The Alpine Christmas (17 page)

We started with cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre of pickled herring in sour cream. I didn’t badger Milo until he was halfway through his drink.

“You’re holding out on me, Sheriff.”

“No, I’m not. I won’t hear from the folks at King County until Monday.”

“I don’t mean about the Seattle angle,” I said, noting that the quartet from the sleigh now seemed to be happily draining wineglasses at a nearby table. King Olav’s cellar was rumored to be an improvement over the Venison Inn’s limited stock of domestic red, white, and rosé that could be purchased for a third of the price at Safeway. “I’m referring to Bridget’s lurker. You know something you’re not telling me.”

Milo looked faintly exasperated. “And if I do? I’m the sheriff, for God’s sake.”

I gave him my most wide-eyed stare. “You want Vida and me to muck it up for you?”

“You two …” Milo speared another piece of pickled herring. “Okay, let me clarify one point. Just one.” He tapped his index finger on the linen tablecloth. “There may be two men hanging around the Nyquist house. I don’t know much about the tall, skinny guy in jeans. But the so-called workman is from the PUD truck.”

I made a face. “The PUD? Why? Are the Nyquists wasting electricity?”

Milo slowly shook his head. “I didn’t say he worked for the PUD, I said he was from the PUD
truck
.” His hazel gaze fixed on my face. I had the feeling he thought I was being stupid.

“A cover? Are you talking about a stakeout?”

Milo hummed an off key tune and looked beyond me to the sextet of high school students who were dressed à la Dickens and singing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” to a table of eight near the bay window.

I wiped my fingers on my napkin and leaned my elbows on the table. “Okay. To what purpose? Who is this man watching? Bridget? Or Travis?”

Milo kept on humming. I was getting annoyed. He was playing a game, supposedly keeping his confidences while
forcing me to guess what was going on. This was not like Milo. Which, I realized, meant he was out of his mind or out of his league. I opted for the latter.

“FBI,” I asserted. “Or some such Federal agency. Keeping an eye on … Travis.” I had a fifty-fifty chance. Usually, I make the wrong choice. But this time, I could tell from Milo’s swift glance of approval that I was right. “Why?” I demanded.

Now Milo stopped humming and ended the game. “I’m not sure. We’ve been asked to cooperate, but only to give these guys permission to maintain surveillance. If we need to know more, they’ll tell us.”

“Travis,” I murmured, recalling Vida’s attempt to pin Bridget down about her husband’s former place of employment. “Have you checked him out?”

Milo made a dour face. “What for? As far as we’re concerned, he hasn’t done anything except break his leg.”

I had to admit that Bridget’s uncertainty was no indictment of Travis. Still, I persisted. “Do you know where Travis worked in Seattle?”

“Sure, Bartlett & Crocker. Jack Mullins went to high school with Travis. They weren’t best buddies, but they kept in touch.”

Bartlett & Crocker struck only the dimmest of bells. Or half a bell, since I remembered Bartlett, but not Crocker. “Local?” I asked.

Milo shrugged. “You mean in Seattle? I guess so. Not one of the big international houses, but well established. What are you driving at?”

I didn’t know. Our waiter, whose name was Vincent and who looked like a ski bum, stopped to ask if we’d had time to consider the menu. Milo had—and ordered the Danish roast loin of pork, which went by the name of Stegt Svinekam. I scanned the entrées swiftly, choosing the Norwegian duck stuffed with apples and prunes.

The conversation turned to Evan Singer. Milo dismissed
my idea that the unexpected appearance of Bridget and Travis Nyquist had anything to do with our crash landing.

“You’ve got Nyquists on the brain,” he chided me. “Evan Singer’s a terrible driver. He’s already been picked up by us three times, once for speeding, and twice for illegal turns.”

“Drunk?”

“No, just out of it. He’s not a world-class driving disaster like Durwood, but give the guy some time. Evan isn’t thirty yet.” Milo wore a pained expression. If there was one thing his deputies didn’t need, it was a contender for Durwood Parker’s reckless driving crown.

“He’s weird,” I asserted as Vincent showed up with our beet salads. “Very weird.” The high school chorus was coming closer, now serenading the next table with “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

Milo made no further comment on Evan Singer. Except for exceeding the speed limit and turning out of the wrong lane onto Alpine Way, the multitalented, mega-bizarre Mr. Singer didn’t seem to trouble Milo. Yet I knew the sheriff had something on his mind, and it didn’t take a swami to figure out what it was.

“You’ve been getting calls about the bodies?”

Milo sighed and put down his fork. He had gobbled up all his pickled beets, which was more than I could manage. “You bet. Winter’s a bad time to have a murderer loose. People feel trapped, especially the old folks. On the face of it, we’ve got two dead young women. There may or may not be any tie-in—except for their youth and gender. But try to convince an eighty-year-old arthritic woman living alone up on Icicle Creek that she’s perfectly safe, and you might as well talk to a Norway spruce. Of course there are the calls from worried parents who have daughters in that age group. That makes more sense.”

I thought of Carla and Ginny. My spine tingled. Between Ted Bundy and the Green River killer, we of Western Washington
weren’t strangers to serial murderers. “Do you really think these women were killed by the same person?”

Milo’s hazel gaze was steady. “I don’t know. Hell, I don’t even know who these women are. We may never figure out who the first one was if we don’t find more than that damned leg.”

It wasn’t the right moment for Vincent to bring Milo’s loin of pork and my carved duck. Milo sucked in his breath; I regarded the drumstick with dismay.

But I ate it anyway.

It was delicious.

After Milo polished off his lingonberry mousse and I devoured my egg flip with a side of macaroons, we climbed back into the sleigh and headed down the mountain. Evan Singer seemed subdued, even glum. There were three other couples crammed into the conveyance, two from Alpine, though they were merely nodding acquaintances to Milo and me.

Milo walked me from his Cherokee Chief to my front door, but declined my invitation to come in. It was just as well. We had talked ourselves out over dinner, and one—or both—of us might feel compelled to do something foolish. I suspected that we didn’t want to ruin a beautiful friendship. Or that we were chicken.

Virtue cannot dispel loneliness. In the cold quiet of my living room, I set a Wise Man up next to one of the camels in my Nativity set. I should be accustomed to being alone, I told myself, or at least used to not having a male companion. Oh, there had been men in my life since Tom Cavanaugh, but only a few, and never for very long. A single working mother has to give up many things. Intimacy is only one of them, but it may be the greatest sacrifice. Raising a child alone takes time and energy. As the only parent who can drive, clean, cook, cheer, chastise, teach, nurture, and listen, you discover there aren’t many minutes of the day left
to yourself. And even after that child has gone away, the mold in which life has been cast for almost twenty years has grown virtually unbreakable. After all, it’s a safe haven, with those thick, high walls, like the womb that put you there in the first place.

But Ben was close by, and Adam was coming home in less than forty-eight hours. No doubt my son was within driving distance, somewhere in Kirkland, snug in the bosom of Erin Kowalski’s family. As for Tom, he was probably in San Francisco, surrounded by his unstable wife and insecure children. I could imagine their beautiful home, their lavish decorations, their expensive presents. Graciousness and good taste would flow from their holiday festivities. Mr. and Mrs. Tom Cavanaugh’s photographs would grace the pages of the Bay Area newspapers as they attended a whirlwind of parties, galas, and candlelight suppers. To the casual observer, it would look like a fairy tale—until Sandra Cavanaugh got hauled off for trying to eat the plastic grapes in an I. Magnin display window.

Poor Sandra.

Poor Tom.

Poor me.

Ben gave a terrific sermon Sunday morning, transforming St. Luke’s account of the barren fig tree into a clear-cut forest on Mount Baldy.
Patience
, my brother urged; it takes time to grow a stand of Douglas fir, but even longer to live a fruitful life. Logger or lawyer, don’t just stand there, but reach, stretch,
grow
. Ben’s words could be taken on a couple of levels, which may have been lost on some of the parishioners, but they seemed appreciative all the same. At least they weren’t being called upon to drive out bad thoughts or avoid suggestive entertainment.

Ben was going to entertain himself by joining Peyton Flake on an excursion to Surprise Lake. I didn’t ask if they would be armed. It was scary enough to think that it might snow before they got back.

I spent the day wrapping presents and catching up on Christmas cards. I’d had mine ready to go the previous weekend, but had held off mailing them. As usual, I’d already heard from several people who weren’t on my list. I’d ship the whole batch off in the morning on my way to work.

By late afternoon, the snow began to drift down again. I baked spritz cookies, squeezing camels, dogs, trees, wreaths, flowers, and every other imaginable shape out of my copper pastry tube. Adam loved spritz. So did I. By the time I’d finished, I’d already eaten about a quarter of the dough. My original intention to take a couple of dozen cookies to the office went by the board.

I was beginning to worry about Ben when he called just before seven o’clock to say that he and Dr. Flake had returned. I asked my brother if he’d like to pick up something and eat with me. But Ben had been invited to join the ecumenical celebration of St. Lucy’s Day at the Lutheran Church. I had attended the previous year, enjoying the Scandinavian custom of crowning a young girl with a wreath of candles and serving strong hot coffee and piles of pastry. Carla was covering the event which would star a thirteen-year-old Gustavson, yet another shirttail relation of Vida’s. I’ve always secretly questioned the wisdom of allowing an awkward teenager to waltz around with burning tapers in her hair while pouring out quantities of steaming liquid, but, I must admit, I’ve yet to hear of a St. Lucy Wannabe incinerating herself or scalding her family to death. Still, I decided to conserve my resources and stay home.

Monday would be a busy day. We were publishing twenty-four pages, to capitalize on holiday advertising. Naturally, Ed Bronsky was in despair. He had scarcely recovered from the thirty-six pager the previous week. Gleefully, I warned him that we wouldn’t get back to sixteen pages until the second week of January. Promotion had been Tom Cavanaugh’s key advice when I’d consulted with him about making
The Advocate
more profitable. While he’d insisted that a special edition could be published almost every week, I’d been too timid to try. Once, maybe twice a month was the extent of my ambition—except for wonderful, lucrative, dazzling December. Of course it would have helped if my advertising manager hadn’t preferred to sit around on his dead butt and drink coffee.

Twenty-four pages, however, doesn’t require more work only from Ed. It also means that Vida, Carla, and I have to produce enough news copy to carry the non-advertising part of the paper. Consequently, we were all busy banging out stories first thing Monday morning. I polished the Evan Singer piece, Vida pried information about the Marmot from
Oscar Nyquist, and Carla concentrated on a Russian Christmas customs feature. Although she’d plagiarized most of it from a library book, she’d taken the trouble to interview a family who had recently moved to Alpine from Minsk via Vancouver, British Columbia, and Bellingham.

I was getting back to my editorial when Milo called. He’d heard from his contact in the King County sheriff’s office. Stefan Horthy said that Kathy Francich worked as a cocktail waitress in a bar near the Kingdome. Carol Neal was a table dancer at a seedy nightclub on the Aurora Avenue strip. They’d moved into the Villa Apartments in July. He had never met Carol or Kathy, so he wouldn’t be coming to Alpine to identify bodies. Horthy also managed the Riviera Apartments two blocks away, which was where he lived. He would certainly like to know if his tenants were dead or alive.

So, of course, would Milo. I was about to ask if he intended to send someone to talk to neighbors in the Villa Apartments who might know Carol and Kathy, but Ginny Burmeister rushed up to my office door, signaling that I had another call, long distance. Reluctantly, I hung up on Milo and pressed line two. Adam’s voice sailed into my ear.

“Mom! I missed the bus! Can you come get me?”

“What bus?” There was no bus service from Seattle to Alpine, only to Everett, with a change for Monroe.

“Huh?” Adam sounded amazed. “Hey, I remember a bus. You know, last summer. It came right up Front Street and stopped at Old Mill Park.”

I gritted my teeth. “That was a tour bus. Where are you?”

“Kirkland.” Adam had regained his aplomb. I envied and despised the resiliency of youth. “You need directions?”

I did. Like the rest of Seattle’s Eastside, Kirkland is a suburban maze. Indeed, my son’s proposed route so confused me that we finally settled on a landmark, rather than the Kowalski residence. At one
P.M
., I would meet Adam at the carillon bell tower by the lake in downtown Kirkland.

My day was virtually shot. It was now after ten, and the
round trip would consume almost four hours. What had I been thinking of? That Erin or her parents would drive Adam to Alpine? That Ben would volunteer to collect his nephew? That Durwood Parker and Crazy Eights Neffel would zip down Stevens Pass on the snowmobile?

As usual, the burden fell on good ol’ Mom. I abandoned the editorial, not wanting to rush through the conclusion, and instead devoted what remained of the next hour to a few local news briefs and reading proofs. As usual, Carla had made several typos, including the fact that Alpine had been blanketed with four feet of
snot
and a reference to the Episcopal
rectom
. If necessary, I could start working on the layout in the evening. Meanwhile, it occurred to me that as long as I was going to be in the Seattle area, I might do a bit of sleuthing on my own. As ever, Milo seemed set on going through channels. That could take forever. Or at least until our deadline had passed. I very much wanted to get an ID on one of the nameless victims before we went to press.