The Alpine Escape

by Mary Daheim

  “Oh, yes,” Paul replied. “She stayed on with Uncle Arthur and his wife.”

  “And Sanford?” I inquired, hearing my stomach growl.

  Paul’s earnest face sagged. “That’s weird … I’d forgotten about him. I mean, what happened to him. He had to be put in a home or something. I think he had a breakdown after Uncle John was killed in the war. My dad always said John was Grandfather’s favorite.”

  Jackie pounced on her husband, who was sitting on the soft footstool. “You never told me your grandfather was crazy! There’s insanity in the family! Our baby could be a maniac!”

  Paul tried to pry Jackie loose. “I didn’t say he was crazy. That was fifty years ago. It was probably depression. After listening to Aunt Sara, I’d guess he was a pretty depressed guy all along.”

  Jackie relinquished her hold on Paul. “He sounds morbid. I don’t want a morbid baby, brooding all over the playpen. Maybe we should ask Dr. Carlisle about it.”

  Paul ignored Jackie and turned to Mike. “Well? Let’s see those bones.”

  As Mike had said, they were tiny. They could have belonged to a chicken. “I’ll take them to the college lab tomorrow,” Mike promised. “If that doesn’t work out, we can ship them off to the University of Washington.”

  Paul nodded. “Might as well. We’re in too deep now to give up.” His grin took in all of us. “This is so strange. One minute I’m scared I’ll find out something really horrible about my relatives, and the next I can’t wait to see where all this leads us. The worst thing would be if we never come up with an answer.”

  I disagreed. “The worst thing would be if I starved to death. You, too, Paul. Jackie and Mike have had a big snack, but we haven’t. Why don’t I make some pasta and a salad? I bought prawns on sale at Safeway and they won’t keep forever.”

  It didn’t take long to fix dinner. Jackie pitched in, though her efforts with slicing tomatoes and cutting up green onions were haphazard.

  “Cooking makes me sick,” she asserted. “Are you sure it wouldn’t be easier to order a pizza?”

  I didn’t dignify her question with a reply. Instead, I tried a diversion. “Jackie, if you were a rich widow, what would you do?”

  Jackie stared at a bunch of radishes as if they’d just arrived in a spaceship from Mars. “You mean like Simone?”

  “Right. She was your age, more or less, when Cornelius died.” I retrieved the radishes and gave them a good scrubbing under the kitchen faucet. “So what’s your move, assuming you don’t like Port Angeles?”

  “I’d go to Calcutta and help Mother Teresa with the lepers. Or is it Bombay?”

  Speculation clearly wasn’t Jackie’s strong suit, at least not at the moment. “Mother Teresa wasn’t around then. And somehow I don’t think charity was Simone’s style.”

  Jackie made a face as she tried to concentrate. “How do we know she was rich? Simone, I mean, not Mother Teresa. I wonder what she did with that money she got from the Nobel Prize?”

  “She blew it at the craps table in Reno,” I retorted a trifle testily. “I assume Simone was rich—Cornelius must have left her some of his money, if not all of it. That’s something else Aunt Sara might know, if we can’t find out from the lawyers.”

  “We know Eddie and Lena got the house,” Jackie said, back on track. “Eddie never made any money; in fact, he lost it, right? And Sanford didn’t work. Lena had no money of her own. Maybe Rose had a … what do you call it? A dowry?”

  “Could be.” I whacked up the radishes. “Whatever money there was in the family, it petered out eventually, according to Sara. Maybe Lena spent it all on her social causes. Or Cornelius could have left it to Carrie and her husband, Jimmy Malone. They had three kids by the time the old boy died.”

  Jackie’s manner had turned heated. “I know one thing—Paul didn’t get any. Neither did his dad. We were darned lucky to inherit this house. Nobody else in the family wanted it because of the condition it’s in. Besides, Paul’s an only child and his cousins are all over the place.”

  I hadn’t considered Paul’s contemporary relations. “Like Sara and Verne’s offspring?”

  Jackie wasn’t sure. “All I know is that the ones who came to the wedding were from places like Spokane and Billings and L.A. and Denver and a ranch in Wyoming. They didn’t give a rat’s behind about an old broken-down house on the Olympic Peninsula.”

  “Lucky you,” I remarked, thinking about a few internecine family fracases over the years involving property no more lavish than a birdcage. It was amazing how excitable some people could be when it came to greed. Apparently, Paul’s relatives weren’t of that ilk. Jackie was right—she and Paul were very lucky.

  We ate in the kitchen, seated on the tall stools at the counter. Jackie’s thoughts turned domestic. She pressed Paul about the return of the electricians. Her husband informed her that it might be wise to put them off until the mystery was solved.

  “Why?” Jackie wore a pugnacious air. “What’s to find now? Mike said we’d have to dig forever to make sure everything was uncovered down there. We’ve got to get on with the project. The floor man is coming next week.”

  Paul confessed that he and Mike planned to do some more digging after dinner. If nothing else, they might find some other personal items that would pinpoint the date of the victim’s death. Or perhaps verify the victim’s identity.

  “This rumor about Simone’s disappearance muddies the waters,” Paul explained. “Wouldn’t you think someone would know what happened to the wife of a prominent, wealthy man like Cornelius Rowley?”

  Paul had a point. Indeed, there were probably quite a few people who knew or suspected where Simone Dupre Rowley had gone after her husband’s death. But that had been over eighty years ago. They, too, were now dead.

  Unless one of them was Claudia Malone Cameron.

  Mike raved about my cooking. I pretended to be flattered. How anyone could ruin a green salad, sautéed prawns, and fettuccine eluded me—until I thought of Vida. As multifaceted as she is, Vida cannot cook. Her pasta tastes like sponge, the only time I ever ate her prawns she had forgotten to remove them from the shells, and even lettuce is not safe in my House & Home editor’s hands. Vida is an ardent and capable gardener. She often raises vegetables. But she cannot cook them properly. Not that lettuce needs to be cooked, but one must first remove the slugs that infest it. Vida didn’t.

  There was no dessert. Paul and Mike retreated to the unfinished basement. Jackie and I perused the photo albums once more. We found nothing new, but we were becoming well acquainted with our cast of characters.

  Jackie seemed mesmerized by Rose Felder Melcher. She went back up to the third floor and brought down some of the later pictures. We saw Rose grow from an innocent, fair-haired maid to a sad-eyed woman of middle age. Finally we studied the old Rose, withered and bereft of bloom. This was the Rose that Paul remembered.

  “Aunt Sara may be right.” Jackie sighed. “Grandma Rose looks like a woman with a broken heart. I wouldn’t do that to my mother.”

  “You bet you wouldn’t,” I replied, thinking of my pal, Mavis, and her unquenchable spirit. At forty-eight Mavis had developed cancer of the uterus. Downing four martinis, she had simultaneously set the date for surgery and made plans for a trip to Fiji with her husband. Six weeks later she had sent me a postcard from the South Pacific: “Who needs the female parts you can’t see at my age? Glad you aren’t here—you’d be embarrassed. We’re on our second honeymoon and much better at it than we were on the first. Practice, practice, practice!”

  The dishwasher was making agreeably efficient noises when the men returned from the basement. They had a plastic basin full of small items: two more little bones, half a dozen buttons of varying styles and sizes, eyelets that might have come from a shoe, two safety pins, an I LIKE IKE campaign button, six Olympia Beer caps, a Captain Midnight decoder, a decaying faux leather watchband, a plastic barrette featuring cooing yellow birds, a child’s thermometer from a play doctor�
��s kit, a Rita Hayworth paper doll dressed as Carmen, a gold locket with strands of dark hair in it, several shards of broken crockery, and the mate to the garnet earring.

  “Eureka!” I cried. “You’ve struck … something. At least you found the other earring.”

  Jackie pointed to the mildewed cardboard doll. “Who’s that? She’s pretty.”

  Trying not to feel old, I told her about Rita Hayworth and The Loves of Carmen. “It was before my time, actually, but I saw it on TV. The movie was based on the opera, but they didn’t sing.”

  Jackie shrugged. “Good. I don’t like opera anyway. Let’s see that locket.”

  It was heart-shaped, with a tiny circle of glass in the middle. The dark hair was soft. There was no inscription. I guessed it to be old but couldn’t date it positively. Jackie asked if the men had found it near the earring.

  “Within a couple of yards,” Paul said a bit vaguely. “We dug sort of frantically. Like pups, I guess.”

  I reflected on the contents of the plastic basin. “That part of the basement wasn’t closed off for all those years. This stuff covers a wide time span, at least from the Forties. But I suppose nobody did any actual excavation until the electricians went down there.”

  Jackie nodded. “It would be a neat place for kids to play. Sort of like being outside when you were inside. You know, when it rained and you had to stay in.”

  I gave Jackie a smile of encouragement. Her enthusiasm seemed to veer up and down, like a yo-yo. Some of her mood swings could be attributed to pregnancy, but I was certain that Jackie was mercurial by nature.

  Juggling the garnet earrings, Paul frowned. “I played down there a few times. When we were really little, the grownups would lower us in that wood-basket rig. It comes out upstairs under the inglenook seat next to the fireplace. That was fun because it was so scary. All the kids in the family loved riding in it. You could go down on your own if you jiggled the thing right, but you had to be cranked back up. Later we outgrew it, but we still horsed around downstairs. Once we made a fort.”

  Mike leaned forward on the packing crate. “Did you ever dig?”

  “No.” Paul’s features twisted in the effort to recall. “The dirt was higher. Or maybe it seemed that way because we were smaller.”

  “It could settle over time,” I commented.

  “Earthquakes,” said Jackie, then held her nose. “What about the smell? Don’t bodies smell terrible when they … decompose?”

  The question was relevant. Mike had a possible explanation. “Back then, this was a real mill town. I imagine it smelled most of the time. I’m from Tacoma, and I can tell you, before the environmentalists stepped in, when the mills were going full tilt, there were days when you could hardly breathe. You got used to it, of course.”

  I knew all about the so-called Tacoma Aroma; Everett, too, and almost any other place in the Pacific Northwest where pulp and paper were made had one. Mike was right—the smell would have masked almost any other odor. And Port Angeles’s early fish-packing plants would have done the rest.

  Mike was smiling at the plastic basin’s contents. “Fascinating. Think what an archaeologist could make of this a thousand years from now!” He transferred his smile to me.

  I sensed that Mike wanted to be admired. “Nice work,” I said lightly. “As a matter of fact, my son and my brother are involved in a dig in Arizona right now.” We digressed long enough for me to tell the others about Adam’s and Ben’s adventures with the Anasazi. My audience expressed polite interest, but it was obvious that they’d rather concentrate on the contents of the unfinished basement.

  It was Paul who brought us back to the past. “What we need to do is figure out how the body got to where we found it. Or where the electricians found it, I should say. Why there? Was she dead before or after?”

  Paul’s logical approach was admirable, too. I was quick to praise him. “Why would a young lady be in the basement in the first place?” I posed the question after Paul had accepted my compliment with a self-effacing shrug. “We must assume this is Carrie, if only so that we can fixate on one person. She might go down to the rec room—or whatever it was called at the time—but she wouldn’t do laundry or canning or stoke the furnace.” I unfurled the house plan again. “The rec room isn’t that close to the unfinished part of the basement. Was she lured there? Or killed somewhere else and carried there?”

  Silence filled the little den. Darkness seemed to be descending earlier this evening, casting shadows in the corners. The clouds had never quite disappeared. A muted sunset filtered in through the leaded-glass windows.

  “The fissures,” Mike said suddenly, leaping off the packing crate. “The broken bones. Carrie goes downstairs with someone else—the killer, to be precise. X, let’s say. X leads her down that hallway to the door. The door is opened. X has armed himself—or herself—with something heavy. He—she—is behind Carrie and hits her on the back of the head. Carrie is stunned, maybe even killed, and falls off the ledge. Her legs are broken. Isn’t that what Dr. Carlisle thought?” He paused just long enough for nods from Jackie and me. “X closes the door, locks it, and goes away. Or maybe X gets a ladder and goes down into the unfinished area and actually buries Carrie. Nobody has any reason to go there, and if Carrie was missed, a cursory look would show she’s not there. Who’d think of digging up the place?”

  Jackie had gone pale. “That’s horrid,” she whispered. “Why would anyone do such an awful thing?”

  Paul grimaced. “People do awful things all the time. Pick up the latest newspaper or turn on the TV. How different were people eighty years ago? Not much, I’d say. People are people.”

  We didn’t contradict Paul. Contemporary society had no monopoly on violence. “If we knew the why, we might know the who,” I commented. “We talked about motives earlier, and even off the cuff we came up with several. At least for murdering Carrie Rowley Malone. Greed, sex, the usual reasons people kill for. Just go down the list.”

  Paul wore an expression of chagrin. “My family, the homicidal maniacs. Gosh, I sure hope we find out that the killer was an outsider.” He gave Jackie an apologetic look.

  But Jackie was in one of her effervescent moods. “Why? Having a murderer on the family tree would give it some color. Who wants everybody to be law-abiding and virtuous? That’s so dull!”

  Paul didn’t appear convinced, but he was willing to be a good sport. “Okay, so let’s check motives. Simone—maybe she didn’t inherit Cornelius’s fortune. If it went to Carrie, Simone might have wanted to do in her stepdaughter.”

  I had to quibble. “Even if Carrie died, her children would have inherited. There was no point in getting rid of just Carrie. Simone would have had to wipe out all the little Malones, too.”

  Mike nodded, clicking his ballpoint pen. “And we know they weren’t. Okay, what about Eddie, the brother? A sibling rivalry?”

  “Same thing,” I noted. “The only way the inheritance motive works is if the money went to Carrie only for her lifetime. A trust, maybe. But we won’t know about that until Meriwether and Bell come up with Cornelius Rowley’s will.”

  Jackie snapped her fingers. “Jimmy Malone. He married Carrie for her money but really loved Minnie. He’d gotten into the Rowley family and now he wanted out. Divorce wouldn’t do because he couldn’t get his hands on Carrie’s money. So voilà! He belts Carrie with an Irish shillelagh, or whatever you call them, on St. Patrick’s Day. What is a shillelagh, anyway?”

  I was bemused. “I think it’s a sort of club. But I’m not Irish.”

  Paul’s forehead furrowed. “Jimmy is a good pick. But why wait so long? He and Carrie already had three kids. Where was Minnie all this time?”

  The problem didn’t faze Jackie. “Stashed in Seattle. It was only five years. If Jimmy was counting on a fortune, that’s not long to wait.”

  Again I had to contradict. “It might be to Minnie. It sounds like the old story: ‘Stick with me, honey, I’m getting a divorce. But these thi
ngs take time.…’ ” I choked on my own flippancy. Fortunately, nobody noticed. But suddenly my own dilemma was forced upon me. Not that Tom Cavanaugh had ever promised to divorce his wife, Sandra. Far from it. Her mental instability seemed to bind him even closer. Tom was too honorable to abandon a woman who needed him. Except I wasn’t sure she did—Sandra needed a keeper, not a husband. But of course that was the role Tom had assumed. “On the other hand,” I added in an acid tone, “some women are notoriously patient.” I hoped no one would realize that I meant myself.

  No one did. “So far,” said Mike, “Jimmy has the best motive. If he was a bigamist.”

  “Sanford,” Jackie put in. “Maybe he was gloomy because he’d killed somebody. Hey, let’s get wild with this one. Sanford was gay, and why not? People didn’t talk about that stuff in those days, right? He was crazy about Jimmy, a big, rough, tough, macho guy. Sanford killed Carrie in a fit of jealous rage.” Jackie crossed her arms over her abdomen and sat back on the sofa, looking well pleased with herself.

  “That’s plausible,” Mike said, offering Jackie a smile of approval. “I understand that loggers often used to exhibit homosexual tendencies, if only because they lived in isolated camps where there weren’t any women. You may be on to something, Jackie.”

  Her husband seemed dubious. “I know we can’t rule out any possibilities, but if this one is right, murdering Carrie didn’t bring Sanford and Jimmy Malone together. Jimmy went off to Seattle and Sanford settled down with Grandma Rose.”

  Jackie was undaunted. “Jimmy rebuffed Sanford’s advances. Being in the olden days Sanford couldn’t admit he was gay. He had to live a lie, so he married Rose. That’s why he was glum and she was unhappy.”

  As theories went, it wasn’t bad. A major sticking point for me was the five children that Sanford and Rose had produced over a period of fifteen years. I had a variation to offer. “What if the Widow Simone was in love with Jimmy Malone?”

  Jackie was aghast. “Not her type. Even if she got a pile of money from Cornelius, I can’t imagine her running off with an Irish logger.”