Aunt Dimity Goes West (16 page)

First Street . . .”

“. . . and old Rufe swears it was on Third,” said Lou. “But we’ll work it out.We surely do . . .”

“. . . appreciate the loan,” finished Rufe.

“Oh . . . my . . . Lord,” I breathed.

Despite my previous encounters with Bluebird’s

army of doppelgangers, I was dizzied by déjà vu. Rufe

and Lou Zimmer appeared to be the exact male equiv-

alents of the ancient, identical Pym sisters, who lived

up the road from me in Finch. They even talked in

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129

the same ping-ponging fashion. If I hadn’t been clinging to Toby’s arm, I would have keeled over from the shock.

Rufe and Lou were accompanied by a slender,

middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair and

a sun-burnished face. She was dressed for the warm

weather in a rose-colored linen skirt, a sleeveless

white silk blouse, and extremely sensible shoes. Al-

though she had the refined, slightly pedantic manner

of an old-fashioned schoolmistress, I assumed that she

was Rose Blanding, the minister’s wife.

“Please, take your time,” she urged the brothers.

“There’s no need to bring the maps back quickly. I

know you’ll take good care of them.” She glanced up,

saw me and Toby through the screen door, and smiled

broadly. “Why, look, boys, I have more visitors.”

“It’s young Tobe!” Rufe exclaimed.

Identical smiles lit the Zimmer brothers’ faces as

Mrs. Blanding ushered them out onto the porch. They

greeted Toby fondly, asked after his family, and told him he’d grown at least two inches since they’d last seen

him.Toby then conducted a round of introductions that

turned out to be for my benefit rather than theirs. The

Zimmers and Mrs. Blanding already knew who I was,

where I was staying, and with whom.

“Rufus and Louis are Bluebird’s oldest citizens,”

Mrs. Blanding informed me, beaming at the two elderly

men. “Though, technically, Rufe is older than Lou by

two minutes. Their birth certificates are on display at

the historical society.”

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Nancy Atherton

Rufe nodded. “Some people think we founded the

town . . .”

“. . . but we’re not
that
old,” said Lou.

The brothers chuckled wheezily, then turned to

Toby.

“So, tell us, Tobe,” said Rufe, “have you had any

trouble . . .”

“. . . up at the Auerbach place?” Lou asked.

“None,” Toby declared, with a touch of impatience.

“Everyone’s healthy, happy, and having a great time.”

“Hope your luck holds.” Rufe glanced down at the

briefcase. “Well, we’ll get out of your way. We got us

some map-reading to do. Mighty pleased to meet you,

Lori. Hope to meet your boys . . .”

“. . . one of these days,” said Lou. “
And
their pretty nanny.”

The Zimmer brothers winked simultaneously,

placed their boaters on their heads at identical angles, and tottered down the stairs. I shook my head to clear

it, but it didn’t help because Rose Blanding reminded

me so forcibly of Lilian Bunting, who was married to

the vicar of St. George’s Church in Finch. In this in-

stance, however, the resemblance made a certain sort

of sense to me. The wives of vicars and ministers

probably had a lot in common, I reasoned, no matter

where they lived.

“Will they get home all right, Mrs. Blanding?” I

asked, observing the brothers’ unsteady progress along

the lakeside path.

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131

“They’ll be fine,” she assured me. “Rufe and Lou

may look frail, but they’re as tough as old axe handles.”

“Of course they are,” I murmured. “Just like the

Pyms.”

“If I’m to call you Lori,” she went on, “you must

call me Rose. Please, leave your things in the hall and

come into the front parlor. Can I get you a bite to eat

or a cold drink? It looks as though you hiked down

from the Aerie.”

We left our packs and packages on a table in the

entrance hall and followed Rose into a high-ceilinged,

spacious room overlooking Lake Matula. While Toby

refused her offer of refreshments, explaining that

we’d had lunch at the cafe, I took in the front parlor.

There was a lot to take in. The house’s demurely

painted exterior concealed an interior that paid unre-

strained tribute to grand Victorian style. The tables

were made of heavily carved walnut, the chairs and so-

fas were upholstered in lush fabrics, and the walls were covered in a flocked wallpaper that imitated silk bro-cade. Layers of drapes drawn back by tasseled cords

hung at the tall windows, and a large rug with a swirling floral pattern covered the polished hardwood floor.

Dainty whatnot shelves displayed a splendid collec-

tion of Victoriana: beaded reticules, kid leather baby

shoes, embroidered gloves, tiny spectacles, cobalt-blue

medicine bottles, impossibly elaborate Valentine’s Day

cards, and feathered fans.A stereopticon sat on a small, marble-topped table near the love seat in the bay win-

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Nancy Atherton

dow and a voluminous silk paisley shawl had been

draped over the baby grand piano.Toby and I sat on the

fringed, bottle-green velvet sofa, and Rose sat oppo-

site us on a button-backed easy chair with low arms

and braided trimming.

“You have a lovely home,” I said, as soon as we were

seated.

“Do you like it?” Rose asked, as her gaze made

a leisurely circuit around the room. “It was once a

bordello.”

“A . . . a
bordello
?” I gaped at her in astonishment.

“Next door to a
church
?”

“Not originally, but the situation did occur.” Rose

leaned back in the easy chair and shrugged noncha-

lantly. “It could hardly be avoided. At one time houses

of prostitution outnumbered schools and churches in

Bluebird by a factor of twenty to one.”

My eyebrows shot up. “That’s a lot of . . . enter-

tainment . . . for such a small community.”

“Bluebird wasn’t small back then,” said Rose. “Nearly

eleven thousand people lived in the valley in 1865, and

the vast majority of them—” She stopped short and

tilted her head toward Toby. “Forgive me,Toby, I cast no aspersions on your noble sex, but the truth remains that the vast majority of the early residents were men. I’m

sure there were some who didn’t require such
entertainment,
as you so delicately put it, Lori, but evidently many of them did.”

“Evidently,” I said, smiling wryly.

“So many of them were single, you see,” Rose con-

Aunt Dimity Goes West

133

tinued, “or acted as if they were. Gold fever struck of-

fice workers, salesmen, farmers, and factory workers

not only because it offered them a chance to get rich

quickly, but also because it offered them a chance to

escape the restrictive lives they’d led back East—to

throw off their traces and kick up their heels.”

“Hence, the multitude of bordellos,” I put in.

“And drinking establishments and gambling hells.

But respectable women came to Bluebird, eventually,

and tamed some of its wilder aspects.” Rose paused,

lowered her eyes, and smiled self-consciously. “Forgive

me. I’m lecturing. It’s an occupational hazard when

one is both preacher’s wife
and
president of a historical society.”

“Don’t stop,” I said. “It’s fascinating. I had no idea

that Bluebird used to be a metropolis.”

Rose seemed only too pleased to carry on. “From

1865 to 1870, Bluebird’s population doubled. Butchers,

barbers, bakers, blacksmiths—every type of tradesman

was needed to serve the mines and the miners, and many

of the tradesmen brought their families with them.”

“Families that needed schools and churches,” I said,

nodding.

“And much more,” said Rose. “In its heyday, Blue-

bird had an opera house, a theater, a newspaper, two

hotels, five boarding houses, seven law offices, four

debating societies, countless gambling hells, saloons,

and brothels, and no fewer than seven churches. I’d

have to consult a reference book to give you the exact

number of shops that once lined Bluebird’s streets,

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Nancy Atherton

but you could find almost anything here that you

could find in Denver. Passenger trains stopped here

seven times a day.”

I gazed at her incredulously. “What happened? Not

that Bluebird isn’t lovely as it is,” I added hastily, “but it’s not exactly
metropolitan.
”

“Boom and bust,” Rose replied succinctly. “The

price of silver plummeted in 1893, when the country

went on the gold standard.The silver claims dried up,

the miners moved on to other jobs, and businesses

failed. Bluebird shrank. By 1930, there were fewer

than a thousand people living in the Vulgamore Valley.

The state authorities selected the valley as a good

place to build a reservoir partly because there were so

few people left to displace.”

“Hold on a minute,” I said, glancing toward the bay

window. “Are you telling me that the town of Blue-

bird used to be where Lake Matula is now?”

“Yes,” Rose said brightly, “and I can prove it.Would

you like to see a photograph of Bluebird at the height

of its prosperity?”

“Very much,” I said.

Rose left the front parlor and returned a moment

later carrying a framed, oblong, sepia-toned photo-

graph that was at least three feet in length. Toby and I made room for her to sit between us and she propped

the photograph on her lap for us to see.

“It’s a composite photograph,” she explained, “a col-

lage made in 1888 by a photographer named Mervyn

Blount. Mr. Blount came to the valley in the early days

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135

to document the prospectors’ lives, and stayed on to

photograph the burgeoning town. He was quite the

outdoorsman. He took these photos from a vantage

point halfway up Ruley’s Peak, and that’s a difficult

mountain to climb.”

I peered curiously at the panoramic view Mervyn

Blount had pieced together from separate photographs.

The Vulgamore Valley was scarcely recognizable. Build-

ings of all shapes and sizes jostled for space along streets that ran parallel to a narrow stream—“Bluebird Creek,”

Rose informed me—at the very bottom of the valley.

Railroad tracks emerged from the serpentine canyon

we’d passed through on the way from Denver to Blue-

bird, and great swathes of forest were missing from the

surrounding slopes.

“Where are the trees?” I asked in dismay.

“Propping up mine shafts, heating stoves, housing

machinery and people,” Rose replied matter-of-factly.

“Mining was not kind to the environment in those

days. It still isn’t.” She pointed to a blurred complex of wooden buildings halfway up the northern wall of the

valley. “The Lord Stuart Mine stayed open a bit longer

than the silver mines because it produced gold, but

the gold vein played out, as gold veins always do, and

it closed in 1896.”

“And forty years later, they built the reservoir and

drowned the town,” I said sadly.

“There wasn’t much of a town left by the time they

flooded the valley.” Rose’s fingers drifted from left to right over the photograph. “Long before the reservoir

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Nancy Atherton

was built, a series of flash floods had driven the re-

maining townspeople to higher ground at the valley’s

western end.They’d already salvaged what they could

from the ruins of the old town.”

“Danny Auerbach followed their example,” I com-

mented. “He reused timber from the old mine buildings

when he built the Aerie.”

“Waste not, want not.” Rose pointed to the pho-

tograph. “The parsonage was built where it now stands,

but Good Shepherd’s loyal congregation dismantled the

church in 1934, a year before construction began on

the reservoir, and moved it to its present location.”

“Next door to a bordello?” I said questioningly.

Rose laughed. “My house was used as a bordello

for only a few years, after which it was occupied by a

series of fine, upstanding families. Still, my husband

and I had to do a great deal of restoration work on it

when we came to Bluebird, thirty-five years ago. For-

tunately, the town was in the midst of a resurgence

then, thanks to the outdoor adventure trade.We mine

tourists now, instead of gold and silver.” She swiveled

her head from side to side. “Iced tea, anyone? Please

say yes. I’ve talked myself dry!”

“Iced tea sounds great,” said Toby, “but let me carry

the photograph for you.”

After he and Rose had left the room, I walked over

to the bay window to gaze at the reservoir. I tried to

superimpose Mervyn Blount’s sepia-toned image of the

bustling town onto Lake Matula, but I couldn’t man-

age it. It was almost impossible for me to imagine

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137

clouds of smoke fouling the crystalline sky, train whis-

tles blotting out birdsong, a vigorous community filling the Vulgamore Valley from end to end.