The Alpine Christmas (5 page)

Hearing my phone ring, I went into my office and grabbed the receiver. Milo Dodge had Doc Dewey’s report.

“This is pretty sketchy,” he warned me. “Subject was female, aged fifteen to twenty-five, about five foot six, a
hundred and twenty pounds, probably Caucasian, reasonably well-nourished, dismembered after death. Oh, and the tennis shoe is a Reebok, size seven and a half.”

“It doesn’t sound so sketchy to me,” I said, making notes. “What’s this
dismembered after death
bit?”

I heard Milo’s sigh. “You don’t like gory details, right?”

“Right. Oh, dear.” I steeled myself for the worst. “You mean …?”

“Sawed up. Just like you said.”

Somehow, it sounded worse coming from Milo than it had from me. But maybe that was because I had been guessing. Milo’s verdict—or rather Doc Dewey’s—was official. “Foul play?” I asked in a faint voice.

“We can’t rule it out,” said Milo. “That’s obvious. Right now, we’re checking the missing persons file, but as I told you …”

“What about the tennis shoe?” I didn’t care to hear Milo’s missing persons lecture a second time.

“It’s pretty ordinary,” he replied. “It’d take forever to track it down. In fact, we probably never could.”

I fiddled with my ballpoint pen. It would be almost a full week before we’d publish again. Maybe Milo would learn something else by that time. If he didn’t, I might as well relegate the item to next week’s back page. In this case, no news wasn’t good news, but it was no more than a follow-up.

After I hung up from talking to Milo, it occurred to me that Evan Singer, Jack of All Trades, Master of Some, might be worth a feature. I went into the newsroom and offered Carla the assignment. She balked.

“Evan is weird,” she declared. “I was in Video-to-Go a few times while he worked there. He was always trying to push X-rated films off on me. All I wanted to do was chill out with Mel Gibson or Dennis Quaid.”

Since Carla rarely balks at anything and enthusiasm is her major asset, I capitulated. “I’ll do it myself. I need to keep
in practice.” It was true—I hadn’t done a feature in six months. My last interviewee had been a U. S. Senate candidate who’d made a swing through Alpine. The quotes were platitudes, the pictures were dull, the background was bland. The would-be senator had lost in the primary. It served him right for making such lousy copy. Yet it had occurred to me that maybe I was losing my touch as an interviewer. I would try to do better by Evan Singer.

But I had another task slated for that afternoon. It was December 9, the traditional day I bring home my Christmas tree. When Adam and I had lived in Portland, we’d always bought one from a lot, made a two-inch cut off the trunk, and stuck it in a bucket of water outside for a week. Sometimes the trees stayed fresh and fragrant through New Year’s; other times, their branches drooped and needles dropped by Christmas Day. Since coming to Alpine, I had cut my own trees, not on designated forest service lands, but wherever I happened to find the perfect Douglas fir during the course of the year. Last June, I had discovered my tree, eight feet tall, bushy, virtually symmetrical, just below Alpine Falls. As always, I’d checked with Milo to make sure I wasn’t trespassing or poaching or whatever I might be doing if caught in the act of hacking down a tree with somebody else’s name on it.

“That’s state land, so don’t tell me about it,” Milo had said as he did every year. “It’s not strictly legal, and if you get caught, I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

About eleven-thirty, I called Ben at the rectory to see if he wanted to have lunch and accompany me to Alpine Falls. Teresa McHale answered the phone and sounded pained when I asked for my brother.

“I thought he’d be spending the days with you,” she said in an irritated voice. “I don’t see any need for him to go through yesterday’s collection. Father Fitzgerald can handle that when he feels better.”

“It’s probably wise to get the cash to the bank,” I said in a mild tone. “It may be a few days before Father can cope.”

“He’s coming home tomorrow, Friday at the latest,” Teresa went on in her irritable manner. “Knowing him the way I do, he’ll want to get right back to work. Speaking of which, why doesn’t the city get off its lazy backside and plow Cedar Street or Cascade? It’s very hard for our older parishioners to get to mass in all this snow.”

I sympathized, though I was confident that most of Alpine’s senior citizens had probably been dealing with snow all of their lives. Maybe it was Teresa who was having problems. I made commiserative murmurs, then asked if the Volvo had four-wheel drive. It did, she assured me.

“That’s not the point,” Teresa went on, sounding increasingly cranky. “I’ve been here over a year and I can’t believe how backward this place is. Half the streets don’t have sidewalks, the power is unpredictable, you can’t get decent TV reception without one of those ugly satellite dishes, the growing season lasts about four months, the Seattle Sunday paper has to be trucked in on Saturday. There’s only one dress shop, two decent restaurants, no public swimming pool, no espresso carts, no live entertainment unless you count the drunken loggers throwing each other through the windows at the Icicle Creek Tavern. I feel marooned in this town!”

Again, Teresa McHale struck a sympathetic chord. After almost three years, I often felt the same way—cut off, isolated, cast adrift. I, too, missed the opera, the theatre, major-league sports, vast shopping malls, and high-rises. But most of all, I missed the energy of the city. Despite the demons that drive urban dwellers to despair, there is no other atmosphere that has such vitality. But I wasn’t about to say so to Teresa McHale.

“Dear me,” I sighed in mock anguish, “why ever did you move up here from Seattle?”

There was a faint pause. When Teresa spoke again, I heard a defensive note in her voice. “I wanted a change. I thought
I’d be doing some good, taking this job. I never figured I’d be bored to tears in the bargain.”

“I wouldn’t think you’d be bored, what with all the help you could give Father Fitz in the parish,” I pointed out, genuinely trying to exercise compassion.

“He’s got plenty of lay people to do all that,” asserted Mrs. McHale. “That’s another thing: this town has more busybodies than we had in the whole north end of Seattle. I’m talking about spare time activities. Instead of passing that bond issue for the new swimming pool in the last election, these backwoods dodos voted it down because they’re getting a bowling alley. Now who in their right mind would rather bowl than swim? No wonder everybody is about fifty pounds overweight!”

Again, Teresa had a point. Alpine, like many other small towns, seemed to churn out a greater proportion of people with greater proportions. On the other hand, Teresa wasn’t exactly wasting away. “There is a gym,” I said, a bit sharply. Teresa and her gripes were spoiling my festive tree-cutting mood. “Has my brother shown up yet?”
Like in the last ten minutes while you were bitching my ear off
, I wanted to say.

“He just walked in.” Mrs. McHale was obviously not appeased by my suggestion of working out at the gym.

The next voice I heard was Ben’s, faintly amused. “I haven’t cut down a Christmas tree since we were kids,” he said in response to my invitation. “The parish council meets tonight. I wonder if I should prepare for it.”

“Why? It’s not your parish.” Exasperation tainted my voice.

“True.” He hesitated. “Father Fitz probably doesn’t hear half of what goes on anyway. He’s pretty deaf. Do you want me to bring the axe from the rectory woodshed?”

“I’ve got Dad’s old Swede saw already in the trunk,” I said. “And some ropes and clippers, in case we see any good greens for a swatch.”

Ben emitted a little sigh. “Dad’s old Swede … I didn’t know you kept that, Emma.”

I knew Ben was picturing our dad sawing up the cord of wood we had delivered every fall to our home in Seattle’s Wallingford district. Dad never started cutting the wood until it had stayed on the parking strip for at least three days. Mom would nag at him, insisting that it would rain, or that somebody would trip over it and sue us, or that kids would steal it. I still remembered the smell of the freshly cut wood, usually hemlock with just enough cedar to provide some snap, fourteen-inch chunks, to fit our small fireplace.

“I wonder if the big maple is still there,” I said, my mind staying in a tree mode. “We used to rake leaves until we dropped.”

“Mom and Dad made us take down our tree house,” recalled Ben. “We never should have dropped water balloons on Mr. and Mrs. Peabody.”

“That wasn’t so bad,” I noted. “What really riled Mom and Dad was when we threw Brewster Baxter out of the tree.”

“It was Baxter Brewster,” corrected Ben. “Hell, he landed in one of those big piles of leaves. He wasn’t hurt—just rustled around and got dog poop in his hair.”

We both laughed. I wondered if Teresa McHale was lurking in the rectory, listening to our reminiscences. I told Ben I’d pick him up in fifteen minutes. Nostalgia is best when shared, but it’s sometimes painful. The memories Ben and I had of our parents were wonderful, but there weren’t enough of them. They had died together, when a semitrailer jackknifed in front of them on the way home from Ben’s ordination. Dad was fifty-two; Mom was forty-nine. In the usual scheme of life expectancy, we could have had another thirty years to make memories.

After lunch at the Burger Barn, it took us only five minutes to get to Alpine Falls, which is just up the highway from the town. The tree I had selected was about twenty yards from the river’s final cascade—far enough not to get drenched,
though close enough to impair our hearing. The snow had stopped, but the air was chill and damp. I struggled over the rough ground in my boots, gesturing for Ben to watch his footing.

“Here!” I yelled, pointing at the stately Douglas fir I’d adopted half a year ago.

Ben sawed, while I clutched the trunk. When he finished, I sniffed euphorically at the cut he’d made. But before he could hoist the fir and carry it up the bank to the car, I motioned at a couple of small cedars. Ben waited while I attacked them with my clippers. There was no pine in sight, but I could pick up a couple of branches off the Christmas tree lot in town. Maybe some holly, too, I decided, and even a bit of blue spruce. That always made a cheery combination for a swatch.

Gathering up a half-dozen branches, I saw Ben at the river’s edge. The waters roiled past him, the churning falls at his left, the snow-covered ground under foot, the great stands of evergreen marching up the mountainside. How different this must be for him from the hot, dry plateau in Arizona. Or the humid, lethargic delta of the Mississippi. How much did Ben really miss his roots here in the Pacific Northwest? My brother and I were city children, but never far from the forests and mountains and rivers and sea.

Ben was bending over, presumably digging around in the rocks at the river’s edge. I smiled fondly. When we were young, he was always looking for a flat pebble that he could skip across whichever body of water we were visiting. I waited, expecting him to reach back and pitch. Instead, he turned to look at me, and his face had gone pale under its all-year tan.

“Don’t come any closer, Emma,” he yelled. “Go up to the car.”

Puzzled, I stared at him. But his stunned expression, more than his words, urged me to flee. Clutching the greens and the clippers to my breast, I scurried up the bank. I slipped
twice, swore, dropped the clippers, retrieved them, and finally reached the Jaguar. A minute later, Ben appeared, dragging my beautiful Douglas fir.

“What’s wrong?” I gasped, out of breath.

Ben righted the tree, shaking snow from its branches. His color was beginning to return, but his face was very grim. Suddenly, I thought of Milo and let out a little squeal. “Ben—what did you see down there?”

He shoved the tree into the trunk of my car. “Shit.” His gloved hands dangled at his sides. “It was an arm. I swear to God, Emma, it was an
arm
.” He gazed at me as if he didn’t expect to be believed. Along with my shock came the realization that Ben didn’t know about Milo’s ghastly catch. The paper wasn’t out and I hadn’t thought to tell him.

I stuffed the greens into the trunk and began to wrestle with the ropes. “We have to tell the sheriff,” I said, hearing my voice crack. Abruptly, I began to laugh. Ben stared at me, the horror on his face replaced by mystification at my reaction. I waved a weak hand at him. “It’s okay,” I gasped. “It’s just that … somebody has gone to pieces!”

Ben didn’t laugh. There was nothing indecisive about my brother as he pushed me into the passenger side of the car and took the wheel. I was still semi-hysterical when we crossed the bridge into Alpine.

For over twenty years, I had relied on nobody but myself. I took great pride in my independence, my resourcefulness, my competence. On the short ride into Alpine, I chided myself for falling apart. Was it because I had Ben at my side, the older brother who had shielded me from all harm unless he was the one perpetrating it? Or was I genuinely shattered by the discovery of various body parts along the Skykomish River? I didn’t know. But I wasn’t about to go on being such a weak sister, as my mother would have put it. Giving one last sniffle, I showed Ben where the sheriff’s office was located. He pulled the Jaguar into the slush at the curb just as Milo came down the street, presumably from lunch.

After listening to our recital, Milo looked as if his lunch had rebelled. “Damn,” he breathed, then gave Ben an apologetic nod. “Sorry, Father. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Shit,” said Ben, “I didn’t know that you’d already found a leg. What the hell is going on around here?”

Milo looked askance at Ben, apparently shocked by my brother’s salty language. Milo had been brought up a Congregationalist, which explained his amazement, as well as a few other matters. Milo said he’d get Sam Heppner, then take his deputy and Ben up to the falls in a county vehicle. Having regained my composure, I insisted that I should go along, too. After all, I was the press.

“Here comes more of the press,” said Milo, indicating Vida, who was marching briskly down the street, her tweed
coat flapping around her boots. “Why don’t the two of you have a press conference?”