The Alpine Betrayal (2 page)

Having retrieved her hat and put her glasses back on her nose, Vida regarded me over the rims. “If everybody buys as much space as they promised, we may have room for a photo essay on Dani. You know—Dani arriving in Alpine, Dani on location, Dani at her old home, Dani getting ready for the parade. People love that sort of thing.” Vida pulled a face and jammed her straw hat back on her head. Obviously, she didn’t number herself among those people.

I considered her suggestion. Unless Ed somehow single-handedly managed to discourage Alpine’s merchants from participating in the special Loggerama edition, we should be able to go at least forty-eight pages. Maybe even sixty. The sound of money jingled in my head. It was not a noise I’d heard much since buying
The Advocate
, but I liked it.

“Where
is
Ed?” Not in the newsroom; not in my editorial quarters. Nor had I seen him as I came through the front office.

Vida was putting a fresh piece of paper in the battered typewriter. “He and Ginny took the Safeway people to the Venison Inn for coffee. If you ask me, you ought to let Ginny handle this alone. Ed still thinks Safeway made a
terrible mistake coming into Alpine and competing with the Grocery Basket.”

I flipped through Vida’s article on Dani Marsh. “That’s only because he can’t go on talking the Grocery Basket out of running big ads. Do you remember last Easter when he tried to convince Jake that he didn’t need to advertise his hams because nobody else in town had any?”

“Oooooh!” Vida gave a tremendous shudder. “The man’s impossible! Just this morning I overheard him telling Itsa Bitsa Pizza they shouldn’t advertise their new special because that wife of his, who’s built like a bathtub, is on a diet!”

I groaned, though it didn’t do any good. All the badgering and coaxing in the world couldn’t change Ed’s attitude. But
The Advocate’s
balance sheets looked a little brighter now than when I’d taken over. The previous owner, Marius Vandeventer, had made a good living in the halcyon days of low paper costs and hot type job printing. But new technology had moved the printing business—including that of
The Advocate
itself—down the highway to Monroe. Even more ironically, in a town that once had been dependent on logging and mill operations, the price of trees had sent newsprint costs skyrocketing. But with the help of an old friend, I’d managed to pare down other expenses and somehow goad Ed into soliciting more advertising, however reluctantly. Circulation was up, too, a source of personal pride. I expected the Loggerama edition to be our biggest moneymaker of the year. Certainly the presence of a bona fide movie star would help.

“Vida,” I said, now sitting at Carla’s empty desk, “where did you get this stuff about Dani Marsh?”

She turned halfway in her chair. “What? Oh, the Hollywood bilge is from some press release. The early background is off the top of my head.”

Most Alpine background comes from Vida’s head. She is a walking encyclopedia of local lore. Vida knows so much about the town and its residents that usually the most interesting stories aren’t fit to print. The piece on Dani Marsh,
however, was bland in the extreme. “She was born, grew up, graduated from high school, got married, divorced, and moved to L.A.” I tapped page one of the article with a fingernail. “Then you’ve got six hundred words of press kit. Couldn’t we do more with the local angle? What about her mother?”

Vida gave another shudder, setting the paisley print of her summer dress aquiver. Fleetingly, I pictured her in a wet T-shirt. It was an awesome sight.

“Patti Marsh! Now there’s a piece of work!” Vida yanked off her glasses again. “Do you know her?”

“I ran into her just now at Mugs Ahoy. She didn’t seem real thrilled about her daughter’s triumphal return.”

Vida put out her hand. “Give me that story.” I complied, and Vida put her glasses back on to scan it. “Dani was born—so far, so good. Ray Marsh allegedly knocked up Patti Erskine when they were in high school. They had to get married—or else. Ray walked out when Dani was a baby. Patti got divorced, went after Ray for child support, couldn’t collect, took a job as a waitress in the old Loggers’ Café, which is where the computer store is now. Patti had a string of men, but never married again. After the café closed, she went to work for Blackwell Timber. She’s been seeing Jack Blackwell—or been seen with him—ever since his wife left him a couple of years ago.”

I realized that it was Jack Blackwell I’d seen with Patti at Mugs Ahoy. “And?”

“And …” Vida ran a finger down the page. “Not a very stable upbringing, but I can’t say that, can I?” She shuffled paper. “High school—let me think, Dani got suspended at least twice, for drinking and being naked during study hall. Not inside the school, I mean, but in somebody’s pickup across the street. Still,” she added grudgingly, “the girl graduated. Then she married Cody Graff.”

That name rang a bell. Somehow, I connected him with Vida or one of her numerous kinfolk. Half of Alpine was related to the Runkels, her late husband’s family, or her own branch of Blatts. I must have been looking curious, because
Vida nodded. “That’s right, Cody is engaged to my niece, Marje Blatt, the one who works for Doc Dewey. By coincidence, Cody is also employed by Blackwell Timber.”

It was a coincidence, but not an amazing one. Although the original mill closed in 1929, logging had continued as a major enterprise, right up until the recent—and most serious—controversy over the spotted owl. The two smaller mills, located at opposite ends of the town and supplied by gyppo loggers, were outstripped by Blackwell’s operation between Railroad Avenue and the Skykomish River. Jack Blackwell also owned some big parcels of land—on Mount Baldy, Beckler Peak, and along the east fork of the Foss River. It struck me as odd that I hadn’t met Blackwell until today.

“Does Blackwell live here?” I asked.

“Part of the time. He’s got operations in Oregon and Idaho. Timbuktu, for all I know.” Vida spoke impatiently, going through the rest of her story. Jack Blackwell was obviously a side issue. “So Dani and Cody got married when they didn’t have enough sense to skin a cat, and they had a baby—a full nine-month one, I might note—but the poor little thing died at about six weeks. Crib death, very sad. Then about two months later, the marriage blew up and Dani flew south. Five years later, with some big-shot director’s backing, she’s a star.” Vida gave an eloquent shrug. “How much of that do you want me to put in?”

I accepted defeat gracefully. “I was hoping she’d starred in the senior play or something. How did the press kit cover her background?”

Vida waved a hand. “Oh, some tripe about how she came from a quaint Pacific Northwest logging town up in the mountains with snow on the ground half the year and deer sleeping at the foot of her trundle bed. You know—the sort of nonsense that makes us look like we’ve got moss growing around our ears and we’re still wearing loincloths.”

I inclined my head. Having spent all of my life in Seattle, Portland, and Alpine, I was accustomed to the attitudes of outsiders. Let them think we ate raw fish for dinner and
held a potlatch instead of hosting cocktail parties. Maybe it would keep them away. I allowed Vida to put her story in the copyediting basket.

“What’s the name of this picture Dani’s doing?” I asked, feeling a bit passé. The life of a single mother running her own business didn’t leave me with a lot of leisure time for moviegoing.

Vida, another single working mother, albeit with children out of the nest, had to look down at the press release on her desk. “Let me see … here it is. ‘A film by Reid Hampton, starring Dani Marsh and Matt Tabor.
Blood Along the River
.’ Ugh, what a stupid title.”

I had to agree. Maybe they’d change it. It never occurred to me that it might be not only stupid, but prophetic.

D
URWOOD
P
ARKER WAS
under arrest. Again. Durwood, who had once been Alpine’s pharmacist, was probably the worst driver I’d ever had the opportunity to avoid. Drunk or sober, Durwood could nail any mailbox, hit any phone pole, or careen down the sidewalk of any street in town. Since not all the streets in Alpine have sidewalks, Durwood often tore up flower beds instead. His latest act of motoring menace had been the demolition of Francine Wells’ display window at Francine’s Fine Apparel on Front Street. Francine was in a red-hot rage, but Durwood was stone-cold sober. For his own protection, Sheriff Milo Dodge had locked Durwood up overnight.

“We have to run it,” Carla Steinmetz announced the following morning as she went over the blessedly short list of criminal activity for the past twenty-four hours. “It’s a rule, isn’t it? Any name on the blotter is a matter of public record, right?”

I sighed. “I’m afraid so. Poor Durwood. Poor Dot. His wife must be a saint.”

“She’s got her own car,” put in Vida. “She’d be crazy to go anywhere with Durwood. Did you know he drove an ambulance in World War II?”

“Who for?” I asked. “The Nazis?”

Vida’s response was stifled by Kip MacDuff, our part-time handyman and full-time driver. Kip was about twenty, with carrot red hair and cheerful blue eyes. He was, he asserted, working his way through college. Since I had never
known him to leave the city limits of Alpine, I assumed he was enrolled in a correspondence school.

“Hey, get this!” Kip exclaimed. “Dani’s coming in by helicopter! She’s going to land on top of the mall! The high school band is coming out to meet her!”

I gazed at Vida. “I guess you’d better get a picture.”

But Carla was on her feet, jumping up and down. “Let me! This is incredibly cool! When I was going to journalism school at the University of Washington, I never thought I’d get to meet a movie star in Alpine!”

And, I thought cruelly, her professors probably never thought she’d get a job in newspapers. But here was Carla, now in her second year as a reporter on
The Advocate
. Why, I asked myself for the fiftieth time, did all the good ones go into the electronic media? Or were there any good ones these days? Was I getting old and crotchety at forty-plus?

Vida was only too glad to let Carla take the assignment. “I’ve been looking at Dani Marsh since she was waddling around in diapers and plastic pants. Just make sure you load the camera this time, Carla. You remember what happened two weeks ago at Cass Pidduck’s hundredth birthday party.”

Carla, who usually bounces her way through life, looked crestfallen. “I left the film in the car.”

Vida nodded. “At least you had it with you.”

Carla’s long dark hair swung in dismay. “So I went out to get it, but when I came back, Mr. Pidduck had died.”

“Yes, I know,” said Vida, “but his children liked that shot of him slumped forward in his birthday cake. They said it was just like old Grumps. Or whatever they called him,” Vida added a bit testily. “Frankly, the Pidducks never did have much sense. Cass may have been long in the tooth, but he was short in the upper story.”

Accustomed to Vida’s less than charitable but often more than accurate appraisals of Alpine residents, I withdrew to my inner office. The usual phone messages had accumulated, including one from my son, Adam, in Ketchikan. After two years and no foreseeable major at the University of
Hawaii, my only child had decided to go north to Alaska. He was spending the summer working in a fish packing plant, and had a vague notion about enrolling for fall quarter at the state university in Fairbanks. I looked at Ginny Burmeister’s phone memo with my customary sense of dread whenever my son called in prime time.

He was staying in a dormitory owned by the fish co-op, which meant that I was put on hold for a long time while somebody tried to determine if he was on or off the premises. For ten minutes, I counted the cost and perused the mail. Adam should be at work in the middle of the day. Maybe he’d had an accident. Or had gotten sick. I lost interest in the numerous bills, press releases, irate letters to the editor, advertising circulars, and exchange papers that jammed my in-basket—especially on Mondays. At last Adam’s clear young voice reached my ear:

“Hey, Mom,” he began, “guess what? Fairbanks is seven hundred miles away! I thought I could take the bus to campus.”

Adam’s sense of geography, or lack thereof, was astounding. Indeed, I had tried to explain the vastness of Alaska to him before he flew out of Sea-Tac Airport. I might as well have saved my breath.

“Is that why you’re calling at two o’clock on a Monday afternoon when you ought to be at work?” I demanded. “Bear in mind, Fairbanks is so far away it’s in another time zone, twice removed.”

“I worked Sunday,” Adam said, sounding defensive. “Didn’t I tell you I’m on a different shift this month?”

He hadn’t. Adam was well over six feet tall, weighed about a hundred and seventy pounds, was approaching his twenty-first birthday—and still qualified as my addled baby. One of these days, I’d turn around and find him gainfully employed, happily married, and the father of a couple of kids. And maybe one of these days I’d fly to Mars on a plastic raft.

“So you just discovered you couldn’t commute to Fairbanks?” I said, wondering whether to be amused or dismayed.
At least he’d never suggested taking a degree in transportation.

“Well, yeah, but that’s okay. I’ll just move there next month. I can take a plane.” His voice dropped a notch. “If you can advance me the price of a ticket.”

“So why are you working? I thought you made big bucks in Alaska.”

“I got tuition, room and board, you know—I didn’t count on having to pay for an airline ticket.” He sounded faintly indignant, as if it were my fault that Alaska was so spread out.

“I’ll see what I can do.” I didn’t have the remotest notion how much it cost to fly from Ketchikan to Fairbanks. It appeared I’d have to dip into savings. At least I still had some, thanks to a fluke of an inheritance that had allowed me to buy both
The Advocate
and my green Jaguar. Still, it crossed my mind that this was one of those times when it would have been nice to have Adam’s father around, instead of off raising his own kids and taking care of his nutty wife.