The Alpine Betrayal (7 page)

Ed’s head shot up. “Forty percent off? Gosh, Francine, don’t tell me you’re having a clearance sale!”

Francine’s carefully plucked eyebrows lifted slightly. “Not yet, Ed.” She gave him her sweetest smile. “I thought about having a renovation sale after Durwood wiped out my front window, but I’ll wait until September. Do you think I should take out a
full page
ad?”

Ed reeled against the desk. Trying not to laugh aloud, I crept into my office.

My walk home was uphill. I arrived at my cozy log house in a weary, wilted state, hoping that the shelter of the evergreen trees had kept the interior cool. Clutching the mail I had retrieved from my box by the road, I went inside and discovered that though there was no breeze, the temperature in the living room seemed at least ten degrees below the heat outdoors.

I got a Pepsi out of the refrigerator and poured it over a tall glass of ice. Collapsing on the sofa, I scanned the mail. The usual bills, ads, catalogues—and a single letter. The return address put my heart in my mouth: a well-heeled residential street in San Francisco. Hurriedly, I ripped open the plain beige envelope.

This was the third letter I had received from Tom Cavanaugh since he had visited Alpine the previous autumn. He had come to town to give me advice on running the newspaper. He had also expressed an interest in investing in
The Advocate
, since buying into newspapers was one of the ways he had built up the considerable fortune his wife had inherited. I had not been keen on a partnership, no matter how silent, and Tom had respected my wishes. But he and I were already partners in another far different enterprise: Tom was Adam’s father, and in this letter, he was insisting on playing a bigger role in our son’s life.

“With my other children virtually raised and on their own, I feel honor-bound to help you with Adam,” Tom wrote on his word processor. “I haven’t pressed you about this because I know how hell-bent you are on being independent. If you don’t want to tell Adam about me, you don’t have to, but in good conscience, I can’t go on ignoring my responsibilities. It’s not fair to Adam, and it’s not fair to me.”

Bull
, I thought to myself angrily. None of it was ever fair to anybody. It wasn’t fair that Tom had married a wealthy heiress before I met him. It wasn’t fair that we had fallen in love and that his wife and I had gotten pregnant about
the same time. And it certainly wasn’t fair that Sandra Cavanaugh had turned out to be a raving loony.

“I can see you wadding this letter up and throwing it across the room while you swear like a sailor,” Tom went on in his usual wry—and perceptive—manner. “But I’d like you to at least think about this. I may be coming up your way in the early fall again, so maybe we can have dinner. Meanwhile, there are a couple of recent developments that came out of a publishers’ meeting last month in Tampa …”

He went on to enlighten me about a new way of billing advertisers and how small newspapers could become the middlemen in job printing. I didn’t pay much attention. All I noticed was that he signed the letter, “Love, Tom.”

And I still did.

Perhaps I’d give his proposal some thought. After Loggerama. I might even consider his suggestions about the paper. Certainly I would think about having dinner with him if he came up from the Bay Area in the fall.

One thing I would not do: I wouldn’t crumple up the letter and throw it across the room. But I did swear like a sailor.

M
Y DINNER WITH
Reid Hampton was a dud. The food at the Café de Flore was excellent as always, the wine list was extensive and impressive, and the service was superb. But the company was definitely second-rate.

To be fair, I suppose a lot of women would find Reid Hampton fascinating. Certainly he had traveled a lot, read widely if not deeply, and knew everyone who had graced the covers of
People
magazine in the past year. But by the time the main course arrived, I was already full—at least of Reid Hampton, who was so full of himself. It’s an occupational hazard of journalism that much of one’s career is spent listening to other people tell you the stories of their lives. So maybe just once, I was hoping that in my off-hours, I’d find someone who might want to hear mine. As it turned out, Reid Hampton didn’t. He didn’t even ask any questions about Alpine, which struck me as strange—certainly a director who was setting a film in a small town should want to know what life was really like. But I gathered that Reid Hampton preferred to make up his own version.

It was no wonder that he didn’t ask to come in when he brought me home or that he made no romantic advances. I suspected that he was as glad to park me on my doorstep as I was to see him drive away. Most of the time he had talked about himself, his films, his ambitions, his philosophy. My efforts at steering him away from his ego and onto his coworkers came to naught. He remarked that the camera loved Dani Marsh, and that she was like an empty bottle,
just waiting for him to fill her up with emotions. He appeared to know next to nothing about her background, except that she came from Alpine. “Cute little town,” he had commented. “We’ll do a couple of street scenes after all this Loggerama crap is out of the way. I should have some of those buildings repainted along the main drag. They’re not right for this picture. I need more blue, some green, maybe even a splash of red. Say, Emma, how would you like to have your newspaper office take on a coat of canary yellow?”

The Advocate
badly needed a make-over, but
yellow
coupled with
journalism
did not strike me as a suitable visual message. Somehow, I’d avoided a direct answer. Reid had waxed a bit more eloquently on the subject of Matt Tabor, praising the actor’s “brooding presence” and “unquenchable masculinity.” Matt was from Kansas and had started out as a dancer. I had refrained from asking if he’d worn ruby slippers or had owned a dog named Toto. My only revenge had been dessert, a marvelous confection of meringue and apricots and whipped cream topped with crystalized sugar.

If I had not turned Reid Hampton into a slathering beast, he had not stirred me to pulse-throbbing excitement either. It was strange, perhaps, since he was good-looking in his lion-maned, broad-shouldered way, and certainly had the trappings of power and success to provide the necessary aphrodisiac. As I slipped out of my plain black linen sheath, it occurred to me that the evening might have gone better if I hadn’t received the letter from Tom Cavanaugh just over an hour before Reid had picked me up. To my addled heart, Tom would have made Erich von Stroheim seem bland.

It was not yet ten. I put on my summer-weight cotton bathrobe and went back to the living room to check my messages. Carla had called to say she’d definitely be in on Friday. Francine Wells wanted to know if I’d like to look over her new stock when it came in the second week of August. Henry Bardeen had phoned from the ski lodge to tell me they had found a family of raccoons living in the
little house where they stored their firewood. Did I want a picture?

I supposed I did. Raccoons always make good pictures. I called Henry to tell him I’d send Carla up in the morning.

“I’m afraid we can’t wait,” said Henry, sounding unusually testy for a man whose job as resort manager required endless patience and perennial good will. “One of our guests suffers from raccoon-phobia. If we don’t get those animals out of the wood house tonight Matt Tabor says he’ll drive into Seattle and stay at the Four Seasons Olympic.”

“Oh, for heavens’ sake!” I didn’t know whether to laugh or be annoyed. “Okay, Henry, I’ll be up in ten minutes.”

While changing into slacks and a blouse, I decided I was definitely annoyed. I didn’t want to bother Vida this late, and Carla needed a good night’s sleep to complete her recovery. Fortunately, I had an extra camera at home. The drive to the ski lodge would take less than five minutes, since my house was on the edge of town. But the idea of the aggressively masculine Matt Tabor being afraid of a bunch of big-eyed bandits with four legs was irksome. I wished that Henry Bardeen had at least cornered a grizzly bear.

Mama, Papa, and four babies posed graciously for my camera. Then Mama wanted to borrow the camera. I back-pedaled out of the wood house and was grateful for Henry’s assistance. He had brought some cooked hamburger and peeled oranges to lure the raccoon family out of its self-styled lair. A van with open back doors waited a few yards away, to transport the raccoons to the other side of Alpine.

“Having these Hollywood people here is no picnic,” Henry sighed as the van headed down the road. “Oh, they’re paying a pretty penny, which is always welcome in off-season; but I tell you, Emma, it’s one aggravation after another.” Henry Bardeen shook his head, which was topped by an artfully graying toupee.

“Like what?” I asked guilelessly.

“Like diet.” Henry’s thin mouth twisted. He was a slim man of medium height, with an aquiline nose and fine gray eyes. Unlike most professional men in Alpine, who tended to go in for more casual attire, Henry always wore a suit and tie. “They have the strangest eating habits. And schedules. In bed by ten, maybe even nine, then up at the crack of dawn, which means the kitchen help has to come in early. Not only to fix breakfast, but to pack up the hampers for their lunch up on Baldy. I’ve had to hire extra people. Tonight, Dani Marsh wanted some sort of cabbage drink sent up to her room. We had no idea how to make it, and when we finally got through to somebody in Everett, Dani was gone. Now she’s a local, wouldn’t you think she wouldn’t be as queer as the rest of them?”

“She hasn’t lived here for five years,” I pointed out, wondering if there was a feature story in
The Peculiar Palates of Picture People
. Probably not, I decided. It would annoy most of the locals as much as it irked Henry Bardeen.

“She’s been gone from the lodge for three hours,” said Henry, looking even more aggravated. “That Hampton fellow is about to call the sheriff.”

“Good,” I said, hoping Reid Hampton would catch Milo Dodge in the sack with Honoria Whitman. It would serve all of them right.

“Good?” Henry stared at me. He may have possessed a gracious manner—usually—but he had absolutely no sense of humor. “What’s good about having Reid Hampton roar around the lobby while Matt Tabor is cringing in a corner because some of our furry friends are living outside his window? What’s good about Dani Marsh being gone for several hours? She has a wake-up call scheduled for five
A.M.!”

“As you pointed out,” I said in a soothing voice, “Dani
is
a native. She probably has some old friends here. And her mother, of course.”

Henry’s stare grew hypnotic. “Patti?” He shook his head, breaking the spell. “I know for a fact that Dani has tried to
call Patti at least three times, but either she isn’t in or she hangs up on Dani.” Suddenly he turned sheepish. “My daughter, Heather, should be more discreet. But I’m afraid she’s star-struck.”

I knew Heather Bardeen, a pretty, self-contained young woman who worked for her father in various capacities, including that of PBX operator. Somehow, his description didn’t sound right. “Aren’t Heather and Dani the same age? They would have gone to school together.”

Henry grew tight-lipped. “They did. Heather was a year behind Dani. They weren’t really friends, but they knew each other. I suppose that’s why Heather is so curious. In fact, Heather says that by the time Dani left Alpine, she didn’t have any friends. Maybe that’s why she went away.”

“She’ll show up,” I said hopefully. “Did she take a car?”

“She may have,” Henry replied, looking pessimistic. “The crew rented a whole fleet of them. They’re all a white Lexus model. They got them from a dealership in Seattle, except for some custom-built job that belongs to Matt Tabor, and Reid Hampton’s Cadillac. He got that here.”

The Cadillac had served to take me to dinner at the Café de Flore. I gave Henry an absent nod, then glanced up at the ski lodge. Except for the main floor, most of the lights were already out. It was my understanding that the movie crew had taken up at least three of the lodge’s four floors.

“You’ve got only a little more than a week to go,” I said encouragingly. “Think of this as free promotion. It can’t help but bring in more visitors next year.”

“Normal
visitors, I trust.” Henry was looking very glum.

I gave up trying to cheer him, said good night, and headed for my Jaguar. Sundown had brought cooler temperatures, and a faint breeze stirred the trees. I didn’t trouble to turn on the air-conditioning.

At the bottom of the road that led to the ski lodge, I noticed a white car pull up on the verge. My headlights caught a man getting out on the passenger’s side. He came around to speak to the driver, who had apparently rolled down the window. As I stopped to watch for any oncoming
cars from Alpine Way, I recognized Curtis Graff. And, just as I stepped on the accelerator, I realized that the woman behind the wheel was Dani Marsh.

An odd couple, I thought. Unless Francine Wells hadn’t been talking off the top of her carefully coiffed head.