The Alpine Nemesis (3 page)

Maybe not.

“The younger generation,” Janet said scornfully. “She'll be out for at least a week. Between her and Al's new assistant, Dan Peebles, I should quit at Sky Travel and work at the mortuary full time. The only problem is, I get free trips at the travel agency. At the funeral home, people go, but they don't come back. Until this morning, they haven't even been going. It's all these hardy Scandinavians—they live forever.”

Janet had found the Conleys' number, and two minutes later I was speaking to Mrs. Conley. She seemed a bit confused about who I was and why I was calling, but finally she figured it out.

“It's a terrible thing, not knowing,” Mrs. Conley declared. “My husband and I should have come out when we learned that Brian was missing. But we kept waiting and hoping…” Her voice trailed away. I felt like a ghoul, knowing that I had upset her, aware that I had made dozens of such calls to bereaved relatives and friends. I hated this part of the job, but it was necessary.

I spoke up in an attempt to rescue her from the awkward moment. “A friend reported him missing, as I recall.”

“Yes.” There was an audible sniff at the other end of the line. “Gina, his girlfriend. We met her once, they came to visit last summer. She's very sweet. But by the time she notified the authorities, Brian had been gone overnight. Still, we thought maybe he'd just been hurt or gotten lost or …” Again Mrs. Conley's voice faded.

“Brian was alone, as I recall,” I said, racing to the rescue one more time.

“Yes.” Another sniff. “I guess so. Though we'd spoken with him a few days earlier, and I thought he mentioned something about going with a friend. But Gina wasn't sure, so maybe he changed his mind. Oh, Ms. Lord, you can't imagine what it's like to lose a son!”

I could, but I didn't want to. “I have a son about the same age as Brian,” I said. “He's my only child. Do you have other children?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Conley said, her voice somewhat stronger. “Two girls and two boys besides Brian. They're a comfort, but they can't make up for losing him. He was the baby of the family, and very special. Brian was such a passionate young man, always caught up in this cause and that. Do you think we're foolish to want to conduct some sort of service on that mountain where he was lost?”

“No,” I answered slowly. “If it would help you deal with your loss, it isn't foolishness.”

“That's so,” Mrs. Conley said vaguely. “You have a priest in Alpine?”

“Yes, Father Dennis Kelly,” I said. “He's very spiritual, very intelligent.” And his sermons are about as inspiring as legal notices. “Did you plan to come out soon?”

Mrs. Conley said that she and her husband hadn't made up their minds, they'd just come up with the idea of a mountainside service a couple of days ago. Their pastor in Penn Yan had celebrated a memorial Mass just two weeks earlier. Maybe they shouldn't spend the money on travel. Maybe they really were being foolish. Maybe Brian wasn't dead after all.

I pounced on that remark. “What do you mean?” Besides the hope of the hopeless, I thought.

Mrs. Conley didn't respond right away. When she did, her voice had taken on a wary note. “You never know. About disappearances, I mean.” She began speaking more
Mary Daheim

rapidly. “Amnesia, for instance. Someone here in Penn Yan had amnesia and went missing for over two years. His son-in-law ran into him at a service station in Albany where he was pumping gas. Imagine—the poor man was an attorney with a very profitable practice.”

I made encouraging noises, then politely extricated myself from the conversation. There was no news here, and even if the Conleys did come to Alpine, the story wouldn't rate more than four inches. The missing snow-boarder was a dead end.

How could I have been so wrong?

W
HEN
I
ARRIVED
at my little log house, I was still lacking a decent front-page story. I'd spent two hours on the phone, checking with the city, county, state, and federal agencies to see if any of them had generated a smidgen of local news other than toilets. They hadn't. Fiscal reports, that was the thing, they said, coming July first. Wow.

The mail was all catalogs and circulars and a couple of bills. There were no messages on the answering machine. I wished I were back in St. Paul with Adam. I'd visited him in February and we'd spent some wonderful hours together, walking the snow-covered grounds of the seminary where he was studying to be a priest. Leaving winter behind on the return trip, I took a detour to Arizona to see my brother, Ben. I enjoyed the sun in Tuba City for two days before I started griping about the heat. My brother had laughed at me. At his mission church in Mississippi and now tending his flock in Arizona, he had grown accustomed to hot weather, both humid and dry. I preferred the cold damp of Alpine. Ben thought I was nuts.

Then Tom Cavanaugh showed up the week before Easter. He'd been promising to come for over a year, and I'd almost given up on him. It wouldn't have been the first time that the father of my son had broken a promise. Our entire off-and-on-again relationship of almost thirty years had been full of them.

But he finally arrived, and he spent over a week with me in the log house that now felt empty and desolate. Ironically, I'd used up most of my vacation time visiting Ben and Adam. I suppose that, deep down, I didn't believe Tom would ever come to Alpine. But he had, and he'd talked of marriage. His mentally unbalanced wife, Sandra, had been dead for over three years, and his daughter, who—like me—had given birth to a child out of wedlock, was finally capable of taking care of the baby and herself. It helped, of course, that Tom could afford a nanny, a maid, a gardener, and for all I knew a clutch of liveried footmen in his San Francisco mansion.

So now I was pondering the possibility of finally marrying The Love of My Life. Vida was all for it. She became unwontedly starry-eyed whenever I mentioned Tom—or Tommy, as she insisted on calling him. Vida hadn't carried the scenario through to its logical conclusion: I'd have to sell the
Advocate
and move to San Francisco. It was not a prospect that thrilled me, though that of being Tom's wife did.

Thus, I poured a hefty bourbon and water—and pondered. For a month now, pondering had taken up most of my spare time. Tom had even offered to buy the
Advocate
from me and add it to his string of small dailies and weeklies. But I hated abandoning the paper; maybe I hated more the idea of surrendering my hard-won independence.

Half an hour later, I was pondering what to cook for dinner. Nothing that I had on hand appealed to me. Risking frostbite, I reached far back into the freezer compartment, hoping to find some hidden shrimp. Curry seemed tempting, and Alpine was short of ethnic restaurants.

There was no shrimp, so I took out a chicken breast and was defrosting it in the microwave when I heard a series of distant cracking sounds. One, two. I hesitated with my finger on the timer and listened again. Sometimes the
power lines that marched down through the Skykomish River valley made that kind of sound. Three, four. The noise was muffled. I waited for a full minute, but all was quiet. My faint hope dwindled; apparently, nothing had exploded to give me a lead story.

I was frying the chicken when I heard a far-off siren. Experience has taught me to differentiate among the various emergency vehicles. This was Milo Dodge's British police horn, a rare bit of whimsy for the usually practical sheriff. A little over a year ago, he had found the item in a catalog and ordered it through Harvey's Hardware and Sporting Goods. I guess he wanted to pretend he worked for Scotland Yard. The siren was used on his private vehicle, a red Grand Cherokee Chief. Now my interest was piqued. What had brought the sheriff out after his official shift was over?

I dialed Vida's number. “Did you hear those noises a few minutes ago?” I asked.

“No,” Vida replied. “Roger has the TV on. It's a trifle loud.”

Roger was Vida's odious grandson. His parents had taken an off-season vacation trip to Hawaii and he was staying with Vida. Roger was sixteen, and learning to drive. I was certain that he'd soon replace Durwood Parker as Alpine's worst menace behind the wheel.

“Did you hear Milo's siren?” I inquired further.

“No.” Vida sounded vexed. “Roger, dear, could you lower the volume just a teensy bit?” she asked, away from the phone. There was a pause. The volume remained at full decibel. “Roger? Roger!”

At last the little creep responded, though not without complaint. Vida spoke again into the receiver. “What is it? I didn't hear anything.”

“I'm not sure,” I replied. “I thought it came from over your way.”

“I'm sorry,” Vida said. “I've no idea. Should I call Billy?”

Bill Blatt was Vida's nephew and one of Milo's deputies. “Yes, if you get a chance. It may have been the power lines. You know how they snap sometimes.”

“Yes, that could be it,” Vida agreed, “though it usually happens in the winter cold. I must dash, Emma. I'm making Roger some lovely pudding.”

The description was dubious, I thought. Vida's collection of House and Home-page recipes over the years overflowed from the bottom drawer of her desk. They were, as is said, enough to choke a horse—which is also an apt description of her cooking. But pudding from a box might not be ruined: I envisioned a huge vat of it, with Roger plunged facedown, only his feet showing above the creamy chocolate rim.

For once, Vida had proved a washout as the source of all knowledge. I still wondered what Milo was up to. The siren had definitely been off to the east, no doubt starting from the sheriff's home in the Icicle Creek development. After dinner, I'd call him to see if there was any news, even the slightest of stories to put on page one.

It was exactly seven o'clock when I finished my meager dinner and dialed the sheriff's number. He answered on the fourth ring, out of breath.

“Dodge here,” he said, sounding official.

“Lord here,” I said. “Were you running to catch the phone or chasing a perp?”

“I was in the can,” Milo growled. “Why does the phone always ring when I'm in the can?”

I chuckled, not because I was amused, but because after more than two long, awkward years, the sheriff and I seemed to have picked up the pieces of our friendship. After our breakup, his rebound romance with the much younger Jeannie Clay hadn't panned out. Milo had re-

cently taken up with a widow, Tara Peebles, the mother of Al Driggers's new assistant. Tara was much closer to the sheriff's age, and a relative newcomer to Alpine. Milo hadn't seemed to resent Tom's visit. Maybe he figured we deserved each other—if we ever got to that point.

“I heard your British inspector's horn,” I said, cradling the cordless phone against my shoulder while I loaded the dishwasher.

“You did,” Milo replied. “Somebody up on Second Hill called to say there was a commotion at the O'Neill place.”

My spirits rose a trifle. “Was there?”

“Nope. Everything was quiet when I pulled up.”

“Oh.” I tried to hide my disappointment. “I thought I heard something that sounded like gunshots.”

“Probably,” Milo said in his laconic manner. “The O'Neills are always taking potshots at birds and stray cats and whatever else wanders onto their property. They already put about twenty bullet holes in that new arterial stop sign by the Icicle Creek turnoff.”

“Were they sober when you got there?”

“Are they ever?” Milo snorted. “I didn't bother to knock. The last thing I need at the end of a workday is a false alarm and getting cussed out by those wild Irishmen.”

The infamous O'Neills were a clan of freelance gyppo loggers, forced to find work outside of Alpine since the decline of the local timber industry. The father, Paddy, had died the previous winter, and his remains had been sent back to the old sod in County Armagh. His three sons, though into middle age, still considered themselves lusty lads and beer-loving brawlers. The O'Neills' ongoing feud with Cap Hartquist and his two “boys” had long been a source of amusement—and occasionally terror—for Alpine residents. Thirty years ago, more or less, Cap's pet goat had been run over by Paddy O'Neill,
igniting the war between the two families. I suppose it was wishful thinking, but I'd hoped that Paddy's demise might signal a truce. As far as I knew, the Dove of Peace had yet to fly.

“I don't suppose you could discover a crime between now and five o'clock tomorrow,” I said wistfully.

“How come?” Milo asked with genuine puzzlement. Even after more than ten years of observing me as editor and publisher of
The Alpine Advocate,
the sheriff never seemed to understand my need for news.

“Never mind.” I sighed, then had a small idea. “What about equipment? Anything new?”

“Equipment?” Milo paused. “Hell, no, we're lucky to afford pencils with the county budget so tight.”

“Programs? Why don't you come up with some new programs to fight crime?”

“Like what?” Milo responded. “Starting a curfew now that school's out?”

“That's good,” I enthused. “Are you really considering it?”

“No,” he replied. “I just thought of it now. It's pretty dumb.”