The Alpine Betrayal (6 page)

Most of the criticism, however, had to do with the historical pieces we had run in the special Loggerama section. The turn-of-the-century silver mines had been worked by Chinese, not Japanese. The Japanese and possibly some Koreans had worked on the Great Northern Railroad because the Chinese had been excluded by a federal act in 1882. That, asserted Grace Grundle, was why Alpine had originally been named Nippon. The largest steelhead ever caught in the Skykomish River was thirty-two pounds, three ounces, not thirty-three pounds, two ounces. And the year was 1925, not 1924, insisted Vida’s eldest brother, Ralph Blatt. The correct spelling of the name of the Norwegian emigrant who had helped Rufus Runkel found the ski lodge was Olav Lanritsen, with just one n, not two, said Henry Bardeen, the current resort manager.

No matter how certain a reader may be, it doesn’t pay to accept criticism on faith alone. I would check and recheck each correction. I never ran a retraction, never suppressed a
story, never allowed anyone to censor the news—but I always owned up to mistakes.

I was verifying the spelling of Olav the Obese’s surname when I heard the newsroom door open. Vida, I thought, without looking up. But it was Patti Marsh, tramping purposefully toward my inner sanctum.

“You bitch!” she flared, leaning on my desk and showing her teeth like a she-wolf. “You defamed me! I’ll sue your butt off!”

Being threatened by furious readers wasn’t a novelty to me. Usually, however, they resorted to the telephone, being timid about facing me in person. But Patti Marsh was bold as brass tacks, glaring at me from about three feet away.

“What’s the problem?” I asked, turning slightly in my swivel chair and staring right back.

She jabbed at a copy of
The Advocate
that lay on my desk. “That’s the problem, right there on page four! You said my husband left me! That’s a lie, I threw the bastard out! Nobody leaves Patti Erskine Marsh!”

Calmly, I pulled the paper out from under her hand and opened it to the offending page. I read Vida’s copy aloud:

“‘When Dani was less than a year old, her father left Alpine. Patti Marsh raised her only daughter alone, working at the Loggers’ Café. After Dani’s graduation from Alpine High School in 1985, she married …’” I stopped and shrugged. “Excuse me, Ms. Marsh, it doesn’t say he left
you;
it says he left
Alpine
. That’s not exactly the same.”

“The hell it isn’t!” Patti Marsh waved a sunburned arm in repudiation. Up close, in the daylight, I could see a faint resemblance to Dani. The brown eyes were similar; so was the aquiline nose. But the bad perm and the tinted blond hair didn’t do much to enhance her features. I judged her to be about my age, but there was a lot more mileage in her face than mine. She was short, like her daughter, but carried an extra twenty pounds. The polka dot halter top and the skintight white pants showed that most of the added weight was well-distributed. It was too bad that her head seemed to be empty.

“Look,” I said, standing up but staying behind the desk which I always thought of as the moat that kept my public at bay, “you’re trying to interpret the sentence. Why? It just says that Dani’s father left town. Some other reader might figure that you chased him off with a two-by-four. Did you?”

Patti was still wild-eyed, but she was beginning to lose steam. I gauged that she was the sort of person who can bulldoze her way through life as long as there’s nothing very substantial in her path. In my guise as editor and publisher of
The Advocate
, I always felt fairly substantial. It was in my other roles that I sometimes felt like a will-o’-the-wisp.

“This town’s full of gossipy old bitches—the men, too.” Her brown eyes raked over my small cluttered office. Patti Marsh had a skittish, nervous gaze, as if her emotions were in charge of her vision. “How many calls have you had?”

My own stare turned blank. “About what?”

She pointed again at the paper. “About me. And … Dani.” It seemed she could hardly get her daughter’s name out.

“None. It’s a pretty tame story, Ms. Marsh.”

The expression of scorn she bestowed on me might have withered a person who wasn’t used to letters that started “Dear Knucklehead.” Or worse. “Hey, kiddo, you don’t know the half of it,” asserted Patti, with a toss of her bleached hair. “This whole ball of wax is anything but tame.” She started to heel around on her black thongs, then her mouth twisted into a nasty little smile. “If you ask me, we’ll all be lucky if somebody doesn’t end up killed.” Her eyes dropped to the stack of glossy photos at the side of my desk. “Who’s that?” she demanded, looking startled.

I glanced down. Reid Hampton’s picture was on top of the pile. “The director. Why?”

Patti Marsh gave herself a vigorous shake. “Hunh. So he’s the one who’s been pushing Dani. I wonder why.” There was a sneer in her voice, then she strutted out of the office, almost colliding with Vida, who was just coming in.
I didn’t hear the exchange between them; I was too busy trying to figure out what on earth Patti Marsh was talking about. Whatever it was, I assumed it had nothing to do with Loggerama.

Vida surged through the newsroom, heading straight for my office. Her sailor hat was tipped over one ear. At least she didn’t have it on backward, as often happen with Vida’s headgear. Behind the tortoiseshell glasses, her eyes were afire. “If I didn’t think all you Catholics were a bunch of smug hidebound hypocrites, I’d convert so I could be eligible for sainthood. Any normal person would have put Patti Marsh’s nose in her navel.”

Accustomed to Vida’s fulminations against any religion but her own Presbyterian sect, I merely grinned. “Got you riled, huh? What’s really eating that woman?”

“Woman!” sniffed Vida, plopping down into one of the two chairs on the other side of my desk. “Patti doesn’t qualify. Real women aren’t so hare-brained.” She stopped fuming, then cocked her head to one side. “You’re right, Emma. What
is
wrong with Patti? Oh, she and Dani were always at sixes and sevens, but that doesn’t make for such bitterness. Patti’s the type who’d hitch her wagon to a star, especially if the star’s her daughter. Five years have gone by, and it sounds as if Dani has grown up considerably. I can’t help but think they ought to have worked through their differences by now.”

Not knowing either mother or daughter, I was in no position to speculate. Admitting as much, I let Vida continue her mulling out in the newsroom while I answered another rash of post-publication calls. By ten o’clock, I was mired in conversation with Alpine’s oldest rational citizen, Elmer Kemp, 101 years old, who had come to town as a teenager to work in the sawmill. Elmer had a laundry list of omissions from the historical coverage, and paid no heed to my attempts to remind him that we were limited in terms of space. He didn’t much like the implication that clear-cutting was bad; he objected to a reference to the Lumber Trust of the post-World War I era, claiming there never was such a
thing; he asserted that the big price hike back in 1919 was due solely to an unprecedented demand for lumber in the mysterious East—i.e., New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

I was taking desultory notes for a possible feature when Ginny Burmeister signaled from the outer office, mouthing something I couldn’t understand. At last, she whipped out a piece of paper and scrawled her message in red pen:

“Reid Hampton on line two.”

Getting rid of Elmer was no mean feat, and I was finally forced to resort to the promise of an interview, perhaps in early September. “I should live so long,” huffed Elmer. He finally hung up, giving me no opportunity to point out that having already reached 101, his chances of being around in another month might be better than mine.

The telephone only served to amplify Reid Hampton’s booming voice. “You’re a busy woman,” he remarked in what I took to be a chiding tone. It was likely that Reid Hampton was rarely put on hold.

“The paper came out yesterday,” I explained, holding the phone a half-inch from my ear. “We always get a lot of feedback. Like a movie premiere.”

His hearty laugh rumbled along the line. “But unlike the picture business, it’s too late for you to make any changes.”

“Yes. Journalism is real life.” I felt my voice tense.

“And movies are
reel
life,” Reid Hampton noted with a deep chuckle.

At least he hadn’t condescended to spell
reel
. We were making small talk, and I couldn’t see the point.

Reid Hampton went straight to it: “Are you free for dinner tonight?” The question was posed on a softer note.

“Why—yes.” Taken by surprise, I blurted out the truth.

“Where can we get a decent meal within a fifty-mile radius?” He sounded pleased with himself.

I was nervously shuffling papers on my desk. I didn’t particularly want to have dinner with Reid Hampton. But how often would Emma Lord, small-town newspaper publisher, have a chance to go out with a famous Hollywood
director? How often would old Emma have a chance to go out at all? Alpine wasn’t exactly a hotbed of eligible middle-aged men who were sufficiently sophisticated to know they were supposed to sniff, not chew, the wine cork.

“There’s a good French restaurant just a few miles down the highway,” I said, gathering courage. “It’s run by a Californian and a Provençois,” I added, hoping to give the place credibility.

“French food via Rodeo Drive? That sounds fine to me.”

We settled on seven o’clock, and I gave him directions to my home. Then Reid Hampton was off, presumably to tell Dani Marsh how to shiver in eighty-six-degree weather. I had regained my poise and was smiling, a bit wryly. Take that, Milo Dodge, I said to myself. I, too, can strike California gold.

It was busier than usual Thursday, with all the Loggerama doings. I filled in for Carla at the Miss Alpine pageant rehearsal in the high school gym, stopped by the football field to catch the trials for the timber sports competition, and checked out the parade floats being assembled in an empty warehouse by the river.

Since I was afoot, I was hot and tired by the time I dropped off four rolls of film at Bayard’s Picture-Perfect Photo Studio, where we do most of our developing work. Buddy Bayard is efficient, competent, and contrary. He will argue any issue, any time, choosing any side you’re not on. I cut my stay at his studio short and dragged myself the last two blocks along Front Street to the
Advocate
office.

Vida was already gone, leaving a note atop a pile of copy. Ed was going over an ad with Francine Wells for Francine’s Fine Apparel. Francine was set on buying half a page to show the first of her new fall line; Ed was determined to cut the ad by half.

I stopped at his desk, greeted Francine, and admired the sketches she’d brought along. “Terrific separates,” I gushed, wondering how anyone could contemplate woolens in July. “What are the colors this season?”

Francine brightened; Ed blanched. No doubt he had visions of Francine wanting a special four-color insert. But before Francine could respond, a tall, lean young man with sun-streaked blond hair came through the door, carrying a bouquet of tiger lilies, gladioli, and asparagus fern. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t immediately place him.

“Excuse me,” he said in a soft, diffident voice. “Could someone tell me where I could find the movie people?”

My first reaction was that the film crew probably preferred not to be found. But perhaps this self-effacing young man had a reason for going to the location shoot, such as delivering his flowers. “Do you have some connection with the company?” I asked, making an effort to sound friendly.

“Hey,” said Ed, looking up from Francine’s ad dummy, “aren’t you Curtis Graff?” He rose awkwardly from his chair, lumbering across the room to shake the newcomer’s hand. “I remember you from the fire department. You rescued a couple of kids from a burning house out on Burl Creek Road.”

Curtis Graff smiled in a modest manner. “I had help.” His smile grew wider. “I don’t think those kids wanted to come out, though. They’d been playing with matches and were more afraid of their parents than the fire.”

I backed off, allowing Curtis and Ed to get reacquainted. Francine sidled up to me, her carefully styled hair and her white sleeveless dress somehow keeping unruffled in the heat of the day. “He’s better-looking than Cody,” she whispered. “Maybe Dani should have married him instead.”

Francine was right. The weaknesses in Cody Graff’s features weren’t evident in those of his older brother. Perhaps it was a matter of character. Curtis Graff struck me as more serious, with a touch of melancholy. At any rate, he didn’t look as if he were prone to pouting.

“I just got in from Alaska,” Curtis was saying. “I’m staying with some friends.” He turned to me and his dark blond eyebrows lifted. “Say—are you Adam Lord’s
mother? He asked me to have you send him a few things when I go back up north.”

“Surprise, surprise,” I murmured. “Just let me know what and when. Are you looking for anyone in particular with the movie or did you just want to watch the filming?”

Curtis, who was wearing knee-length shorts and a T-shirt, shifted from one foot to the other. “I know someone who’s making the movie. I just didn’t know how to get hold of anybody. Do they stay around here at night?”

“They’re all up at the ski lodge,” I said without further hesitation. The movie company’s lodgings were no secret. Indeed, a lot of locals—and maybe a few tourists, too—had probably made their way by now to the location site.

“Great,” said Curtis Graff. He offered us his diffident smile. “Thanks. I’ll get back to you in a couple of days, Mrs. Lord. Adam gave me a list, but he said he might call you about some other stuff he forgot.”

I inclined my head. Curtis Graff moved quickly out of the office, giving the impression that he was making an escape. “That’s odd,” I remarked, more to myself than to Ed and Francine. “I wonder why he isn’t staying with Cody.” My ad manager didn’t pay any attention, but Francine’s bright blue eyes fastened on me.

“If my memory hasn’t failed,” said Francine, “there’s no love lost between the brothers. Their parents retired to the San Juan Islands about the same time Curtis went up to Alaska. I never knew the boys very well, but Hetty Graff was always hanging around the sale rack. She never bought anything unless it was at least forty percent off.”