The Alpine Advocate (3 page)

Which, I must confess, is bad enough. Marius Vandeventer, who started out as a raving Socialist in the 1930s, had evolved into a patriarchal capitalist by the time I met him in 1990. At eighty-five, he was still sharp, but he had lost his crusading zeal along with his hair. He was
also ready to retire. I thought the asking price of $200,000 cash was a steal. As it turned out, I was the one who got robbed. A kindly newspaper broker told me later I could have acquired
The Advocate
for $150,000, with one-third down and ten years to pay. I guess it was the Jaguar that gave me away.

My debut was not auspicious. I was an outsider; worse yet, a City Person. At first, the locals assumed I was divorced or widowed. While I didn’t flaunt my status as an unmarried mother, I didn’t hide it either. There are, as my mother used to tell me when she was especially mad at my father, Worse Things Than Being Married. Some of the Alpiners didn’t agree, and the usual spate of outraged letters ensued. I printed every letter in full. Without rebuttal. The letters stopped. But of course I was still an Outsider.

So, in fact, were two members of my staff. Carla had been on the job for only three months, but Ed had worked on
The Advocate
for almost a decade. He was gradually assimilated, but acceptance took time in a small town.

So we muddled along under my untested managerial skills. We weren’t losing money—yet. But we were teetering, just making ends and the payroll meet, but I was determined to make a go of
The Advocate
and had actually upped the circulation by almost fifty subscribers, most of them in outlying areas. The same, alas, could not be said for the advertising income.

“The Grocery Basket wants to cut its ad to a half page,” Ed reported in his rumbling, mournful voice. “No more coupons. They’re losing money on the fifty-cent eggs.”

“Promotion,” chimed in Carla, whirling around the office like a wind-up doll. “The Grocery Basket needs to promote its specials more. Take squash. It’s the season. Do you know there are twenty-eight varieties of squash available this time of year?” Her long black mane sailed around her slim shoulders.

Ed looked affronted. “I hate squash.”

“Pumpkins are a squash,” Carla went on blithely.
“They’ll be in next week. The Grocery Basket could sponsor a jack-o’-lantern carving contest.”

Ed was shaking his head, his heavy jowls undulating. “Halloween is getting dangerous, even in a town like Alpine.”

“Ed, you’re a ninny,” asserted Vida Runkel, who had just stumbled across the threshold carrying a megaphone. “You think Arbor Day is dangerous.”

Ed gave a mighty heave of his body and got up from his desk. “It can be, around here. All that controversy with the environmentalists and the loggers. A bunch of nuts want to picket Old Mill Park.”

I sighed. The park was the site of the original sawmill, complete with a small museum and a half-dozen picnic tables next to the railroad tracks. “How can you picket a memory?”

“Symbolism.” Carla nodded sagely. She turned to Ed. “Besides, that’s only a rumor, probably started by the loggers. There are too many rumors in this town. It’s impossible to verify everything if you have to make a deadline. Like finding that gold this morning.”

I frowned at Carla. Ed swiveled slightly, his hand on the coffeepot. “Gold?” I echoed. “What gold?”

Carla was taking off her suede flats and examining the heels. “These are really worn down. Maybe I should put on my running shoes and go to the shoemaker’s.”

“Carla …” My voice held a weary warning note. Carla’s attention span was as fragile as her five-foot frame.

“What?” The big black eyes were wide. “Oh! The gold mine!” She giggled. Carla was a world-class giggler. “I got a call when I came in first thing saying that Mark Doukas had found gold in … some place.”

“Bunk,” Ed said, sloshing coffee into a Styrofoam cup.

“Rubbish,” Vida said, tapping the megaphone with her stubby fingers.

“Who called?” I inquired, feeling that familiar unease I often experience when Carla goes off chasing wild geese.

“Mmmmmm.” She danced a bit in her stockinged feet.
“Kevin MacDuff, I think. He said Mark Doukas was tripping out. Isn’t Kevin the kid with the pet snake?”

Kevin was. In addition, his eldest brother was Kent, who happened to be married to Mark Doukas’s sister, Jennifer. Despite the snake, Kevin was as easygoing as Kent was touchy. Kevin was also one of our carriers.

“That snake eats mice,” Vida declared, putting down the megaphone and taking off her ancient velvet cloche which, as usual, she’d been wearing backward. “I don’t care for mice, but I think that’s disgusting.”

I was bearing down on Carla, which only took about four paces, since our front office is quite small and very crowded. “The gold, Carla. What exactly did Kevin say?”

Carla turned vague. “Oh—that Mark had been panning or digging or delving and he’d hit pay dirt, or whatever you call it, and he came racing out of the woods looking half nuts. Kevin said Mark must have found gold. You know how he likes to play prospector.”

Mark did indeed, though
playing
was the word for it, as he expended no more energy on prospecting than he did on any other endeavor that might qualify as work. Neeny Doukas’s oldest grandchild had never held a steady job in his twenty-six years, despite the family’s efforts to make him a responsible citizen. As far as I could tell, his alleged duties as property manager for his grandfather consisted of harassing tenants he happened to run into in various bars around the county. It was no wonder that Heather Bardeen had dumped him the previous weekend.

“I doubt it was gold,” I said. “Nobody’s ever found any around here, and not much silver, either, in the last forty years.” I glanced at Vida for confirmation, but she was wiping off the mouthpiece of the megaphone with a tissue soaked in rubbing alcohol. A sudden horrible thought assailed me as I turned my gaze back to Carla. “You didn’t write this up, did you?”

Carla’s long lashes flapped up and down like spider legs. “Well, of course I did! I made room for it by pulling that two-inch story on the zoning commission meeting.
They meet every two weeks and never do anything. Who cares?”

“Oh, Carla!” I didn’t try to hide my exasperation. It wouldn’t faze Carla anyway. Nothing ever did. “Where is it? Let me see your hard copy.”

Undismayed, Carla obliged. The short article was fairly innocuous—for Carla:

I handed the story back to Carla. At least Carla hadn’t misspelled Dodge’s first name this time. In her first article involving the sheriff, she’d made a typo, calling him
Mildo
. Fortunately, I caught it in time, telling myself that it could have been worse. “Okay,” I said to Carla, “this probably isn’t libelous, unlike your piece on Grace Grundle’s bottle cap collection—where you insinuated she stole it from Arthur Trews. You’re very lucky that Arthur died the week after that story came out.”

“Not so lucky for Arthur,” remarked Vida.

I ignored my House & Home editor. “However, you shouldn’t have pulled the zoning commission story. We’ll catch hell from Simon Doukas for that, since he’s the chairman. As for the gold: you have only the word of a fifteen-year-old boy. And you didn’t contact Mark Doukas. Where was he when you called?”

“I didn’t call.” Carla’s eyes were so wide and innocent that I thought her face might split. At least I hoped it
would. “I didn’t have time. I had to get the paper off to Monroe.”

“Monroe’s getting too big,” said Ed, sitting back down. “You see that new development going up? Thirty houses, at least. They’ll ask an arm and a leg. I couldn’t afford one of those three-car garages.”

I also ignored my advertising manager. I hadn’t yet finished with Carla. “Look, I appreciate your initiative. But this isn’t the kind of story we need to get in at the last minute, if at all. Next time, wait until Mark runs in here with a ten-pound nugget, shouting—”

“Eureka!” Vida blasted the word through the megaphone, and both Carla and I jumped.

“What on earth are you doing with that thing?” I demanded, sounding more cross than I really was.

Vida shrugged, her rumpled blouse quivering over her big bosom. “I interviewed the high school cheerleaders this morning. They gave it to me as a souvenir. Actually, I stole it. I’ve always wanted one.” She started to give me her smug little smile, but stopped when a car door banged outside her window. Vida glanced through the rain-spattered pane. “Oh, swell, now I’m under arrest. It’s Sheriff Moroni. The old fool.”

Enrico Moroni was actually the former sheriff, having given up his office on account of his diminishing eyesight, and, according to Vida, his diminishing hold on the electorate. Moroni’s impaired vision didn’t keep him from driving a battered old Cadillac de Ville, but his status as an ex-sheriff kept him out of jail. Nothing else could, since he averaged about one accident per month. No doubt he was now parked on the sidewalk. Moroni and Neeny Doukas had been chums since boyhood, and Enrico was known as
Eeeny
. Some day I intended to ask Vida what had happened to Miny and Moe.

“Che bella!”
Moroni burst into the office, making straight for Carla. His parents had been immigrants from Palermo, and while Eeeny had been born in Seattle, he retained a few fragments of their native tongue, especially
when he wanted to impress pretty women. “Hey, Carla, you want to make pesto with me?”

Carla giggled. “I can’t. I have to interview Henry Bardeen about the improvements at the ski lodge.”

Moroni, who was spare and sinewy, looked over the top of Carla’s head to Vida. “Vida,
cara mia
, let’s go in the broom closet and make beautiful music, eh?”

Vida gave him her gimlet eye. “I’ll play the dust mop on your head, Eeeny. Why don’t you marry one of those silly widows who are always having you to dinner?”

Moroni pulled a long face. “You’re a widow, Vida, but you never feed me. How come?”

Vida’s expression was sour. “Because you’re an idiot, that’s why. Isn’t Moroni the Italian plural for moron?”

The former sheriff laughed and made a slashing gesture with his hand. “Ahhh! You never forgave me for arresting your husband as a Peeping Tom, right, Vida? Give up the grudges. Think of the good times we could have.”

Vida shot back in her chair. “Ernest never peeped! That was his brother, Elmo! And that halfwit cousin of theirs, from Skykomish!”

Eeeny leaned on Vida’s desk and wagged a finger at her. “Now, Vida, you know what I always say—The Family ‘That Peeps Together, Keeps Together,’ eh?”

Vida was about to boil over with outrage, but Moroni had already swung around to face me. “Say, what’s this I hear about young Chris? Harvey Adcock just told me he showed up at the hardware store not half an hour ago. Where’d he come from?”

“Hawaii,” I replied as the phone rang and Ed answered it in his lugubrious voice. I’d dropped Chris off at the house about an hour earlier. He hadn’t mentioned any plans to go out, but there was no reason why he shouldn’t. Yet I somehow felt uneasy. “I brought him in from the airport this morning.”

Moroni was studying me closely through his thick glasses, his usual leer displaced by a scrutiny that I felt
he’d probably reserved for hardened criminals in bygone days. “Does Neeny know?”

“I don’t think so.” I glanced at Ed, who seemed to be trying to talk Driggers Funeral Home out of its standing four-inch ad. “Chris came over here all of a sudden. He quit school.”

“Aaargh!” Moroni made another slashing motion with his hand, this time more emphatic. “These kids! No staying power!” His dark, lined face displayed a grimace. “So why come to Alpine? Does he expect a big welcome-back party?”

I shrugged, trying to ignore Ed’s doleful arguments and Vida’s aggressive typing. Carla had slipped out the door, presumably to interview Henry Bardeen up at the lodge. “Alpine is home, after all. Where else would he go?”

Eeeny Moroni seemed to take the question seriously. He rocked back on his heels, rubbing his hands together. “Damned if I know. But why is he trying to buy a gun?”

I blinked. Unfortunately, I thought I knew. But I was not going to say so to the ex-sheriff.

W
EDNESDAYS ARE USUALLY
set aside for catching up. The paper is finished for the week; the reactions haven’t yet started to come in; and the next edition is just beginning to take form in my mind. After Eeeny Moroni left, I went into my cubbyhole of an inner office and sat down to look at the books. It was the end of the third quarter, and I needed to assess
The Advocate’s
current financial position. A cursory scanning of the columns told me we weren’t in any worse shape than I feared. But we weren’t any better, either.

Ginny Burmeister had come to
The Advocate
directly from high school three years ago. She ran the tiny front office, which had its own entrance and led to the former back shop, which was now mainly used for storage in this age of high tech. Ginny answered the phone, took classified ads, sold stationery supplies, filled out small printing orders, and handled the books. A tall, thin girl with auburn hair, she was far more reliable than Carla but had no literary gifts whatsoever. Money was her metier, and I was glad of it.

I opened the drawer of my old oak desk and took out some gum. No wonder my teeth kept trying to fall out, but at least I wasn’t smoking a pack and a half a day anymore.

It was almost noon, and I suddenly realized I was starving. I also knew I should go out looking for Chris. Handguns—if that’s what he was trying to get—were sold in the sporting goods section of the hardware store, but I convinced myself that he wanted a rifle. For deer, or
maybe birds. The season was upon us, after all. I didn’t care to dwell on its being open season on Neeny Doukas.