Authors: Mary Daheim
“The woman can't write, either,” I declared, poking at the four-page newsletter. “This is a turgid, pedantic bunch of crap.”
“She spells better than Averill,” Vida said, inserting a sheet of paper into her typewriter. “Certainly her punctuation is superior to Arthur Trews's and Cass Pidduck's. And please watch your language, Emma.”
“It's still crap—or worse,” I muttered, scrunching up
Crystal Clear
and tossing it into Leo's wastebasket. “Crystal worked for a bank in Oregon. Why didn't she stick to numbers instead of words?”
“I believe,” Vida said in an annoyingly calm tone, “she put out the bank's newsletter before they downsized and let her go.”
“In-house publications,” I sneered. “They give people the idea they can actually write.” I paused as my new reporter, Scott Chamoud, entered the office. “Scott,” I began as he grinned a greeting at Vida and me before sitting down at the desk that had belonged to Carla Stein-metz Talliaferro until she quit to get married, “you're from Portland. Did you ever run into this Crystal Bird person?”
Vida looked up from her typewriter. “She wouldn't have been Bird then. As I understand it, she took her maiden name back only after she left Portland. She would have been Crystal Ramsey or Crystal Conley, depending upon which husband she was married to at the time.”
Scott, who is so young and good-looking that he makes my eyes water, leaned way back in his swivel chair. “Portland, like Seattle, is a generic term for a forty-mile radius. I was born and raised in Gresham, a suburb. I'm afraid there are several hundred thousand people in Portland that I don't know, Mrs. Runkel.”
My new recruit, who had joined the staff November 1, wisely deferred to Vida. Indeed, Scott had excellent manners,
as well as brains and talent. After not quite a month with
The Advocate
, his only drawback was that he had severe difficulties meeting a deadline. I hoped that experience would cure him, but knew that Carla had never gotten the hang of the inverted pyramid concept in straight news reporting. Her whos, whats, whens, and wheres could be found scattered throughout the story, instead of in the lead paragraph. I was realistic, however. With the salaries that I could afford on a small weekly, the perfect reporter was beyond my means.
Vida sadly shook her head. “Imagine,” she murmured, “living in a place where you don't know the other inhabitants. I've never understood why people choose cities over small towns.”
The typewriter rattled as the keys clicked at Vida's usual two-fingered staccato pace. My wrath had waned, at least for the time being. I'd never met Crystal Bird, which made her use of me for target practice all the more puzzling. Luckily, she published
Crystal Clear
on an erratic schedule. She had moved back to the area in April, and brought out her first edition in June. So far, there had been seven issues in Volume One. Since this was the Friday after Thanksgiving, I hoped I'd be free of her harangues until New Year's. Otherwise, Advent was going to be a spiritual bust.
I was off to a bad start anyway. Having missed a full day of work, we had some catching up to do to make our Tuesday deadline. With Scott still easing his way into the job as well as the community, I had to handle more of the hard news until he became assimilated.
Bringing up my editorial format on the computer screen, I uttered a sigh of resignation. The second bridge over the Skykomish River was in the news again, after four years of false starts. The three old duffers who made
up the county commissioners had finally yielded to pressure from the community college to change the original site. I was duty-bound to praise them and had written the first two sentences of my editorial when my old friend Paula Rubens came into the cubbyhole I call an office.
“I have my hand out,” Paula announced, easing her full figure into one of my twin visitors' chairs. “Literally.” She reached into her briefcase and passed a single typewritten page across the desk.
I scanned the sheet, which displayed the logo of Sky-komish Community College. “Is all the stained glass your doing?” I asked, referring to the announcement of an upcoming exhibit at the student union building.
“In a way,” Paula replied with a wry expression. “This is only the second quarter that I've taught glass-making at the college. Let's just say that the students who are taking part in the show have had a lot of help. And,” she added, with no attempt at false modesty, “the really good stuff is mine.”
I grinned at Paula, who had the power to lift my spirits. “So the glass show starts next Friday in the RUB,” I said, using the acronym for the college's Rasmussen Union Building. “Why so late? Aren't finals coming up?”
“Not until December tenth,” Paula replied, untangling the strands of glass beads that cascaded over her handsome bosom. “Assuming we get that far. Wouldn't you know it, my second quarter on campus, and we've got a threat of sexual harassment, two cases of date rape, and a poli-sci professor who showed up in class wearing only his mackinaw.”
My eyes bulged. “How come I don't know anything about this stuff?”
Paula sighed. “Because none of it has gone public. I should have kept my mouth shut. Sometimes I forget you're the press.” She laughed and gestured at my cubbyhole
with a dimpled hand. “All this power in one tiny room.”
“Ha.” My spirits dropped a notch. “Have you seen this week's copy of
Crystal Clear?”
Paula laughed, a hearty, rich sound that seemed to make my plywood walls shake. “Not yet. But I've seen the earlier issues. Is Crystal still trying to run you out of town?”
I nodded. “Why has she got it in for me, Paula? You mentioned that you knew her. Has she ever told you why she hates me?”
The Burlington Northern Santa Fe whistled as it slowed on its approach to Alpine. A fresh snowfall the previous night had required crews to plow the stretch of tracks between Alpine and the Cascade Tunnel.
Paula shrugged. “Don't editors need a target? You're a major one for Crystal. Who else can she pick on?”
I admitted I wasn't the only victim. She'd attacked Sheriff Dodge, Mayor Baugh, the county commissioners, the U.S. Forest Service, the state department of wildlife, the local clergy—just about everybody, and all in less than six months. “My complaint,” I said to Paula, “is that when it comes to me, she gets personal. Last month she jumped me for using the term
Pilgrim Fathers
in an article on Thanksgiving, and before that, she pitched a five-star fit because Vida had written
ladies
instead of
women
in a piece about the Burl Creek Thimble Club.”
Paula shrugged again, then rose from her chair. “Crystal's always been big on women's issues, and I don't blame her. Don't sweat it, Emma, she's not evil, just a little off center. She might move on to somebody else eventually.”
“I hope so,” I said, also getting to my feet. “Frankly, I'm so pissed I could strangle her.”
“Relax,” Paula soothed. “Crystal's had kind of a strange
life. Maybe she's—I hate to say it, it's such a stereotype—but maybe she's going through menopause.”
“Who isn't?” I snapped, then felt chagrined. “Sorry. I'm still waiting for Doc Dewey to find the right hormone dosage before I really do go out and kill somebody.”
Laughing as she put the hood of her car coat over her dark red hair, Paula headed for the door. “‘Women of a certain age,’ huh? Aren't we all?”
She was right. Paula was a few years older than I, a woman of the world who appeared to have found contentment in a refurbished farmhouse down the road at Gold Bar.
“Hold it,” I called after her. “You have to fill me in on those simmering stories at the college. You know I won't print any of it until charges are filed.”
Paula grimaced. “I hate to be a snitch.”
Making a clucking sound with my tongue, I reminded her that she couldn't wiggle off the hook so easily. “I need background,” I told her. “When you work with deadlines, you snatch up all the preparation you can get.”
Paula sighed and leaned an elbow against the door-jamb. “Okay. I have no names of the students involved in the date rape, but they were two separate incidents, four different kids, all off-campus. Or so President Cardenas insists. The sexual-harassment charge stems from a nineteen-year-old male who is charging his female instructor with ‘excessive fondling, ‘ whatever that means. Again, I don't know the student's name, but I
think
the teacher involved is Holly St. Sebastien in botany.”
I ran Holly through my memory bank: single, mid-thirties, on the plumpish side, pretty if she tried harder, given to giggle fits. “What about the Naked Professor?”
“Sad case,” Paula murmured. “It's Earl Havlik, one of the original faculty members when the college started out in the high school.”
I nodded. I recalled Earl as a tall, spare man with glasses and a rather large nose.
“Earl's wife moved to Alpine with him, but she hated it,” Paula continued. “Mrs. P.—I think her name is Margaret—left him about a year ago. He hasn't been the same since. Maybe you know he boarded up all the windows in his house out on the Burl Creek Road.”
I had heard someone mention it—probably Vida—but didn't make the connection with Earl Havlik until now. “Poor guy,” I remarked. “Hasn't Nat Cardenas or somebody else at the college tried to get him into counseling?”
“That I don't know,” Paula replied. “I'll keep you posted.” She exited with a wave, and I heard her greet Vida and Scott in a breezy manner. Scott was cheerful and polite; Vida grunted a goodbye. Sometimes my House & Home editor is possessive of me when it comes to my other female acquaintances.
As soon as Paula had left the newsroom, I informed Scott about the alleged—my favorite journalistic insurance word—activity at Skykomish Community College. As Carla's replacement, my new reporter had inherited the campus beat.
“Tame,” Scott commented. “You should have heard the weirdo stuff that went on at U of O.”
I nodded. “I graduated from Oregon, remember? I was there in the late Sixties. It wasn't Berkeley, but there was action.”
“Such a silly time,” Vida declared, pulling a sheet of foolscap from her typewriter. “We had our share of protesters here, too. Some of the loggers put an end to that nonsense.”
Since even in more peaceable eras, the loggers—particularly those who were unemployed—spent their leisure hours pitching each other through the windows of the Icicle Creek Tavern, I didn't doubt Vida's statement.
“It was chaotic,” I allowed, remembering anti-Vietnam War protests, equal-rights marches for blacks and women, and the violence that had gone along with what basically were just causes. “It changed the face of America, for better or for worse.”
Vida made a tsk-tsk noise. “The women. So ridiculous, demanding equality with men. Why lower yourself?”
Scott stifled a laugh as Leo Walsh entered the office, dusting snow off his dark green parka. “It's started again,” my ad manager said in disgust. “I'm used to the rain, but this damned snow for five months a year makes me wonder why I ever left California.”
Leo, who had spent much of his life in the L.A. area, never seemed to get the knack of driving in snow. When the first flurries hit in late October, he totaled his Toyota by skidding into a mail truck parked by the Alpine Medical Clinic. Fortunately, Leo hadn't been hurt, and the car had been replaced by a newer model, but his insurance premium had jumped.
Vida was regarding Leo with her gimlet eye. “What point is there in living where the weather never changes? How do you know if it's April or November? Honestly, I'd go quite mad.”
Leo chuckled, albeit grimly. “The weatherman in Southern California has the easiest job in the world, Duchess,” he said, using the nickname that Vida despised. “‘Sunny today with highs in the seventies and lows in the fifties.’ Those guys—and gals, nowadays—can't go wrong.”
“They already went wrong,” Vida retorted, “by living in California.” She inserted another sheet of paper and began tap-tap-tapping away.
I was headed back into my office when Leo called to me. “I just saw Paula Rubens leaving
The Advocate,”
he said, placing his parka on the back of his chair and lowering
his voice. “Tell me, Emma, am I uglier than I thought I was?”
Leo wasn't ugly at all, in my opinion. A trifle homely, perhaps, but in an attractive, careworn way. “Why do you ask?” I inquired with a quirky smile.
My ad manager ran a freckled hand through his graying auburn hair. “Paula and I went to dinner about a month ago, Café Flore out on the highway, fine food, fine wines, fine conversation. Or so I thought. I've asked her out a couple of other times, but she's always got some excuse. You know her. What do you think?”
“I think,” I said honestly, “that she's extremely busy. Paula was only supposed to be part-time at the college with her glass-making class, but they've got her teaching introductory art as well, and right now she's putting an exhibit together. Not to mention that she has her private clients. Christmas is coming, it's a hectic time of year for her.”
Leo tipped his head to one side, apparently considering my rationale. “I suppose. But I'm beginning to think Rejection is my middle name.” His soulful brown eyes rested on my face.
I winced. Leo and I did things together, but none of them included sex. His off-and-on-again romance with Delphine Corson, the local florist, had come to a dead end several months earlier. I knew—and Leo knew I knew—that he'd always hoped we might have some kind of future, or at least a fling. He also knew why that wasn't likely.
“Try her again after fall quarter is over,” I suggested. “Paula's a very focused person.”
Leo made a self-deprecating face. “Okay, why not? Or,” he asked, his voice now down to a whisper, “how about dinner tonight?”
He'd caught me off guard. “Sure. What time?”
Leo was looking surprised. “Seven?”
I nodded. “Sounds good.”
He broke into a grin. “You drive?”
I grinned back. “My pleasure.”
Leo sobered. “I wish.”
Glancing at my other staff members to make sure they hadn't overheard, I tried to keep smiling. Scott was on the phone. At the typewriter, Vida never broke stride.