Read Aunt Dimity Goes West Online
Authors: Nancy Atherton
First Street . . .”
“. . . and old Rufe swears it was on Third,” said Lou. “But we’ll work it out.We surely do . . .”
“. . . appreciate the loan,” finished Rufe.
“Oh . . . my . . . Lord,” I breathed.
Despite my previous encounters with Bluebird’s
army of doppelgangers, I was dizzied by déjà vu. Rufe
and Lou Zimmer appeared to be the exact male equiv-
alents of the ancient, identical Pym sisters, who lived
up the road from me in Finch. They even talked in
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the same ping-ponging fashion. If I hadn’t been clinging to Toby’s arm, I would have keeled over from the shock.
Rufe and Lou were accompanied by a slender,
middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair and
a sun-burnished face. She was dressed for the warm
weather in a rose-colored linen skirt, a sleeveless
white silk blouse, and extremely sensible shoes. Al-
though she had the refined, slightly pedantic manner
of an old-fashioned schoolmistress, I assumed that she
was Rose Blanding, the minister’s wife.
“Please, take your time,” she urged the brothers.
“There’s no need to bring the maps back quickly. I
know you’ll take good care of them.” She glanced up,
saw me and Toby through the screen door, and smiled
broadly. “Why, look, boys, I have more visitors.”
“It’s young Tobe!” Rufe exclaimed.
Identical smiles lit the Zimmer brothers’ faces as
Mrs. Blanding ushered them out onto the porch. They
greeted Toby fondly, asked after his family, and told him he’d grown at least two inches since they’d last seen
him.Toby then conducted a round of introductions that
turned out to be for my benefit rather than theirs. The
Zimmers and Mrs. Blanding already knew who I was,
where I was staying, and with whom.
“Rufus and Louis are Bluebird’s oldest citizens,”
Mrs. Blanding informed me, beaming at the two elderly
men. “Though, technically, Rufe is older than Lou by
two minutes. Their birth certificates are on display at
the historical society.”
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Rufe nodded. “Some people think we founded the
town . . .”
“. . . but we’re not
that
old,” said Lou.
The brothers chuckled wheezily, then turned to
Toby.
“So, tell us, Tobe,” said Rufe, “have you had any
trouble . . .”
“. . . up at the Auerbach place?” Lou asked.
“None,” Toby declared, with a touch of impatience.
“Everyone’s healthy, happy, and having a great time.”
“Hope your luck holds.” Rufe glanced down at the
briefcase. “Well, we’ll get out of your way. We got us
some map-reading to do. Mighty pleased to meet you,
Lori. Hope to meet your boys . . .”
“. . . one of these days,” said Lou. “
And
their pretty nanny.”
The Zimmer brothers winked simultaneously,
placed their boaters on their heads at identical angles, and tottered down the stairs. I shook my head to clear
it, but it didn’t help because Rose Blanding reminded
me so forcibly of Lilian Bunting, who was married to
the vicar of St. George’s Church in Finch. In this in-
stance, however, the resemblance made a certain sort
of sense to me. The wives of vicars and ministers
probably had a lot in common, I reasoned, no matter
where they lived.
“Will they get home all right, Mrs. Blanding?” I
asked, observing the brothers’ unsteady progress along
the lakeside path.
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131
“They’ll be fine,” she assured me. “Rufe and Lou
may look frail, but they’re as tough as old axe handles.”
“Of course they are,” I murmured. “Just like the
Pyms.”
“If I’m to call you Lori,” she went on, “you must
call me Rose. Please, leave your things in the hall and
come into the front parlor. Can I get you a bite to eat
or a cold drink? It looks as though you hiked down
from the Aerie.”
We left our packs and packages on a table in the
entrance hall and followed Rose into a high-ceilinged,
spacious room overlooking Lake Matula. While Toby
refused her offer of refreshments, explaining that
we’d had lunch at the cafe, I took in the front parlor.
There was a lot to take in. The house’s demurely
painted exterior concealed an interior that paid unre-
strained tribute to grand Victorian style. The tables
were made of heavily carved walnut, the chairs and so-
fas were upholstered in lush fabrics, and the walls were covered in a flocked wallpaper that imitated silk bro-cade. Layers of drapes drawn back by tasseled cords
hung at the tall windows, and a large rug with a swirling floral pattern covered the polished hardwood floor.
Dainty whatnot shelves displayed a splendid collec-
tion of Victoriana: beaded reticules, kid leather baby
shoes, embroidered gloves, tiny spectacles, cobalt-blue
medicine bottles, impossibly elaborate Valentine’s Day
cards, and feathered fans.A stereopticon sat on a small, marble-topped table near the love seat in the bay win-
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dow and a voluminous silk paisley shawl had been
draped over the baby grand piano.Toby and I sat on the
fringed, bottle-green velvet sofa, and Rose sat oppo-
site us on a button-backed easy chair with low arms
and braided trimming.
“You have a lovely home,” I said, as soon as we were
seated.
“Do you like it?” Rose asked, as her gaze made
a leisurely circuit around the room. “It was once a
bordello.”
“A . . . a
bordello
?” I gaped at her in astonishment.
“Next door to a
church
?”
“Not originally, but the situation did occur.” Rose
leaned back in the easy chair and shrugged noncha-
lantly. “It could hardly be avoided. At one time houses
of prostitution outnumbered schools and churches in
Bluebird by a factor of twenty to one.”
My eyebrows shot up. “That’s a lot of . . . enter-
tainment . . . for such a small community.”
“Bluebird wasn’t small back then,” said Rose. “Nearly
eleven thousand people lived in the valley in 1865, and
the vast majority of them—” She stopped short and
tilted her head toward Toby. “Forgive me,Toby, I cast no aspersions on your noble sex, but the truth remains that the vast majority of the early residents were men. I’m
sure there were some who didn’t require such
entertainment,
as you so delicately put it, Lori, but evidently many of them did.”
“Evidently,” I said, smiling wryly.
“So many of them were single, you see,” Rose con-
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133
tinued, “or acted as if they were. Gold fever struck of-
fice workers, salesmen, farmers, and factory workers
not only because it offered them a chance to get rich
quickly, but also because it offered them a chance to
escape the restrictive lives they’d led back East—to
throw off their traces and kick up their heels.”
“Hence, the multitude of bordellos,” I put in.
“And drinking establishments and gambling hells.
But respectable women came to Bluebird, eventually,
and tamed some of its wilder aspects.” Rose paused,
lowered her eyes, and smiled self-consciously. “Forgive
me. I’m lecturing. It’s an occupational hazard when
one is both preacher’s wife
and
president of a historical society.”
“Don’t stop,” I said. “It’s fascinating. I had no idea
that Bluebird used to be a metropolis.”
Rose seemed only too pleased to carry on. “From
1865 to 1870, Bluebird’s population doubled. Butchers,
barbers, bakers, blacksmiths—every type of tradesman
was needed to serve the mines and the miners, and many
of the tradesmen brought their families with them.”
“Families that needed schools and churches,” I said,
nodding.
“And much more,” said Rose. “In its heyday, Blue-
bird had an opera house, a theater, a newspaper, two
hotels, five boarding houses, seven law offices, four
debating societies, countless gambling hells, saloons,
and brothels, and no fewer than seven churches. I’d
have to consult a reference book to give you the exact
number of shops that once lined Bluebird’s streets,
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but you could find almost anything here that you
could find in Denver. Passenger trains stopped here
seven times a day.”
I gazed at her incredulously. “What happened? Not
that Bluebird isn’t lovely as it is,” I added hastily, “but it’s not exactly
metropolitan.
”
“Boom and bust,” Rose replied succinctly. “The
price of silver plummeted in 1893, when the country
went on the gold standard.The silver claims dried up,
the miners moved on to other jobs, and businesses
failed. Bluebird shrank. By 1930, there were fewer
than a thousand people living in the Vulgamore Valley.
The state authorities selected the valley as a good
place to build a reservoir partly because there were so
few people left to displace.”
“Hold on a minute,” I said, glancing toward the bay
window. “Are you telling me that the town of Blue-
bird used to be where Lake Matula is now?”
“Yes,” Rose said brightly, “and I can prove it.Would
you like to see a photograph of Bluebird at the height
of its prosperity?”
“Very much,” I said.
Rose left the front parlor and returned a moment
later carrying a framed, oblong, sepia-toned photo-
graph that was at least three feet in length. Toby and I made room for her to sit between us and she propped
the photograph on her lap for us to see.
“It’s a composite photograph,” she explained, “a col-
lage made in 1888 by a photographer named Mervyn
Blount. Mr. Blount came to the valley in the early days
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135
to document the prospectors’ lives, and stayed on to
photograph the burgeoning town. He was quite the
outdoorsman. He took these photos from a vantage
point halfway up Ruley’s Peak, and that’s a difficult
mountain to climb.”
I peered curiously at the panoramic view Mervyn
Blount had pieced together from separate photographs.
The Vulgamore Valley was scarcely recognizable. Build-
ings of all shapes and sizes jostled for space along streets that ran parallel to a narrow stream—“Bluebird Creek,”
Rose informed me—at the very bottom of the valley.
Railroad tracks emerged from the serpentine canyon
we’d passed through on the way from Denver to Blue-
bird, and great swathes of forest were missing from the
surrounding slopes.
“Where are the trees?” I asked in dismay.
“Propping up mine shafts, heating stoves, housing
machinery and people,” Rose replied matter-of-factly.
“Mining was not kind to the environment in those
days. It still isn’t.” She pointed to a blurred complex of wooden buildings halfway up the northern wall of the
valley. “The Lord Stuart Mine stayed open a bit longer
than the silver mines because it produced gold, but
the gold vein played out, as gold veins always do, and
it closed in 1896.”
“And forty years later, they built the reservoir and
drowned the town,” I said sadly.
“There wasn’t much of a town left by the time they
flooded the valley.” Rose’s fingers drifted from left to right over the photograph. “Long before the reservoir
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was built, a series of flash floods had driven the re-
maining townspeople to higher ground at the valley’s
western end.They’d already salvaged what they could
from the ruins of the old town.”
“Danny Auerbach followed their example,” I com-
mented. “He reused timber from the old mine buildings
when he built the Aerie.”
“Waste not, want not.” Rose pointed to the pho-
tograph. “The parsonage was built where it now stands,
but Good Shepherd’s loyal congregation dismantled the
church in 1934, a year before construction began on
the reservoir, and moved it to its present location.”
“Next door to a bordello?” I said questioningly.
Rose laughed. “My house was used as a bordello
for only a few years, after which it was occupied by a
series of fine, upstanding families. Still, my husband
and I had to do a great deal of restoration work on it
when we came to Bluebird, thirty-five years ago. For-
tunately, the town was in the midst of a resurgence
then, thanks to the outdoor adventure trade.We mine
tourists now, instead of gold and silver.” She swiveled
her head from side to side. “Iced tea, anyone? Please
say yes. I’ve talked myself dry!”
“Iced tea sounds great,” said Toby, “but let me carry
the photograph for you.”
After he and Rose had left the room, I walked over
to the bay window to gaze at the reservoir. I tried to
superimpose Mervyn Blount’s sepia-toned image of the
bustling town onto Lake Matula, but I couldn’t man-
age it. It was almost impossible for me to imagine
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clouds of smoke fouling the crystalline sky, train whis-
tles blotting out birdsong, a vigorous community filling the Vulgamore Valley from end to end.