The Alpine Escape

by Mary Daheim

  With the food’s arrival the conversation turned to lighter topics. Paul talked about his job at Rayonier. Mike expounded on how college students lacked self-esteem. Jackie wondered about wallpapering the downstairs rooms. I recounted my Jaguar’s troubles but not the reason for making the trip in the first place. Mike accepted another chunk of garlic bread, his deep blue eyes straying in my direction. Feeling uneasy, I engaged in a drawn-out monologue about publishing The Alpine Advocate. By some miracle my audience was still awake when I finally wound down.

  It was after ten-thirty when we got back to the Rowley-Melcher house. Mike made polite noises about not coming back inside, but Jackie insisted, at least until we finished going through the photo albums.

  “It shouldn’t be too hard,” she assured us as we trooped into the den. “Emma says that the shoe is from around the turn of the century.”

  “I’m guessing, I’m guessing,” I put in hastily, waving a hand at Jackie. “I did some fashion features on The Oregonian for your mother’s special editions. This heel is stacked, a style that women adapted from men after 1900. It’s straight, not curved, which is unusual for a woman’s shoe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If I have to stick my neck out further, I’d guess that whoever wore that shoe wasn’t on her way to the opera or a ball.”

  Jackie giggled. “In Port Angeles? I’ll bet she wasn’t, either!”

  With an air of apology, Mike corrected Jackie. “Actually, there was an opera house in town at the time. I understand it was the center of most social activities. I read up on local history before I moved here.”

  “Neat,” Jackie remarked without enthusiasm. Suddenly, she sobered and tears welled up in her eyes. “Poor thing! The dead woman, I mean. But what was she doing, wearing her jewelry while she was cleaning house?”

  Paul, who was now sitting next to Jackie on the sofa, patted her knee. “They had servants, Sweets. They had to, with this big place.”

  “Well, we don’t!” Jackie pulled away and shot her husband an accusing look. “That’s the trouble with this modem age, you men expect us to be superwomen!”

  I had resumed my place on the floor while Mike tried not to sink into the footstool. Jackie had a point. When the house was finally renovated, it would be a wonderful place to live. But not to clean. Since Jackie showed no interest in housekeeping, I felt for her. And for Paul.

  “Women wore jewelry much more in those days than we do now,” I remarked, trying to steer the conversation away from controversy. “Everyone dressed more formally, even in small towns like Port Angeles.”

  The atmosphere perked up as quickly as it had run down. I was trying to get used to Jackie’s mercurial temperament, but it wasn’t easy. My sole reporter on The Advocate, Carla Steinmetz, was also given to unpredictable mood swings. But Carla was inherently enthusiastic if basically addled. She rarely resorted to tears and seldom complained. I found myself overcome with appreciation for what seemed like comparative stability. Competence was another matter.

  Each of us was perusing one of the old albums. We were silent for several moments, with only the sound of pages turning and a faint breeze stirring the evergreens in the spacious yard. The street was quiet, probably because most traffic used the truck route a couple of blocks away.

  Jackie finished her album first. “I wish that earring was bigger. With some of these pictures I can’t see much. The women are looking straight at the camera.”

  I was the one to spot the garnet earrings, though I’d had to use a magnifying glass Paul had found in a drawer. The woman was wearing a high-necked dress with a lace yoke. Under a broad-brimmed hat her fair hair was coiffed into a pompadour. She had tilted her head just enough to permit a full view of the left earring.

  “That’s Carrie Rowley Malone!” Paul exclaimed in an excited voice. “My God!” He began to pace around the small room, his hands clasping and unclasping behind his back.

  The full impact of the discovery had not yet hit Jackie, who was gazing in a bemused fashion at the photograph. “She was sort of pretty, in her way. Do you suppose that’s really her in the basement?”

  Paul stopped abruptly in front of the bookcase. His expression was faintly appalled. “All we can do is guess from the evidence. I’d have to say so. My God, Jackie, she was part of the family! This is terrible!”

  But Jackie didn’t agree. “She wasn’t family. She was a Rowley. You’re a Melcher. She might as well be a stranger.” Jackie paused, shuddered, and slumped against the sofa. “You’re right, it is awful. But what about serial killers? All those victims who are never found? What do their parents and children and friends think? Do you realize that at this very minute someone is waiting for a loved one who isn’t ever coming home?”

  Incredulously, Paul stared at his wife; I looked away; Mike seemed ill at ease. “That’s exactly what we’re talking about, Jackie,” Paul finally said in a stem voice. “Not serial killers, maybe, but somebody who disappeared and was left in the basement.”

  Jackie’s eyes grew very wide. She put a hand over her mouth and bolted from the room. Paul hesitated, then rushed after her. I was left alone with Mike.

  He got to his feet, hovering over me. “Is she ill?” he inquired in a worried voice.

  I recalled that Mike and his ex-wife had had no children. “Probably,” I replied. “No cause for alarm. Morning sickness doesn’t always happen in the morning. It’s normal, especially after all those anchovies.” Feeling a trifle silly kneeling at Mike’s feet, I also stood up.

  “Mmmmm.” Mike nodded absently. “I haven’t been through the wonder of childbirth. It’s a privilege to share even in a small way.”

  My smile was feeble. “Well, certainly,” I temporized, “it’s a … marvel.” The real marvel was that having once done it, anyone would do it again. Throwing up, being clumsy, having no energy, and going into labor weren’t among my favorite memories. Yet I knew that if I’d had the chance, I would have given birth to more than one child. Not expecting Mike to understand, I didn’t elaborate.

  An awkward silence grew between us. We stood an arm’s length apart, he looking vaguely embarrassed, I feeling a flush on my cheeks. Mike Randall was undeniably good-looking and apparently eligible. He was educated, employed, and in my age group. Why wasn’t I warming to the man? Why did I feel that I ought to? After tonight I’d probably never see him again.

  “What should we do next?” he asked, sounding vaguely helpless. But at least he broke the tension.

  I checked my watch. It was almost eleven. “We can’t do much. Not this late. I realize there’s no way to be sure that it’s Carrie Rowley Malone’s remains, but it’s a logical conclusion. I suppose I’d have her buried in the family plot and try to forget about it.”

  Mike agreed, adding that Jackie and Paul might want to have a graveside service. “I’m not a member of any formal religion myself, though we all have our spiritual side. I can’t speak for Paul and his wife, but getting a minister to say a few words often makes people feel better. You know, a sense of closure.”

  I wasn’t about to go into my own philosophy of the soul. “Jackie’s parents are Episcopalian,” I noted, recalling the mutual needling Mavis and I had indulged in over the years. She’d tease me about Episcopalians having purified the existing Roman Catholic Church; I’d retaliate by asking her how she could belong to a religious group founded by a king whose midlife crisis demanded that he marry a younger woman. We both took our faiths seriously but never the arguments. I had a sneaking suspicion that Mike Randall wouldn’t understand that, either. Or, worse yet, that he’d try.

  Paul returned without Jackie, who had gone to bed. “She’s worn out from all this,” he said by way of apologizing for his wife. “Jackie takes things too hard.”

  Mike Randall took his leave, but not before offering his suggestion about disposing of the unfortunate body. Paul seemed receptive, but after Mike had left, he shook his head.

  “Jackie won’t let go so easy,”
he declared, helping me put the old photo albums in a temporary resting place on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. “Now that she thinks she knows who, she’ll want to know why.”

  I couldn’t blame her. So did I. If the bones in the basement belonged to Caroline Rowley Malone, if there was no record of her death in the family Bible, if the remnants of apparel could be dated to the first decade of the century, then she couldn’t have been more than thirty when she died. And how had Carrie Malone, wife and mother of three, ended up in an unfinished basement?

  It seemed to me that her story was also unfinished.

  Chapter Four

  ALL WAS NOT well in Alpine. While I had not yet heard back from Dusty’s Foreign Auto Repair, I felt I should touch base with The Advocate. It was Wednesday, publication day. When I left the office early Monday evening, everything had seemed to be under control. If there were any last-minute crises—and there often were, even on a weekly paper—the capable Vida Runkel could handle them.

  But even Vida couldn’t make miracles. Carla had come down with the flu the previous morning and was still at home in bed. Her current boyfriend, Peyton Flake, M.D., couldn’t make miracles, either. My ad manager, Ed Bronsky, had suddenly lost the steam he’d finally acquired in the spring.

  “Ed lost two half-page ads besides,” Vida fumed at the other end of the telephone line. “Flat out lost them! Barton’s Bootery and Harvey’s Hardware! The bootery was having a summer sale to unload all of the sandals nobody’s wearing because it’s too cold, and Harvey Adcock had a special purchase of lumber for Fixer-Upper Week. I don’t want to think about what Ed’s doing with that special section!”

  I could almost hear Vida rubbing her eyes, a habit she has when she’s agitated. In my mind I pictured my House & Home editor, the receiver propped between one ear and a wide, rayon-clad shoulder, the unruly gray curls bobbing on her head, tortoiseshell glasses sitting on the desk, fists grinding away.

  The Fixer-Upper issue was due out the following week, and I’d hoped it would run at least twelve pages, bringing the paper’s total to thirty-six. The present edition was set for the usual twenty-four, but with a full page of missing ads, I had to ask the dreaded question: “Have we come up short?”

  “Of course,” Vida responded promptly. “We’re going twenty. Carla didn’t finish her story on the proposed swimming-pool bond issue or the Bible school feature. And she didn’t get those pictures taken of the new picnic tables up at the Icicle Creek Campground. That would have filled a page in itself—if there’d been any campers. The tourist count is way down. I did three inches on the Chamber of Commerce’s lament about the downtrend in visitors. I also—God help me—relented and wrote that piece on Crazy Eights Neffel playing board games with a bear.”

  “Oh. Oh, no.” I groaned. Crazy Eights Neffel was Alpine’s resident lunatic, a seventy-five-year-old cuckoo who may or may not have been senile but who had always been insane. Roughly every six months Crazy Eights would wander into the editorial offices and demand that Vida or Carla or the hatrack—whichever he found most responsive—write a story about his latest adventures. Some of them were true; all of them were bizarre. The board games with the bear could fall into both categories.

  “How long?” I asked, holding my breath and clutching the Melchers’ cordless phone.

  “Four inches,” Vida replied. “I used one inch to describe the cave.”

  I nodded absently, my mind preoccupied with how we could make up for the loss of the two ads to Barton’s Bootery and Harvey’s Hardware. “Has the paper actually gone off to be printed yet?” It was shortly after eight A.M., and under ordinary circumstances Kip MacDuff would have left Alpine between seven and seven-thirty.

  “No. I forgot to tell you that part. Kip broke his arm playing soccer.”

  Hearing Jackie rustle about in the kitchen, I suppressed several four-letter words. “So who’s driving the paper down to Monroe?” I asked, hearing my voice rasp.

  “I am,” snapped Vida. “Who else is there?”

  “Ed?”

  “Oooooooh! Emma! I tried to tell you, Ed suffered a relapse! He has again become completely feckless. It happened overnight, from when he left early for his stupid appointment Monday afternoon and when he strolled into work yesterday around nine-thirty. I think he’s on drugs.”

  I reeled at the idea. Ed didn’t have enough imagination or daring to become involved in anything that couldn’t be covered with gravy. I said as much to Vida.

  “Yes, yes,” she answered impatiently. “But all the same, Ed’s acting very peculiar, even for Ed.”

  I could hear bacon sizzling in the microwave. “Morose as well as lazy, I suppose.”

  “No, actually.” Vida’s tone conveyed bafflement. “Ed seemed very chipper yesterday. He hummed.”

  It was my turn to be mystified. Until Ed had undergone his previous metamorphosis, he had suffered from severe gloominess as well as inertia. “One day does not a lifetime make,” I noted, attempting to lift my spirits and maybe Vida’s, too. “I take it he hasn’t come in yet this morning?”

  “That’s right.” Vida sounded annoyed.

  My mind was wrestling with the problem of the missing ads. I hated to ask Vida to do more work than she’d already been saddled with, but I had no choice. I suggested that she use Ed’s tired clip-art file and try to salvage the lost ads.

  “We could go twenty-two pages,” I continued. “There must be news filler or handouts to cover each of the half-pages.” I hated to publish a paper with a single sheet; it cost extra because the printer had to stuff the odd page.

  “I was planning to leave in five minutes,” Vida said sharply. “Ginny is holding down the fort.”

  The reference to Ginny Burmeister, our young but efficient office manager, calmed me a bit. As of July first I’d given her a promotion and a raise. Ginny had proven her mettle during the past three years by not only excelling at her own job but by helping Ed with the advertising side of the shop. Maybe she could bail us out of the current mess.

  “I hope Ginny doesn’t catch whatever Carla’s got,” I said with fervor. Ginny and Carla were chums. I had visions of them passing the flu bug back and forth between them like a tennis ball. “It’s too bad Ginny didn’t handle those ads in the first place. I hate like hell to leave them out.”

  “We’ll make it up to Barton’s and Harvey Adcock next week,” Vida said, still sounding testy. “There’s no time to waste now. Ginny and I’ve already spent over an hour looking for the blasted dummies. The press is already off schedule. That’ll cost you something, too.”

  I hardly needed the reminder. Surrendering, I gave up and told Vida to drive safely. She harumphed in my ear, asking if I thought she would otherwise drive carelessly. A hundred miles away, the receiver banged.

  I wandered back into the kitchen, still holding the cordless phone. There had been no chance to tell Vida about my car troubles. Or, as a side issue, the body in the Melchers’ basement. I felt a real sense of letdown. Not only was my staff falling apart on me, so was The Advocate itself. And Vida, whom I sometimes thought of as my second mother, hadn’t offered her broad shoulder for sympathy.

  “Not that I blame her.” Jackie jumped, and I realized I had spoken aloud.

  “Blame her? Who, me?” She was draining three slices of bacon on paper towels.

  I shook my head and gave Jackie an apologetic smile, then tried to explain the predicament with the paper. Jackie put two slices of bread in the toaster.

  “Most newspapers have too many ads anyway,” she asserted, sounding as if she and Ed would get along famously. “I always used to argue with Mom about that before she retired from The Oregonian. Who wants to look at all that stuff? Especially the electronics ads. They’re so ugly. Paul’s the only one I know who ever reads them.”

  If Mavis hadn’t been able to convince her daughter that advertising revenue paid the bills, then I wasn’t about to try. I accepted a cup of coffee and arranged myself at the breakfast cou
nter on one of the kitchen stools. Paul had left for work before I got up. Jackie’s breakfast had consisted of soda crackers and coffee. She insisted on fixing toast and bacon for me.

  “I can’t do eggs, though,” she said, putting my plate in front of me. “The yolks—they’re like big yellow eyes staring up at me. And soft-boiled—all I can think of is what’s going on inside the shell. Isn’t it gruesome?”

  Never having considered the inner workings of an egg, I was at a loss for words. Bacon and toast would do nicely. There were many mornings when I didn’t eat anything for breakfast unless somebody on the staff stopped off at the Upper Crust Bakery.

  Jackie joined me on one of the other stools. “I’ve been planning our day,” she announced. “We’ll start with the museum.”

  “Good,” I said, assuming she meant we were going sightseeing. “We’ll have to wait until Dusty’s calls, though. I’d like to go out on Ediz Hook, too.” The Hook was a topographical companion to Dungeness Spit. It curved out into the strait like a big scimitar, forming the city’s natural harbor.

  Jackie, however, was shaking her head and blowing on her coffee. “We don’t need to do that. The museum, the newspaper, maybe the city and county libraries—that’s where the information will be.”

  I blinked at Jackie. “Oh! You mean … research on the family?”

  “Right.” Jackie sipped her coffee and made a face. “Uhg, needs more sugar.” She scooped two heaping teaspoons out of a red ceramic bowl.

  My first reaction was to discourage Jackie in her attempt to delve deeper into the mystery of the basement. But I was curious, too. If I helped her with the task, I wouldn’t feel like such a freeloader. My car might not be ready until late afternoon.

  A moment later I discovered I was being optimistic. Dusty’s informed me that I needed a new fuel pump. The estimate was somewhere between two and three hundred dollars for parts and labor. The fuel pump would have to be ordered from Victoria, but the ferry that would bring it across the strait probably wouldn’t arrive until three o’clock. I’d be lucky to have the Jag back by noon on Thursday.