The Alpine Recluse (11 page)

“Not so warm this morning,” she declared, despite the fact that it was already seventy-two, the same as it had been early in the previous day. “You can feel autumn in the air.”

“Then how come there’s a heat haze along the tree line?” Leo inquired.

“It will dissipate,” Vida said with confidence. She had on a different straw hat this morning, bright red with white polka dots on the matching red ribbons. After pouring herself a cup of hot water—her usual pick-me-up when she wasn’t drinking tea—she sat down and began sorting through her in-box. And hummed.

Her humming—always off-key and seldom recognizable as a song—drove me nuts. It was a signal of self-righteousness on Vida’s part as well as a barrier against intrusion or interference. After snatching up a maple bar, I retreated to my cubbyhole.

Milo didn’t call. That was ominous, as was Scott’s report when he returned from his early morning rounds, which included checking the police log.

“Sam Heppner told me there was nothing new on the Rafferty case,” Scott said, leaning against the door frame. “Nothing else, except for the usual traffic violations, a street race on Alpine Way, and a couple of prowler reports. By the way, Toni Andreas is out sick today.”

I wasn’t surprised. She’d probably worked herself into an emotional tizzy. I’d already informed Scott that he’d be covering the search party gathering. Vida could take some pictures, but the event wasn’t suitable for her House & Home page. She might argue, but the line was firmly drawn.

The rally was news to Scott, who, along with Tamara, was in the Alpine minority. They rarely listened to
Vida’s Cupboard.
Being young and in love, they probably had better things to do. Scott, in fact, thought Vida—or Roger—had a good idea.

“Why not?” he’d said, both of us keeping our voices down so that Vida couldn’t overhear. “Those kids might be doing something a lot crazier or more dangerous than hiking around the woods.”

I supposed he had a point.

Scott and I left the office at a quarter to ten. Vida had departed a couple of minutes earlier. My reporter and I walked along Front Street together, but parted company at the sheriff’s office. I had just enough time to needle Milo, although I half expected him to have gone to the park, too.

He was, however, in his office, drinking his vile coffee and flipping through the latest issue of
Combat Handguns.

“What’s new?” I said in a hopeful voice.

The sheriff leaned back in his chair, stretched, and yawned. “Not much.”

I didn’t sit down, but leaned on the back of Milo’s visitor’s chair. “Then I guess I won’t ask how the investigation’s going.”

He shook his head slowly. “Nope.”

“You
are
investigating, aren’t you?”

He shot me a dark look. “Don’t be a pain in the ass, Emma.”

I shrugged. “Just curious. What’s wrong with Toni?”

Milo pulled his chair closer to the desk. “She says she’s got a virus. There’s one going around, I guess. There always is.”

I was dying to tell Milo about the possibility that Toni might have been seeing Tim Rafferty on the sly. But I had no real evidence, still only vague intimations from Adam and Janet. The sheriff despised personal guesswork as much as the professional variety.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “Maybe that’s why she had such a bad day yesterday.”

“Probably. Wrong time of the month, I figured.”

You would.
But I didn’t say it out loud. “Are you going to Roger’s rally?”

“Hell, no. I’m sending Dwight and Dustin.” Milo sipped coffee. “This is better today. Doe made it. Her coffee’s not bad.”

“I’m going to stroll by for a few minutes,” I said, pushing the chair away. “In fact, I’d better go. Keep me posted.”

“Right.” Milo turned back to his magazine.

I headed out onto Front Street again, noting the barrenness of the mountains I could see from my vantage point. In the past, the snow hadn’t completely melted from Mount Baldy until after Labor Day. This year, it had trickled off the slopes by the first week of August. Global warming be damned, I thought, and walked briskly past the post office, the Alpine Hotel, and the old railroad station. I crossed Alpine Way after a short wait for a couple of trucks rolling into town. At the entrance to the park, I spotted a big banner with red letters on a white background:

THE SEARCH IS ON!!!

Halfway through the park, I saw that was indeed the case. Or at least, the search party was arriving. Some thirty young people were clustered in the picnic area several yards beyond the statue of town founder Carl Clemans. Scott was moving outside the group, holding his camera and seeking good angles.

At the center of the group was Roger, with Vida not far behind him. Having turned eighteen, Roger was now taller than his grandmother and considerably wider. He seemed to be in charge, offering sign-up sheets, taking down information, and checking ID cards. Maybe I’d underestimated the kid.

Scott saw me and gave a thumbs-up gesture. I didn’t know if he was saying that he approved of the turnout or that he was taking good pictures. I recognized most of the crowd, though I could identify only a few by name. It seemed to me that one day I was admiring an infant in the aisle of the Grocery Basket, a toddler a short time later at the Alpine Mall—and the next thing I knew, the child had turned into a high school student. Despite the slow pace of a small town, the years had gone by too fast.

More volunteers were arriving. A handful of parents were present, as well. I saw Norm Carlson in his Blue Sky Dairy uniform, leaning against one of the empty picnic tables.

“Are your daughters joining in?” I asked after I’d approached Norm.

He nodded. “Both of them. They’ve been working part-time this summer at the Bourgettes’ diner. They decided this’d be their great adventure. Georgia and I hope it’s safe.”

“Have you ever seen Old Nick?”

Norm shook his head. “He’s a myth as far as I’m concerned. Oh, I’ve noticed a couple of those hermits over the years, but not Nick. In fact, a while back—five, six years, maybe—I found one hanging around the dairy. He was trying to cadge some milk. Harmless, but creepy. The problem is, some of them are badasses, if you’ll excuse the expression. I heard about one in King County who killed trespassers. After the guy died, they found him in his cabin with about six skulls lined up on his mantelpiece.” Norm shuddered. “Another one had shrunken heads over his bed.”

Milo had told me similar stories years ago, gleaned from his law enforcement peers in other counties. Coincidentally, I saw Dwight Gould and Dustin Fong strolling in from the park’s south entrance.

Norm saw the deputies, too. “Are they going to break this up?” he asked in what sounded like a hopeful voice.

“They can’t,” I replied. “This is a public park and these are volunteers. This isn’t exactly a first when it comes to search parties in this area.”

“Right.” Norm looked thoughtful. “Georgia and I told the girls to stick together.”

“That’s good advice,” I said. “I understand they’ll go in threes.”

“That’s smart.” He moved away a few paces, toward the group. “Maybe I’ll grab a snack. ’Scuse me, Emma.”

“Sure.” I walked over to a place where I could see what was on the table where Roger was conducting his heroic business. There were plates of cookies, bags of chips, bottled water, and what looked like power bars. Vida had been shopping. Maybe that’s why she’d been late to work.

With the help of another beefy boy, Roger climbed up onto the table, megaphone in hand and suede hiking shoes trampling some bags of chips.

“Okay, everybody!” he bellowed, as ear-shattering as ever his grandmother could be. “Listen up! You got the description of this Old Nick dude, right? You got trail maps and the rest of your gear. You all got your assignments, north, south, east and . . .” He stopped briefly, consulting his grandmother. “. . . west.”

Roger probably hadn’t done well in geography. He was pointing in the wrong directions. Maybe the others didn’t know the difference.

“Remember the rules,” he went on. “Everybody report back here by six o’clock sharp. Earlier, if you’re draggin’. Meanwhile, be careful, and now haul ass!”

I saw Vida flinch, but she didn’t reprimand her grandson. Instead, she broke into a wide smile and clapped her hands. Roger got down from the table, joining the other beefy boy and one of our former
Advocate
carriers, Oren and Sunny Rhodes’s son, Davin. Roger immediately led his buddies over to a pretty, buxom girl I recognized as a Gustavson. Apparently, he was trying to talk her into making it a foursome. She seemed reluctant.

As the others began to prepare for departure, I moved away. Scott approached me, looking sheepish.

“I interviewed some of the volunteers before you got here,” he said. “Including Roger.”

I made a face. “Well, you had to interview him. He seems to be running this show, and if you didn’t include him in the story, Vida would have your head on a silver platter.”

“That’s what I figured,” Scott replied. “Actually, he did okay.”

I shot my reporter a wry look. “He didn’t fall off the table.” My gaze shifted to Vida, who was engaged in conversation with some of the parents, including her daughter Amy and son-in-law Ted. “Of course, Roger enjoys being the center of attention.”

Scott and I decided we might as well head back to the office. It was ten-thirty, and I wanted to check for messages before I went to Stella’s Styling Salon for my haircut.

There was nothing pressing in the calls Ginny handed me. Except for Scott, the newsroom was empty. Ginny had also delivered the mail. There was nothing of importance there, either—just the usual boilerplate news releases, filler material, and the notice of the next Washington State Newspaper Association meeting.

I retraced my steps down Front Street, crossing over to the Clemans Building, where Stella had her salon. It was already getting overly warm. I was perspiring by the time I greeted Stella.

“Your hair’s so thick it makes you even hotter,” she declared, surveying my image in the mirror at her station. “You haven’t had it cut since April. What have you got in mind before I bring out the mowing machine?”

I smiled back at Stella, who was always blunt. Her own hair was very short, with gold highlights mingled among a rich brown shade. I had no idea what Stella’s real color was. In all the years I’d been going to her salon, she’d changed her hair along with the seasons.

“Short,” I said, “like yours, but not quite as short. Tapered on the sides, high on top.”

“Your perm’s grown out,” Stella said after a studious look at my head. “You have absolutely no curl. Great body, nice color—
but.
”

“But?” I gazed at her mirror image. “You refer to my utter lack of talent for styling my own hair?”

Stella nodded. “You’re inept. Take Toni Andreas, for example. I tried to talk her out of letting her hair grow out. It’s thick, like yours. But she has some curl. It looks okay. I told her so a while ago when she came in for a facial. Toni knows how to do her hair. Of course she’s . . .” Stella paused. “She’s a bit younger.”

“Like twenty years?” I said dryly.

Stella waggled her head from side to side. “Something like that.” She motioned for me to get up so that we could move on to the shampoo sink. “But would you really want to be thirty again? Especially if you’re a woman and still single.”

“I
am
still single,” I pointed out.

Stella positioned me in the chair by the sink. “You’re different. No offense, Emma. By that age you’d had a kid, you had your college degree, you had a solid career, you weren’t trying to beat your biological clock.” She stopped to turn on the water. “Girls these days—even in small towns—wait so long to get married. Oh, I don’t blame them,” she continued as she began to shampoo my hair. “Richie and I were barely twenty-one when we got married. Those first few years were an awful struggle, especially with babies on the way. But I wouldn’t want to be single and thirty now. It’s different.”

I relaxed under Stella’s expert hands. “I gather Toni has complained about her status.”

Stella laughed wryly. “Everybody complains to their hairdresser. It’s like being a bartender.”

“I know,” I said. “Occupational hazards.”

“You don’t complain,” Stella said with a touch of reprimand.

“No. I have an entire newspaper in which I can vent.”

“But not about your personal problems,” Stella pointed out as she rinsed the soap out of my hair.

“I’m not the type to talk about my personal life.”

“Rare,” Stella said tersely, winding a towel around my head.

We returned to her station. The salon wasn’t busy. There was no air-conditioning, only a couple of ceiling fans that Richie Magruder had installed recently.

“I wish,” I said, “that I knew what was wrong with Toni. She had an emotional breakdown yesterday. I tried to help, but she wouldn’t tell me what was wrong.”

“I heard something about that,” Stella said. “You actually talked to her?”

I recounted what had happened at the sheriff’s office and by the Sears catalog store. “Stress,” I said. “That’s all she’d tell me. She’s out sick today.”

“No kidding.” Stella’s artfully made-up face was stamped with curiosity. “I wonder.”

“About what?” I watched my own expression of feigned innocence.

Stella had removed the towel and was beginning to snip. “About the guy who was causing her to be so upset. That is, one minute Toni was happy as a deer with a salt lick, and the next she’d be down in the sawdust hopper. I’ve only cut her hair once this year—back during the winter, maybe right around New Year’s. But she comes in fairly often to have her nails done or get a facial. In fact, the last few months she’d been here pretty often. That’s always a sign that romance is in the air.”

“And the hair?” I murmured.

Stella laughed. “Funny Emma.”

“I’m serious,” I asserted. “Women usually don’t get their hair cut short if the man in their life likes long tresses. You know what I mean. Hair splayed on the pillow like a fan, running their fingers through—”

“You’re right,” Stella broke in. “Toni’s always had short hair until this spring. Changing your hairstyle means a big change in your life, one way or the other. You get dumped, you decide to color your hair blue or some damned thing. You find Mr. Right, you let him dictate how you look. Women are like that. You’ve got a new man in your life, Emma. How does he like your hair?”