The Alpine Betrayal (8 page)

My intention was to tell Vida first thing about seeing Curtis Graff with Dani Marsh. Her reaction would prove interesting. But when I arrived at the office Friday morning, Vida was screaming at the top of her ample lungs and browbeating Abe Loomis. Ed Bronsky watched in dismay while Carla twittered in the vicinity of the coffeepot.

“You’re crazier than a bear on a bee farm, Abe Loomis!” cried Vida, waving a sheet of paper at the shocked owner of Mugs Ahoy. “I wouldn’t enter your ridiculous contest in a million years! I ought to have you horsewhipped!”

“But Vida,” protested Abe, pointing a bony finger at the piece of paper, “you signed the entry form. See for yourself.”

Vida glared through her glasses. Her jaw dropped. “Oooooh …” She yanked the glasses off and rubbed furiously at her eyes. “I couldn’t have! It’s a forgery!”

I took the sheet of paper from Abe. Vida’s unmistakably flamboyant signature was emblazoned in the space marked for
Entrant
. Someone might have signed her name, but I doubted that anyone would go to the trouble—or have the expertise—to render such a perfect facsimile of her handwriting. It seemed to me that there was another more logical explanation. But I didn’t want to mention it in front of Abe Loomis.

Finally, Vida stopped grinding her eyeballs. She sat up very straight, fists on hips, bust thrust out as if she were auditioning for Abe’s contest. “All right. I’ll do it. What time?”

Abe didn’t exactly smile, but at least he moved his mouth. “That’s wonderful, Vida. It’s tonight, nine o’clock …”

I rolled my eyes at Ed, who was shaking his head. Carla
was bouncing up and down, trying to get Vida’s attention. But Vida was jotting the specifics on a notepad. At last, Abe finished relaying information, nodded to the rest of us, and left the office.

“Vida!” shrieked Carla. “You can’t do this! It’s demeaning! You’ll give journalists a bad name!”

Vida gave Carla the gimlet eye. “A lot of journalists do that every time they get their byline on a story. Put a sock in it, Carla, I won’t go back on my word. Though how my name got on that silly form, I’ll never—”

I sprang around Carla to face Vida. “I think I know. You signed the entry form instead of the print order. They called from Monroe Wednesday to say we didn’t have an authorized signature this week, but they’d go ahead and print without one.”

“Oh!” Vida blanched. “That’s right! There was a lot of hubbub about then. Oh dear!” She whipped off her glasses again and started a renewed attack on her poor eyes. “Then I’m glad I gave in to that idiot Abe. I have no excuse.”

In his typically lugubrious fashion, Ed had come around to Vida’s desk. “It’ll be just fine, Vida. We’ll all come and root for you. I’ll bring Shirley. Say,” Ed exclaimed, showing signs of actual animation, “maybe Shirley ought to enter, too. She’s pretty buxom.”

Buxom
wasn’t the word I’d have chosen to describe Ed Bronsky’s wife.
Barrel
usually came to mind. I shuddered at the thought, but left the lecture to Carla. She did not disappoint me, rattling off-at least a half-dozen reasons why Shirley Bronsky should not engage in such a sexist competition. For once, Ed seemed to pay attention.

By mid-morning, Carla had gone off to talk to the Chamber of Commerce about the influx of tourists, and Ed had left to confer about an ad at the Toyota dealership. Their departure gave me the chance to tell Vida about seeing Dani Marsh with Curtis Graff.

Vida turned contemplative. “How very odd,” she remarked, chewing on the tortoiseshell earpiece of her glasses.

“Why?” I inquired, perching on the edge of her desk. “Didn’t Dani get along with her brother-in-law?”

Vida squinted up at me. “No, no, that isn’t what I mean. Curtis and Dani were on amicable terms, as far as I know. I meant that it’s strange for Curtis to show up after all these years at the same time that Dani comes back to town. This is his first trip to Alpine since he went to Alaska.”

“Well,” I said, as Ginny Burmeister came into the office with the morning mail, “there hasn’t been much to draw him here if his parents are in the San Juans and he and Cody weren’t close.”

“Exactly.” Vida gave a single, sharp nod of her head. “The brothers were always scrapping. But Dani makes an appearance and here comes Curtis.” She snapped her fingers. “Don’t you find that curious?”

“I had a crush on Curtis when I was thirteen,” said Ginny, distributing stacks of mail in each of the three in-baskets in the news office. “He was almost ten years older than I was, but I used to hide behind our hedge and watch him go down the street. The Graffs lived at the other end of the block, on Cedar. I’d gotten over him by the time he went to Alaska, but I still felt sort of sad.”

“Everyone felt sad for the Graffs and the Marshes,” said Vida. “That was the first case of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in this town in several years. We’ve only had one SIDS tragedy since, thank heavens.”

I accepted the pile of bills, news releases, and letters to the editor from Ginny. “It sounds to me as if the death of that poor baby changed a lot of lives. Dani and Cody broke up, Dani left town, the Graffs moved away, Curtis went to Alaska, and Patti Marsh doesn’t want anything to do with her daughter.”

“Exactly,” agreed Vida, fingering a couple of wedding announcements she’d just received. “And Art Fremstad committed suicide. It was an awful year for Alpine.”

I blinked at Vida, who was ripping open one of the envelopes,
pink stationery with a gilded edge. “Who’s Art Fremstad?” In two years, I’d never heard of the man.

Vida scanned the announcement. “Michelle Lynn Carmichael and Jeremy Allan Prescott. A have-to. Marje says she’s six months along.” Vida tossed the pink and gilt announcement into the box by her typewriter. “What? Oh—Art. He was a deputy sheriff, not yet thirty, and seemed to have good sense. But he was found in the river, about a mile from Alpine Falls. His family insisted it had to be an accident, but later they found a note. He was despondent, or depressed, or whatever claptrap people use to disguise the fact that they have no self-discipline.”

I winced a little at Vida’s harsh pronouncement. “What did Milo Dodge think?”

Vida had turned to her typewriter, obviously ready to roll. “Milo?” She gave a little shrug. “He was pretty upset. He was sure it was an accident, too, until that note turned up.” The typewriter keys began to clickety-clack at about a hundred words a minute.

I looked at Ginny. “Do you remember the incident?”

Ginny ran a hand through her auburn hair. “Sure. Not that many people kill themselves in Alpine. I suppose,” she added musingly, “because there aren’t that many people to begin with.” Her gaze was ironic.

“I suppose,” I said, and wondered why I suddenly had a feeling of unease.

To my amazement, Milo Dodge called me in the late afternoon and asked if I’d like to go with him to the Mugs Ahoy wet T-shirt contest. “I heard about Vida,” he said, obviously trying not to sound too amused. “You and your staff could probably use some moral support.”

“Moral?” I snorted into the phone. “I don’t know whether it will help or hinder Vida to have us there. In some ways, I think we should spare her the embarrassment.”

Milo laughed outright. “Vida? Embarrassed? She’ll love it. What did Abe say in the ad about sticking
more
than your neck out? Vida’s been doing that with her nose for years.”

“We’re not talking about Vida’s nose,” I snapped, unhappily recalling one of the changes I’d allowed Abe Loomis to make. “This whole carny show is offensive, and you know it, Milo Dodge. What does Honoria Whitman think about it?”

There was a faint pause. Apparently, Honoria had declined to attend. “She finds small towns amusing. Not that she’s a big city girl,” he added hastily. “She’s from Carmel. She says it’s getting too crowded.”

“Tut,” I remarked, but decided it might be prudent to drop the subjects of Honoria and the wet T-shirt contest. “Milo, why did Art Fremstad kill himself?”

This time, the pause was longer. “Jesus,” breathed Milo at last, “why are you bringing that up? I was finally beginning to forget about poor Art. At least a little.”

“His name was mentioned today,” I said. “How was he connected with the death of Dani and Cody’s baby?”

“Dani called Doc Dewey, who told her to send for the firemen and the sheriff,” said Milo carefully. “I was out of town—it was during the time that Old Mulehide and I were wrangling over custody and all that. Art Fremstad covered for me while I was in Bellevue. He went to the trailer park where Dani and Cody were living, out there past the fish hatchery where those new townhouses went up last year. He and his wife had a new baby of their own. I think the Graff kid’s death unhinged him somehow. At least that’s what his note indicated.”

“He was distraught, you mean? Or depressed?”

“All of the above,” replied Milo, sounding very unhappy. “Muddled, too, judging from the way he wrote. Hell, Emma, it wasn’t at all like Art. If we hadn’t found that note, I’d have sworn it was an accident. Or worse.”

Involuntarily, I pushed myself and my chair away from the desk. “What do you mean? Foul play?”

“We considered that at the time. But three days after Art was found—in fact, it was the day of his funeral—this note turned up at his home. His wife discovered it when she got back from the Lutheran church. Case closed.”

And, I thought to myself, with good reason. Art was a young man with a wife and a new baby. The trauma of finding a baby dead from the most inexplicable of causes must have shaken his very soul. Even thinking about it upset me. Art Fremstead must have been a sensitive man, as yet unhardened to the realities of the world.

“Pick me up at eight,” I told Milo. There was no point in distressing him further. His recollections were obviously painful. My own emotions were unsettled.

Oddly enough, I would be very glad to see Milo Dodge.

M
UGS
A
HOY WAS
jammed. The noise level was deafening; the cigarette smoke weakened my resolve to abstain; the lack of air-conditioning made the interior uncomfortably warm, even at sundown; and the usually murky interior was intermittently lighted up by some sort of revolving lamp above the bar. Even Abe Loomis looked brighter than usual, his long face teetering on the edge of enthusiasm.

If I hadn’t been escorted by the sheriff, I would have ended up standing by the door. But Milo pushed his way through the crowd, dragging me by the hand. We stopped at a table near the front where Carla, Ginny, and the Bronskys were already seated. Somehow, Milo commandeered two more chairs, and I squeezed in next to Shirley Bronsky while Milo draped his lanky frame in the chair beside Carla.

Our attempts at small talk failed. It was too loud for normal conversation; the jukebox was playing the Judds and Randy Travis at ear-splitting volume. Milo had ordered a pitcher and a bowl of complimentary thin pretzels. Shirley Bronsky was shoveling mixed nuts into her round mouth, and Carla was drinking white wine. If it was Abe Loomis’s house vintage, I figured it probably tasted like paint thinner, but Carla was smiling all over the place. To my amazement, she leaped right out of her seat when Jack Blackwell picked up the microphone and announced that the contest was about to begin.

Jack, who had been seated in front with Patti Marsh and two couples I recognized but didn’t know by name, was
wearing a silk sportcoat and a string tie. For all the money he had allegedly made in the timber business, I had never seen him dressed up. He didn’t exactly rival a Wall Street banker, but at least he looked presentable. Patti glowed up at him, her rhinestone earrings swinging almost to her shoulders.

Jack’s first words were indecipherable, mainly because nobody had thought to turn Garth Brooks off on the jukebox. Finally, someone had the sense to pull the plug. Jack grinned at the crowd, revealing very white, if uneven, teeth.

“This is it,” he began, clutching the mike to his chest as if he were about to serenade a honeymoon couple in the Poconos. “You’ve all been waiting for the great moment, the biggest beer bust of them all. Here we go, it’s time for Mugs Ahoy’s Jugs Ahoy!”

I sighed, Ed chuckled, Ginny grimaced, and Shirley giggled. Milo, thankfully, remained impassive, but to my horror, Carla clapped like crazy. It appeared that her principles had evaporated in a bottle of Yosemite Sam.

The contestants came out from the ladies’ room, mounted four temporary stairs to the bar, and to the relatively subdued strains of Waylon Jennings’s “Sweet Caroline,” paraded above the crowd, strutting and straining in their remarkable wet T-shirts. Jack, meanwhile, shouted each contestant’s name and occupation. First in line was Chaz Phipps from the ski lodge, wearing neon green with blinking earrings that must have been on batteries. I wished I’d been on drugs. The catcalls were obnoxious. But Chaz and the three young women who followed her didn’t seem to mind in the least.

Milo squeezed my elbow. “You could do that,” he remarked, more seriously than I would have wished. “You have a nice chest, Emma.”

It was the first personal observation Milo had ever directed at me in the two years I had known him. I didn’t know whether to slug him or smile in gratitude. Deciding that he meant well, but couldn’t help being an inarticulate boob, I settled for a noncommittal shrug. Then I realized
that
boob
was probably inappropriate. I had to stifle a laugh, lest I encourage Carla to further mayhem.

There were twelve contestants in all, and either by accident or design, Vida was last—but certainly not least. She stomped up the stairs to Johnny Cash’s classic “Ring of Fire,” her head held high, her glasses almost at the end of her nose. She wore a pair of dark gray slacks I’d seen fifty times at work, but her T-shirt was a sight to behold: Vida’s impressive bust was adorned with the front page of
The Advocate’s
Loggerama edition, and in each hand she held a small pennant. The left said
SUBSCRIBE NOW
!; the right said
READ BOOKS
! Carla jumped onto the table and lead the applause. Naturally, I joined in. Vida sailed off the bar and down the ramp at the far end to join her fellow contestants in the men’s room, which was temporarily off-limits. I noticed that Patti Marsh was no longer seated at the first-row table. Maybe she was having regrets about not having taken part in the competition.