by Mary Daheim
“There’s nothing to say,” Max said with a shrug. His own lips trembled, but he held my gaze. “You’ve had your own terrible loss, I understand.”
“Yes.”
Vida closed the album. “Your sister, Lynn, was quite lovely, too,” she remarked, referring to Max’s sister. “Life is so hard.”
Max got to his feet. “I really should go. I don’t like leaving Ma for too long since I have to go back to Seattle Monday morning. I have a departmental meeting that I shouldn’t miss.”
Vida and I both stood up, too. “What do you teach?” I asked, again under control.
“American history,” Max replied. “My specialty is the era between the world wars.”
“Fascinating,” I said, probably sounding phony. But I meant it. “I’m kind of a history buff myself. I took three quarters of American history at the U before transferring to Oregon in my senior year. I had an absolutely wonderful professor for all three classes.”
Max grinned. “You must mean Tom Pressly. He’s still an inspiration for the rest of us.”
I nodded. “He certainly inspired me. I loved his description of ‘history sense’ being like ‘tennis sense.’ Some people have it, some don’t. He had both.”
“That’s the truth,” Max said. “Say, why don’t we have dinner tomorrow night and talk about Tom and history and whatever else you need to know for your article?”
All of a sudden I felt giddy. Two out of three nights having dinner with a man who wasn’t Milo? “I’d like that,” I said simply.
“I must confess,” Max said with a deferential air, “I have a motive. I’ve been working on a book for a couple of years. I’d like to pick your brain a bit. Not only are you a writer, but you seem to have an interest in history.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d been asked to help with a manuscript. My former ad manager, Ed Bronsky, had prevailed upon me to work with his autobiography. If I could endure hours with Ed and reams of bad writing, I could probably put up with Max’s historical treatise.
“I’m no expert,” I pointed out.
“But you’re a professional writer. I stand in awe of people who write for a living. Then it’s settled?” He waited for me to nod my agreement. “Wonderful. I’ll call you tomorrow,” Max said, then bade us farewell.
“My, my,” Vida murmured as Max closed the news room door behind him, “I believe you have a date.”
“Shut up, Vida,” I snapped, no longer giddy.
“I think it’s very nice,” she declared.
I didn’t respond. I was too embarrassed.
And guilty.
Vida went off to finish her errands, which included buying Roger some additions for his Nintendo Game Boy. She, too, may have been feeling some guilt in case she changed her mind about Buck moving in with her and displacing her precious grandson.
I remained in the newsroom, flipping through the albums. I noted that there were few pictures of Jonas Iversen, and none taken after 1917. It was almost as if he’d ceased to exist.
“Now what?” demanded Milo Dodge as he lumbered through the door. “Have you moved into your office?”
He’d startled me. “Gosh, Milo, are you stalking me?”
“Nope,” he replied, sitting down in the chair that Vida had vacated. “I saw your car. You don’t usually work weekends.”
“We have a special edition coming out Wednesday,” I said. “I’m doing some research.”
Milo paused to light a cigarette. “No kidding. How come?”
“We need the money,” I replied. “Give me one of those things.”
He flipped me a Marlboro Light, then offered a match. “As long as you’re researching, figure out why that stiff had batteries in his hand.”
I stared at Milo. “What stiff? The fire victim?”
The sheriff nodded. “Batteries often explode in a fire, but these didn’t. They leaked alkaline instead.”
“You didn’t mention anything about batteries before,” I said in mild rebuke.
“I didn’t know about them until we pried open one of the hands,” Milo responded, tapping his cigarette into Leo’s ashtray. “I’ve got an idea, though.”
“Really?” I tried not to sound sarcastic. “I mean, you don’t usually speculate.”
“I don’t.” Milo pushed the chair back and placed both long legs on the table, just missing one of the Frolands’ older albums. The sheriff, who was otherwise dressed in his usual civilian garb of flannel shirt and suntan pants, was wearing cowboy boots. He wore his off-duty gun, a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special, tucked in the waistband of his pants.
“But this time,” he continued, “I had to wonder why. Who gets burned to death while hanging onto a couple of AA batteries? Why not let go? Wouldn’t you want both hands free if you were in the middle of a raging fire?”
I agreed. “So what’s your point?”
Milo looked a bit smug. “The victim may already have been dead before the fire started.”
“Ah.” It was so obvious that I felt stupid. Even then, it took a couple of seconds for the implication to sink in. “You mean this person may have been murdered?”
“Could be.” Milo leaned back in the chair and recrossed his legs on the table. It occurred to me that I was supposed to comment on his boots. They were definitely new; the soles were scarcely marred.
“Intriguing,” I said, then duly admired the new footgear. “I’ve never seen you wear cowboy boots before. Is this a fashion statement?”
“What?” Milo feigned surprise as he waggled his feet and gazed at the brown-tooled leather. “Oh, no. Barton’s Bootery had these in their window at the mall. I kind of took a liking to them. Clancy Barton talked me into buying a pair. What do you think?”
“I think they’re very handsome,” I said truthfully. “With those heels, you must stand about six-eight.”
“Close to it,” Milo replied. “That’s not a bad thing for a law enforcement officer.”
I’d done my duty. I wanted to get back to business. Rescuing the old album from Milo’s boots, I turned to the page that held the snapshot of the railroad trestle. “Look at this. Coincidence, or what?”
Milo looked closely at the photo. “You mean this isn’t the same picture you showed me the other day?”
I shook my head. “No. Let me show you the other one.” I got up and went into my office to get the snapshot Marsha Foster-Klein had received in the mail. “See? You said you knew the site where this was taken. I drove out there, I could see the rock that looked like somebody’s hind end. It’s in shadow in the album snapshot, but judging from the photo’s format, it looks as if it had been taken by the same camera.”
Milo studied both photos. “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions about the same camera taking these. Way back, most people only had the one kind of Kodak.”
“But it looks like almost exactly the same shot,” I countered. “How long would that rope have hung from the trestle?”
Milo shrugged. “How would I know? It would depend on why it was there in the first place. Hey, how come you’re so interested in these pictures anyway?”
“I told you,” I said, on the defensive, “I’m doing some historical research. We have a special edition coming out.”
Milo gave me a curious look. “You’re bullshitting me, Emma. You’re about the worst liar I ever met. If you ever commit a crime, confess right off the bat.”
I felt a faint flush cover my face. “I am doing research,” I said doggedly.
The sheriff shrugged again, then removed his legs from the table and stood up. He certainly was tall. His head almost hit the newsroom’s low ceiling.
“If you say so,” he remarked. “Now I’ve got to give the M.E. in Everett a big shove. I want to know if our burn victim was killed by something other than the fire.”
“I’d like to know that, too,” I said, following Milo to the door. “Still no missing persons report?”
“Nope.” Milo had to duck to get through the door
. I figured he’d be about seven feet tall when he put on his Smoky the Bear hat.
“Let me know about Jack Froland, too,” I called after him.
Milo stopped with his hand on the knob of the outside door. “I’m betting there won’t be much to tell.”
I didn’t argue.
I was turning back toward the newsroom when I heard the door reopen. Milo, I thought, forgetting to tell me something. But it was Spencer Fleetwood who leaned in the doorway.
“Working overtime?” he inquired in his smooth, casual voice. “That’s very un-Alpinish, isn’t it?”
“I’m not a native,” I replied. “I don’t necessarily follow the local rule of thumb, ‘If you can’t make it in five, you’ll never make it in six,’ Anyway, I’m doing research for the special autumn edition.”
“Don’t forget,” Spence remarked, “when you start working on the Halloween edition ads, we’re in it together.”
“I won’t.” I waited for Spence to continue on his way, but he lingered.
“I saw Milo Dodge go off in the other direction,” Spence said. “Did he bring you a hot news tip?”
I tensed a bit. “We didn’t agree to share news. Just ad revenue. But no, Milo stopped in to show off his new cowboy boots.”
Spence chuckled. “Which will appear in Vida’s ‘Scene Around Town’ column, right?”
“Right.” I told myself to make a note for Vida. Her weekly snippets of gossip were the best-read part of the newspaper.
“I’ve thought of doing something along those lines,” Spence said, now edging into the front office. “In fact, I’m already putting together a kind of ‘This Day in Alpine History’ thing. Not just Alpine, or we wouldn’t have much to say, but what went on everywhere. I may have to bother you for your morgue. Would you mind?”
“No,” I replied, wondering why I’d never come up with the idea myself. “Everything’s in bound volumes. Kip MacDuff is planning to put at least some of the back issues on disk.”
Spence was now all the way past the front desk. “That’s a big job. Any chance I could take a peek at those bound volumes now?”
The request was a bit surprising. “Why, no, go ahead. You can work off the table in the newsroom. I’ll be in my office.”
Gathering up the Froland family albums, I headed for my cubbyhole. Maybe I’d been too abrupt. As a courtesy, I left the door open.
Going through a virtual stranger’s pictorial memories is always a bittersweet experience. Usually, family photographs record only happy moments, but a sense of sadness permeates the pages of someone who has died. Except for the rabid genealogist, fifty years from now anyone who looks at the Froland collection won’t have known the people in the pictures. The names in the captions may identify them, but they will be little more than that, except for the rare anecdote passed down the years. I’ve always thought that was an unfortunate commentary on Americans, whose history is so short, and whose memories are often even shorter.
I never found a smiling likeness of Olga Iverson. Maybe she was a melancholy personality; maybe she had bad teeth.
At the beginning of the most recent album, I found photos of Lynn Froland. She had been a pretty blonde girl, tall and athletic-looking. Indeed, one color picture showed her with skis, perhaps at the Stevens Pass summit where she had died in that tragic car accident. Another shot showed her without skis, but in winter togs, sitting with a group of young people outside of what might have the lodge at the summit. I looked closely to see if Max was one of the three young men with his sister and two other girls, but I didn’t recognize him. The date was January 1967, the year that Lynn had died.
From the newsroom, a burst of Vida’s startled voice made me look up.
“Well!” she cried, “whatever are you doing here?”
“Boning up on Alpine’s past,” Spence replied in an amused tone. “Is everybody working on Saturday?”
“So it seems,” Vida retorted, then marched into my office and closed the door. “What’s going on with Mr. Fleetwood?”
I explained about Spence’s idea for a radio feature. Vida sniffed. “Marius Vandeventer did that for years in the Advocate. We dropped it not long before he sold the paper to you. It was getting redundant.”
“Then,” I pointed out, “it’s all the more harmless for him to do it over the air.”
“Silly,” Vida said, sitting down across from me. “Only the very young will learn anything new.”
The comment amused me, but Vida was quite serious. She gave herself a shake, then plopped both elbows on my desk. “That’s not really why I’m here. After I bought those cute little games for Roger, I went home. The mail had come. You’ll never guess what I got.” She reached into her purse and drew out a letter-sized envelope. “It’s a thank-you from June Froland.”
I stared at the address, which was written in a spidery hand. Then I stared at the brief message on the single page.
“Thank you for the lovely flowers. They mean so much at this sad time.” The note was simply signed, June.
But what I stared at even more than the message was the envelope and the paper. They were the same as the missive that had been sent to Marsha Foster-Klein.
“What do you make of that?” Vida asked with a glint in her gray eyes.
“It’s not the same handwriting,” I pointed out.
“True,” Vida allowed. “And I’m sure Parker’s Pharmacy, for example, sells quite a bit of this stationery. But still . . .” She gave me her owlish look.
“If June’s handwriting doesn’t match Marsha’s letter,” I said in an incredulous voice, “did Jack write it? But why?”
“We must try to get a handwriting comparison,” Vida declared. “Going through the guest book for the funeral might help. I’ll drop in on June tomorrow night while you’re out with Max. But there’s another thing—which becomes even more curious since I received June’s note—that I must discuss with you.” She turned to make sure the door was firmly closed. “What about that trestle snapshot in the Froland album? I couldn’t say anything while Max was here.”
I sat back in my swivel chair. The morning had grown warm, especially in my little office with its low, slanting tin roof. “I’ve been thinking about that. Most people—at least in my family—might take two or three shots of a single subject, but only one—the best—would go into the album. The others would get stuffed back into their original envelopes or put in a . . .” I clapped a hand to my head. “I forgot to bring the shoe box in here. I’ll go get it.”
Hurrying into the news office, I discovered it was empty. The shoe box was on the table, but Spencer Fleetwood was gone. It certainly hadn’t taken him long to do his research, I thought. In fact, he hadn’t quite put away the volume he’d been perusing. It stuck out on the shelf by a good two inches. I gave it a nudge, then looked at the year: 1967. A coincidence, maybe. It was the year that Lynn Froland had died. I pulled the bound newspapers from the shelf, grabbed the shoe box, and returned to my cubbyhole.
“You’re right,” Vida said as I sat down again. “It’s very possible that there are more views of that trestle with June and Jack’s other pictures.” She noticed the volume of Advocates. “What are you doing with that?”
“Spence had taken it off the shelf,” I replied. “I thought I might check out the article on Lynn Froland’s fatal accident.”
Vida looked suspicious. “Why?”
“Just curious,” I said lightly. “Have you ever been curious, Vida?”
Vida harrumphed, then said in a normal voice, “It was late January. I remember, because my youngest daughter, Meg, was born two days later. I wasn’t able to attend Lynn’s funeral.”
The 1967 version of The Alpine Advocate looked quite different than the current edition. For one thing, it was a standard-sized newspaper then, rather than the tabloid into which it had evolved during the mid-Seventies. The type-faces for the headlines were different, too—much bolder and blacker thirty-odd years ago. But the main thing mi
ssing from the earlier Advocate was Vida. She was ten years away from widowhood and working mom status. I could hardly imagine the paper without her.
The Lynn Froland story was in the January twenty-sixth issue, written under Marius Vandeventer’s byline. The Advocate was published on Thursdays instead of Wednesdays in those days. The accident had occurred on the previous Sunday, with the funeral scheduled for Thursday. Thus, the newspaper was late with the fatality story and early for Lynn’s services. I empathized with my predecessor.
“Alpine mourned former Alpine High School prom queen Lynn Froland today, following her tragic death in an automobile accident near the summit of Stevens Pass last Sunday evening,” I read aloud. “The daughter of Jack and June Froland died at the scene when the 1960 Plymouth Valiant in which she’d been riding skidded on black ice and rolled down a sixty-foot embankment.
“Lynn had been skiing with friends at the summit. An active, sports-loving young woman, Lynn worked as a checker at the Grocery Basket, and was known to most of Alpine for her friendly manner and high spirits. She had planned to en-roll at Western Washington State College in Bellingham this coming fall.”
There was more, but I stopped reading. A one-column headshot of Lynn was probably her high school senior picture. The larger front-page photo showed law enforcement officials—identified as the state patrol—looking at the car’s wreckage after it had been brought up from the embankment. The tangled mass of metal was a chilling sight.
I closed the book. “Was anyone else hurt?” I asked Vida.
For once, Vida looked vague. “Y-e-s... I believe so. But I don’t recall. . . . Such a distracting time for me, with the new baby. . . . It should be in the article.” She paused. “Yes, as I recall, Lynn was with two or three other young people. The driver wasn’t from here, Sultan or Monroe, perhaps. . . . I don’t remember the name. You can look it up in here.” She tapped the bound volume with a forefinger.
I shook my head. “I was only curious. The car looked like a mess.”
“It was,” Vida said, “but Lynn was riding in the passenger seat, the dead man’s seat, I think it’s sometimes called. She took the brunt of the crash. In those days, seat belts were still a novelty. I doubt the car even had them.”
