The Alpine Kindred (27 page)

Deirdre accompanied us to the door, but Davin remained in the kitchen. “Grandmama talks too much,” Deirdre said, though the wary expression I'd first seen in her hazel eyes had now returned. “That's not like her.”

Vida clasped Deirdre's hand. “Your grandmother and I go way back. You can't imagine the memories we've shared.”

I could, and marveled that Vida kept a straight face. “We appreciate getting to meet Davin,” I put in, then realized that no one had introduced me.

Apparently the oversight had gone unnoticed. “Thanks for coming,” Deirdre said, giving me a small smile. “Thanks for the pie, Mrs. Runkel. We'll have it for dessert.”

“Excellent,” said Vida as we started to descend from
the porch. “My regards to the rest of the family, especially your dear grandparents.”

“Sure,” Deirdre said, standing by the Little Mermaid. “I just wonder how long we can live with them without going nuts.”

Vida turned, the swing coat fluttering around her sturdy calves. “You're going to move in with Thyra and Einar Sr.?”

Deirdre nodded. “We're putting the house up for sale this weekend. Grandmama insists it's silly for her and Grandpapa to rattle around alone in that big place in Sno-homish. I suppose she's right, but it won't be easy.”

“How does your mother feel about that?” Vida asked, her voice a trifle sharp. “She doesn't enjoy being close to neighbors.”

“She'll adjust.” Deirdre spoke without inflection, her eyes resting somewhere beyond us.

“I hope so,” Vida said. “Good luck. Oh, and do give our best to Beau.” We continued along the paved path. I heard the double doors close behind us as Deirdre went back inside the house.

“Ridiculous!” Vida exclaimed when we were back inside the Buick. “Not to mention stupid. Why give up such a lovely place to live with Thyra and Einar Sr.? It doesn't make sense.”

“Maybe Marlys wants to install herself in order to inherit the house for herself and Deirdre,” I offered.

“No, no, no,” Vida asserted. “Marlys wouldn't have had Einar Jr. build her this house away from everybody if she wanted the place on Avenue B. It would make more sense for Deirdre to inherit the Snohomish house, though she doesn't act as if she wants it. Certainly Thyra won't include Mary Jane in her will, and I doubt that she'd leave the family home to Harold and Gladys. As for Beau, it
doesn't matter where he lives—he keeps to his room, so he might as well live in a hotel.”

We were back on the highway, passing Alpine Falls. “I'll bet that Deirdre and Davin won't stay with the senior Rasmussens for long,” I said. “Maybe Deirdre will get her wish and move to the city.”

“The city?” Vida bristled. “Why would she want to do that?”

I never argue the benefits of city living with Vida. She is convinced that a small town—specifically a small town named Alpine—is the only acceptable place to live. Thus I changed the subject.

“You're an infamous liar, Vida,” I said with a laugh. “I've rarely heard you spin such a story. And how did you guess that Davin had been in rehab?”

Vida gave a small shrug. “It wasn't difficult. His uncle Harold has had a drinking problem, Einar Sr. was reputed to enjoy more liquor than was good for him, and I've always wondered if Marlys's reclusiveness was due to Demon Rum. I also suspect that Mr. Nichols—I don't recall his first name—may have been a drinker. Perhaps that's what broke up his marriage with Deirdre. If Einar Jr. thought his grandson was beginning to drink heavily— Davin is only seventeen, but that's no hedge against alcoholism these days—then he may have uprooted him from Deirdre's too protective embrace and shipped him off to a rehab center. It had to be that or drugs or even both, but given the family history, I decided it was probably liquor. Naturally, I could be wrong about which vice Davin had acquired, but the point is, the boy had problems, and wasn't a runaway.”

“He still has problems,” I remarked as we took the turnoff into Alpine. “He acted just a bit strange when you not so subtly inquired as to his whereabouts the night that Einar Jr. was murdered.”

“So he did.” Vida sighed. “Perhaps he was still staying with his great-grandparents. But that's a big house, and you could easily disappear without anyone knowing. It's the kind of place where you can get lost. In many ways,” she added on a somber note.

I really shouldn't have taken the time to go with Vida to the Rasmussens'. We had learned nothing new for our coverage, since Davin's apparent stay in rehab didn't have any viable connection with his grandfather's murder. Indeed, we had ended up with more unanswered questions.

I couldn't dwell on the homicide story. There was the rest of the paper to put together, and less than three hours before Kip MacDuff would start to print. Leo and I finished up the Memorial Day section by three-thirty, Carla and I worked on the front page and the inside, Ginny finished the classifieds, and Vida rechecked her House & Home domain. At five to five, we were ready to roll. After all these years of meeting our deadline, I don't know why I always feel a sense of panic around four-thirty. The paper has always come out on schedule, even when upon rare occasions, we've had a late-breaking item.

“It's a good issue,” I said to Leo after giving Kip the thumbs-up signal. “That is, death isn't usually a good thing, but it does create avid readership.”

Leo, who had read my story on the remains at the warehouse site, grinned. “Dem bones will have everybody in SkyCo yapping their heads off. You got any guesses?”

“None,” I replied. “Vida reviewed all the women— assuming Milo's right, and it is a woman—who had gone missing in the last year, but they were accounted for.”

“She might not be from here,” Leo said, making a haphazard attempt to put his desk in order. “Those freight
riders could be responsible. I hear they almost never get caught. Or someone could have carted a dead body from another town down the pike. If the corpse was naked, then it was either rape or an attempt to disguise the identity. Let's face it, in bigger cities, plenty of people go missing every year. Sometimes their disappearance is never reported.”

I knew that was true. The woman might be a hooker, a runaway, a homeless person. “We don't know that foul play was involved,” I said. “Milo didn't mention the cause of death.”

Leo shrugged. “If you've only got bones, it can be hard to tell. But why dump the body of someone who died a natural death?”

Leo had a point, and in all honesty, I had been assuming that the bones belonged to someone who had been murdered. “I don't blame the Bourgettes for being discouraged,” I said, hoisting my handbag over my shoulder. “I'm not sure I'd want to build a restaurant where a corpse had been found.”

Leo laughed. “Why not? It could be a marketing ploy. They could have a crime theme, maybe Roaring Twenties gangsters. How much violence has there been in Alpine over the years?”

I found Leo's idea distasteful, and told him so. “Besides,” I added, “I think Dan and John are going more for the Fifties diner concept. A simpler lifestyle, innocence, the Eisenhower years.”

“Bull.” Leo lighted a cigarette. “What was innocent about Ike? You don't send hundreds of thousands of troops to be slaughtered at Salerno and Omaha Beach and Bastogne and all those other hellholes of World War Two because you're innocent. My old man got blinded by a grenade at Monte Cassino. You'd think he'd have blamed
the Germans and the Italians, but it was Ike he never forgave. Up until the end, about fifteen years ago, he was a bitter, angry man.”

I'd never heard Leo talk about his parents before. The story touched me, and I temporarily forgot about the Bourgettes and the bones and even Einar Jr. “You want to have a drink?” I asked.

But Leo shook off my suggestion with a wry smile. “Can't, babe. I'm meeting with some of the chamber-of-commerce folks. We've got School's Out, Father's Day, and the Fourth of July issues coming up. Your ad manager never rests. 'Night.” He blew me a kiss and was gone.

So was everybody else. I turned off the lights in the newsroom and headed for my car. Then, seeing Milo's Cherokee Chief still parked down the street in front of his headquarters, I changed directions.

Jack Mullins and Dustin Fong were booking a couple of drunks. I didn't recognize the men, who were dirty, disheveled, and kicking at the curving counter with their worn-out work boots. The taller of the two had long black hair and was badly pockmarked; his drinking buddy wore a black-and-white bandanna around his stringy blond hair and had the potbelly that younger men acquire with too much beer.

Always polite, Dustin peered around the two inebriates. “Ms. Lord, are you looking for Sheriff Dodge? He's in his office.”

I hesitated, but just then the two drunks burst forth with a foulmouthed indictment of the justice system in general, and Jack Mullins's ancestry in particular.

“Actually,” Jack said in his droll manner, “my mother was a quilt maker.”

I slipped inside the counter and headed for Milo's office, pausing to knock on the door. “It's me, Emma,” I said.

Milo told me to come in. Did he sound resigned, or merely tired? As T faced him across his desk I noticed that he certainly looked worn-out. “You're working too hard,” I blurted.

“What else is there to do?” he shot back.

“It's baseball season,” I said brightly. “Watch the Mariners on TV.”

That was the wrong thing to say. Milo and I had spent many hours curled up on the couch, watching baseball. It was the one thing—besides sex—that we both enjoyed with a passion.

“Don't rub it in,” Milo sneered. “I didn't know you were such a bitch.”

I'd sat down, and now held my head in one hand. “Damn it, I didn't mean it that way. I'm sorry.” I removed my hand and looked Milo straight in the eye. “Are we ever going to get past this?”

“That's up to you.” Milo averted my gaze, and stared at one of his NRA posters. His ashtray was overflowing, the air smelled like cigarettes and bad coffee, and his in-basket was about to tip over.

“Okay.” I gave him what was probably a phony smile. “Then I'm past it. Can we talk about something else, like business?”

“Go ahead.” Milo was stony-faced, and still wasn't looking at me.

“Is there anything new on the bones?”

The Sheriff checked his watch. “It's five-eighteen. Your deadline's passed. Can't you wait until next week?”

A sarcastic response was on my lips, but Milo's version of the baiting game was wearing thin. “Technically, I could. But I want to keep on top of things. Also, I was wondering if you'd determined cause of death.”

“The only thing we can rule out is a blow to the head,”
Milo said, finally looking at me. “The skull seemed in good shape, all things considered.”

“There was nothing else at the site, like a spent cartridge, or a knife?”

“Nope. We figure the body was brought there after death.”

I figured the same thing. “So what are you looking at? Strangulation, a stab wound, poison?”

“Suffocation's a possibility.” Milo popped a breath mint in his mouth.

“You're sure it was foul play?”

“Nope. But whoever it was didn't starve to death, or die of a heart attack. Who'd run around Alpine naked?”

Crazy Eights Neffel, our resident loon, came to mind. But Milo had said the bones probably belonged to a woman, and I'd seen Crazy Eights in the past couple of weeks, wearing nothing but a bowler hat and carrying a huge stuffed panda into the local veterinarian's office on Alpine Way.

“How soon before you expect to ID the body?” I asked, still keeping my tone cool and professional.

Milo shrugged. “Who knows? There are no dental records.”

“Not in Alpine, you mean.”

“Not anywhere,” Milo said with a grimace. “The deceased had perfect teeth.”

“Wow.” Bitterly, I thought of all the money I'd shelled out to Dr. Starr and his predecessors over the years. My teeth were very imperfect, but at least I still had them. More or less. “What do you make of that?”

Milo shrugged again. “It happens now and then, though it's usually with young people who've had fluoride at an early age.”

“Was this person young?”

Milo chewed the rest of his breath mint, then reached
for a cigarette. “Forty to sixty is our experts' best guess. No broken bones. While the teeth were in top-notch condition, they were somewhat discolored. Probably a coffee drinker or a smoker, or both.”

I sat back in the chair. “You may never know who it is,” I said after a pause. “You're certain that no one in the county has been reported missing in the last year?”

Milo gave me a baleful look. “Don't you think I'd know?”

“Of course,” I said. “But not everybody gets reported. I was thinking of rumors, or something about somebody that didn't quite mesh. You know—'My wife went to visit her mother in Kansas. She'll be back next year.' “

“Nope.” Milo took a deep drag on his cigarette.

“This doesn't make sense. Have you checked with Snohomish and King counties? What about Chelan and Douglas counties on the other side of the mountains?”

“They've got dozens of missing persons, especially in King County,” Milo replied, referring to the area that included Seattle. He stubbed out his cigarette, spilling ash on his desk, then leaned forward. “The next step is to reconstruct the face from the skull. SnoCo is working on that now. We ought to have something by Friday. That's our last resort.”

I gave Milo a grateful smile. Maybe he was trying, in his weird, awkward, male-type way, to make amends. “Thanks. What about how long the bones have been there? Can they pin that down?”

Milo gave a nod. “Sort of. At least seven months, no more than ten. I figure eight.” The hazel eyes didn't blink as he locked his gaze with mine.

I counted backward. “October,” I said. “When the warehouse burned down.”

“That's right.” The Sheriff leaned back in his chair. “We thought it was kids with leftover fireworks, but that
was a guess because a bunch of our local dropouts had been caught at the site twice after the Fourth of July, trying to stir up trouble. We could never prove it, so we didn't charge them. Now I figure it was the killer, disposing of the body.”

“Is this for publication?” I asked, inwardly cursing Milo and wondering if it was too late to stop the presses.