The Alpine Betrayal

by Mary Daheim

  I gave Doc a sympathetic look. “But it didn’t happen again, and that was the main thing.”

  Doc turned very grave. “It might have saved Art Fremstad, if I’d acted fast enough.”

  Vida’s jaw thrust out. “You and Curtis and even Dani might have ended up dead, too, Doc. You can’t look at it like that.”

  Doc shrugged. I scooted the chair forward a few inches. “All along I kept feeling as if I were watching scenes from a movie,” I said, unable to keep from wondering how long it would be before I could get some painkiller inside my aching body. “How much of all that was make-believe?”

  Doc scratched his bald spot. “Not as much as you’d think. Patti always blamed Dani, and Dani was never sure what had happened. But when Curtis came back to town and told Dani and Patti what he thought was true, they joined forces. Then Reid and that actor fellow got into the act, too. After all, Scarlett was Reid’s granddaughter as much as Patti’s. They came to me one evening and asked what I thought. Then they asked what ought to be done about it.” He stared at his hands which were lying flat on the desk. “I’d already tried to talk Marje out of marrying Cody. Now it seemed that I was being asked to administer justice. I considered going to Milo, but what could we prove? It never occurred to me that Art Fremstad had been murdered, at least not by anyone around here. Maybe I didn’t want to believe it. Art wasn’t the suicidal type, that’s for sure. But,” Doc went on and his words were meant for me, rather than Vida, “a small town is the center of the universe to the people who live there. Even though we know better, we like to believe that its imperfections aren’t as bad as other places’.”

  I tried to give Doc a thin smile of understanding. “So you and the others formed a sort of pact?”

  “There was never much said out loud.” Doc leaned back in his chair and let out a weary sigh. “The rest of them had somehow designated me as their avenging angel. They tried to create a smokescreen by carrying on as if they were all still mad at each other—at least Dani and Patti did—but the only one who was really disturbed by Dani’s return to Alpine was Cody. He may have hated her, but mostly I think he was afraid of her. I’d bet my bottom dollar he would have liked to have landed that axe right in her gizzard.”

  “I was never in favor of Marje marrying Cody, either,” sniffed Vida. “I said something to her parents once, which wasn’t enough, because my brother and his wife are both dumb as a brick wall. And Marje thought I was being an old fogey.”

  “But,” I noted quietly, “Marje knew, didn’t she?”

  Doc again nodded. “I told her. After he was dead. She carried on something fierce when she heard he’d been hit by a car. She called me at the hotel in Seattle that Sunday, all upset. I didn’t let on then, I hoped maybe the whole thing would actually be passed off as an accident. But after Cody’s autopsy, I called her back a couple of days later and told her what Cody had done to little Scarlett. She cried some more. But she thanked me.”

  “For what?” The question fell out of my mouth.

  Doc gave a little grunt. “For saving her, I guess.” He glanced at Vida, then looked back at me. “If I’d told her earlier what I thought Cody had done to that baby, she might not have believed me. Even if she had, there would have been another foolish girl and another innocent baby. Nobody—not Dani, not Patti, not Curtis, not me, by God—wanted that. I think Marje guessed … what I’d done to Cody.”

  Vida nodded vigorously. “Of course she did. Marje tried to divert Billy Blatt and Milo by saying Cody was taking Haloperidol. But he wasn’t. You and Marje were really the only ones who could have put the stuff into Cody’s beer. In fact, you put it in all three of his beers, didn’t you, Doc?”

  He gave a little grunt of assent. “I had to be sure. Nobody can calculate an individual’s tolerance.”

  “I guessed that,” I put in. “Cody was already showing signs of drunkenness when I got to the tavern with Carla and Ginny. You were the only one on duty behind the bar and you’d been there the whole time, doing your two-hour stint. I wondered about the bottles of Haloperidol, then I remembered that clicking sound in your pocket. Although it didn’t register at the time, it was glass striking glass. I finally realized that when Honoria and I toasted Milo.”

  Vida shot me a sidelong glance, but this was no time to get distracted. “I thought the person with the poison”—I was careful to avoid the word killer, which seemed so ill-suited to Doc—“might be taking a risk by bringing the stuff into the tavern, but if you were found with it, no one would think twice. You’re a doctor. Still, I had to wonder if you were concerned about being found out.”

  Letting out a disdainful breath. Doc scowled at me. “I sure was! My family, my reputation, the whole works, would—will—be hurt. I didn’t want that to happen. I may have killed somebody, but I’m not nuts.”

  “Of course not,” Vida agreed. “You carried it off beautifully. This is all conjecture, Doc. I doubt that a serious case could be made against you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” mused Doc. “It could be done if we had a decent prosecutor in this county.” He seemed quite untroubled, however, his clinical air intact.

  “Witnesses are so unreliable,” Vida remarked. “Dani passed the mug along, but someone might have seen her tamper with it.”

  “Actually,” I noted, “Jack Blackwell could have done it, since he was behind the bar. He had no motive, unless he was acting on behalf of Patti. But I ruled him out when Honoria Whitman told me he hadn’t touched Cody’s beer. Neither did Reid or Matt or Patti herself. Honoria never mentioned Donna Fremstad Wickstrom. I doubt she knew who Donna was, but I never seriously considered her anyway because I honestly don’t think she knew Cody killed Art until the last few days. If she did, and had wanted revenge, she would have acted much sooner.” I paused, my voice tired and my ankle making my ears ring with pain. “Curtis Graff was there, but he was nowhere near his brother. That left you and Marje, Doc. And I had to believe Honoria would have seen Marje if she’d been the one with the Haloperidol.” Oddly enough, the once-unfamiliar word slipped easily off my tongue. I was beginning to know its name all too well. “But Vida’s right. Conflicting testimony, no concrete evidence—it’s all circumstantial.”

  Vida was making stabbing gestures on Doc’s desk with her forefinger. “Tell me this, Doc—was it planned that Dani would drive Cody out and dump him by the Burl Creek Road?”

  Doc’s tired face wrinkled up, then sagged again. “No. There was no plan, as such. But I think Dani knew what I’d done and she hoped to make it look like an accident, so she borrowed Matt’s car—more smokescreen, maybe—and went over to Cody’s. I’m surprised he could get as far as the street, but he must have, unless she had help.”

  “Maybe she did,” I suggested. “Maybe there were two cars.” Had Dani lost her eyeliner while she was trying to get Cody out of the car? Or had Patti, perhaps with Reid Hampton in tow, actually dropped it? The point was now moot. “Reid or Matt or even Curtis might have been driving the other one.”

  “Could be.” Doc looked as if not only the subject at hand, but the world itself had gotten very tiresome. “When are you going to call Milo?” The question was put to Vida.

  For once, she actually squirmed. “Ooooh … I don’t know—he may not be back from Seattle yet.” Her hand went to her glasses, then her hair, and finally came to rest on the edge of the desk. “Doc, what did they tell you in Seattle?”

  He lifted his hands, which still trembled slightly. “Three months, six at most. It’s lymphatic. I diagnosed myself, you know.”

  “I should think so,” Vida retorted, bridling a bit at the mere suggestion that Doc would allow some big city specialist to figure out his condition.

  Doc was on his feet, moving toward the door. “Parker’s is closed,” he said. “I’ll get something out of the supply closet for you, girlie.”

  “Okay,” I said, much relieved. I had the good sense not to tell him to skip the Haloperidol.

  Chapter Eigh
teen

  MILO SHOWED ME how to shift my body and thus keep my weight on my hands rather than my armpits. I thanked my lucky stars I only weighed a hundred and twenty-five pounds. I cursed the Fates that had made every ounce so clumsy.

  “Damn,” said Milo, after he’d finished his demonstration and was lapping up a beer, “what do I do now?”

  “That,” I replied, lying on the sofa like a nineteenth-century tubercular heroine, with a bowl of popcorn as an unlikely prop, “is up to you.”

  “Hell.” Milo was staring at Honoria’s ceramic blob which I had put on the coffee table for want of a better venue. “This puts me in a terrible spot,” he muttered. “If I arrest Doc, the whole town will hate me and I could lose the election to Hitler. If I don’t make an arrest, I’m a goner, too.”

  I moved my ankle, complete with tightly wrapped Ace bandage, slightly to the left. “You have to see that justice is done, Milo.” I put absolutely no emotion into my words. The truth was, I didn’t have much left.

  “Yeah, sure, right …” Milo’s annoyance could have been with me or with the concept. Maybe both. Finally it dawned on him that he wasn’t the only professional who was on the hook. Since it was almost midnight and we’d been hashing Cody Graff’s death over since ten-thirty, it was about time. But as Vida says: men aren’t like other people. I could hardly have expected him to consider anybody’s position but his own so quickly.

  “Say, Emma,” he said, rolling the beer can between his hands. “What are you going to do about this? You’ve got one hell of a story.”

  I gave him my most innocent gaze. “Only if you make an arrest, Sheriff. Otherwise, I’ve got hearsay and a libel suit.” It was a non-story, and I mustn’t beat myself over the head for suppressing the news.

  “Oh.” Milo slumped with disappointment. I didn’t add that if I were back in Portland, working on The Oregonian, I would have used the information I had to rock City Hall. If some doctor had poisoned somebody else, no matter how benign the killer or how malignant the victim, I would have seen it as my professional duty to bring the culprit to justice. But that was Portland, and this was Alpine. I knew Doc Dewey. I knew Cody Graff. I knew what had gone before, and what might have been. I would rather burn The Advocate to the ground than sully Doc’s reputation.

  “Cancer, huh?” murmured Milo. I nodded. Milo swore. “What’ll we do without Doc?” There was a plaintive note in the sheriff’s voice.

  “There’s young Doc, and I suppose he’ll get somebody new. It would have happened eventually. Doc must be seventy, at least.”

  “Seventy-four,” said Milo, into his beer can. The words echoed; the can must be empty.

  “Go get another beer,” I urged. “And bring me some milk instead of Pepsi this time. I’m getting high enough on Percodan.”

  Milo complied, loping back with a glass of milk and a Miller. The ale was gone. Reclining in the rocker, Milo closed his eyes. “Everybody says it was an accident. An overdose maybe.” He spoke musingly. “It’s Art I’m thinking of …”

  “Donna knows the truth,” I put in. “Isn’t that enough?”

  Milo’s eyes flickered open. “It is if she tells it.”

  “She’ll only have to tell it once.”

  “True.”

  We lapsed into silence. In the distance, I could hear the midnight train, followed by a roll of thunder. I smiled to myself. Perhaps the heat wave was breaking, at least for a day or so. All up and down the Cascades, I could imagine rain beginning to fall, up on the mountain crests, down into the foothills, onto the hillsides, and eventually, with luck, all over Alpine.

  “I could stall.” Milo lifted his head from the back of the rocker.

  “For six months? A year?”

  “People forget.”

  “In Alpine?”

  Milo gave me a twisted grin. “No. But they get sidetracked. And sometimes even when they don’t forget, they forgive.”

  I smiled back at Milo. “Go for it.”

  Milo’s grin widened, then he sobered abruptly. “Go for what, Emma?”

  Our gazes locked. I heard myself let out a little gasp. Then I started to giggle. “Oh, Milo, you dope, you know what I mean! Besides, right now, I’m a helpless cripple. What about Honoria?”

  Milo turned sheepish. “She’s a helpless cripple, too.”

  “Oh, dear. You know the strangest women!” My giggles were verging on hysteria, the result of emotion, pain, and Percodan. “I should go to bed.”

  A bit clumsily, Milo got to his feet. He loomed over me. “How are you going to get there?”

  “Damned if I know,” I admitted.

  Milo sighed. “I’ll help. Then I’ll sleep on the couch. Don’t argue. Nobody’s waiting up for me at home. Damn it, Emma, why can’t we be as sexually irresponsible as our children?”

  “We weren’t raised that way,” I replied. And wondered what that said about the likes of Milo and me as parents. By the time I put my head on the pillow in my bed and Milo had settled down in the living room, I decided that maybe our children were smarter than we were. Or was it that our own parents had been wiser? Again, maybe it was the Percodan….

  “‘Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.’” Cal Vickers paused to clear his throat, take a sip of beer from his mug, and receive a glance of approval from Vida. “‘Do not think that am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.’”

  Cal’s monotone droned on, as he read the opening-chapter of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. I sat back on my orange crate, while the crowd of customers at the Icicle Creek Tavern listened to the fourth reader of the evening.

  Vida’s brainstorm had been a success. Over fifty patrons had brought an eclectic array of books to the Saturday night gathering. New paperbacks from the drugstore rack, old novels culled from boxes in dusty attics, books checked out on seldom used or often abused library cards, even a collection of Latvian recipes, rested on the tavern’s rough table-tops and blemished bar.

  During the past six days, we had had a rainstorm that lasted less than an hour, a minor earthquake with the epicenter just south of the Canadian border in Whatcom County, and the resumption of our hot, dry summer. Reid Hampton had been released from the hospital, and apparently made up with Matt Tabor, and Blood Along the River was proclaimed a wrap about the same time The Advocate hit the street on Wednesday. Our building was still the color of Vida’s canary, but we were promised it would be repainted in thirty days. I disposed of my crutches on Thursday, though I still walked with a limp and Doc Dewey informed me would last until Labor Day. But it was mid-August, and if I peeked at the calendar, autumn would officially commence in just a little over a month. But I didn’t peek. I never do—for fear that somehow I will jinx the change of seasons.

  Milo was sitting between Honoria and me, wedged in at the same table the two of them had shared the night Cody Graff had been poisoned. Two weeks had passed since Cody had staggered out the door on Marje Blatt’s arm. It seemed like a lifetime. On Monday, Milo had announced that the investigation of Cody’s death was closed. He and Doc Dewey, who was the county coroner, after all, had come to the conclusion that Cody had accidentally overdosed. I wrote the story for Wednesday’s front page, but kept it to under two inches of copy, buried in the lower left corner. No one called or wrote to question the article. Maybe that was because the much longer piece that surrounded the Graff announcement had dealt with Tacoma City Light’s desire to build a dam on the Skykomish River. Since such a project might threaten the already meager number of fish in the river, Alpiners took umbrage and personally blamed me for such a harebrained scheme. The locals knew their priorities, and Cody Graff was no longer numbered among them.

  Fuzzy Baugh was now reading a Tennessee Williams play, changing his voice up and down, depending upon the speaker’s sex. The relic of a New Orleans accent that remained in Fuzzy’s voice lent authenticity, which was a blessing—because he couldn’t act worth a hoot. Vida
, seated on a tall stool behind the bar, kept a poker face; I tried not to snicker when I caught her eye.

  Feeling a jab in my shoulder, I craned my neck, careful not to upset my orange crate. Patti Marsh and Jack Blackwell stood behind me. She carried a Jackie Collins paperback; he held a hardcover Elmore Leonard.

  Patti leaned over to whisper in my ear. “Dani called from L.A. this afternoon. She’s decided to make at least one more movie.”

  “For Reid?”

  Patti’s laugh was on the wry side. “Yeah. Co-starring Matt. Reid—Ray—thinks they’re hot.”

  “They certainly looked hot in all those winter clothes,” I replied, forgetting to whisper. Fuzzy Baugh frowned at me in his most mayoral manner, then resumed reading Maggie the Cat’s impassioned lines to her husband Brick.

  Patti started to edge away, but Blackwell stayed put. He addressed his words not to me, however, but to Milo. “It looks like you’re unopposed, Dodge. You feeling comfortable?”

  Fuzzy had concluded his scene, so Milo was able to speak in his normal voice. “I do now. Averill Fairbanks had me worried for a minute there.”

  Blackwell snorted in disdain. “Averill! He’s nuts.” When Milo didn’t argue, Jack slapped the sheriff’s shoulder. “Don’t get too cozy under that badge, pal.” His grin wasn’t exactly sinister, but it would have gone well with a curling mustache and a flowing black cape. Jack Blackwell might not be as evil as he seemed, but I still didn’t like him much. I was betting he always rooted for Leonard’s sleaziest characters. “I’m going to the courthouse Monday and file for sheriff myself.”

  Milo choked on a mouthful of small pretzels. “You …” It was hard to tell if the word was a question or an accusation.

  “Why not?” said Blackwell, as Vida introduced the local dentist, Dr. Bob Starr, who had brought along Lawrence Sanders’s latest deadly sin. “It’s not that hard to run a timber company when the woods are shut down for two to three months at a time with this lousy hot weather. Who knows? The way things are going, it could be curtains for the whole frigging industry. It might be smart to have a sideline.” He gave Patti a light slap on the behind. “Let’s go, babe. Milo wants to play games with his pair under the table. His guns, I mean.” Blackwell leered at Honoria, then at me, and sauntered off in the wake of Patti’s swaying hips.