The Alpine Kindred (12 page)

'Til watch it,” I said, edging for the door. “I'd better dash, Ed, or your story won't make it into tomorrow's edition.”

Ed seemed to recall the exigencies of a deadline, at least when his own ego was involved. He meandered away in his Guccis while I went into the back shop. Kip and I decided we could squeeze Ed's item onto page four if we cut the last graf in Carla's feature about DeeDee and Amer Wasco's trip to Europe. The lines were expendable, since they dealt with the Wascos' cheese purchases in the Netherlands.

“Too much of a Gouda thing?” Kip said, grinning.

I was glad he still had a sense of humor. These days, I wasn't sure that I did.

Carla kept to her bed the following day, so I decided to use the customary Wednesday lull to talk to the Bour-gettes. I was interested in finding out why anyone thought there might be more gold buried under the old warehouse.

I found the brothers at the restaurant site, with Dan running some kind of digging apparatus. “You're really moving along,” I remarked to John, who'd been studying a bunch of blueprints. I had to shout to make myself heard over the sound of the tractor.

John smiled, then wiped his brow with his sleeve. “We have to, since we'll be doing most of the work ourselves. Dad may pitch in, now that his job at the college has wound down.”

I nodded. We were standing on Old Mill Street, with our backs to the railroad tracks. Now that virtually all remnants from the warehouse had been cleared away, I could see the Skykomish River less than a hundred yards away, and River Road winding through the trees on the far bank. On this overcast morning in May, the Sky flowed at an unruffled pace in this part of the river, but its color was off. The murky brown current might have been caused by the recent rain, or perhaps someone was actually logging farther up, near the source.

I gestured at the old loading dock which stood between the future restaurant site and Alpine Way. “Is that part of the parcel?”

“No.” John lowered his voice as Dan shut off the tractor. “Burlington Northern turned it over to the city along with the warehouse, but Mayor Baugh wanted to keep it in case they ever widen Alpine Way and need right-of-way.”

I made a note on my steno pad. “So who's getting the gold? The nuggets in the steel chest, that is.”

John grimaced. “Mayor Baugh is playing hardball. He says it belongs to the city. Maybe he's got a point. It was found last fall, before we bought the land.”

“That's true.” I paused as Dan gave me a friendly wave, then started up the tractor again. “What,” I asked, raising my voice, “did those trespassers expect to find?”

“More gold,” John replied. “We've gone over the surface pretty thoroughly, though, and haven't turned up anything more interesting than some old tools.”

“It must have been a onetime stash,” I said, thinking that I should interview the assayer, Sandy Clay.

“There were gold and silver mines here in the old days,” John said. “But you must know that.”

“Yes. They attracted all kinds of people, including some of the Japanese and Korean railroad workers.”

John's broad forehead creased in a frown. “I thought the railroad workers were mostly Chinese.”

“They were at first,” I explained. “But some kind of legislation was in force for a while which prevented them from working on the railroads. That's when they brought in other Asians, mostly Japanese. Alpine was known as Nippon back then before the turn of the century, and there was a whistle-stop up the line called Corea. With a C, the old-fashioned way.”

“Interesting,” John said, and looked as if he really thought it was.

Dan stopped the tractor again and jumped down from the operator's seat. I thought he was coming over to join us, but instead, he knelt down to scramble around in the dirt.

John had his back to his brother. “We're bringing a trailer in here as an office, so we thought maybe one of us could spend the night and keep watch,” he said. “Maybe we won't have to. Those signs might do the job.” He pointed to the half-dozen
NO TRESPASSING—PRIVATE PROPERTY—KEEP OUT
signs that ringed the site.

“John?” Dan's voice sounded uncertain. “Take a look, will you?”

I hesitated, then followed John to the spot where Dan was kneeling in the overturned dirt. It had a damp smell, the scent of age and the nearby river.

“What the … ?” John bent down. I could see four charred bones, one larger than a turkey leg.

“Dogs?” Dan said, taking off his glasses and rubbing at one eye. “Burying bones, somehow. What do you think?”

Dan stood up and grabbed a shovel. “Could be. But this one looks like a rib.” He jabbed at a curving fragment with his steel-toed boot. “I'm not talking beef or pork ribs, either. I took anatomy in college, remember?”

“What are you saying?” Dan asked, sounding breathless.

“I'm not sure.” John plied the shovel. He unearthed several small bones that looked suspiciously like vertebrae. “Holy Mother,” he whispered. “What's this?”

I thought he already knew. But I said it anyway: “I think you and Dan have found a human being.”

I
WAS PAINFULLY
reminded of finding similar remains in the basement of an old house in Port Angeles a few years earlier. The house had belonged to the daughter and son-in-law of my old friend Mavis Marley Fulkerston, and the bones had belonged to a woman who had met an untimely end. Though Jackie and Paul Melcher had helped solve the eighty-year-old murder, that gruesome discovery still haunted me. Now, at the old warehouse site, I felt a sense of deja vu and wandered off several yards before the Bour-gettes noticed that I had been affected by their discovery.

“Are you okay, Ms. Lord?” John asked, his manner full of concern.

I gave him a weak smile. “I'm fine. I think. Are you?”

He mopped his brow again. “I don't know. This is pretty damned creepy.” John put a hand on his brother's shoulder. “Danny?”

Dan Bourgette was still staring at the bones. “Maybe this was an Indian burial ground at some point,” he finally said after a long, thoughtful pause.

That was a possibility, but only marginally comforting, given the alternatives. “If it is, would you have to stop digging?”

John and Dan gazed at each other, their faces showing bewilderment. “I'm not sure how that works,” John finally said. “We'd have to get hold of somebody from
whichever tribe it would be, and as far as I know, there aren't many Native Americans left in Skykomish County.”

I knew about the Wenatchis, but they had lived on the other side of the pass. Regrettably, I could name only a few of the other tribes who might have laid a claim to the area around Alpine.

“What should we do?” Dan asked his brother. “Keep digging to find more bones, or call the Sheriff?”

The brothers agreed that alerting Milo was the best solution. I felt I should stay, but wasn't keen on confronting the Sheriff again. Maybe he'd send a deputy.

But five minutes after John had called the Sheriff's headquarters, Milo drove up in his Cherokee Chief. He looked about as happy to see me as I was to see him.

The Sheriff dealt with my presence by pretending that I wasn't there. “John? Dan? More nuggets?”

“Afraid not, Sheriff,” John replied. “Take a look.”

Milo looked, bending down in silence, almost as if he were at prayer. I knew better; Milo's religion is fishing, and the only time I've known him to pray is when he's trying to catch a steelhead.

“They look like human remains, all right, “ he said, straightening up. “I'll bag what you've got and send it to the lab. I'm no expert, but I'd guess these bones have been here a while. Keep digging. If you collect any more fragments, put them in a bag for us.”

“What if it's an Indian burial ground?” Dan seemed disturbed by the possibility.

Milo, however, shook his head. “I doubt it. I was born and raised here, and I never heard of any Indian burial ground. If there had been, somebody would have raised a ruckus a long time ago.”

“So what do you think, Sheriff?” Milo's assurances hadn't wiped away Dan's worried expression.

Milo shrugged. “Who knows? My best guess is that since the warehouse was next to the train tracks, some hobo jumped off a freight, hid out, and OD'd on white lightning.”

Relief flooded Dan's face, and John managed a smile. “That makes sense,” John asserted, then put out his hand. “Thanks, Sheriff.”

As Milo headed to the Cherokee Chief to get an evidence bag, I followed him. “What if you're wrong?” I asked, trying to keep up with his long, loping strides.

He barely turned to look at me. “Then I'm wrong. Why do you care? Your paper's already out this week.”

The comment rankled. John and Dan's discovery wouldn't be as old as the bones they'd dug up, but it would certainly be stale by the time the news was published in
The Advocate.

“Maybe you'll have some answers by next week's edition,” I said, acid coating my words.

Milo opened the rear of his vehicle and took out a big plastic evidence bag. “Maybe I will. Don't expect me to call if I do.” He loped back to the Bourgettes.

I'd seen enough of the Sheriff. With a shout and a wave, I bade the Bourgettes farewell and got into my old Jag. Five minutes later the car was back in its usual place by
The Advocate
, and I was on the third floor of the Cle-mans Building, where Sandford Clay holds forth as an assay er and appraiser.

Sandy was already occupied. As I entered the small, jumbled office the assayer was talking to a thin-faced Japanese-American man in his thirties who I recognized as Scott Kuramoto, a part-time math instructor at the college.

“Emma!” Sandy's parchmentlike skin stretched into a grin. “To what do I owe this honor? I haven't seen you up
here since you brought in your aunt's 1908 British gold crown.”

“It was my grandfather's,” I replied, “but you're right. How are you, Sandy? And you, Scott? I'm Emma Lord from the newspaper, and I'm not sure we've been formally introduced.” I held out my hand.

Scott shook it somewhat diffidently. “I've seen you around town,” he said in a soft voice. “You work for Mrs. Runkel.”

I grimaced. “Actually, it's the other way around. But an easy mistake to make.” And not an uncommon one. “Vida exudes authority.”

Sandy, who wears small, rectangular glasses with wire rims and very thick lenses, chuckled. “That she does, Emma. That she does.” Abruptly, he frowned. “I don't understand why Vida wasn't more interested in our little mystery. It's not like her to be uncurious.”

I drew back a bit and stared. “It's not. What little mystery are you talking about?”

Sandy lifted a chamois cloth from a battered metal chest. I knew immediately what he was talking about. But I was still puzzled. “Is this the chest the firefighters found? You say Vida wasn't interested?”

Sandy gave a nod. “That's what I heard. What's her name? Carla? She said it was old news, and nobody at the paper, Vida included, would bother writing about it.”

Delicate condition or not, I felt like kicking Carla. “When did she tell you this?”

“Urn …” Sandy scratched his bald head. “Last fall? That's right, it was just before Thanksgiving, about a month after the fire.”

I could imagine Carla, lost in the fresh haze of a new love, not wanting to bother passing on an item she wasn't interested in covering. “What was the information?”
I asked, still envisioning my foot planted in Carla's backside.

“This.” Sandy tapped the box. “Scott here and I were just checking it out before we turn it over to Mayor Baugh. He wants to use the nuggets to finance a petting zoo by the Overholt farm.”

It wasn't the worst idea I'd ever heard, but it came close. “How much? Did someone say the nuggets were worth three hundred grand?”

Again, Sandy nodded once. “Approximately. That's the value I appraised them at. But the thing is, I hate to hand the nuggets over to Fuzzy until we've exhausted all possibilities of finding the rightful owner.”

Scott made a lithe movement with one hand, lifting the lid of the metal chest. The nuggets were there, not glittering like pirate loot on a movie set, but dull and lumpy and unimpressive. Only when Scott stepped back out of the direct light could I see a gleam or two of precious metal.

“Sandy asked me to take another look today,” Scott explained in that soft, soothing voice. “All I can find is the name Yoshida.” He indicated some Japanese characters on the side of the chest. “It could be a first name, it could be a last name. Frankly, it's not much to go on, especially not after all this time.”

“How old do you think the chest is?” I asked.

“I can pinpoint it to the turn of the century,” Sandy replied, “give or take a few years. It's a McFarland case, and they went out of business in 1906. But there's no trademark on it, just the name, which means it was probably manufactured before 1900, when the government tightened up regulations requiring the publication of patent registrations.”

I felt myself blanch. What if there was a connection between the chest and the bones at the warehouse site?

What if the chest and its treasure of nuggets had been the downfall of those old bones? I started to tell Sandy and Scott about the Bourgettes' discovery, then thought better of it. There was not yet any official word on whether the fragments belonged to a human being. If I couldn't print the story right away, I certainly wasn't going to spread rumors.

“Who actually found the chest?” I asked as Sandy lowered the lid.

“Urn … one of the volunteer firefighters. Which one?” He gazed at Scott, hoping for an answer.

“Pat Dugan,” Scott answered. Then, though I didn't need elucidating, he added, “Pat teaches part-time at the college, too. That's how I know. He was kind of excited. It was his first fire after he joined up as a volunteer.”

I'd seen Pat at Mass, accompanied by a pretty, dark-haired young woman who I assumed was his wife. We had never met, but Father Den had pointed Pat out to me one Sunday and identified him as one of the part-timers at SkyCoCo.

“Is there some way you could advertise?” I inquired, dismissing Pat Dugan from my mind. “You know—a blind ad in
The Advocate
and the other area papers to anyone named Yoshida, saying you have something of interest for him. Or her.”