppose Minnie Burke went with ’em. No real loss—she was another foreigner you couldn’t understand half the time. The only ones left were Eddie Rowley and that old bat he married. And her nambypamby son. Eddie was all right, but I steered clear of the rest of ’em. The old girl—Lena was her name, but you had to call her Mrs. Rowley. Everybody h
ad to kowtow to that one. She was always ranting and raving about this cause or that. I’ll say one thing for her, she pitched in when we put through the port bond issue back in Twenty-five. Old Lena helped close down all the businesses that day to man the polls and get out the vote. There was a few that didn’t like it, but we gave notice that their opinion wasn’t real popular.” Jerkily, Flint sat up. His thin fingers clawed at the sheets. “Where’s that grub? They’re late.”

  Giving Jackie a discreet nod, I stood up. But I had one last question for Flint Bullard. “When was the fire that burned down your first house?”

  The old man answered promptly. “September sixth, 1908. We moved back in the day before Christmas, same year. As fires go, it wasn’t much, just enough to put us out of house and home. Now back in Oh-seven, there was one hell of a forest fire in the Sol Due Valley.…”

  We thanked Flint Bullard for his time and trouble. He didn’t say that we were welcome. With a querulous gesture he muttered something about a “bunch of bullshit. Nobody wants to hear about the important stuff …”

  Eager to escape, I almost fell over the tiny figure leaning on a metal cane. In the process of righting the little old woman, Jackie ran into me. We staggered and struggled, gaining the attention of two elderly men and a nurse’s aide.

  I apologized, but the old lady didn’t seem perturbed. “I was listening in. Why not?” she demanded in a wispy, lisping voice. “What else is there to do in this place except make scrapbooks and play bingo? I’ve never been one for worthless pastimes.”

  “It’s fine,” I said hastily. I couldn’t say much else, being an eavesdropper by profession.

  “He’s such a windbag,” the old lady declared. The wispiness of her voice didn’t detract from the accusation. “I’m Clara Haines.” She put out a birdlike hand.

  The cart containing the supper trays was moving toward us. Jackie and I stepped aside. Clara didn’t budge. “I’ve known Flint since he was knee-high to a grasshopper,” she went on as the orderly rerouted his cart. “He’s a conceited bully. What did you want to know about Minnie Burke?”