The Alpine Advocate (17 page)

The sun was still out and the air felt crisp when I got back to
The Advocate
. Ginny was mailing out bills; Ed was at the Grocery Basket; Vida had gone to the drugstore; and Carla was taking a picture of the raccoons.

“Only four phone calls,” Ginny said, handing me the slips of paper and showing off perfect white teeth in one of her rare smiles. “Some man is waiting to see you. He got here about ten minutes ago.”

“Not Chris Ramirez?” I asked on a sharp intake of breath.

Ginny shook her head. “I never saw Chris, but it’s not him. This guy’s older.”

I relaxed. Swinging my handbag over my shoulder, I strode through the editorial office and into my inner sanctum. The door was already open, and there was somebody sitting behind my desk.

It was Tom Cavanaugh.

Over the clutter of my desk and a chasm of twenty years, we shook hands. On the surface, we acted like civilized people who were mildly pleased to see each other. Tom was prepared for the encounter, but I was flabbergasted. A bit too quickly, I sat down, not in my own chair, where Tom was seated as if he owned the blasted place, but one of the pair reserved for visitors.

“Well, Tom,” I remember saying in a voice about an octave too high, “how are you?” After that, I don’t recall much except pleasantries. I suppose we spoke in clichés, acknowledgment of the years that had passed, the physical changes we had undergone, the quirks of fate that had brought us together in that tiny office in a small town on the slope of the Cascade Mountains.

Somewhere between noting the gray in Tom’s black hair and his observation that I no longer looked as if I were starving to death, my brain began to take charge of my emotions. I nailed Tom down for the reason he had come to Alpine. Dave Grogan had contacted him, he said in that easy, mellow voice that also could have made a living in radio and television.

“Dave told me you were paddling a leaky canoe. Either you bail out or patch up the holes.” He pointed to a bound volume that contained the first six months of my tenure. “I’ve been studying these. You’d have to be publishing out of a mud hut in the Third World not to make money with a weekly or a small daily these days.”

My eyes narrowed. It was bad enough that he’d invaded
my life unannounced, stolen my chair, and forced me into a subservient role. But now he was lecturing me on how to run my freaking paper. I was getting angry, but the sight of him diluted my temper: Tom Cavanaugh was still handsome, whatever softness hammered out by life, leaving him sharp of feature and even sharper of eye. He was a tall man and had apparently kept fit. Tom looked so much like Adam that I wanted to cry.

“Except for Christmas and Easter and your loggers’ festival, I don’t think you’ve run a single promotion,” Tom was saying. “You could do one a month—back-to-school, Halloween, Thanksgiving, you name it. Inserts are what make money, Emma. Chain stores, independents, co-op advertising. Who’s your ad manager, Dopey the Dwarf?”

“Yes.”

Tom lowered his head, looking at me in that dubious manner I recalled from twenty years ago. “That’s what I figured. Dump him. Or her.”

“Can’t.”

He started to look stern, then broke into that wonderful, charming, delicious grin. “Of course you can’t. Old softhearted Emma. But you
could
hire someone to supervise him, a business manager, let’s say, and …” He saw me start to argue and held up a hand. “In the long run, it would pay off. Unless you’ve had a personality transplant, you make a lousy boss, Emma. You couldn’t even get the gofers at
The Times
to remember to put sugar in your coffee.”

I shook my head emphatically. “Hold it. Listen, Tom, this is wonderful of you to offer advice. Really.” I tempered my growing irritation with a thin smile. “But I’m in the middle of covering a murder investigation. It’s big stuff, involving a very prominent old line family. I can’t get sidetracked. Frankly, Tom, as usual, your timing stinks.”

His eyes, which were so blue they were almost black, took on a hint of surprise, even hurt. “Dave Grogan
painted a desperate plight. Leaky canoe, headed for the falls.” His own smile was now a trifle limp, too.

I sighed. “Dave’s right. But he probably didn’t know about the murder.” It crossed my mind that even as I had talked with Dave on the phone, Mark Doukas might have been meeting his killer. “Look,” I went on, trying to sound more kindly, “come for dinner tonight. I’ll have Ed Bronsky, the ad manager, and his wife, and Vida Runkel and Carla Steinmetz join us.” If necessary, I’d ask the city council and the U.S. Forest Service, too. There was no way I’d share an evening alone with Tom Cavanaugh.

I’d risen, tired of Tom’s advantage in my chair. Now he stood, too, and for one sharp, painful moment, it struck me that he looked as if he belonged behind that desk. But he didn’t. I did.

He was still looking down at the back issues of
The Advocate
. His attire was casual, a navy blue sweater over a light blue shirt with gray slacks. He didn’t look rich, just comfortable. Then, as I knew he would do eventually, he gestured at the framed photograph on the filing cabinet. “Adam?”

“Yes.”

He stared at the picture. I suspected Tom had looked very much like that when he was in college at Northwestern. “Good-looking kid,” he remarked. “Smart?”

“Fairly. Not motivated, though.”

“Right. Nice?”

“Oh, yes.”

“No big problems?”

In the context of today’s teenagers, I knew what Tom meant. “No. Thank God.”

“Not exactly,” he said dryly. “Thanks to you, Emma. You’ve done well.”

The dark blue eyes held mine just a moment too long. “So have you,” I said lightly.

But Tom shook his head. “No, not really. Sandra did well. She was born into money. I just use it.”

“How is Sandra?” I was trying to keep the light note in my voice, but it wasn’t working very well.

“Bats.” He shrugged.

“Define
bats.”

His expression was guarded. “She’s unstable. Delusions. Paranoid. She also shoplifts. Fortunately, we can afford topnotch keepers.”

“Is she at home?”

“Sometimes.” He fingered a sheaf of papers in my inbasket. “If she undergoes a violent episode, her doctors and care givers recommend that I have her …” He stopped, apparently aware that he was reciting like a parrot. With a sheepish grin, he reverted to the irreverent candor I remembered so fondly: “I cart her off to the loony bin.”

“Sounds like the place for her,” I retorted, equally flippant. Now I understood the comment I’d heard about
poor Tom
at the Sigma Delta Chi banquet. “All the same, I’m terribly sorry.”

He had sobered and shrugged again. “That’s one reason I travel a lot. If I didn’t get away, I’d go nuts, too. It’s my version of a paper route.”

“Only you buy them instead of deliver them,” I noted. Fleetingly, I thought of Sandra Cavanaugh. I’d only met her twice, once at an office holiday party, and another time in a restaurant where she was lunching with other suitably well-heeled young matrons. She was a pale, pretty ash blonde, fine of feature, slim, and inclined to keep one eye on her handbag and the other on her conversational vis-à-vis. It not only made her look a little walleyed, but caused me to wonder if she thought the rest of the world was after her Big Bucks. Or maybe, it occurred to me now, after
her
.

Tom had come around to the other side of the desk, a scant two feet away. “Are you serious about dinner?”

I reflected. “Sure. Seven-thirty?” For safety’s sake, could I possibly assemble another fifty people by then? I berated myself. What was I afraid of? Twenty years over the dam, and what was there still between us? Only Adam.

“Look,” I said, lowering my voice as I heard Vida talking to Ginny in the outer office, “I may be able to use some advice, but I’m not a damsel in distress. Believe it or not, I’ve already come up with some ideas of my own for increasing revenue.”

Tom’s expression didn’t change. “I’m sure you have. Like what? A Color-the-Pumpkin Contest?”

I, too, kept my face impassive. “Not quite. It’s more like an Ask-the-Jackass-to-Dinner Party.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“We’ll see.”

“Who’s the jackass?” asked Vida after Tom had left.

I explained, briefly. Since I’d never told Vida who had fathered my son, I felt there was no need to go into anything but the barest professional details. I invited her to dinner.

“With Ed and that fat, sad-sack wife of his?” Vida looked appalled. “And Carla? Don’t feed that girl Jell-O. She’ll giggle and jiggle all night! Ask Ginny instead.”

I was looking at the pictures of the raccoons. Carl Clemans’s bronze statue appeared to be feeding them. “Is that a yes or a no?”

Vida rubbed her eyes. “Ooooh—I’ll come,” she said grudgingly. “So will Ed and Shirley. That woman is so lazy she wouldn’t get off a keg of dynamite if somebody lit the fuse.”

As it turned out, everybody came, including Carla and Ginny. I left the office just before five, racing to the Grocery Basket before the commuters arrived. Luckily, sock-eye salmon was in, if not exactly a bargain at $10.99 a pound. Local corn was still available, a new crop of Idaho bakers had arrived, and the bakery that supplied Café de Flore had made its semiweekly delivery to the store that morning. Dessert would be my lifesaving, timesaving, but not necessarily money-saving cherry cream cheesecake. Dodging Durwood Parker, who was driving down the
wrong side of Front Street, I stopped at the liquor store before heading home.

It was when I was unloading the groceries that I saw the Ramada Inn laundry bag on the floor of the backseat. Mark’s jacket, I thought with a pang. I should have given it to Milo Dodge. But I hadn’t. Should I call and tell him where it was?

A glance at my watch told me it was almost six. My guests were due in an hour and a half. There wasn’t time to spare. Or so I rationalized, as I tucked the motel bag into one of the grocery sacks.

I didn’t want to admit that I could be afraid of what the sheriff might find on the jacket that Chris Ramirez had borrowed from Mark Doukas.

V
IDA CAME EARLY
. “You need help,” she announced, and without further ado, she put on an apron that displayed two pigs hunched over a trough. “My daughter, Meg, gave me this. It reminded me of Ed and Shirley. Where’s your biggest kettle?”

I showed her. She shucked corn, and I greased potatoes.

“I went to see Fuzzy after work,” Vida said. “That must be his real hair. It looked like it had died instead of him.”

“How was he?” I asked, using a cooking fork to poke holes in the potatoes.

“Critical, my foot! He should be out of there tomorrow. Or Sunday, anyway.” She filled the big cast-iron kettle with water from the tap. “At least I found out why he had the heart attack.
Spasm
, I should say. Or so young Doc Dewey told me. No wonder, Neeny is enough to give anybody a stroke. Or a spasm.”

I closed the oven and eyed Vida curiously. She was dumping salt with one hand and sugar with the other into the kettle. I refrained from asking her why. Vida had been cooking a lot longer than I had, though, I knew from experience, not necessarily better. “What did Neeny do now?”

Vida looked at me over the rim of her glasses. “Fuzzy went up to see Neeny last night. He asked Neeny about opening up Mineshaft Number Three to see if it was filled with opium.” She made a face. “Imagine! Fuzzy’s such a dolt! Anyway, he had to ask Neeny because the mineshaft is on that old fool’s property. And Neeny had a fit—not a
spasm—and threatened to have Fuzzy impeached if he did such a thing. So Fuzzy got all upset, and his ticker went kaflooey.” She wiggled her eyebrows at me. “Well, what do you think?”

I wasn’t sure. Obviously, Vida’s suspicions didn’t bode well for Neeny. “Neeny has hidden something in that mineshaft?” I asked. “How about Hazel?”

Vida sniffed. “I saw Hazel Doukas on view at Driggers Funeral Home in 1986. She looked almost pretty, considering that in real life, she reminded me of the back end of a Buick. No, it’s one of two things: there really is gold in that mineshaft, or else Neeny is just being a stubborn old goat. I vote for Number Two.”

I wasn’t inclined to disagree. Hastily, I shoved the potatoes into the oven. “I forgot to check the mail,” I said, running out of the kitchen, through the front room, and straight to the barn-red postal box that stood next to the road. Three bills, four circulars, and a cheese catalogue made up the sum of my correspondence. Nothing from Adam. I cursed him, imagining several scenarios, the most likely of which was that he hadn’t gone to the post office until it was too late to make the overnight delivery. Maybe tomorrow I’d get the letter Phoebe had written to Chris. I said as much to Vida when I got back to the kitchen.

“You already know what it says,” she pointed out. “What else? Invisible ink that will show up when you put the stationery over steam?”

Vida was right. It was the fact that the letter existed in the first place that bothered me. “Why?” I asked, as much of myself as of Vida. “Phoebe is not necessarily the tart with the heart of gold.”

“Correct,” said Vida crisply. With one sure, lethal motion, she slit the larger of the two salmon from head to tail. “Phoebe had a reason for writing to Chris. Especially since she sent that letter right after she eloped with Neeny.” She pointed the knife at me. I was glad I didn’t consider Vida a serious suspect. Otherwise, I might have been scared stiff. “Why indeed?” she demanded. “I don’t
see Phoebe as the kindly new wife, trying to make peace between the warring family factions.”

“Me neither.” I sighed in frustration and inadvertently managed to stop our speculations by turning on the hand mixer to whip up my cream cheesecake.

For the next three hours we put the murder of Mark Doukas aside. Tom arrived with a bottle of white wine from the Napa Valley; Ginny trotted out a bouquet from her parents’ yard; Ed and Shirley brought their prodigious appetites; and Carla dragged in a dead squirrel she’d found next to the street.

“We ought to bury him in the yard,” she said.